A Sceptical Aesthetics of Existence: The Case of Michel Foucault Dissertation Submitted for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Emmanouil Simos Hughes Hall Supervised by Dr Ian James Downing College University of Cambridge, May 2018 A Sceptical Aesthetics of Existence: The Case of Michel Foucault Emmanouil Simos (Hughes Hall) Abstract: Michel Foucault’s genealogical investigations constitute a specific historical discourse that challenges the metaphysical hypostatisation of concepts and methodological approaches as unique devices for tracking metaphysically objective truths. Foucault’s notion of aesthetics of existence, his elaboration of the ancient conceptualisation of ethics as an ‘art of living’ (a technē tou biou), along with a series of interconnected notions (such as the care of the self) that he developed in his later work, have a triple aspect. First, these notions are constitutive parts of his later genealogies of subjectivity. Second, they show that Foucault contemplates the possibility of understanding ethics differently, opposed to, for example, the traditional Kantian conceptualisation of morality: he envisages ethics in terms of self-fashioning, of aesthetic transformation, of turning one’s life into a work of art. Third, Foucault employs these notions in self-referential way: they are considered to describe his own genealogical work. This thesis attempts to show two things. First, I defend the idea that the notion of aesthetics of existence was already present in a constitutive way from the beginning of his work, and, specifically, I argue that it can be traced in earlier moments of his work. Second, I defend the idea that this notion of aesthetics of existence is best understood in terms of the sceptical stance of Sextus Empiricus. It describes an ethics of critique of metaphysics that can be understood as a nominalist, contextualist, and particularist stance. The first chapter discusses Foucault’s late genealogy of the subject. It formulates the interpretative framework within which Foucault’s own conceptualisation of the aesthetics of existence can be understood as a sceptical stance, itself conceived as nominalist, contextualist and particularist. As the practice of an aesthetics of existence is not abstract and ahistorical but the engagement with the specific historical circumstances within which this practice is undertaken, the second chapter reconstructs the intellectual context from which Foucault’s thought has emerged (Heidegger, Blanchot, and Nietzsche). The third chapter discusses representative examples of different periods of Foucault’s thought –such as the “Introduction” to Binswanger’s “Traum und Existenz” (1954), Histoire de la folie (1961), and Histoire de la sexualité I. La volonté de savoir (1976)– and shows in which way they constitute concrete instantiations of his sceptical aesthetics of existence. The thesis concludes with responses to a number of objections to the sceptical stance here defended. To my parents Nikos and Angela That which is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil My concern is that after my departure something remains of me, not papers, not final philosophical declarations, but love. […]. That is what I would like to happen, not intellectual survival but the survival of love. Paul Feyerabend, Killing Time PREFACE This dissertation is the result of my own work and includes nothing which is the outcome of work done in collaboration except as declared in the Acknowledgements and specified in the text. It is not substantially the same as any that I have submitted, or, is being concurrently submitted for a degree or diploma or other qualification at the University of Cambridge or any other University or similar institution except as declared in the Acknowledgements and specified in the text. I further state that no substantial part of my dissertation has already been submitted, or, is being concurrently submitted for any such degree, diploma or other qualification at the University of Cambridge or any other University or similar institution except as declared in the Acknowledgements and specified in the text. It does not exceed the prescribed word limit for the relevant Degree Committee. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS It is commonplace that one’s work has been informed by many voices. This becomes more relevant when the work at hand is on a figure like Michel Foucault who thought that this could not be otherwise. This thesis is no exception. First, I would like to thank my two Greek funding bodies for their financial support. I would like to thank the Alexander S. Onassis Public Benefit Foundation for the financial support it provided during the first two years of my research and the State Scholarships Foundation (IKY) for the following years. I would like to thank all those who attended the conferences and seminars where I presented aspects of my work and whose comments enabled me to elaborate and sharpen my arguments. I would like to thank Daniel Defert, Stuart Elden, Colin Gordon, and Frederic Gros for the conversations I had with them and for their patience in dealing with some of my questions. In this context, a special thanks belongs to Michelle Hannoosch, Jean Khalfa, and Martin Crowley. I have not forgotten the latter’s advice that there is no need to always defend Foucault. I am afraid that I may have failed in this regard. I would like to thank Tasos Kaplanis for his friendship, intellectual support, and indispensable help during the first years of my thesis. I would like to thank my teacher Vasso Kindi for her help upon my return to Athens. Apart from the fact that we shared the same philosophical interests and perspectives, she gave me the opportunity to present aspects of my work at the Philosophy of History seminar she convened. I would like to thank the seminar participants and friends Dionysis Christias, Kostas Markou, and Miltos Theodosiou for our continuous, intense, and constructive discussions. May they continue. I owe a special thanks also to my teacher Kostas Gavroglu. Not only were his emotional and intellectual support and trust priceless during these difficult last years. He understood –as an authentic leftist– the importance of material conditions for the non-material superstructure and he provided me with a place to complete my final draft. Finally, I am particularly indebted to my friends Dimitris Galanopoulos, Thilo Glebe, Kostas Loukos, Dora Makri, and Kyriaki Mavrogeorgi. Their care and support, along with our long discussions, have been indispensable. My long-standing teacher and friend Theodore Arabatzis was more than a constant source of priceless stimulation and inspiration, both intellectual and moral, pivotal in the completion of the thesis. I owe a lot to our long discussions on many technical matters. I owe a special thanks to my good friends Samer Frangie, Nicholas Vrousalis and Stavros Alifragkis, who I first met in Cambridge, as well as to Efstathia Papadodima and Emilia Athanassiou. Nicholas and Stavros’ constant and unique ethical encouragement and intellectual inspiration have been constitutive all these years. Although it cannot be said that one finds one’s authorial voice while writing one’s thesis, I was fortunate enough to discover to whom I was addressing my arguments all along. I hope that my mentor and friend Stelios Virvidakis, who first sparked my interest in the notion of aesthetics of existence and whom I profoundly thank for all his help and the discussions we had since, will, even if not fully convinced, at least continue to acknowledge a worthy interlocutor. This thesis would not have been completed without my friend Manuel Dries. Apart from his constant ethical support, there has not been a part of my work that was not thoroughly discussed and to which he did not provide careful comments. And if a complete friendship involves this kind of intellectual intensity and profundity, along with the climate in which our conversations took place, then I have been fortunate to have Manuel and Clare Ryan as true friends. Finally, I am immensely grateful to my supervisor Ian James. I would like to thank him for his constant and unflinching support, encouragement and trust. I have been fortunate to be supervised by someone whose perspective on philosophical matters I could share and admire. I owe my warmest thanks to my dearest parents, Nikos and Angela, and to my brother Yiannis. Especially to my father, I think that I owe aspects of the ‘anti-theoretical’ stance that informs what follows. In addition to their constant intellectual stimulation, their unconditional support, encouragement and trust have taught me the most valuable lesson of this entire experience, that of love. I had the tragic fortuity to experience true coincidence in perspective in all matters with my late partner Faidra Papanelopoulou. I cannot even begin to describe the ways in which her love and intellectual companionship were constitutive: my thesis is about the art of living, and Faidra was teaching me how to live. And the rest is noise. i TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Abbreviations vi Introduction, or How to Respond to the Poverty of Philosophy 1 1. The content of metaphysics 2 2. The content of a sceptical stance 3 3. A note on the framework of approaches to Foucault’s thought 4 4. A note on the chapters 15 1. Foucault’s Genealogy of Subjectivity and Truth as Sceptical Aesthetics of Existence 20 1.0. Introduction 20 1.1. Foucault’s Metahistorical Remarks: the Art of Living as the Aesthetics of Existence 23 1.2. Foucault’s Metahistorical Remarks: the Care of the Self 29 1.2.1. Philosophy versus spirituality: Foucault’s argument 30 1.2.2. Philosophy, or the Cartesian moment 34 1.2.3. Spirituality, or a nominalist conception of the self 35 1.2.4. Critique of the Cartesian philosophical stance 37 1.2.5. Conclusion 43 1.3. Care of the Self: The Practice of Parrhēsia 45 1.3.1. Care of the self as truth-telling: the structure of a genealogical critique 45 1.3.2. Care of the self as Cynic truth-telling: critique and demetaphysicalisation 47 1.3.2.1 Philosophical life as unconcealed life 48 1.3.2.2. Philosophical life as life without mixture 49 1.3.2.3. Philosophical life as straight life 51 1.3.2.4. Philosophical life as sovereign life 52 1.3.3. Conclusion 56 ii 1.4. Games of Truth, Problematisation, Experience: Foucault’s Sceptical Self- Descriptions 59 1.4.1. Convergences: Heideggerian themes in Foucault’s care of the self 59 1.4.2. Divergences: Foucault’s self-description as a sceptical stance 61 1.4.2.1. Games of truth 63 1.4.2.2. Problematisation 64 1.4.2.3. Experience 66 1.4.3. Conclusion 70 1.5. A Sceptical Stance: A Retrospective Justification of Foucault’s Aesthetics of Existence 72 1.5.1. The scepticism of Sextus Empiricus 72 1.5.1.1. Sextus Empiricus’ Outlines of Pyrrhonism 72 1.5.1.2. A dominant interpretation of Sextus: radical scepticism 75 1.5.1.3. A new interpretation of Sextus’ scepticism 77 1.5.1.4. Sextus’ sceptical tools 80 1.5.1.5. Sextus’ ethics 81 1.5.1.5.1. Critique of previous interpretations and answers to possible problems 81 1.5.1.5.2. Sceptical ethics: the possibility of a positive stance 84 1.5.2. The sceptical relevance of Foucault 85 2. Foucault’s Geistesgeschichte 87 2.0. Introduction 87 2.0.1. The role of Foucault’s Geistesgeschichte 87 2.0.2. The three aspects of Foucault’s Geistesgeschichte 88 2.0.3. The content of Foucault’s Geistesgeschichte 90 2.1. Foucault’s Geistesgeschichte: Philosophical Auto/biography 92 2.1.1. From Heidegger to Nietzsche 92 2.1.2. From Blanchot to Nietzsche 63 2.1.3. Foucault’s Nietzsche and his elaboration of the themes of his Geistesgeschichte 95 iii 2.2. Foucault’s Geistesgeschichte: Heidegger 101 2.2.1. Heidegger’s thought as a critique of metaphysics 102 2.2.2. Being and Time 104 2.2.2.1. Dasein as being-in-the-world 104 2.2.2.2. Dasein as being-to-death 105 2.2.2.3. Conclusion 106 2.2.3. Heidegger’s later thought 107 2.2.3.1. Heidegger’s later ethics 107 2.2.3.2. Conclusion 109 2.3. Foucault’s Geistesgeschichte: Blanchot 110 2.3.1. Blanchot’s later thought: L’espace littéraire 111 2.3.1.1. Kafka 115 2.3.1.2. Kirilov 121 2.3.1.3. Rilke 122 2.3.2. Conclusion 125 2.4. Foucault’s Geistesgeschichte: Nietzsche 127 2.4.1. Foucault’s Nietzsche 127 2.4.2. Nietzsche’s sceptical philology 130 2.4.2.1. Nietzsche’s conception of the world as eternal recurrence 131 2.4.2.2. Nietzsche’s critique of metaphysics 133 2.4.3. Foucault’s Nietzschean scepticism 136 2.4.4. Conclusion 139 2.5. Conclusion 140 3. Foucault’s Sceptical Aesthetics of Existence 144 3.1. Critique of Psychological Reason I: Foucault on Subjectivity 144 3.1.0. Introduction or d’écrire seulement en marge 144 3.1.1. Foucault’s critique of Cartesian subjectivity 146 3.1.1.1. Foucault’s approach to Husserl 148 iv 3.1.1.2. Foucault’s invocation of Heidegger 156 3.1.1.3. The sceptical character of Foucault’s critique 159 3.2. Critique of Psychological Reason II: Histoire de la folie 167 3.2.0. Introduction 167 3.2.1. The experience of leprosy as experience of nothingness 171 3.2.2. The experience of madness: Stultifera navis 177 3.2.3. From the danse macabre to the ironic experience of madness 181 3.2.4. From foundationalism to holism: imagination as experience of madness 184 3.3 Genealogy as a Sceptical Critique 191 3.3.0. Introduction 191 3.3.1. Nietzsche’s sceptical philology revisited 192 3.3.1.0. Preliminary remarks 192 3.3.1.1. Herkunft and Entstehung: genealogy as anti-essentialist and anti-teleological history 193 3.3.1.2. Genealogy as critique: the three critical functions of genealogical history 196 3.3.2. Genealogy as Foucault’s metahistory: genealogy as analytics of power 205 3.3.2.1. Power as sovereignty: towards a critique of a metaphysics of power 205 3.3.2.2. A genealogical conception of power 208 3.3.2.3. Power, force, domination 210 3.3.2.4. Power and/as knowledge 213 3.3.2.4.1. Contextualism as power 217 3.3.2.4.2. Power: nominalism and scepticism 218 4. Conclusion: Sceptical Ethics 221 4.1. Critique and Responses 222 4.1.1. Critique 222 4.1.2. Responses 224 4.1.2.1. First response: exposing metaphysics as unjustified 225 v 4.1.2.2. Second response: the internalist aspect of the sceptical stance 228 4.2. Final Remarks 234 4.2.1. Critique of responses 234 4.2.2. Final responses 235 Bibliography of Michel Foucault 240 General Bibliography 244 vi List of Abbreviations AL The Art of Living (NEHAMAS 1998) APGE “À propos de la généalogie de l’éthique” (DE II, 1984, 344) AS L’archéologie du savoir (FOUCAULT 1969) BGE Beyond Good and Evil (NIETZSCHE 1990a) BT Being and Time (HEIDEGGER 1962 [1927]) CIS Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (RORTY 1989) CMF “Entretien avec Michel Foucault” (DE II, 1980, 281) CV Le courage de la vérité (FOUCAULT 2009) DE I Michel Foucault. Dits et écrits I, 1954–1975 DE II Michel Foucault. Dits et écrits II, 1976–1988 EE “Une esthétique de l’existence” (DE II, 1984, 357) ESS “L’éthique du souci de soi” (DE II, 1984, 356) GS The Gay Science (NIETZSCHE 2001) GSA Le gouvernement de soi et des autres (FOUCAULT 2008) HEP “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry” (HEIDEGGER 1949 [1936]) HES L’herméneutique du sujet (FOUCAULT 1999) HF Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (FOUCAULT 1961) IFDS « Il faut défendre la société » (FOUCAULT 1997) IMF “Entretien avec Michel Foucault” (DE II, 1977, 192) IRE “Introduction” (DE I, 154, 1) MC Les mots et les choses (FOUCAULT 1966) NFM “Nietzsche, Freud, Marx” (DE I, 1967, 46) NGH “Nietzsche, la généalogie, l’histoire” (DE I, 1971, 84) PE “Politique et éthique : une interview” (DE II, 1984, 341) PPP “Polémique, politique et problématisations” (DE II, 1984, 342) PS “Pouvoirs et stratégies” (DE II, 1977, 218) RM “Le retour de la morale” (DE II, 1984, 354) SP “Le sujet et le pouvoir” (DE II, 1982, 306) SV Subjectivité et vérité ( FOUCAULT 2014) SV “Le souci de la vérité” (DE II, 1984, 347) UP Histoire de la sexualité II. L’usage des plaisirs. (FOUCAULT 1984) VPS “Vérité, pouvoir et soi” (DE II, 1988, 362) vii VS Histoire de la sexualité I. La volonté de savoir (FOUCAULT 1976) WIM “What is Metaphysics” (HEIDEGGER 1998 [1929]) WP The Will to Power (NIETZSCHE 1968) 1 Introduction Michel Foucault’s genealogical investigations constitute a specific historical discourse that challenges the metaphysical hypostatisation of concepts and methodological approaches as unique devices for tracking metaphysically objective truths. Foucault’s notion of aesthetics of existence, his elaboration of the ancient conceptualisation of ethics as an ‘art of living’ (a technē tou biou), along with a series of interconnected notions (such as the care of the self) that he developed in his later work, have a triple aspect. First, these notions are constitutive parts of his later genealogies of subjectivity. Second, they show that Foucault contemplates the possibility of understanding ethics differently, opposed to the traditional Kantian conceptualisation of morality: he envisages ethics in terms of self-fashioning, of aesthetic transformation, of turning one’s life into a work of art. Third, Foucault employs these notions in self-referential way: they are considered to describe his own genealogical work. In what follows, I will defend a double thesis. First, there is evidence to believe that Foucault’s late genealogical investigations made him retrospectively understand and justify his large parts of his work in the above ethical terms; they made him understand that what he was doing all along was practicing an aesthetics of existence in the form of an ongoing historicist investigation. I thus defend the idea that this notion was already present in a constitutive way from the beginning of his work. In short, I argue that the notion of aesthetics of existence can be traced in earlier moments of his work. Second, I defend the idea that this notion of aesthetics of existence is best understood in terms of the sceptical stance of Sextus Empiricus. According to Foucault himself, the aesthetics of existence can describe his own work. This means that his genealogical studies constitute instantiations of an aesthetics of existence. According to the above definition (genealogy as a historicist discourse that aims at the undoing of metaphysical conceptualisations), it follows that the aesthetics of existence should also be understood as a critique of metaphysics. The sceptical stance describes an ethics of critique of metaphysical truths. Thus, I argue that if the notion of aesthetics of existence is not understood in terms of a sceptical stance, then Foucault’s genealogical investigations would have to be (and have been) considered metaphysical investigations. In that sense, they would be self-refuting, as they would 2 become identified with the metaphysical conceptualisations they aim at undoing. In other words, if Foucault’s genealogical investigations are to be valid and effective, his aesthetics of existence should be understood in terms of a sceptical stance. At this point we need to say a few things about the notion of a sceptical stance. Given that we are talking about a sceptical stance and about genealogy as an undoing historicist discourse, we need to talk, first, about the target of this stance; in other words, we need to ask of what is this stance sceptical. Specifically, I will argue that a sceptical stance should be understood as ontologically nominalist, epistemically contextualist, and morally particularist. Moreover, this description should not be understood as metaphysical. It should not be understood as a substitution of one set of metaphysical categories with another. Rather, I argue that this description derives from the critique of a metaphysical stance. Thus, a nominalist, contextualist, and particularist stance is not a philosophical alternative for which Foucault opts among others. It is the stance that defines his scepticism and is premised on his critique of metaphysics. In that sense, Foucault’s own premises posit a dilemma with mutually exclusive horns: one is either doing metaphysics, or adopts a sceptical (that is, a nominalist, contextualist, and particularist) stance. 1. The content of metaphysics As indicated above, this sceptical stance can be understood as a critique of a metaphysical discourse. The latter is considered a dominant discourse of theoretical inquiry that eliminates concrete human experience, reducing it to universal and ahistorical entities. In short, for metaphysical discourse, something exists, is meaningful, and has value if and only if it corresponds to some ahistorical entity. In contrast, for the sceptic, the existence, meaning, and value of something describe nothing save for the role it plays in a particular historical context. Thus, a sceptical stance describes a historicist, nominalist, and contextualist practice that can be seen as both a diagnostic tool and a therapeutic antidote to the phenomenon investigated by each genealogy. As we will see, in his genealogical inquiries discussed in the chapters that follow, Foucault seems to understand metaphysics as what I would like to call the hypostatisation of the particular. Roughly put, metaphysics proceeds as follows: it takes particular things as objects of inquiry as they are at a specific historical moment, usually the present; it removes their specific, historical context; it engages in further 3 abstractions; and it finally considers the result of this process as non-contingent, ahistorical, or transcendental. More specifically, Foucault seems to claim that modern metaphysical discourse can be understood to appear in two versions (Cartesian and Hegelian metaphysics), according to which the difference between them amounts to nothing but the replacement of one set of metaphysical categories with another.1 The first version is that of Cartesian metaphysics and can be understood, in a simplified way, in terms of three points. First, the ancient view of an ontological stratified structure of essences and accidental properties that encompass the whole of reality is now abandoned for an ontological division between subject and world. Second, in a way, this all-encompassing stratification becomes internalised and transformed into the equally ahistorical and universal categories of the structure of mind. Third, a relation of representation between mind and world is grounded in these categories. In turn, all things epistemic, like truth and knowledge, are grounded in this relation of representation. The second variation is that of Hegelian metaphysics. Despite constituting a critique of the Cartesian viewpoint, both share the same metaphysical structure. Put in an equally simplified way, subject and world are replaced by a series of successive discourses produced by history. The fact that history is governed by ahistorical reason indicates that the Hegelian viewpoint can be seen as the replacement of one set of metaphysical categories with another. 2. The content of a sceptical stance As we said earlier, a nominalist, contextualist, and particularist stance results from the undoing of such metaphysical structures. Although this process will become apparent in the discussion of concrete cases in Foucault’s work in the chapters that follow,2 I will briefly illustrate in general terms the way this stance derives from the undoing of a metaphysical structure and shows the way these terms of nominalism, contextualism and particularism are to be used henceforth. As the Hegelian version can be seen as a variation of the Cartesian, I will here focus only on the latter. The Cartesian metaphysical structure can be described in the 1 This distinction of philosophical modernity is based on Foucault’s own account (1980, CMF) and Rorty’s reconstruction (1986), both further elaborated using the tools of analytic philosophy in the following two chapters. For one of the main sources of this idea, see Heidegger’s Nietzsche lectures, where he often cites Descartes as the paradigmatic philosopher of modernity (HEIDEGGER 2003a–c; cf. 1991a–b. See chapters 2.1 and 2.2.1. Cf. RORTY 1979, 1991b). 2 See chapters 1, 3.1, 3.2, and 3.3. 4 two following interlinked doctrines: “The structure of human language will tell us something profound about the nature of the human mind […] [and] the structure of language is related to the nature of reality beyond the mind.”3 This kind of philosophical inquiry attempts to explain the function of truth in terms of the relation between the structure of language and the structure of the world. The critique of the Cartesian metaphysical structure aims at the historicist undoing of the metaphysical structure of subjectivity. This entails the collapse of the relation between mind and world, and, in turn, meaning and truth would be determined in terms of language alone. This is what contextualism refers to: truth would no longer be identified with and would not be grounded in any ahistorical, non- local, ‘objective’ reality. Truth would become relative to and dependent on practices, psychological and mental states, and local values. More specifically, the truth of a belief would depend on its coherence with other beliefs.4 This epistemological outcome is interlinked with a nominalist ontological corollary. Given this epistemological conclusion, the references of our statements are no longer determined by the world “out there”. Rather, what reality is or consists of, and the cutting up of this reality into things, facts, events, or whatever other entities to which these beliefs refer, depends on a more or less tacit prior contextual description. Thus, in Hacking’s terms again, a nominalist would hold that “(a) all categories, classes and taxonomies are created and fixed by human beings rather than found in nature, and that (b) classifications may grow or be revised”.5 Finally, then, particularism should be understood as nothing other than the ontological and epistemological views of nominalism and contextualism applied to the normative area of morality, traditionally conceived. 3. A note on the framework of approaches to Foucault’s thought I have thus far described Foucault’s philosophical project as sceptical that comprises a nominalist ontology, contextualist epistemology, and particularist ethics. It is this sceptical stance or framework that I regard as the best justification of Foucault’s work. In this section, I want to situate my reading in some recent scholarship on 3 HACKING 1975: 69. 4 See RORTY 1991a and CIS. 5 HACKING 2002b: 106. 5 Foucault and point out the most important advantages of a sceptical reading of his work. First, a sceptical reading of Foucault enables a coherent interpretation of Foucault’s work as a whole.6 It allows us to regard the structure of his genealogical studies (in terms of its premises and goals) as constant, and often explains the particular concrete interpretative choices he makes in his readings, especially in the context of his late genealogical studies. The presence of his sceptical practice of thinking can also be made visible in his earlier work, where it seemed (at least prima facie) to be absent. It thus provides us with a metalanguage (exemplified in the terms of nominalism and contextualism) as an interpretive tool. Second, I regard the sceptical reading as a contribution to the existing literature on Foucault as it can offer a defence and justification of Foucault’s work in at least four ways. First, my suggested interpretation of Foucault allows for a substantive and adequate response to a number of criticisms that have been raised against his work by exposing some of the problematic premises on which these criticisms are based. Second, the sceptical reading also helps with impasses of sympathetic readings of Foucault’s work. I have in mind here readings that offer sympathetic interpretations of his genealogical approach and assent to a large extent to its conclusions, and attempt to defend them. As I will show below, in their attempt to provide a substantive account of Foucault’s ethics they often end up accepting the very premises on which criticisms of Foucault’s thought are based, and which Foucault’s own thought aims to undo. In this way, Foucault is identified with a metaphysical stance. Third, my sceptical reading shows that, even in those sympathetic approaches that avoid the above relapse, the description of Foucault’s ethical stance remains unsatisfactory. In these cases, Foucault’s thought becomes equipollent to the philosophical approaches he criticises. This makes Foucault’s thought to lose its full critical potential, it leaves it vulnerable once again to possible criticisms of self-contradiction, i.e. that he himself relapses into the kind of metaphysical stance he himself wants to attack, and deprives it of its constitutively debunking function. In this way, Foucault’s thought becomes either metaphysical or empty. Fourth and finally, it is important to recognise that Foucault’s sceptical stance is not confined to a meta-level (as points one and two seem to indicate); it is not a 6 Of course, I cannot say that I simply argue for such an interpretation, as the scope of the thesis is more limited. 6 version of metaphilosophical quietism. Rather, as indicated in point three, his sceptical stance extends to the traditional philosophical areas proper. These four points will become clearer in the following discussion of concrete examples of approaches to Foucault’s work. It would go beyond the scope of this section to engage in detail with the large secondary literature that exists on Foucault. In what follows, I frame my discussion in paradigmatic reference to two major figures in order to demonstrate what I see as some of the advantages of reading Foucault in the novel, sceptical way I propose. I will begin with a discussion of Gary Gutting’s sympathetic analysis of Foucault’s thought in his most recent work.7 Gutting’s approach paradigmatically manifests the points raised above and, although I will not do it here, can also be applied to other recent influential sympathetic and critical approaches regarding Foucault’s thought. I will first examine Gutting’s discussion of Foucault’s metaphilosophical status before I turn to his discussion of Foucault’s ethics. First, Gutting’s approach is significant because, unlike many, it explicitly addresses the metaphilosophical status of Foucault’s thought, which, to say the least, does not sit comfortably within philosophy as traditionally conceived.8 The title of his work (Thinking the Impossible) perfectly encapsulates this tension. Although Gutting does not explicate it, at least in these terms, it can be understood to describe a philosophical stance opposed to transcendental inquiry without, however, being identified — or at least without intending to become identified with — a purely empirical inquiry. It can be also understood as the attempt to take the relevance of history philosophically seriously while avoiding the Hegelian solution of giving an ahistorical meaning to it, and without relapsing into Cartesian subjectivity (and vice versa). His astute comment that “[o]ur French philosophers operate either above (Levinas and Derrida) or below (Foucault) the normative level” underlines this point perfectly.9 Finally, Gutting’s approach corroborates a central insight of our thesis that, 7 GUTTING 2011. 8 Gutting explicitly acknowledges the metaphilosophical character of his book: “I am after a deeper penetration into the nature and significance of a certain style of philosophizing, rather than a broader but inevitably more superficial coverage of the doxa of the period” (ibid.: 3, emphasis added, save the ancient Greek term), while he accepts that “in certain ways it parallels my earlier book”, a metaphilosophical study of analytic philosophy (GUTTING 2009). 9 GUTTING 2011: 147. 7 according to Foucault, modern philosophy can be either a variation of transcendental inquiry, or a variation of a sceptical stance.10 It is in this context that Gutting discusses Foucault’s relation to his influences (Heidegger, Nietzsche) and to his contemporaries (Deleuze, Sartre). More specifically, I read Gutting’s discussion of Foucault’s influences as emphasising the radicalness of Foucault’s thought.11 This is obvious in case of Nietzsche’s influence. Foucault “associate[es] genealogy with a counter-philosophy that would try to undermine traditional notions of reality, identity and truth.”12 Thus, with Nietzsche, “Foucault avoids Hegelianism by avoiding philosophy.”13 Concerning Heidegger, Gutting argues, “the great message […] was that the conceptual framework that had defined philosophy since Plato and particularly since Descartes […] was no longer viable.”14 More specifically, “[g]iven Foucault’s move away from traditional philosophy, we may perhaps not be over-reading his oft-cited comment about the influence of Heidegger by noting that he emphasises Heidegger as his main philosophical* influence”.15 This enables Gutting to discuss Foucault’s similarities to (and differences from) Heidegger’s thought. First, genealogical thinking “[i]n Heidegger’s terms […] is ontic not ontological, operating on the level of beings, not of being”, and is in contrast to “overcoming of the forgetting of being […] some sort of ontological thinking (thinking about being).”16 Second, concerning ethics, Heidegger’s preparation for a kind of new foundation is contrasted with Foucault’s attitude of concrete, local offenses. My own approach to Foucault’s relation to Heidegger can be illustrated against the backdrop of Gutting’s remarks, as it exemplifies the difficulty of sympathetic interpretations of Foucault’s thought to accommodate the radicalness of the thought they themselves diagnose. As I will argue in sections 1.4. and 2.2., their divergence is not a difference of focus; this would make their approaches equipollent. Foucault’s distance from Heidegger is a critique of a metaphysical reading of 10 See also GUTTING 2003. In her reply, Han corroborates the dilemma above. According to her, Gutting gives a negative answer to the question “whether Foucault should be read as a philosopher at all (when you say that his works are “primarily works of history, not philosophy in the traditional sense”)” (2003: 1). 11 Gutting writes towards the end of his discussion of Foucault that “he was not really a philosopher in the modern sense.” (GUTTING 2011: 146). 12 GUTTING 2011: 94. 13 GUTTING 2011: 94, emphasis added. 14 GUTTING 2011: 59. 15 GUTTING 2011: 59, emphasis added, save the term with the asterisk. 16 GUTTING 2011: 61. 8 Heidegger’s insights, a critique necessitated by Foucault’s own engagements. In other words, Foucault’s working on the ontic level is a critique of a metaphysical distinction between the two: his own genealogies are a critique of ontological thinking understood as a quasi-foundationalist ethical stance, and his idea of a care of the self as a transformation of the self must be seen also as a critique of Dasein.17 I want to turn briefly to Gutting’s discussion of Foucault’s ethics. His discussion is premised on the triple idea that characterises the approaches to Foucault’s late thought, including my own: in the context of his late genealogy of the subject, Foucault suggests an ethics;18 this ethics is individualist;19 and it can be seen as self-referential.20 Gutting thinks such an individualist and self-referential ethics leads to two problems. The first concerns metaethics, while the second concerns the content of the normative propositions themselves. Concerning the first, Foucault’s historicist critique of the subject (and of any other metaphysical underpinning of discourses) reveals a lack of justification or ground for his ethical stance.21 The second problem ultimately concerns Foucault’s individualism: there seems to be nothing to constrain one’s self-fashioning and avoid it being harmful to others.22 17 The discussion above situates our approach in the context of other relevant readings of Foucault’s relation to Heidegger. Roughly put, I discern two categories of approach: those that emphasise similarities, and those that emphasise differences. As we argue in the chapters that follow, the former run the risk of rendering Foucault’s insights into ahistorical conceptions, while bracketing his critical stance. See, par excellence, DREYFUS 2003; despite his acknowledgement of the differences between the two thinkers (ibid.: 36–37), the parallels he draws (ibid.: 45) are indicative of this risk (cf. DREYFUS and KELLY 2011, for a version of Heideggerian ethics). Furthermore, despite their differences from Dreyfus, I think this critique applies to THIELE 2003, MCWHORTER 2003, and HAN 2003a. Although the connection that Han argues for is a similarity in failure, the problem remains. According to her, Foucault, like Heidegger, retains a transcendental structure of subjectivity, albeit this structure, contra Heidegger, is a naturalised one, a set of conditions of possibility grounded in the empirical side of selfhood (HAN 2002, 2003a, and 2005, especially 176–187). The problem with the approaches that focus on the differences between the two thinkers, like Gutting’s, is that they do not show that Foucault’s stance necessitates a critique of Heidegger’s insights. See SAWICKI 2003 and HICKS 2003. Sawicki’s conclusions (2003: 71) are very close to Gutting’s. Schwartz’s (2003) analysis of the reasons for Foucault’s turn from ‘archaeology’ to ‘genealogy’ are very congenial to our approach. 18 “Foucault found in the ancients the possibility of a meaningful self-construction of the self […], a project that even in a traditional sense, be called ethical” (GUTTING 2011: 142). 19 “This allows for individual choice in self-formation, based, for example, on personal standards of aesthetic value” (ibid.: 143). 20 “Moreover, as his final work makes clear, although he did not pursue philosophical truth, he did aspire to lead, in the ancient sense, a philosophical life” (ibid.: 147). 21 “Readers of Foucault’s previous histories might well wonder how his picture of individuals formed by the social power–knowledge nexus can allow room for any project of ethical self-formation” (ibid.: 142); “Another question is whether Foucault’s turn to ethics reverses his earlier rejection of philosophy as a study of the subject” (ibid.: 145). 22 “A natural objection is that such a self-centered project should hardly be called ethical. It is, however, ethical in its concern with the fundamental values that guide an individual’s life. The worry, presumably, is that, since these values concern self-formation, they lack the directedness to others characteristic of ethics” (ibid.: 145). 9 Before we examine Gutting’s answers, I would like to make a double point. First, these objections are the same as those raised by Foucault’s critics. Second, the sympathetic approaches, in assenting to the validity of these criticisms, also assent to the premises of Foucault’s critics, which I want to argue are none other than the premises his genealogical critique aims at undoing. Concerning the first point (the lack of justification or ground), to which I will return extensively in my conclusion, the objections to Foucault’s stance can be reconstructed in the form of a dilemma: either the ethical stance that Foucault suggests is grounded in a metaphysical structure (a notion of subjectivity, or a historically privileged discourse), which would make Foucault’s thought self- contradictory and self-refuting, as it precisely negates the possibility of such a structure; or it is not grounded in such a structure, and then, although thereby avoiding self-contradiction, he arrives (both ethically and epistemically) at such a radically relativist stance that it must be seen as empty. As we can see, the main premise in which this dilemma is grounded is thus the alleged necessity for a non- contingent structure into which normative and epistemic notions should be grounded. Concerning the second point, the potentially harmful lack of individual constraint, the assent to the validity of these objections entails an attempt to answer them. I will now discuss Gutting’s responses as representative of other sympathetic accounts and show in which way they tend to relapse into a metaphysical stance. On the one hand, Gutting explicitly assents to the contingency of Foucault’s insights, and equally explicitly contradistinguishes Foucault’s stance from the possibility of being grounded in either a transcendental-phenomenological subject, or a Levinasian conception of subjectivity.23 On the other hand, this does not prevent Gutting from suggesting, malgré lui, a stratified structure that makes Foucault relapse into a non- contingent, metaphysical stance. First, Gutting assents to a notion of selfhood, itself associated with a series of thick normative concepts (mainly freedom, reflection, and autonomy). The following passage makes this explicit: 23 “Foucault’s ethics does not provide necessary conditions for anything other than ethical life itself. [§] More generally, Foucault’s ethics is not a contribution to philosophy in the sense that has defined the discipline since at least Kant and Hegel: a body of theoretical knowledge about fundamental human questions. He had no such theoretical conclusions to offer us, just ethical and political commitments to the kind of life he wanted to live” (ibid.: 146). “Foucault’s account of ethical subjectification does recall Levinas’s account of how the encounter with the Other constitutes the I as a subject. But Foucault’s “subject” already exists at the center of a world of objects prior to the encounter with the Other” (ibid.). 10 “Freedom” and “reflection” need not be read as the technical terms of idealist philosophy but may refer to everyday features of human life (the metaphysical equivalent to Freud’s famous reminder that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar). In their everyday sense, freedom and reflection do not imply Kantian (or Sartrean) autonomy. They may, for example, represent the small spark of subjectivity in a context heavily constrained by the social system of power- knowledge.24 Second, this cluster of notions grounds the universality of Foucault’s stance: Foucault can plausibly reply that, on his view, it is a universal human good that each individual engages in a project of aesthetic self-creation. This, indeed, is Foucault’s ethical reason for supporting the struggles of marginalized people.25 Third, given Foucault’s distinction between ‘moral codes’ and ‘modes of subjectification’, and that the latter occurs already within the normative framework of the former, it is the set of values provided by the normative framework that prevents or “constrains self-formative behaviour that would harm others.”26 Before indicating the way Gutting’s responses constitute a relapse into a metaphysical stance, I would like to turn briefly to Johanna Oksala’s approach, which shares similarities with Gutting’s. Like Gutting, she suggests an individualist ethical stance that describes Foucault’s work, and she attempts to respond to the problems Gutting raises. However, her solutions to what she sees as otherwise insurmountable problems involve the acceptance of some metaphysical grounding. More specifically, like Gutting, she accepts the idea that Foucault’s stance raises metaethical concerns, and attempts to specify the content of the normative framework Foucault seems to endorse: This understanding of the subject as being, on the one hand, constituted 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 Foucault’s late thinking on ethics.27 While I have argued that to criticize Foucault’s 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.28 24 Ibid.: 146, emphasis added. For a similar approach to the notion of ‘experience’, see GUTTING 2002. 25 GUTTING 2011: 145. 26 Ibid.: 145. 27 OKSALA 2005: 165. Cf. “How can we understand the capacity of the subject for critical self- reflection? How is the constituted subject capable of engaging in truly critical practices?” (ibid.: 192). 28 Ibid.: 175. 11 [W]e must acknowledge the fundamental importance of the other for the constitution of ethical subjectivity. […] This means also that the question of how to live a good life must be subordinated to the more primary question which alone can give life an ethical meaning: how do I respond to the other person?” (194–195).29 Consequently, the response she develops on these issues is, again, similar to Gutting’s. First, despite acknowledging Foucault’s attempt to break new ethical ground, Oksala suggests a Levinasian constitution of selfhood, according to which the individualist carer of herself has internalised concern for the other. Second, it is only by virtue of this constitution of selfhood that the self can be engaged in critical and creative practices in certain contexts. These contexts are traced by Oksala in an ethos of Enlightenment and a series of relevant values. According to Oksala, a series of Foucault’s late texts indicate his implicit assent to this framework, with the simultaneous acknowledgement of its contingency.30 Third, possibly because of the invoking of the Levinasian foundation in the other, it seems such a framework can only ever be implicit as it must remain unarticulated. Specifically, drawing on the thought of early Wittgenstein, Oksala argues for the unarticulated character of values and moral criteria as “[e]thical situations are characterized by an experience of a fundamental limit to what can be brought to the realm of language and knowledge”.31 I think the problem with both Gutting’s and Oksala’s accounts ultimately lie in their (in my view unsuccessful) attempts to do justice to Foucault’s radical critique of a metaphysical stance one the one hand, and on the other to provide a theoretical solution to the above interpretative problems of (a) justification and (b) a self-care lacking care for the other. 29 Ibid.: 194–195. Cf. “However, can a relationship be ethical if the personal other involved is contingent and not fundamentally constitutive of it? What kind of ethical relationship is not constituted by the singular, personal other who makes the relationship what it is? How or why should ethics mean anything at all without a personal other? How or why does anybody give an ethical meaning to the task of caring for oneself ?” (Ibid: 196). 30 To be fair, Oksala does not refrain from underscoring the contingency of this ‘foundation’ in reference to both the nominalism (to use our terminology) of the self and the conditions in which it is found: “In connection with Foucault’s genealogy, I have argued that this indeterminacy or ontological contingency characterizes not only discursive structures, but also embodiment and experience.” (Ibid.: 189). “I argue that, in general, we can conclude that freedom in Foucault’s philosophy is divorced from the subject understood as a stable entity and reference point, and is attached instead to practices, forms of experience or the being of language. The understanding of the subject underlying Foucault’s thinking of ethics and politics is consistent in this sense with his earlier explicit rejections of the humanist subject.” (Ibid: 191). 31 Ibid.: 170–171. In support of this, she draws a sharp distinction between linguistic propositions and ethos or ethical practice. 12 First, the notion suggested by Gutting of a “small spark of subjectivity” is philosophically problematic, regardless of its ‘small size’, as it would be difficult to differentiate it from a more (metaphysically) robust conception of the subject. On the one hand, Gutting would need to have recourse to a kind of meta-criterion for distinguishing between kinds of subjectivity, an enterprise hardly non-metaphysical. On the other, Gutting’s own premises do not permit assent to such a notion of subjectivity: it is Gutting who spots a “quasi-Hegelian spectre” in the notion of the subject in his Histoire de la folie.32 It is far from obvious why this ‘small spark’ should not be described here as the return of the Hegelian repressed. Similarly, Oksala’s recourse to a notion of Levinasian subjectivity relapses into a level of abstraction, if not metaphysical conceptualisation, that Foucault’s approach seeks to avoid. In that sense, the problems we have raised and will discuss concerning the relation between Foucault and Heidegger are repeated if Heidegger is replaced by Levinas. More importantly, Oksala’s emphasis on the notion of inarticulateness or ineffability leads back to the metaphysical.33 Second, Gutting’s notion of everydayness runs against Foucault’s genealogical insights. As already alluded to in our invoking of Nietzsche, Foucault’s critique of metaphysical constructions does not occur primarily because these are untrue; it is required because they are constitutive of, embedded in, and thereby hidden within, our everydayness to such an extent that we need the diagnostic tool of a genealogy to discern it. Both everydayness and the set of post-Enlightenment concepts that populate it (like self, autonomy, and freedom) are neither anti-metaphysical nor immune to metaphysics; rather, they are constituted by and recalcitrant remnants of metaphysical insights. In the same way that literal meanings are often old, worn-out metaphors, everyday platitudes mask ossified metaphysical positions. As I will later argue, invoking Foucault’s Sextan scepticism can make this visible, contra interpretations that identify scepticism with conservatism. Specifically, as I will discuss and elaborate on an interpretation by Michael Frede in section 1.5, the sceptic, 32 GUTTING 1994a: 13, retained in GUTTING 2005a. 33 The implicit identification of the discursive realm with the traditionally normative and the universal and the sharp distinction between logos and bios, from which this notion of ineffability seems to stem, are not only of Wittgensteinian vintage (and, mainly, of a specific interpretation of it), but mainly repeat the basic tenets of early positivism. For an extensive discussion of the notions of logos and bios in the context of Foucault’s care of the self, see section 1.4. The consideration of positivism in terms of metaphysics to which I allude is not uncontroversial, and could not be argued here. For the relation, however, between Carnap and neo-Kantianism, which we can see as a version of subject-centred metaphysics, see FRIEDMAN 2000. 13 correctly understood, not only differs from everyman and the everyday. His difference consists precisely in exposing the hidden dogmatism of the latter. Third, both Gutting and Oksala come close to the imagery of a pragmatist liberalism. The assent to a post-Enlightenment, contingent community; the values of freedom and avoidance of harm; the sharp distinction between self-formation and moral code (Gutting), or ethics and politics (Oksala), that maps a sharp distinction between private and public; all correspond closely to Richard Rorty’s position. To be effective, however, the above concepts become metaphysically charged.34 Nevertheless, according to Foucault, there cannot be an a priori distinction between a moral code and a mode of subjectivation. Modes of subjectivation can be followed by many, and they can overturn and eventually replace moral codes (and vice versa). On this matter, Foucault’s own critique of Rorty is revealing: Rorty fait remarquer que, dans ces analyses, je ne fais appel à aucun « nous » – à aucun de ces « nous » dont le consensus, les valeurs, la traditionalité forment le cadre d’une pensée et définissent les conditions dans lesquelles on peut la valider. Mais le problème justement est de savoir si effectivement c’est bien à l’interieur d’un « nous » qu’il convient de se placer pour faire valoir les principes qu’on reconnaît et les valeurs qu’on accepte ; […]. C’est que le « nous » ne me semble pas devoir être préalable à la question ; il ne peut être que le résultat – et le résultat nécessairement provisoire – de la question telle qu’elle se pose dans les termes nouveaux où on la formule.35 I would like to end this discussion with an explanatory note. I have come to believe that what I have called sympathetic approaches to Foucault are virtuous and fruitful attempts to respond to a Foucauldian paradox. On the one hand, Foucault seems to have his heart in the right place. He sides with the marginalised and the oppressed, and he sides with those marginalised and oppressed that are neglected by contemporary critical theory.36 On the other hand, when he attempts to talk about an ethical stance in what seems to be more abstract terms, he does so mainly to negate the possibility of grounds and universalisms — to such an extent that it seems to undermine his own stance. I think the element of self-referentiality entailed in understanding his ethics as a sceptical aesthetics of existence can offer a way out of this paradox or aporia. First, 34 See the relevant critique of NEHAMAS 1990 and HORTON 2001. 35 PPP: 1413. 36 For an association of Foucault with Benjamin in light of this point, see ARONOWITZ 1994. 14 it may be that we should leave open the possibility of a relativist conclusion.37 Second, as I will argue in the conclusion, the best defence of Foucault’s stance from possible criticisms or aporias is the one that undoes the premises on which these criticisms or aporias are based: Foucault’s genealogies themselves were attempts to undo these very premises.38 Thus, it seems that a self-referential aspect of Foucault’s ethics can be seen to solve the impasses created by a more general conceptualisation of the ethics he suggests. Given there is not much room for non-individualist points to be made, or prescriptive and metaethical claims (traditionally conceived), the self- referential aspect is the interpretative answer to this lack. It intensifies the sceptical character of his stance, since it accentuates the radically nominalist (no foundations whatsoever) and contextualist (it’s only about the practices) of his thought. Although this can appear meagre in comparison to more constructive approaches of Foucault’s thought, I think it is philologically more accurate (that is, closer to what Foucault says) and it avoids charging Foucault’s thought with self-contradiction. Paul Veyne’s personal, moving note about the very meaning of his impression of Foucault overtaking him in a car, at a time when Foucault’s health was already deteriorating, perfectly encapsulates Foucault’s ethics and succeeds in describing it: I found myself at that time along a highway; the news available about Foucault’s health was very bad; […]. Just as it [the car] overtook me, I recognized Foucault as the driver; surprised, he turned his head quickly toward me and smiled at me in passing […]. In the first place, the strange car was going too fast; and then its appearance did not have the look of a perception but rather the scent of a hallucination. The car disappeared in the 37 For example, since there are no objective qua non-context-dependent criteria for the determination of success in the formation of a good life, the notion of success is rendered as an acknowledgment of success. Thus, in the same way that (given the absence of objective criteria) the interpretative community determines the aesthetic value of a work of art and the praise of a work of art by the interpretative community constitutes an indication of aesthetic achievement, the admiration of a good life is an indication of success. In this sense, all aspects related to the formation of a life (epistemic and moral, along with criteria according to which these are defined) are a matter of an interpretative community. For an excellent discussion and defence of these issues, see NEHAMAS 1998, 2001a, 2001b, 2001c; cf. Gonzalez’ critique (2000, 2001). For the notion of interpretative community, see FISH 1980. 38 In that sense, I found Hoy’s (1986), Flynn’s (1989), and Rouse’s (1994) accounts congenial. From their analyses, it derives that Foucault does not have to assent to the premises of his critics — that is, to posit a transcendental standpoint. Although these accounts — along with O’Leary’s (2002), Davidson’s (2005), and Bernauer and Mahon’s (2005) approaches to Foucault’s ethics — do not provide any universalist or metaphysical claims to defend Foucault, as we have seen above with other sympathetic approaches, they nevertheless do not underscore the aspect of his critique in nominalist, contextualist, and particularist (or equivalent) terms. In that sense, they do not show the way in which Foucault’s stance surpasses other philosophical approaches, thus making it vulnerable to possible critiques. For an excellent approach of Foucault’s ethics in the latter terms, see FLYNN 1991. Contra Flynn, for a problematic approach that hypostatises truth-telling and thus does not do justice to Foucault’s self- referential aspect in these terms, cf. HAN 2005. 15 distance, or ceased to be, I don’t know which (and I am not sure either that the question has any meaning). […]. I knew instantly (and I stopped right away on the shoulder to make a note of this, so as to be sure later that on that I had not been dreaming) that this vision meant both that Foucault’s history books went much farther than mine, and that Foucault himself was going where we shall all go.39 4. A note on the chapters The first chapter focuses exclusively on Foucault’s late genealogy of the subject and seeks to formulate the interpretative framework within which we can see, on the one hand, Foucault’s own conceptualisation of the aesthetics of existence, and, on the other, in which way it can be associated with a sceptical stance understood as nominalist, contextualist and particularist. More specifically, as we said, in the very beginning, Foucault’s notion of aesthetics of existence has a triple function: it is used to summarise specific practices of the care of the self in antiquity, it suggests a different, non-Kantian ethical stance, and it describes Foucault’s own work. In the first section 1.1., I analyse Foucault’s metahistorical remarks, that is, the remarks that describe the structure and comment on the content of his actual genealogical investigations. I argue for a double point. I attempt to show that Foucault’s notion of aesthetics of existence is used to suggest a contemporary ethical stance, and that this ethical stance can be understood in terms of nominalism, contextualism and particularism. In the second section 1.2., I analyse Foucault’s own description of the genealogy of the subject as undertaken in his lecture series L’Herméneutique du sujet, and specifically how the Cartesian subjectivity can be seen as the outcome of the process of hypostatisation of various practices of the care of the self. I attempt to show four things. (i) Foucault suggests a dilemma according to which modern philosophy acquires the form of either a version of Cartesian metaphysics or a version of the care of the self. (ii) Foucault describes his own work with the latter. (iii) This care of the self is identified with a nominalist, contextualist, and particularist stance. (iv) This stance is not a metaphysical one, but it derives from the critique of a metaphysics of subjectivity. In the third section 1.3., I analyse a crucial instance of Foucault’s genealogy proper, namely the practice of truth-telling, and specifically its instantiation in the 39 VEYNE 1997 [1993]: 232–233, fn. 2. 16 context of the Cynic philosophy. I attempt to show three things. (i) Foucault’s aesthetics of existence does not only describe his own work, but his own work can be seen to be modelled on the Cynic practice of truth-telling. (ii) This does not imply that his aesthetics of existence is Cynical instead of sceptical. On the contrary, his interpretation of the Cynics is an instantiation of his sceptical practice. It is an interpretation that demetaphysicalises their (metaphysically) realist claims and recontextualises them within a practice of radical critique. (iii) This explains at the same time the reason why Foucault does not include the sceptics themselves from his genealogical investigations. In the fourth section 1.4., I analyse Foucault’s explicit retrospective descriptions of his own work in terms of the notions of ‘games of truth’, ‘processes of problematisation’, and ‘fields of experience’. I attempt to show two things. (i) These notions describe his work in terms of nominalism and contextualism. (ii) The way in which these notions suggest a divergence from Heidegger’s conceptions corroborates their understanding in the sceptical terms of nominalism and contextualism. Finally, in the last section 1.5., I show in which sense the sceptical stance so far described follows the scepticism of Sextus Empiricus. (i) I attempt to show how a philological accurate interpretation of Sextan scepticism can be paralleled to Foucault: the way that Foucault stance of critique of the metaphysical tradition in both its Cartesian and Hegelian versions parallels Sextus’ own critique of his contemporary philosophical framework that includes all of his current philosophical schools (Academics, Scholastics, Epicureans, Stoics). (ii) In light of this, I show that the radical metaphysical critique that the Sextan scepticism suggests results in a nominalist, contextualist, and particularist stance. To be sure, a series of notions, like the one of phenomenalism, for example, are introduced and work as a kind of bridge- concepts in order to avoid the possible anachronisms that such a parallel can create. An aesthetics of existence should not be understood as an abstract, ahistorical category. Rather, the nominalism and contextualism of this stance should be applied to itself. On the one hand, what prevents an aesthetics of existence from being reduced to traditional moral discourse (that is, from being identified with the metaphysical outlook on ethics), and, on the other, from being empty (that is, from being identified with just living), is that it emerges from and conceives itself as emerging from a specific historical context. In this sense, an aesthetics of existence is a sceptical practice of thinking, the content of which is informed by the 17 transformative work on the contingent historical situation in which its practitioner is found. In short, one defines the kind of sceptic one is by one’s sceptical practice; and one’s sceptical practice is the engagement with the specific context within which this practice is undertaken. Thus, the sceptic works within a story, or what I will call (following Rorty) a Geistesgeschichte. It is a story that defines both the sceptic’s standpoint and his objects of critique, both his perspective (the why and the how of his critique) and his target (what he criticises). Thus, the second chapter attempts to reconstruct Foucault’s Geistesgeschichte, the matrix from which his thought can be considered to have emerged. As stated in the previous paragraph, this matrix is defined by, first, the specific intellectual tradition, instantiated in his contemporary cases of phenomenology and Marxism, from which he attempts to break free; and, second, the thinkers (Heidegger, Blanchot, and Nietzsche) who provide the context that makes his opposition to this intellectual tradition possible. The intellectual tradition describes the structure of the object of Foucault’s critique: Foucault transcends, and is opposed to, the metaphysical horizon defined by the two poles of Cartesian (subject-centred) and Hegelian (history-centred) philosophy. The context of his influences can be understood as the successive reconceptualisations of the two main themes of self and ethics. Heidegger’s thought is conceived as a critique of Foucault’s intellectual tradition. The notion of the Dasein as being-in-the-world can be seen as a critique of metaphysical subjectivity, and as a nominalist conception of the self. Equally, the notion of authenticity, centred around the notion of the Dasein as being-towards- death, delineates an ethics that is both anti-Kantian and an anti-Hegelian. The question of whether Heidegger’s quasi-historical history runs the risk of relapsing into Cartesian or Hegelian metaphysics leads to a radicalisation of the conception of both self and ethics. This radicalisation can be traced in Blanchot’s reflections on literature, which take the form of a meditation on the lack of a metaphysical bedrock for both self and history. Blanchot’s radicalised view of authenticity is associated with the experience of groundlessness. Authenticity is not the acknowledgement of the irreducible vulnerability of the self, but the concrete understanding of it as inherently fractured. In Foucault’s first approach to Nietzsche, authenticity as an experience of groundlessness takes the form of a metahistorical reflection, and specifically of a radically historicist critique. Authenticity thus acquires a more constructive aspect and can be seen as a twofold ethical stance. The critique of metaphysics is an experience 18 of nothingness; at the same time, this critique is the practice of critique, and this practice is the all-too-human, precarious, incomplete, and gapping coherence of an on-going askēsis. This coherence is the context that replaces a metaphysical foundation with a non-metaphysical discursive space in which writer and reader can meet. This space is the self. The third and final chapter has three parts, and attempts to argue specifically that sceptical ethics as a nominalist, contextualist, and particularist stance is present in the whole of Foucault’s work. I discuss three instances representing different periods of his thought, ranging from his earliest essay to his later reflections on his own historical investigations. More specifically, I intend these three parts to show two things. First, I intend to reveal the specific contents informing the metaphysical horizon defined by the two poles of Cartesian and Hegelian thought, and which become the objects of his critique. Second, I intend to show that the twofold ethical stance traced in his earlier approach to Nietzsche characterises his entire work. The first part is the discussion of Foucault’s very first exemplification of his sceptical stance: his essay on Ludwig Binswanger’s “Traum und Existenz”. Binswanger’s main argument is that dreaming reveals Dasein’s ontological structure as being-in-the-world, and thus manifests its contingency. Foucault’s approach constitutes a radical reinterpretation of Binswanger, as it diverts crucially from Binswanger’s actual argument and its Heideggerian underpinnings. As manifesting the self’s contingency, dreaming constitutes an experience of the groundlessness of human existence, or an experience of nothingness. Foucault’s argument consists in a critique of the metaphysical attempt to conceive and, consequently, cover this nothingness in terms of an ahistorical ontology, epistemology, and ethics regarding the self. In this part, I reconstruct Foucault’s critique of Husserl and Freud, which has a twofold importance. In the first instance, Foucault’s critique constitutes a par excellence instantiation of his critique of the metaphysics of subjectivity, as he refutes their shared underlying Cartesian ontology and epistemology, manifested in the metaphysical premises of their approach to meaning, and argues for a nominalist view of the self. In the second instance, I illustrate that these premises are representative of the tradition of a metaphysical conceptualisation of selfhood that runs from Husserl to Hilary Putnam, Saul Kripke, and Pascal Engel. As Foucault’s critique is applicable to the whole of this tradition, his approach is not only timely, but also necessary. 19 The second part of this chapter is the discussion of Foucault’s Histoire de la folie, considered as the extension of his sceptical approach to the experience of nothingness. The experience of madness is another instance of the self’s groundlessness, and thus constitutes an experience of nothingness. Foucault’s approach to the experience of madness qua nothingness here becomes that of a historical investigation, and in fact of historicist undoing. More specifically, his historicist approach is twofold. In the first instance, it constitutes the critique of the metaphysical stance towards madness that emerged in modernity. This stance constitutes not only the viewpoint in which the scientific discourse on madness is grounded, but also the metaphysical conception of the self that reduces and eliminates the self’s concreteness. In the second instance, therefore, Foucault’s approach involves the attempt to uncover the structure of the premodern experience of madness, understood as the attempt to uncover a non-metaphysical conceptualisation of the self. This premodern experience is itself identified with the two aspects of the sceptical ethical stance: it constitutes both an experience of groundlessness proper, and the experience of the critique of the metaphysical approaches that attempt to eliminate it. The third part of this chapter extends the discussion of Foucault’s historicist approach to his so-called ‘genealogical’ period of writing. Here, I discuss Foucault’s metahistorical reflections (his thoughts on historicist practice), and I make the case that genealogy can be conceived in terms of a twofold sceptical ethics. I first show how his conception of genealogy reveals the structure of his sceptical critique. Specifically, it reveals the structure of metaphysical thinking as a process of decontextualisation and hypostatisation of contingent things, and the mechanism of historicist undoing as exposing this process, thus uncovering the nominalist and contextualist aspects of genealogical investigation. I next show how the undoing of the metaphysical, transcendental subject involves the simultaneous creation of a new kind of selfhood. The disentangled metaphysical bedrock is replaced by the coherence of the nexus that the genealogist weaves. Thus, the practice of genealogy becomes the genealogist, and the genealogist his practice, and its nominalist and contextualist aspects are grounded in this particularist ethical stance. Finally, I conclude with a series of responses to a number of objections (actual and possible) to the sceptical stance I defend in this study. Following Foucault’s insight of self-referentiality, I think that this defence outlines, at the same time, a sceptical ethics. 20 1. Foucault’s Genealogy of Subjectivity and Truth as a Sceptical Aesthetics of Existence 1.0. Introduction I have made a number of claims in the introductory remarks above. First [1], Foucault’s later work constitutes a genealogical investigation of the subject, and specifically of the relations between subjectivity and truth. According to our definitions, and as we will show in this chapter, this genealogical investigation constitutes a historical critique of the metaphysical conception of both self and truth. Second [2], in the context of this genealogical investigation, Foucault refers to the ancient notions of the art of living and of care for the self, and develops the interpretative concept of an aesthetics of existence. This concept describes a different conceptualisation of ethics that can be understood as being in opposition to the Kantian one: it is not universalist — that is, it does not prescribe a moral code or duty to be followed by everybody; and it is not metaphysical — that is, it is not grounded in an ahistorical structure of the subject. Third [3], according to the interpretation I intend to defend here, this ethics qua aesthetics of existence is best understood in terms of a sceptical stance. This sceptical stance [3.1] can be conceived as a practice of critical thinking. It is defined as a critique of metaphysics instantiated in an ontologically nominalist, epistemological contextualist, and ethically particularist stance. In what follows, I will show that this stance [3.2] is best understood as modelled on the scepticism of Sextus Empiricus. Fourth [4], a sceptical aesthetics of existence does not only describe the possible replacement of a Kantian ethical stance. It describes, at the same time, Foucault’s own genealogical thought. In this chapter, I will argue in favour of these four points. Section 1.1. argues for points [2] and [3.1]. First, it shows how the ancient art of living can be understood in terms of an aesthetics of existence — that is, in terms of a concrete ethical stance that remains relevant today. Second, it shows that this ethical stance is a sceptical stance, in other words a nominalist, contextualist, and particularist stance. My arguments are based on what I call Foucault’s metahistorical remarks. If we consider genealogy as a form of historical discourse, then Foucault’s remarks that describe its structure or summarise its content can be considered metahistorical and are found either embedded within the content of his actual 21 historical studies, or in texts commenting on these. This first section works as a preliminary matrix in which the above notions are first introduced. In the next three sections, I argue for points [3.1] and [4]. Section 1.2., concerning point [3.1], elaborates on the notions of nominalism and contextualism. Concerning point [4], as we have noted above, Foucault’s later thought is a critique of a metaphysical conception of the self. Specifically, Foucault’s genealogy can be understood as tracing the way the ancient practice of care for the self (implying a nominalist conception of the self) has been developed into the contemporary Cartesian metaphysical conception of the subject. The Cartesian conception entails a realist conception of both self and reality, as well as an anti-contextualist view of truth. Thus, Foucault’s genealogy poses a dilemma. Either philosophy is a Cartesian version of a transcendental inquiry, or it is a practice of the care of the self. Since Foucault is critical of the former, his genealogy is best seen as the latter, which, as I will show, can be identified with a nominalist, contextualist, and particularist stance. Following the discussion of Foucault’s metahistorical remarks, Section 1.3. then discusses Foucault’s genealogy proper. It is important to acknowledge that, when Foucault discusses the ancient philosophical schools, he does not claim they are all sceptical. What is sceptical is Foucault’s overall genealogical schema: he interprets his material in a sceptical way. This means that he either brackets the metaphysical commitments of the philosophers he discusses, or he interprets them in light of aspects of their thought that cannot necessarily be seen as metaphysical. To use a general example, Foucault seems to interpret the theoretical doctrines of the philosophers he discusses in light of the concrete practices in which they are engaged (writing, meditating, talking), rather than vice versa. One of the most indicative and important instances of Foucault’s interpretation is that of the Cynic truth-telling. First, the metaphysical aspects of their thought are interpreted in light of their truth-telling practice. This is not an arbitrary and external hermeneutic decision; as we will see, Foucault can be seen to solve significant problems created by a face-value acceptance of their metaphysical commitments. Second, as the Cynic practice of truth-telling is a practice of radical critique and the metaphysical aspects of the Cynic stance are interpreted in the context of this critique, metaphysics stops being a possible foundation or justification of the Cynic critique; instead, it becomes a neutralised and naturalised extension of this very critical stance. This means, however, not only that the Cynics are interpreted in Foucault’s sceptical 22 way, but also that the very Cynic stance comes very close (if it does not become identical) to Sextan scepticism. Third, and considering the conclusions of the previous sections, this means Foucault’s genealogy can be seen to have been modelled on the Cynic practice of truth-telling, which he has incorporated into his genealogical narrative. Fourth and finally, this self-referential element is crucial for a further reason. Not only does it explain the reason why Foucault does not include the sceptics in his genealogy, but (most importantly) their very absence corroborates our reading that Foucault’s genealogical thought is sceptical. If genealogy entails the interpretative practice of de-metaphysicalisation qua re-contextualisation, then the Sextan sceptical stance that (as we shall see) is explicitly anti-metaphysical cannot be subjected to that practice. The sceptical stance, conceived as the perspective that defines Foucault’s interpretative practice, cannot and is not included within it, in the same way that the eye cannot and is not part of its own field of vision. The fourth section (1.4) focuses almost exclusively on point [4], the self- referentiality of Foucault’s descriptions. I present a series of Foucault’s retrospective interpretations of his whole work in terms of the following notions that he developed later in his thought: ‘games of truth’, ‘processes of problematisation’, and ‘fields of experience’. I show how they are related to (but also differentiated from) Heidegger, and how they are not metaphysically conceived. This provides further evidence that Foucault’s project is best seen as sceptical. Finally, section 1.5 argues exclusively for point [3.2]: that Foucault’s stance follows that of Sextus Empiricus. I defend in some detail a philologically accurate reading of Sextus’ scepticism, which suggests a stance of a radical metaphysical critique that results precisely in the nominalism, contextualism, and particularism we find in Foucault. This reading justifies our description of Foucault’s interpretation of the Cynic stance as sceptical. 23 1.1. Foucault’s Metahistorical Remarks: the Art of Living as the Aesthetics of Existence In a late interview, a topos of Foucault’s metahistorical remarks, he provided the following aphorism: “La liberté est la condition ontologique de l’éthique. Mais l’éthique est la forme réfléchie que prend la liberté.”1 The association of freedom with ethics seems cryptic at first, but can be analysed through three propositions: (i) Freedom is the possibility of action. (ii) Freedom is instantiated and expressed in reflected action. (iii) Ethics is the form this reflected action takes. The first proposition seems to state a platitude; it is, however, justified by the passages that follow, and accords with Foucault’s analysis of power (which we will examine later).2 Propositions (ii) and (iii) can be read as Foucault’s own summary of his reading of ethics in antiquity. He describes the content of this reflected action as follows: Les Grecs, en effet, problématisaient leur liberté, et la liberté de l’individu, comme un problème éthique. Mais éthique dans le sens où les Grecs pouvaient l’entendre : l’êthos était le manière d’être et la manière de se conduire. C’était un mode d’être du sujet et une certaine manière de faire, visible pour les autres. L’êthos de quelqu’un se traduit par son costume, par son allure, par sa manière de marcher, par le calme avec lequel il répond à tous les événements, etc. C’est cela pour eux la forme concrète de la liberté ; c’est ainsi qu’ils problématisaient leur liberté. L’homme qui a un bel êthos, qui peut être et cité en exemple, c’est quelqu’un qui pratique la liberté d’une certaine manière. Je ne crois pas qu’il soit besoin d’une conversion pour que la liberté soit réfléchie comme êthos ; elle est immédiatement problématisée comme êthos. Mais, pour que cette pratique de la liberté prenne forme dans un êthos qui soit bon, beau, honorable, estimable, mémorable et qui puisse servir d’exemple, il faut tout un travail de soi sur soi.3 Ces arts de vivre, qui vont depuis l’art d’affronter quelque chose de particulier dans l’existence jusqu’à l’art d’accéder à un certain mode de vie (général, complet, définitif), ont ceci de particulier qu’il s’agit moins, à travers eux, d’apprendre aux gens comment faire quelque chose, que de leur enseigner surtout comment être, comment parvenir à être. […] On n’y apprend pas tellement, ou pas seulement à se tenir, à faire certains gestes, à être conforme à un certain modèle social, main on y apprend à modifier son être, à qualifier ou modeler son être, et à se donner un certain type d’expérience qui soit absolument spécifique. […] Envisagé du côté de ses objectifs, l’art de vivre doit permettre d’acquérir un certain nombre de qualités, qui ne sont pas des 1 ESS: 1531. 2 See section 3.3.2. 3 ESS: 1533. 24 aptitudes, qui ne sont pas plus exactement des vertus au sens moral qu’on entendra par la suite, [mais] qui sont plutôt des qualités d’être, des qualités d’existence, ce que j’appellerais des modalités d’expérience, des qualités qui affectent et qui modifient l’être lui-même.4 – Au nom de quoi choisit-on de s’imposer ce mode de vie? – Je ne pense pas qu’il s’agisse d’atteindre une vie éternelle après la mort, parce que ces choses-là ne les [les anciens] préoccupaient pas particulièrement. Ils agissaient au contraire dans le dessein de donner à leur vie certaines valeurs (de reproduire certains exemples, de laisser derrière eux une réputation exceptionnelle ou de donner le maximum d’éclat à leur vie). Il s’agissait de faire sa vie un objet de connaissance ou de tekhnê, un objet d’art.5 These extracts describe the content of ethics as instantiated and expressed freedom. First, as we can see, action (or, even better, acting) as an expression of one’s freedom should be understood neither as a singular type of action, nor as a series of actions in a singular domain. It should be read in terms of many actions in many domains encompassing all aspects of life, ranging (as we have seen) from the simplest activity, such as walking, to the most complex, such as facing up to one’s own death. Second, these actions can be seen as interconnected and thus forming a whole, a nexus of practices that, more often than not, overlap. Third, as Foucault forcefully couples one’s being (‘mode/manière d’être’) with one’s behaviour (‘manière de se conduire/mode de faire’), we could say that what one is means nothing over and above this nexus of practices. Fourth, Foucault makes a contradistinction between ethics and morality, i.e. between the evaluation of a way of living one’s life on the one hand, and the assessment of singular acts or stances on the other, according to their success or failure in complying with the command of duty or with particular values and virtues. As such, Foucault’s ethics can be interpreted as what we would today call non-atomistic and coherentist. Ethics does not describe a relation of correspondence between two entities (‘atoms’), or between an action and the corresponding value it instantiates. On the contrary, it describes the coherent whole we can see formed among one’s different engagements with different things. Thus, the notions of presenting oneself as an example, and of rendering one’s life as something to be admired, invoke the idea of evaluating one’s way of living as a whole in opposition to the atomistic correspondence between singular actions and values or Kantian duties. In that sense, we can say that: 4 SV: 31–33, emphasis added. 5 APGE: 1442–1443. 25 (iv) Ethics, as reflected action in the context of a technē tou biou (an art of living), is the evaluation of one’s way of living considered as a whole, or considered as a nexus of interrelated practices in which one is engaged. Foucault qualifies this idea further. Roughly put, up to now, we have seen that (a) the object of ethical evaluation becomes life as a whole, or a way of living, as opposed to a singular act, or type of act; and (b) the evaluation depends on the coherence of this whole, and not on a correspondence relation between a singular act and a specific duty, value, or virtue. This nevertheless raises a further question concerning the criterion of this coherence. Could it not be argued that the criterion of coherence of the whole life lies precisely in its correspondence with a certain value or set of values? And if so, would this not again be a case of correspondence, albeit on a different level? Would this not then count as a relapse into the atomistic model, with the singular act being now substituted to a whole, and the correspondence relation remaining intact? At least two remarks suggest the opposite. First, Foucault refers to a series of values that define the aesthetic criteria according to which a way of living can be assessed. Specifically, he presents the values of beauty and of being honourable, memorable, and exemplary, without tying them to any universal moral principle of any form (such as virtue, command, obligation, or duty). Second, he underlines this anti-universalist element by explicitly dissociating the ancient art of living from the telos of an afterlife and, thus, from any associated set of values that governs and directs one’s way of living, and according to which this way of living would be evaluated externally. Foucault’s rejection of a universalist aesthetics of existence becomes explicit in the following crucial passages: Je ne crois pas que l’on puisse trouver aucune trace de ce qu’on pourrait appeler « normalisation », par exemple, dans la morale philosophique des Anciens. La raison en est que l’objectif principal, la cible essentielle recherchée par cette morale était d’ordre esthétique. D’abord, ce genre de morale était seulement un problème de choix personnel. Ensuite, elle était réservée à un petit nombre de gens ; il ne s’agissait pas alors de fournir un modèle de comportement à tout le monde. C’était un choix personnel qui concernait une petite élite. La raison que l’on avait de faire ce choix était la 26 volonté d’avoir une belle vie et de laisser aux autres le souvenir d’une belle existence.6 De l’Antiquité au christianisme, on passe d’une morale qui était essentiellement recherche d’une éthique personnelle à une morale comme obéissance à un système de règles. Et si je me suis intéressé à l’Antiquité, c’est que, pour toute une série de raisons, l’idée d’une morale comme obéissance à un code de règles est en train, maintenant, de disparaître, a déjà disparu. Et à cette absence de morale répond, doit répondre une recherche qui est celle d’une esthétique de l’existence.7 Here, Foucault makes three additional points. First, the art of living becomes explicitly an aesthetics of existence. Second, ethics qua aesthetics is explicitly dissociated from morality traditionally conceived, and the non-universal, individualist character of the former is explicitly underlined. Third, the telos of a life conceived as a work of art is its memorability, and this memorability is specified in terms of beauty. From these points, we can derive the epistemology of such an ethics qua aesthetics. The coherent whole instantiated by one’s way of life is not assessed in terms of its correspondence to an external principle or value. On the contrary, each whole is assessed individually. Each way of life is evaluated according to the values it itself instantiates, and to the way this instantiation takes place, and according to the conditions within which a life unfolds. In a sense, the evaluation of a life qua work of art depends on the criteria it sets itself. Thus: (v) Ethics as a technē tou biou; an art of living becomes an aesthetics of existence. (vi) Ethics is a particularist and contextualist aesthetics of existence. Finally, this description entails a question concerning the ontology of ethics qua aesthetics of existence. As particularism and contextualism are epistemological rather than ontological positions, a question concerning their grounding arises. The answer to this question is important because ethics as an aesthetics of existence can be considered grounded in a certain kind ontology that again has universalist implications, thus compromising both its particularist and contextualist aspects. After all, there might be some universal values to which an art of living does (descriptively) or should (normatively) assent to, and which delimits, if not negates, its possibility as a truly individualist enterprise. 6 APGE: 1429. 7 EE: 1550–1551, emphasis added. 27 This possible line of criticism can, however, be both undercut and undone. I think the following passage encapsulates Foucault’s response: – Mais si l’on doit se créer soi-même sans le recours à la connaissance et aux lois universelles, en quoi votre conception est-elle différente de l’existentialisme sartrien? – Du point de vue théorique, je pense que Sartre écarte l’idée de soi comme quelque chose qui nous est donné, mais, grâce à la notion morale d’authénticité, il se replie sur l’idée qu’il faut être soi-même et être vraiment soi-même. À mon avis, la seule conséquence pratique et acceptable de ce que Sartre a dit consiste à relier sa découverte théorique à la pratique créatrice et non plus à l’idée d’authenticité. Je pense qu’il n’y a qu’un seul débouché pratique à cette idée du soi qui n’est pas donné d’avance : nous devons faire de nous-mêmes une œuvre d’art. Dans ses analyses sur Baudelaire, Flaubert, etc., il est intéressant de voir que Sartre renvoie le travail créateur à un certain rapport à soi – l’auteur à lui-même – qui prend la forme de l’authenticité ou de l’inauthenticité. Moi je voudrais dire exactement l’inverse : nous ne devrions pas lier l’activité créatrice d’un individu au rapport qu’il entretient avec lui- même, mais lier ce type de rapport à soi que l’on peut avoir une activité créatrice.8 As we have seen in our discussion preceding points (iv) and (v), the particularist and contextualist aspects concern not only the criteria for evaluating a life, but also the criteria for defining what a life is. Thus, an ontology has universalist implications if and only if it is a metaphysically realist one. The negation of this realism results precisely in the undoing of the universalist implications. Foucault’s response above formulates such an argument. First, Sartre’s existentialism constitutes an aesthetics of existence as it defines an ethical practice of working on oneself. Second, it can be seen as a particularist and, in a sense, contextualist stance, as the values involved in the enterprise are grounded in a particular self. However, Sartre seems to conceive of the self in terms of a metaphysical given. In that sense, he can be seen as compromising particularism and contextualism, thus eventually suggesting a universalist art of living. This universalism can be understood in a strong or in a weak way, depending on how we interpret the idea of a metaphysically given self. According to the strong interpretation, differences among selves are epiphenomenal, and the self as a metaphysical given is a deep, ahistorical structure, common to all, from which certain universal moral demands derive. Thus, the argument goes, authenticity becomes the endorsement of and compliance with an objective and universal moral law. 8 DE II, 1983, 326: 1211–1212, emphasis added, save the interview question. 28 Foucault’s reading of Sartre seems to endorse the weak interpretation, and is probably closer to Sartre’s actual thought. According to this interpretation, the self is not identified with an ahistorical subject, and the differences among selves are not necessarily epiphenomenal. However, certain things define each one of us, and the work of an ethics of authenticity is precisely to discover what these things are, and to try to live in accordance with them. In this case, we could talk about a second-order universalism. As in the previous case, the idea is still that everybody should have the same ethics, but this now means something different. Everybody should have the same ethics — not in the sense that everybody should endorse and necessarily follow the same values, but in the sense that everybody should endorse and follow the values that derive from one’s own inner self. This universalism no longer concerns the content of the values to be followed, but the relation between a person and his or her deeper self. Of course, given the above, we can ask to what extent these values are common to all, and the answer indicates that the strong and weak interpretations are the two extremes of a continuous spectrum of different, yet similarly realist, possibilities. Hence, Sartrian existentialism is a universalist art of living as it is grounded in a non-contextualist, realist conception of selfhood understood as radically free and self-sufficient.9 By contrast, the Foucauldian conception of selfhood is opposed to the presupposition of both strong and weak interpretations. The question is not how thick or thin the self is, but its conceptualisation as a metaphysically given entity. As we have seen in the discussion of point (iv) above, the self should not be understood as the entity that is engaged in different practices, but as the engagement itself in different practices. The self is not any kind of agent that can be distinguished from the context in which it is found; it is the context in which it is found. Thus, in this extract, Foucault reformulates the idea that the practices in which one is engaged are constitutive of oneself: (vii) Ethics is a particularist, contextualist, and nominalist aesthetics of existence. 9 As we will see later in our discussion of Foucault’s conception of power, his conception of freedom is relational and resistance-based. As such, it differs from Sartre’s non-relational conception. 29 1.2. Foucault’s Metahistorical Remarks: the Care of the Self In this section, I discuss a series of metahistorical remarks that describe the very structure of Foucault’s genealogy. I argue they do not merely show that his genealogy instantiates a sceptical stance manifested in a nominalist conception of self and reality and in a contextualist conception of truth; mainly, they show such a stance can be interpreted as describing his whole work. Foucault’s later genealogy of the subject can be understood as the historical critique of a metaphysical conception of the self, and can be specified in the following points. First, according to Foucault’s formulation, the idea of the knowledge of oneself — originally an integral and subordinate part of the practice of the care of the self or of the practices of spirituality — become detached and are developed at the expense of the latter, and finally obliterate it. Second, Foucault associates the elimination of the care of the self with the Cartesian viewpoint — that is, with a reinterpretation of the notion of knowing oneself in terms of a metaphysical, ahistorical, transcendental structure of subjectivity. Third, philosophy has become identified with a kind of transcendental inquiry.10 Foucault qualifies this picture and argues that elements, aspects, or (even better) traces in form of practices of spirituality can be still found in philosophical discourse from Descartes onwards. Reprenez toute la philosophie du XIXe siècle – enfin presque toute : Hegel en tout cas, Schelling, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, le Husserl de la Krisis, Heidegger aussi – et vous verrez comment précisément là aussi, qu’[elle] soit disqualifiée, dévalorisée, critiquement envisagée ou au contraire exaltée comme chez Hegel, de toute façon la connaissance – l’acte de connaissance – demeure liée aux exigences de la spiritualité. Dans toutes ces philosophies, une certaine structure de spiritualité essaie de lier la connaissance, l’acte de connaissance, les conditions de cet acte de connaissance et ses effets, à une transformation dans l’être même du sujet.11 Foucault’s qualification is crucial: it shows his work can be described in terms of a sceptical stance. First, it shows that his genealogical critique is an instance of a sceptical aesthetics of existence. A strict dilemma derives from the above. Philosophy, conceived in the broadest sense possible, can be either a transcendental inquiry, or a practice of the care of the self. Thus, Foucault’s genealogy as a critique of the former can be only an undertaking of the latter. 10 This is Foucault’s argument in his 1981–1982 Collège de France course, L’Herméneutique du sujet. It would not be an exaggeration to argue that his late genealogical work can be read in the context of this argument. 11 HES: 29–30. 30 Second, and more importantly, this conceptual conclusion is corroborated by Foucault’s own claims. As we have hinted so far and will analyse in the chapters that follow, Foucault’s thought has been informed by that of Nietzsche and Heidegger, and can be seen as a radical reinterpretation of their own. Foucault’s explicit reference to the philosophy of the nineteenth century thus entails the placement of his own thought in the context of a specific Geistesgeschichte that attempts to rethink spirituality. In that sense, Foucault’s genealogy not only shows the obliteration of the care of the self from the knowledge of oneself; it also becomes an attempt to reconstitute the experience of the care of the self. Foucault’s genealogy becomes the practice of the care of the self. 1.2.1. Philosophy versus spirituality: Foucault’s argument The argument represented in the extracts below from his L’Herméneutique du sujet is one of the clearest and most representative indications of Foucault’s sceptical stance that can be traced in his later thought. Foucault’s argument is presented in four subsections. This first reconstructs his argument as represented in his own formulations. The second analyses his presentation of the Cartesian philosophical stance. The third analyses the notion of spirituality. In the form of responding to possible critiques, it shows how Foucault’s presentation of the notion of spirituality constitutes an argument for a nominalist conception of the self. The fourth reconstructs Foucault’s critique of the Cartesian stance. By using the tools of contemporary analytic philosophy, I intend to show that Foucault does not just present the opposition between a metaphysical and a nominalist stance concerning subjectivity and truth; rather, he criticises the former stance, from which the latter derives as a necessary conclusion. More specifically, I will show, first, how a metaphysical conception of truth and reality is necessarily grounded in a metaphysical conception of selfhood; and, second, how, according to Foucault, the collapse of this metaphysical conception of truth entails the collapse of the metaphysical conception of selfhood. The fifth subsection argues that this double conclusion manifests the sceptical character of Foucault’s critique, and I argue that the critique of the metaphysical stance is an internalist critique. (1) Mais je crois qu’il y a une raison qui, elle, est beaucoup plus essentielle que ces paradoxes de l’histoire de la morale. C’est quelque chose qui tient au problème de la vérité et de l’histoire de la vérité. […] je l’appellerai le « 31 moment cartésien ». Il me semble que le « moment cartésien », encore une fois avec tout un tas de guillemets, a joué de deux façons. Il a joué de deux façons en requalifiant philosophiquement le gnôthi seauton (« connais-toi toi- même ») et en disqualifiant au contraire l’epimeleia heautou (souci de soi).12 (1.1) [C’est donc à] la connaissance de soi, au moins comme forme de conscience, que se réfère la démarche cartésienne. De plus, en plaçant l’évidence de l’existence propre du sujet au principe même de l’accès à l’être, c’était bien cette connaissance de soi-même (non plus sous la forme de l’épreuve de l’évidence mais sous la forme de l’indubitabilité de mon existence comme sujet) qui faisait du « connais-toi toi-même » un accès fondamental à la vérité.13 (1.2) Mais si la démarche cartésienne a donc requalifié, pour des raisons assez simples à dégager, le gnôthi seauton, elle a en même temps, et c’est là-dessus que je voudrais insister, beaucoup contribué à disqualifier le principe du souci de soi, à le disqualifier et à l’exclure du champ de la pensée philosophique moderne.14 (2) Prenons, si vous voulez, un petit peu de recul par rapport à ça. Appelons, si vous le voulez bien, « philosophie » cette forme de pensée qui s’interroge, non pas bien sûr sur ce qui est vrai et sur ce qui est faux, mais sur ce qui fait qu’il y a et qu’il peut y avoir du vrai et du faux, et que l’on peut ou que l’on ne peut pas partager le vrai du faux. Appelons « philosophie » la forme de pensée qui s’interroge sur ce qui permet au sujet d’avoir accès à la vérité, la forme de pensée qui tente de déterminer les conditions et les limites de l’accès du sujet à la vérité. Eh bien, si on appelle cela la « philosophie », je crois qu’on pourrait appeler « spiritualité » la recherche, la pratique, l’expérience par lesquels le sujet opère sur lui-même les transformations nécessaires pour avoir accès à la vérité […].15 (3) Disons que la spiritualité, au moins telle qu’elle apparaît en Occident, a trois caractères. 16 (3.1.1) La spiritualité postule que la vérité n’est jamais donnée au sujet de plein droit. La spiritualité postule que le sujet en tant que tel n’a pas droit, n’a pas la capacité d’avoir accès à la vérité. Elle postule que la vérité n’est pas donnée au sujet par un simple acte de connaissance, qui serait fondé et légitimé parce qu’il est le sujet et parce qu’il a telle ou telle structure de sujet. Elle postule qu’il faut que le sujet se modifie, se transforme, se déplace, devienne, dans une certaine mesure et jusqu’à un certain point, autre que lui- même pour avoir droit à avoir accès à la vérité. La vérité n’est donnée au sujet qu’à un prix qui met en jeu l’être même du sujet. Car tel qu’il est, il n’est pas 12 HES: 15. 13 HES: 16. 14 HES: 16. 15 HES: 16. 16 HES: 17. 32 capable de vérité. Je crois que c’est là la formule la plus simple, mais la plus fondamentale, par laquelle on peut définir la spiritualité.17 (3.1.2) Ce qui entraîne pour conséquence ceci : que, de ce point de vue, il ne peut pas y avoir de vérité sans une conversion ou sans une transformation du sujet. Cette conversion, cette transformation du sujet, et ça serait là le second grand aspect de la spiritualité, eh bien elle peut se faire sous différentes formes. […]. C’est un travail de soi sur soi, une élaboration de soi sur soi, une transformation progressive de soi sur soi dont on est soi-même responsable dans un long labeur qui est celui de l’ascèse (askêsis).18 (3.1.3) Enfin, la spiritualité postule que l’accès à la vérité produit, lorsqu’effectivement cet accès a été ouvert, des effets qui sont à la fois, bien sûr, la conséquence de la démarche spirituelle faite pour l’atteindre, mais qui sont en même temps bien autre chose et bien plus : effets que j’appellerai « de retour » de la vérité sur le sujet.19 (3.2) Bref, il y a, dans la vérité et dans l’accès à la vérité, quelque chose qui accomplit le sujet lui-même, qui accomplit l’être du sujet, ou qui le transfigure. En bref je crois qu’on peut dire ceci : pour la spiritualité, jamais un acte de connaissance, en lui-même et par lui-même, ne pourrait parvenir à donner accès à la vérité s’il n’était préparé, accompagné, doublé, achevé par une certaine transformation du sujet, non pas de l’individu, mais du sujet lui- même dans son être de sujet.20 (3.3) Disons schématiquement ceci : pendant toute cette période qu’on appelle l’Antiquité, et selon des modalités qui ont été bien différentes, la question philosophique du « comment avoir accès à la vérité », et la pratique de la spiritualité (les transformations nécessaires dans l’être même du sujet qui vont permettre l’accès à la vérité), eh bien ces deux questions, ces deux thèmes n’ont jamais été séparés.21 (4) Eh bien maintenant, si nous faisons un saut de plusieurs siècles, on peut dire qu’on est entré dans l’âge moderne (je veux dire : l’histoire de la vérité est entrée dans sa période moderne) le jour où on a admis que ce qui donne accès à la vérité, les conditions selon lesquelles le sujet peut avoir accès à la vérité, c’est la connaissance, et la connaissance seulement.22 (4.1) C’est-à-dire : à partir du moment où, sans qu’on lui demande rien d’autre, sans que son être de sujet ait à être modifié ou altéré pour autant, le philosophe (ou le savant, ou simplement celui qui cherche la vérité) est capable de reconnaître, en lui-même et par ses seuls actes de connaissance, la vérité et peut avoir accès à elle.23 17 HES: 17. 18 HES: 17. 19 HES: 17. 20 HES: 18. 21 HES: 18. 22 HES: 19. 23 HES: 19. 33 (4.2) Ce qui ne veut pas dire, bien sûr, que la vérité s’obtient sans condition. Mais ces conditions sont de deux ordres maintenant, et aucun de ces deux ordres ne relève de la spiritualité.24 (4.2.1) Il y a d’une part les conditions internes de l’acte de connaissance et des règles qu’il doit suivre pour avoir accès à la vérité : conditions formelles, conditions objectives, règles formelles de la méthode, structure de l’objet à connaître. Mais c’est, de toute façon, de l’intérieur de la connaissance que sont définies les conditions d’accès du sujet à la vérité.25 (4.2.2) Quant aux autres conditions, elles sont extrinsèques. Ce sont des conditions comme : « il ne faut pas être fou pour connaître la vérité » (importance de ce moment chez Descartes). Conditions culturelles aussi : pour avoir accès à la vérité, il faut avoir fait des études, il faut avoir une formation, il faut s’inscrire dans un certain consensus scientifique. Conditions morales aussi : pour connaître la vérité, eh bien il faut faire des efforts, il ne faut pas essayer de tromper son monde, il faut que les intérêts financiers et de carrière ou de statut se combinent de façon tout à fait acceptable avec les normes de la recherche désintéressée, etc.26 (4.3) Et tout ceci, vous le voyez, ce sont des conditions dont les unes encore une fois sont intrinsèques à la connaissance, dont les autres sont bien extrinsèques à l’acte de connaissance, mais ne concernent pas le sujet dans son être : elles ne concernent que l’individu dans son existence concrète, et non pas la structure du sujet en tant que tel. À partir de ce moment-là (c’est-à-dire à partir du moment où on peut dire : « Tel qu’il est le sujet est, de toute façon, capable de vérité » – sous les deux réserves des conditions intrinsèques à la connaissance et des conditions extrinsèques à l’individu), dès que l’être du sujet n’est pas remis en question par la nécessité d’avoir accès à la vérité, je crois qu’on est entré dans un autre âge dans l’histoire des rapports entre la subjectivité et la vérité.27 (4.4) Et la conséquence de cela, ou l’autre aspect si vous voulez, c’est que l’accès à la vérité, qui n’a plus désormais pour condition que la connaissance, ne trouvera dans la connaissance, comme récompense et comme accomplissement, rien d’autre que le cheminement indéfini de la connaissance. Ce point de l’illumination, ce point de l’accomplissement, ce moment de la transfiguration du sujet par l’« effet de retour » de la vérité qu’il connaît sur lui-même, et qui transit, traverse, transfigure son être, tout ceci ne peut plus exister.28 24 HES: 19. 25 HES: 19. 26 HES: 19. 27 HES: 19–20. 28 HES: 20. 34 1.2.2. Philosophy, or the Cartesian moment Extracts (1)–(1.2) make a double point. First, Foucault specifies the relation between knowing oneself and the care of the self. The knowledge of oneself does not only constitute a parallel development or a transformation of the care of the self; rather, it constitutes the fundamental factor for the obliteration of the later. The development of the knowledge of oneself occurs only at the expense of the care of the self. This obliteration is explicitly associated with the Cartesian viewpoint. The obviousness of the existence of oneself (or the clarity and distinctiveness with which the idea of one’s own existence appears in one’s own mind) becomes the criterion of truth. Thus, the knowledge of oneself — that he or she exists — becomes the foundation of knowledge in general. In other words, the knowledge of oneself becomes the foundation of truth. According to (2), the Cartesian viewpoint determines modern philosophy. Philosophy is explicitly defined as a transcendental inquiry. As long as knowledge is about what is true and what is false, philosophy is the inquiry that attempts to determine the conditions of possibility of this truth, and then specifies the conditions of possibility in relation to the subject. Thus, and also in light of points (4.2)–(4.2.3) that will be analysed below, we understand the following three things. First, we understand that what Foucault calls the ‘Cartesian moment’ is the idea that philosophy adopts, and to a certain extent becomes identified with, a specific view of the relation between subject and truth. According to this view, the subject, conceived as a set of ahistorical functions, holds a relation of representation with an equally ahistorical reality; and truth, conceived as a relation of correspondence with this reality, is itself considered grounded in the subject, and more specifically in this relation of representation. This idea of the predominance of the Cartesian viewpoint is important. It is found earlier in Foucault’s thought in different variations, as we will also see in the chapters that follow, and significantly corroborates the interpretative schema concerning his stance as a critique of both the Cartesian and Hegelian metaphysics we developed earlier.29 29 See HF: 67–70 and “Mon corps, ce papier, ce feu” (DE I, 102). Cf. APGE: 1229–1230. “Avant Descartes, on ne pouvait pas être impur, immoral, et connaître la vérité. Avec Descartes, la preuve directe devient suffisante. Après Descartes, c’est un sujet de la connaissance non astreint à l’ascèse lui voit le jour. Bien sûr, je schématise ici une histoire très longue, mais qui reste fondamentale. Après Descartes, a on a un sujet de la connaissance qui pose à Kant le problème de savoir ce qu’est le rapport entre le sujet moral et le sujet de la connaissance” (ibid., 1230). (In Foucault’s elaborated version of the 35 Second, in that sense, for the Cartesian philosopher qua metaphysician there is only one relation between subjectivity and truth: the one defined by his own stance, and this relation does not have a history. The only history that can be told is a teleological one that, strictly speaking, is not about the relation between subjectivity and truth, but about the different conceptualisations of this relation. This history would be the story of philosophical progress from the formation of the two concepts to the acquisition of their fully-fledged content within the Cartesian framework. Consequently, according to this view, the only possible way in which the care of the self can be related to the knowledge of oneself falls into one of the following three categories: either the care of the self (even in the broadest sense) is a non- philosophical issue and, as such, is indifferent to the knowledge of oneself; or the care of the self does not have any intellectual autonomy, and, as such, is at best identified with the knowledge of oneself; or the care of the self is just a half-baked version of the knowledge of oneself. 1.2.3. Spirituality, or a nominalist conception of the self As we can see in (2), Foucault defines spirituality in contradistinction to philosophy. Spirituality is defined as the practice of a necessary transformation of the self by itself for it to gain access to truth. The notion of the transformation of the self is so central to Foucault’s description that it becomes almost synonymous with spirituality. First, all three characteristics (3.1.1.–3.1.3.) describe different aspects of this transformation: as a necessary condition to knowledge, as the work on oneself, and as an after-effect, or as an effect on the self after having accessed knowledge. Second, in his summarising extract (3.2), Foucault is explicit about the whole range of instances in which this transformation is traced: it precedes, it accompanies and determines, and it follows the act of knowledge. Third, and most importantly, as stated twice in the same extract (3.2), what is transformed is not the subject but the very being of the subject. This description of transformation, particularly this last point, corroborates our interpretation that Foucault holds a nominalist stance. I will argue this in the following two points, both structured as responses to two possible critiques. First, Foucault makes a nominalist point concerning selfhood. Self is something that can fundamentally change, but it could be argued that this conclusion interview, the formulations are slightly different, but the point remains the same, see DE II, 344: 1449– 1450). See also section 2.1.3. 36 about nominalism is a misinterpretation of Foucault’s argument. Foucault holds the idea that a series of practices of the past occurred in the background assumption that the self is something that can fundamentally change. In other words, Foucault does not say that the self can fundamentally change. What he actually says is that, mainly in the past, others believed that the self can fundamentally change. In short, he does not make an ontological claim about how things are; rather, he makes a historical claim, a claim about what others believed happened concerning the self. This point is important as it leads to the crux of various critiques of Foucault that we will attempt to respond to later. However, two points can be made here. The first is that Foucault does not advocate a view on selfhood. He presents a view (spirituality) that has been obliterated by the Cartesian one that dominates our current conception of selfhood to such an extent that it informs the way we approach different views on the matter, both past and present. The reason why this is the case is that this Cartesian view on selfhood considers itself as objectively qua ahistorically true. In that sense, showing that what is considered ‘true’ selfhood is as historical a construct as the one it obliterated undoes the metaphysically realist character of this modern view of the self. If a critique of a realist conception of selfhood entails an antirealist conception of it, one can nevertheless still argue that Foucault makes a metaphysical claim, as he just substitutes one notion of the self with another. However, as we have indicated in our Introduction, Foucault’s nominalism is not a metaphysical position, and can be seen as antirealist if and only if it is identified with a critique of a metaphysical stance. In other words, Foucault’s nominalism concerning selfhood here is not a position in a metaphysical game, but the critique of the metaphysical discourse on selfhood altogether. Furthermore, this discussion indicates the problem with metaphysics that Foucault attempts to resolve, and on the resolution of which we will elaborate later. Roughly put, the metaphysician premises his or her approach on the decision that there is a difference between what people say a self is and what a self really is, and then he or she claims to have discovered the latter. Foucault’s sceptical stance is to show that this decision constitutes a dogmatic postulation, and that it is problematic according to the metaphysician’s own criteria. The second point I would like to make concerns Foucault’s formulation that what changes is the being of the subject itself. This formulation is not a metaphysical claim and, thus, does contradict a nominalist perspective. It can be seen as a dialectical or phenomenalist description; as we will see later in our discussion of 37 Sextus’ scepticism, it constitutes a basic sceptical trope. In this case, Foucault’s formulation emphatically describes a nominalist idea (that the self is nothing fixed) in non-nominalist terms (that what changes is the being of the subject). Thus, a non- metaphysical or anti-metaphysical point is made in the context of the metaphysical discourse it is aimed to be debunked. Foucault describes an idea in quasi- metaphysical terms, subtracting its metaphysical or hypostatising content. 1.2.4. Critique of the Cartesian philosophical stance In the extracts (4)–(4.4), to specify further the differences between spirituality and philosophy, Foucault elaborates on the relations of subjectivity and truth in the context of the modern, Cartesian philosophical paradigm. According to the traditional definition, knowledge is identified with justified true belief.30 Before we move on to analyse these extracts, we can reformulate this definition as ‘thesis 1’ (T1) by unpacking and explicating each of the three terms that comprise it to make it relevant to Foucault’s approach. (T1) Knowledge is a (mental) act of endorsement of, or assent to, a proposition (belief), whose meaning corresponds to the non-linguistic thing this proposition represents (truth), according to specific rules and patterns that determine the way a proposition is produced, that represents a non-linguistic thing, that corresponds to it, and that hangs together with others (justification). Foucault nevertheless approaches the issue of truth and knowledge in a slightly different way from the standard definition. He summarises the relations of subjectivity and truth in modern philosophy as follows. First, there is no demand or need for the subject’s being to be modified or altered for the subject to access truth. Second, knowledge alone is specified as the condition that gives the subject access to truth.31 Foucault specifies both ideas further. He distinguishes between internal and external conditions to the act of knowledge. The internal conditions are the conditions of the subject’s access to the truth that are defined within knowledge, while the external conditions include epistemic virtues and social processes of consensus 30 “ephê de tên men meta logou [justified] alêthê [true] doxan [belief] epistêmên [knowledge] einai”, Theaetetus 201c. 31 See extract (4). 38 inculcation.32 Foucault’s conclusion that both conditions concern the individual in its concrete existence, and not the structure of the subject, underscores the first point.33 According to Foucault, in modern philosophy the necessary and sufficient conditions for truth can be formulated in the following thesis: (T2) In modern philosophy, the only thing a subject needs to make a truth claim (that is, to hold a proposition that corresponds to the reality the proposition describes) is to know and follow (external conditions) the specific rules that define the way we represent and refer to the world (internal conditions). Thus, in virtue of the reformulation (T2), we realise that, according to Foucault, knowledge in modern philosophy seems to become something close to the third part of (T1) — that is, justification sensu lato. The point is not that a subject’s access to truth (to use Foucault’s words) is reduced to the conditions of the possibility of a truth-making relation; that is a platitude. The point is that the conditions of possibility of a truth-making relation seem to be identified with the discourse within which the truth claim is made. In short, a claim ‘p’ about things x in discourse y is true if and only if it follows the rules that govern discourse y. This means that the existence of things depends on the discourse that describes, if not creates, them; the metaphysically objective reality of things is well lost. This is not, however, what Foucault has argued until now: his allusion to contextualism merely indicates the direction of his argument — that eventually modern philosophy, and specifically its realist metaphysical claims, collapses into nominalism. Here, though, he does not make this ‘reductive’ move. The truth-making relation is not reduced to the discourse in which a truth claim is made. In other words, the thing that is linguistically represented, referred to, and works as a truth-maker has a certain kind of independence from this discourse. To understand this independence, we can invoke the basic tenet of the modern philosophical tradition we introduced 32 See extracts (4.2)–(4.2.2). 33 See extracts (4.3)–(4.4). Given the above, we face the following dilemma: either Foucault holds a different view of knowledge, so we cannot talk further about a historicist critique of a metaphysics of truth; or he holds the traditional view of truth, but his view is problematic, if not contradictory. I think Foucault criticises the traditional, ahistorical view of truth without being contradictory. As we will understand in what follows, the distinction between knowledge and truth constitutes a rhetorical trope. It is the result of a combination of two registers, with ‘truth’ being described in traditional terms, while ‘knowledge’ is described more in contextualist ones. With this trope, therefore, Foucault may aim to accentuate the historical constitution of both concepts, and to underline the critique of the traditional viewpoint. 39 earlier: the idea of a kind of homology between the human mind and the world.34 According to this, the mind tells us something about the structure of the world. The structure of the mind is reflected in the structure of language. The structure of language is such that any differences in individual languages, discourses, and contexts are only epiphenomenal. Conversely, the structure of the world is independent of the individual languages, discourses, and contexts in which it is described. Hence, our knowledge of the structure of the world is grounded in the mind. I will use Pascal Engel’s critique to illustrate this idea, as his thought constitutes one of the most prominent representatives of the Cartesian viewpoint. It is explicitly critical of Foucault, addressing (most importantly) the same texts we discuss here. Engel has two theses. First, there is a necessary conceptual interrelation among the notions of belief, assertion (or proposition), truth, and knowledge. Second, beliefs and assertions are made true and constitute knowledge by something outside themselves. On pain of contradiction and incomprehension, the former thesis entails the latter. In other words, truth and knowledge are and cannot but be the norm, not only of inquiry, but of basic interpersonal communication; and (more forcefully) truth requires a notion of minimal realism.35 This means that whenever we talk with each other, we aim at truth and knowledge, and that what makes our talk true is things beyond our talk.36 To put it more formally, according to Engel, when one asserts something and believes (the content of) this assertion, it necessarily follows that he or she also believes this assertion to be true; and if one believes this assertion is true, then he or she believes this assertion is made true (or made false) by something external to it and its context. In short, asserting and believing entails specific ontological commitments to something external and irreducible to the context of asserting and believing. Engel’s analysis is nevertheless problematic. The deflationary or contextualist identification of truth with justification, according to which we tentatively interpreted (T2), is not threatened by Engel’s argument. This deflationist or contextualist position does not preclude the idea that, when one asserts something and believes one’s 34 See HACKING 1975: 69, and our Introduction. 35 For an excellent defence of minimal realism, as a necessary condition of possibility of epistemic, moral, ethical, and aesthetic values and norms, see VIRVIDAKIS 1996, 1999, 2003, 2008, 2014a, and 2014b. 36 The fact that Engel explicitly associates truth and knowledge in almost the same way that Foucault describes the relation between truth and knowledge in modern philosophy corroborates our claim that his thought constitutes a contemporary representative of the Cartesian stance. 40 assertion, one also believes this assertion to be true or that it constitutes knowledge. Moreover, even if the deflationist assents to the idea that believing an assertion means believing it is made true (or made false) by a fact external to this assertion and its context, it does not follow that this truth-making fact is not determined by the much wider context in which this assertion is made.37 In short, the first thesis neither precludes a contextualist stance, nor does it entail minimal realism. Nevertheless, Engel’s approach is important for two interrelated reasons. First, it shows that the idea that truth and knowledge are about something independent of and irreducible to our discourses cannot simply derive from a conceptual analysis of these very notions of ‘truth’ and ‘knowledge’. Second, and more importantly, it indicates that, for any realism to be the case, a form of the basic tenet of the modern philosophical tradition concerning the structural relation between mind and world has to be postulated. In other words, truth and knowledge are about something extra- discursive if and only if the relation between beliefs, assertions, or propositions on the one hand, and what they represent, describe, or refer to on the other, is grounded into something extra-discursive too. As we said earlier, although Foucault’s description of modern, Cartesian knowledge is made in quasi-contextualist terms, he does not reduce the conditions of possibility of truth to discourse. Instead, he makes two relevant points. The first is weak, the second strong. First, in his description of the internal conditions, he refers explicitly to ‘objective conditions’, which can be understood as the conditions of an objective observation of a phenomenon or of an object, and to the ‘structure of the object’ under inquiry. In that sense, he seems to acknowledge the independence of the object beyond a discourse and a method that links our discourse with it. Second, these indications should be understood in a more realist way in virtue of the main point that Foucault makes in extracts (1)–(1.2). Here, we find two ideas. First, according to “Descartes’ view […] [the] criterion for truth is self-evidence or the clarity and distinctiveness of our ideas, but his official definition of truth is adequacy of ideas with respect to things.”38 In other words, as we said earlier, the idea that the knowledge of oneself becomes the foundation of knowledge means that the relation of correspondence between our propositions (‘in here’, in our mind) and the things they 37 For an analytical presentation of this critique of traditional ontology and epistemology in Foucault, see chapter 3.1. 38 ENGEL 2002: 29. 41 refer to (‘out there’, in the world) is grounded in the self.39 Second, given the opposition between philosophy and spirituality, we realise that this self that works as a foundation is something stable, unchanging, and non-historically or socially determined. Thus, in light of these two points above and of the idea of a homology between self and world, the metaphysical independence and stability of references qua things we refer to is due to their being grounded in a structure of subjectivity. In that sense, we understand now in which way Engel’s minimal realism requires a structure of subjectivity, and this structure is none other than the Cartesian schema we have already seen: a truth-making relation involves the split between the self (the bearer of the act of believing, assenting, endorsing) and the world (the things to which the act is directed), a relation of representation of between the two, and the grounding of this relation into the subject. I think invoking Rorty’s description of what he calls a post-Kantian conception of selfhood can be useful here. First, it corresponds perfectly to the structure of subjectivity that Foucault criticises, which we have been analysing so far. Second, as we will elaborate further in the context of Foucault’s critique of Husserl,40 Rorty’s schema enables us to envisage a nominalist view of the self that derives from the critique and collapse of this very metaphysical structure. According to Rorty, this post-Kantian conception of selfhood can be understood in terms of a three layered structure: an outermost layer consisting of empirical, contingent, beliefs and desires, a middle layer which contains necessary, a priori, beliefs and desires and which “structures” or “constitutes” the outer layer, and an ineffable inner core which is, roughly, the True Self of the Platonic-Christian model. […] This ineffable core – the Inner Self – is what “has” the beliefs and desires which form the Middle and Outer Selves.41 As we can see, roughly put: (T3) the middle self, conceived as a set of necessary and a priori beliefs, structures the way in which we refer to the world, and, in that sense, it holds a 39 The point that the modern conceptual triangle of ‘proposition–correspondence–thing’ has exactly the same function and can therefore be considered equally ‘Cartesian’ as the (historically) Cartesian proper conceptual triangle of ‘idea–adequacy–thing’ is suggested by Foucault’s own analysis. For advocating this structural similarity between the two conceptual triangles, see the Foucault-inspired Hacking 1975: part A, and, mainly Chapter 5. Cf. “They [Locke and Berkley (sc.: but I think the collective can apply to the whole post-Cartesian tradition until Frege and Husserl)] were working on something structurally similar to our problems”, ibid.: 52 (emphasis added). 40 See section 3.1.1.1. 41 RORTY 1991a(ii): 118. 42 relation of constitution with the world. The contingent and empirical beliefs that constitute the outer self correspond to and are made true by this world according to the structures imposed by the middle self. What I want to show is not so much that we can necessarily substitute Rorty’s middle and outer selves with Foucault’s internal and external conditions salva veritate. Rather, my point is that if Foucault’s internal and external conditions are to be understood according to the modern, Cartesian, philosophical viewpoint, then they have to be identified with a layered-like structure of subjectivity. However, this layered schema enables us to approach Foucault’s own description in a different light. The fact that Rorty’s schema is concentric helps us to envisage that the difference between the internal and external conditions of knowledge is not a difference in kind, but a difference in degree. This means that internal and external conditions should not be understood as two different, distinct, and non-related sets, but as a continuum of different layers or degrees of entrenchment. In light of (T3): (T4) if a discourse constitutes a nexus of interrelated clusters of propositions, then the degree of entrenchment of a cluster of propositions into the nexus indicates the degree in which the specific cluster determines the existence, constitution, and methodology of approach of the objects the discourse is about. Such a depiction is supported by Foucault’s own account. As we have seen in extracts (4.2)–(4.2.2), his description provides neither a formal nor any other criterion for sharply distinguishing between the two types of conditions. The reason he does not provide one is because there seems to be none: it is not clear whether certain epistemic virtues or values that would typically fall into the set of external conditions (such as the value of ‘accuracy’, for example) would retain their place as merely external ones, and would not be understood as part of the formal rules of method. In other words, the extent to which the external conditions are not constitutive of the method of approaching an object (if not constitutive of the object itself) is not clear and, in a sense, it seems impossible to be a priori defined. Thus: (T5) the difference between internal and external conditions to knowledge is the difference in the degree of entrenchment of different clusters of propositions in the nexus of a discourse. This conclusion reveals the core of Foucault’s critique. It shows that if (T5) is the case, then (T3) is debunked; and, a fortiori, (T1) is reduced to (T2). The main 43 point is found in the idea that the notion of ‘degree of entrenchment’ is opposed to the distinction between ‘necessary and contingent beliefs’. Understanding the distinction between internal and external conditions in terms of degree means that we should also understand the difference between necessary and contingent beliefs in terms of degree. The difference between the middle and the outer self thus becomes a matter of the entrenchment of the propositions that constitute them. This means that neither the distinction between necessary and contingent beliefs, nor between a middle and an outer self, can be upheld. This re-description is not innocuous. A change, for example, in the rules and patterns of justification within a discourse, to put it in terms of (T1), is a change in the degree of entrenchment of propositions, to put it in terms of (T4) and (T5). In terms of (T3), this change indicates the possibility that chunks of the outer layer of a self move to the middle and vice versa. This means that a change in the way we justify things is a change in the way the self is constituted. In short, if changing the way we justify things entails changing ourselves (and vice versa), then the self can no longer be considered the foundation of truth and knowledge. To invoke the Cartesian schema once again: a self that changes means the collapse of the relation of representation between self and world; the collapse of the relation of representation compromises the split between self and world; and the lack of an absolute distinction between the two compromises the metaphysical independence of the latter. Hence, the world is indeed well lost. 1.2.5. Conclusion This conclusion sheds further light on the sceptical character of Foucault’s critique. As we have said at the beginning of this section, Foucault’s argument, as represented in the series of extracts from his L’Herméneutique du sujet, presents the structure of his sceptical critique. One could view Foucault’s whole genealogical project in terms of a syllogism; this series of metahistorical remarks reveals the set of major premises and the conclusion of his critique, while the actual genealogy undertaken in his relevant studies from 1980 to 1984 supplies the set of minor premises that necessitate the undoing of the Cartesian construction. Thus, Foucault’s critique can be considered efficacious if and only it fulfils two criteria. The notion of the care of the self has to be presented, first, as relevant to philosophical discourse traditionally conceived, and, second, as distinct from the knowledge of the self as presented by the tradition from 44 Plato to Descartes. This means that if the Cartesian philosophical tradition is conceived as a process of decontextualisation of specific elements pertaining to the notion of the care of the self, and of their recontextualisation in a metaphysical schema (that of the knowledge of oneself), then the genealogist must expose this process of decontextualisation. In the following section, I will turn to a concrete example that the metaphysician-historian would be compelled to accept: the Cynic practice of truth-telling. 45 1.3. Care of the Self: The Practice of Parrhēsia In this section, I will first discuss Foucault’s structure of the practice of truth-telling.42 I show how it constitutes the structure of a genealogical critique that targets, as before, a metaphysical conception of the subject, in which truth (conceived as a relation of correspondence between propositions and facts) is grounded. Second, I discuss Foucault’s analysis of the Cynic practice of truth-telling, and show how it manifests Foucault’s sceptical stance. I make five points. First, the Cynic practice of truth-telling is a practice of radical critique. It is a critique of the ontological, epistemological, ethical, and aesthetic framework within which it emerges. Second, this critique is an internalist critique. It exposes the dogmatism of the other philosophical schools according to the criteria of their own framework. Third, this Cynic stance is interpreted as not being grounded in (qua being justified in reference to) a metaphysically conceived natural order. Rather, the Cynic somehow can be seen to ‘construct’ this order of nature by incorporating it into his or her practice. This idea not only solves certain paradoxes concerning the Cynic stance; it also corroborates its description as a radical critique. Fourth, all these characteristics can be found in Sextan sceptical stance. Fifth, we have argued before that Foucault’s genealogy of the subject as a care of the self cannot but be understood as Foucault’s own practice of the care of the self or aesthetics of existence. Foucault’s sceptical stance qua radical critique is modelled on his sceptical interpretation of the Cynic radical critique. 1.3.1. Care of the self as truth-telling: the structure of a genealogical critique As we have seen, the care of the self constitutes a series of practices through which the self can acquire a specific form. Parrhēsia, or the practice of truth-telling, is one of these. Foucault’s description of the structure of truth-telling can be reconstructed in terms of the following six characteristics.43 The first refers to the context within which this practice takes place. It can be understood to describe what we could (only heuristically) call the external conditions of this practice: truth-telling takes place within the framework of a non-strictly prescribed and non-institutionalised relation, 42 Our approach to Foucault’s analyses of the practice of parrhēsia draws on his two successive courses at the Collège de France, Le Gouvernement de soi et des autres (1982–1983) and Le Courage de la vérité (1984), and on his Berkeley seminar in the fall of 1983, entitled “Discourse and Truth”. It was published posthumously as Fearless Speech. Henceforth, GSA, CV, and FS. 43 See GSA: 41–70. 46 according to which the parrhesiast has significantly less power than his interlocutor, the person he addresses. In that sense, the parrhesiast’s very act of enunciation creates the parrhesiastic contract within the two interlocutors.44 Second, parrhēsia is a form of telling the truth in the plainest way. It means telling the truth in a way in which it is deprived of any rhetorical ornament that would endanger (the emphasis on) the speaker’s frankness.45 The next characteristics can be understood to derive from the first — from the idea that the enunciation somehow creates the very space (both conceptual and pragmatic) within which it occurs. Moreover, these characteristics belong to what Foucault calls the dramatics of discourse, as contradistinguished from traditional pragmatics. This notion of dramatics describes the idea that truth-telling cannot be reduced to traditional speech act theory. Third, this act of enunciation is therefore not a performative utterance. If this were so, the status of the speaker, the potential content of the utterance, and the effects it can produce would belong to an already prescribed space of possibilities. On the contrary, the parrhesiastic enunciation produces unknown discursive and non-discursive effects. It opens new discursive and non-discursive possibilities, and mainly puts the speaker at the risk of the fundamentally unequal power relation within which the enunciation takes place. Fourth, this act of enunciation creates a double relation of the speaker with oneself. On the one hand, the speaker does not merely talk; they assert their claim.46 On the other hand, in the act of enunciation the speaker presents or better stages himself or herself as the person who speaks the truth. Fifth, as we have said, the relation between the speaker and his or her interlocutor is not one of domination, and the parrhesiastic act does not result from a predetermined social role. Thus, this act constitutes an exercise of freedom, and (in light of point three above) an act of courage. Sixth and finally, the historical development of the practice of parrhēsia creates three distinct 44 The parrhesiast’s act often takes place after they have been granted (however informally) permission to speak. It occurs in the cases of addressing royalty or a friend, and is normally the case in the Platonic Socrates addressing his interlocutors. However, this is not always the case. As we will see, several instantiations of Cynic parrhēsia are premised on the lack of an explicit permission, which works in the form of a discursive ambush. 45 See Foucault’s relevant reference to Quintillian’s Institutio Oratoria, in both FS: 21 and GSA: 53. “Parrhēsia is thus a sort of “figure” among rhetorical figures, but with this characteristic: that is without any figure since it is completely natural. Parrhēsia is the zero degree of those rhetorical figures which intensify the emotions of the audience.” (FS: 21, emphasis added, save the ancient Greek terms). 46 In traditional speech act theory, the formulation would be the equivalent, not of ‘x’, but of ‘I assert that x’. This is classified as explicitly assertive illocutionary act. For the illocutionary act of assertion, see SEARLE 2011 [1969]: 65–66. 47 modes of being that have been ossified into three equivalent social roles: the prophet, the philosopher, and the scientist. This last genealogical conclusion of parrhēsia’s ossification has a strong critical aspect. Although it is not explicitly drawn by Foucault, we can discern the structure of this genealogical critique, especially in light of our argument in section 1.2. As we saw concerning the Cartesian viewpoint that Foucault criticises, the idea of the existence of oneself becomes the foundation of knowledge. Thus, the Cartesian subject acquires the form of a proto-transcendental structure. The notion of truth as correspondence is grounded in the relation of representation the subject holds with the world; in turn, this relation of representation is grounded in this structure of subjectivity. However, as we have just seen, the act of enunciation in the context of the ancient practice of truth-telling is constituted by the very fact of its public qua dramatic performance. In that sense, the Cartesian structure of subjectivity as ahistorical and universal can be seen as the historical outcome of a triple move: a specific context of communication acquires a certain ontological priority and is considered unique and fundamental; it becomes internalised in oneself, or it is considered to describe a mental relation of oneself with oneself; and, finally, it becomes hypostatised.47 1.3.2. Care of the self as Cynic truth-telling: critique and demetaphysicalisation The Cynic parrhēsia can be seen in terms of a triangular relation among logos (or rational discourse), truth (or the very content of the parrhesiastic practice), and bios (or life), conceived as the actual practice of living according to one’s preaching.48 Cynic parrhēsia as the practice of a bios philosophikos [a philosophical life] can be 47 “It would be interesting to compare Greek parrhēsia with the modern (Cartesian) conception of the evidence. For since Descartes, the coincidence between belief and truth is obtained in a certain (mental) evidential experience. For the Greeks, however, the coincidence between belief and truth does not take place in a (mental) experience, but in a verbal activity, namely, parrhēsia. It appears that parrhēsia, in this Greek sense, can no longer occur in our modern epistemological framework.” (FS: 14). See also FS: 169–173. Earlier, in his 1982–1983 course, he describes the Cartesian cogito (“le philosophe comme qui parle en disant « je »”) in terms of a parrhesiastic act “afin premièrement de jouer, par rapport aux structures de pouvoir, qui sont celles de l’autorité ecclésiastique, scientifique, politique, un certain rôle au nom duquel il pourra conduire la conduite des hommes.” (GSA: 321–322). This critique can also be expressed in terms of Engel’s minimal realism. As we have seen, the idea that an assertion is made true by something external to the assertion and its context presupposes a structural relation between the subject and the world. The genealogist shows that this presupposition is the prioritisation, internalisation and hypostatisation of a specific language game or context. Thus, the metaphysical foundationalist view from Descartes to Engel about the relation between subject and world is nothing but a hypostatising interpretation of contextualism. 48 See FS: 97, 101–102. 48 understood in terms of the reversal of four aspects of the traditional philosophical way of living.49 Foucault’s reinterpretation of the Cynic parrhēsia in these terms not only displays the characteristics we saw in the previous subsection; it also indicates his sceptical stance. In the next section, I will show how the Cynic stance can be interpreted as a radical, internalist critique that also reinterprets and neutralises any metaphysical elements by incorporating them into this very practice of critique. 1.3.2.1. Philosophical life as unconcealed life The first aspect of a philosophical life is unconcealed life. Traditionally conceived, it is the life that “ne cache aucune part d’elle-même […] parce qu’elle ne commet aucune action honteuse, aucune action malhonnête, répréhensible”.50 The dramatisation of the Cynic unconcealed life is carried to such an extreme that it acquires the status of a scandal: it is manifested in Diogenes’ absence of a home, his absence of clothes, and his choice to display his life in one of the busiest cities to be seen by as many as possible. The argument that Foucault puts forward can be reconstructed as follows. First, an unconcealed life, traditionally conceived, is a living practice that one does not commit anything bad or shameful. This, however, presupposes the active acceptance and observance of the traditional conception of what is shameful and bad. Second, as our natural dispositions cannot be shameful or bad, what is shameful and bad is that which has been added to nature ( in other words, convention). Third, an unconcealed life should therefore not be a life of acceptance of the traditional, acquired normative framework, but a manifestation of its opposite. In this case, the opposite would be “faisant valoir ce principe que la nature ne peut jamais être un mal”51 and the rejection of convention. However, as will become more apparent in the discussion of the other aspects of a philosophical life that the Cynics aim at reversing, our interpretation emphasises that the Cynic stance of unconcealment should be understood more as the critical move of the rejection of convention than as an affirmation of the natural order. The idea of nature is subsumed into an act of critique, an act that exposes what the non- Cynic has not examined. Foucault’s reference to the ‘spontaneous acceptance’ of the convention can be seen to corroborate this. In that sense, the Cynic unconcealed life 49 See CV: 231–266. Cf. CV: 200–230, and FS: 115–133. 50 CV: 231. 51 CV: 235. 49 seems almost to have the structure of an ad absurdum argument: the unconcealed life of the Cynic is the life of uncovering the idées reçues of one’s fellow citizens. 1.3.2.2. Philosophical life as life without mixture The second aspect of a philosophical life is life without mixture. Traditionally conceived, this form of life comes in two versions — two aesthetics or (more precisely) stylistics of existence: Une esthétique de la pureté, qu’on trouve surtout dans le platonisme, où il s’agit de dégager l’âme de tout ce qui peut constituer pour elle un élément de désordre, d’agitation, de trouble involontaire […] ; et puis une stylistique de l’indépendance, de l’autosuffisance, de l’autarchie, qu’on trouve plus facilement chez les épicuriens et chez les stoïciens, où il s’agit de libérer la vie du tout ce qui peut la rendre dépendante d’éléments extérieurs, d’évènements incertains.52 The Cynic stance constitutes a radical dramatisation of the latter and adopts a practice of living in materially real poverty. Thus, we see a radical reinterpretation of the notions of dégagement and liberation, according to which they no longer describe a stance of mental detachment, but rather an experience of non-dependence in a physically concrete form. Foucault analyses this stance in terms of three main characteristics. First, in contrast with the Stoic interpretation, this stance is not a prophylactic exercise, a preparatory training for possible ills to come; it constitutes an actual, embodied life in poverty. Second, a life without mixture, traditionally conceived, constitutes embracing a frugality manifested as indifference towards one’s status and possessions. For the Cynics, however, a life without mixture is the active renouncement of one’s situation. Third, for the Cynics, poverty describes an infinite process, a constant striving to go beyond the previously set limit, a struggle “jusqu’à rejoindre le sol de l’absolument indispensable”,53 which seems at the same time to acknowledge that both these notions of ‘ground’ and ‘absolute’ are unattainable as they do not exist. In the same sense that truth-telling is the unornamented talking degree zero, Cynic poverty is the never to be fulfilled attempt of a living degree zero. According to Foucault, this life in actual poverty results in the following series of paradoxical effects: the valorisation of ugliness, the state of dependence, and adoxia (bad reputation). These effects are paradoxical as they run fully against the 52 CV: 235 (emphasis added). 53 CV: 238 (emphasis added). 50 traditional ethical and aesthetic normative framework. Moreover, the second effect is paradoxical for an additional reason: it contradicts the value of self-sufficiency to which the Cynics themselves assent. According to Foucault, these paradoxes are justified in the following terms: [Or,] c’est ce déshonneur qui est effectivement recherché par les cyniques : par la recherche active de situations humiliantes qui valent parce qu’elles exercent le cynique à résister à tout ce qui est phénomène d’opinions, croyances, conventions. […]. Donc : indifférence à l’égard de toutes ces situations d’humiliation, et même recherche active des situations d’humiliation, parce qu’il y a d’abord ce côté d’exercice, de réduction des opinions, et aussi le fait qu’on va pouvoir, à l’intérieur de cette humiliation acceptée, retourner en quelque sorte la situation et en reprendre le contrôle.54 Foucault’s justification is very important. It can be interpreted as emphasising both aspects of critique and demetaphysicalisation, mainly subsuming the latter into the former. The notions of resistance, reduction, and taking control can be seen as describing a critical stance in which the received normative framework is exposed as problematic. Thus, in light of the above, we can discern the following five instances of this double aspect of critique and demetaphysicalisation, although Foucault does not elaborate on these five instances. The first three intensify the element of critique, while the last two indicate how any possible metaphysical element of the Cynic stance is reinterpreted in light of the aspect of critique. First, the Cynic stance takes the form of an internalist critique. The Cynic valorisation of ugliness shows to the Platonic philosopher that what he or she proposes is just an exchange of one version of beauty with another; when confronted with offensive comments on his or her behaviour, the Cynic manifests to his accusers that their comments apply a fortiori to themselves, too. Equally, in the same way that the Cynic unconcealed life exposes the traditional philosophers’ uncritical acceptance of the normative framework, it could be argued that the Cynic practice of living in actual poverty shows that the practice of indifference understood only as a mental attitude presupposes and somehow affirms the material conditions in which it is grounded. Finally, and more importantly, I argue that Foucault’s approach to a Cynic life without mixture as a critical stance neutralises any metaphysical aspects. First, as we have just indicated, the fact that the Cynic independence and autonomy result in 54 CV: 241 (emphasis added). 51 dependence and heteronomy constitutes a contradiction within the Cynic ethical framework. This entails that both the value and employment of reason are compromised, and that the orthos logos [right reason] is not a safe criterion for the distinction between nature and non-nature. The very fact that, according to the Cynics, logos is considered to be grounded in nature accentuates the problem.55 In that sense, rationality becomes subsumed in the scandalous effect to be produced. Epistemic functions (reason) and the ontological facts (nature) in which the former are grounded are nothing but tools in service of a critical stance. Second, an active poverty qua infinite and indefinite poverty shows that a natural order is not conceived as a fixed thing: there is no recognisable and describable bedrock of nature for the Cynic to reach, and thus (a fortiori) there is no natural foundation for his stance. Nature does not have the status of a metaphysical brute fact; subsumed into the Cynic dramatics, it is somehow constituted by the very practice of critique. 1.3.2.3. Philosophical life as straight life The third aspect of philosophical life is the straight life: Cette vie droite comme caractère de la vraie vie était une vie de conformité à un certain logos, lequel logos était [de son côté] indexé sur la nature. La vie droite était une vie conforme à la nature, mais c’était aussi une vie conforme aux lois, règles, coutumes, qui était convenues entre les hommes.56 The Cynic reversal consists in the rejection of latter, and the retaining of the conformity to nature alone. Again, moreover, the Cynic dramatisation leads this conformity to the extreme that results in the valorisation of animality. Foucault’s description that “[l]e bios philosophikos comme vie droite, c’est l’animalité de l’être humain relevée comme un défi, pratiquée comme un exercice, et jetée à la face des autres comme un scandale” indicates that this reversal is very similar to the one concerning the life without mixture.57 In contrast with the Cynic valorisation, according to the traditional conceptual framework, animality constitutes the limit of man as a rational being. Further, as in the case of poverty, animality is not characterised by an absolute point; rather, it describes a constant striving to go beyond the previously set limit. 55 For this idea, see Foucault’s description of the straight life below. 56 CV: 243. 57 CV: 245. 52 As in the case of the life without mixture, Foucault’s description can lead to equivalent conclusions concerning the primacy of critique and demetaphysicalisation. The scandal arising from the clash between the Cynic practice and the fundamental belief of the framework of ancient rationality, that human reason is defined in opposition to animal behaviour, constitutes a critique of this fundamental belief. However, in this way, a form of contradiction within the Cynic framework seems to appear again. The idea that reason is defined as the absence of animality raises the question of the foundation of Cynic reason. Thus, if logos becomes defined and justified within a practice of bios alone, then we have an interpretation of Cynic philosophy according to which a metaphysical foundation (nature) is rejected in favour of the context of a practice of critique. Moreover, when Foucault says animality is not only a natural given but also a duty, he describes this element of challenge [défi] to which the notion of nature is subsumed. It seems we do not have the traditional case according to which a moral fact derives from a natural order, and the correspondence of one’s comportment to this fact is the criterion of one’s successful moral stance. Animality does not constitute a brute metaphysical fact; rather, it is constructed by the very practice of the Cynic. Foucault’s manuscript note corroborates this interpretation: Mais ce n’est pas simplement par un repli sur la naturalité la plus immédiate que la vie cynique opère le retournement de la vie droite. Là encore, il s’agit d’un repli actif, agressif, polémique, militant. La vie naturelle du cynique a une fonction maïeutique. Il s’agit pour lui de tenter, d’éprouver toutes des vérités qui peuvent être acceptées et révérées par les hommes.58 1.3.2.4. Philosophical life as sovereign life The fourth aspect of philosophical life is the sovereign life, which can be understood in terms of three fundamental characteristics. First, it describes a life the individual aims to control in every aspect. Second, it is a life that gives pleasure to the person who lives it. It is a pleasure that derives from oneself in the context of this very life and does not depend on external objects. Third, it is a life that becomes at the same time beneficial to others. The Cynic reversal of the sovereignty of oneself is manifested in the theme of the philosopher qua king. The Cynic stance can be understood in contrast to the Stoic conception of the theme, according to which the philosopher is even better than the 58 CV: 244, ft. 53 king, as he or she can guide the king’s soul, and, consequently, the souls of the people.59 In contrast, the Cynic conception of sovereignty has the same structure with the practice of poverty. In the same way that Cynic indifference is not a mental state but rather a concrete practice, Cynic kingship is not presented in terms of the superiority of the philosopher (qua sovereign of the souls) over the king (qua sovereign of the bodies), but in the actual assertion and embodied practice of the Cynic as the de facto king. This stance reveals the critical attitude of the Cynic: “vis-à-vis des rois de la terre, des rois couronnés, des rois assis sur le trône, il est le roi anti-roi, qui montre combien la monarchie des rois est vaine, illusoire est précaire.”60 The story of the encounter between Alexander and Diogenes is the most revealing in this respect.61 Foucault presents the four characteristics or fundamental contrasts of their encounter that work as equal arguments of Diogenes’ true kingship in comparison to Alexander’s virtual one. Alexander’s sovereignty depends on the whole political and military apparatus that surrounds him, while Diogenes’ depends on nothing. Alexander’s sovereignty is the outcome of a hereditary right followed by an appropriate training (paideia), while Diogenes’ is such by nature. The Cynic is courageous by being a man simpliciter.62 Further, if the triumph over one’s enemies is an index of one’s sovereignty, then Alexander has not conquered his true enemies (that is, the internal ones, one’s “défauts et […] vices”).63 Finally, the Cynic life is never exposed to the possibility of the reversal of one’s fortune which is the basic characteristic of political sovereignty traditionally conceived. Foucault makes three further points in his analysis of the encounter that manifest his sceptical stance. The aspect of nature is fully bracketed and reinterpreted in terms of the critical stance of the Cynic life that is itself underscored. First, the care for others has been endowed on the Cynic by nature. This care takes a quasi- sacrificial form, as it is conditioned on self-renunciation. Second, referring to Apuleius’ description of Crates, a disciple of Diogenes,64 Foucault qualifies this care 59 CV: 252. 60 CV: 252 (emphasis added). 61 Foucault relies on Dio Chrysostom’s account; on this source, see CV: 253 and 265. 62 Thus, we can say that the virtue of andreia, which Foucault correctly indicates as being translated as courage and (more generally) as virility (CV: 254), is reinterpreted in the Cynic discourse, which harks back to its etymological origins (the word stems from anēr, ‘man’). 63 CV: 255. 64 CV: 256. 54 in medical terms. The Cynic eliminates the distance between the philosopher and the people, instantiated in the lofty conception of the Stoic sage’s happy life that works as an example to be followed. In lieu of the Stoic advices and examples, we encounter the medical, physical, and social interventionism of the Cynics.65 Third, the character of this intervention is further qualified. Diogenes’ care for others has a militant character. The notion of combat is not only present in the double strife of the Cynics with hardship — that is, in the struggle both against the physical duress imposed on oneself, and in the active search for new conditions of physical strain where the Cynic’s stance is put into test. It is also present in the aggressive character of the Cynic encounter with others. The serenity of the Stoic advice and of the Socratic example is replaced by an ethos of insult and offence. In Foucault’s lectures on truth-telling at Berkeley, the discussion of Cynic parrhēsia is central. It is presented as the par excellence case of political parrhēsia, and the story of the encounter between Alexander and Diogenes is the only case of Cynic philosophy that is presented in length and analysed so thoroughly.66 More importantly, his approach in these lectures illuminates what Foucault would say in his Collège de France course some months later, and especially what he would say about the militant aspect. Here, Foucault approaches the parrhesiastic game in terms of a comparison to the Socratic. First, despite their common dialogical structure, in the Cynic parrhesiastic game, Alexander asks and Diogenes answers. Second, Diogenes does not intend to reveal Alexander’s ignorance, as Socrates would do, but rather aims at hurting his pride. There is, to be sure, exposure of the interlocutor’s ignorance, but it can be seen as subsumed within the main target of hurting one’s pride. This is important as it indicates that the epistemic is subsumed to the ethical. Third, Diogenes’ parrhēsia brings his interlocutor “to the limit of the […] parrhesiastic contract, viz., to agree to play the game, to engage in discussion. […]. [T]he Cynic parrhesiastic game is played at the very limits of the parrhesiastic contract. It borders on transgression”.67 Fourth, therefore the Cynic adopts various techniques for renewing the parrhesiastic contract. Foucault refers to a kind of “exchange, […] [a] kind of courageous ‘blackmailing’ of the interlocutor in the name 65 CV: 256. 66 FS: 115–133. 67 FS: 127 (emphasis added). 55 of truth”.68 Diogenes poses the dilemma to Alexander that if he kills him, he will not know the truth about him. Foucault also refers to a use of “trickery” that is parallel to, but at the same time differentiated from, Socratic irony.69 The Cynic trickery has the form of simulating a compliment with which the interlocutor is lured back into the discussion. Hence, while Socratic dialogue is described more as a kind of process “from an ignorant understanding to an awareness of ignorance,” the Cynic dialogue is a combative game, a succession of aggressive peaks and peaceful moments, themselves being “additional traps for the interlocutor”.70 The exchange between Alexander and Diogenes ends with the former’s silence and the latter’s claim that the only way to be a real king is to adopt the ethos of a Cynic philosopher. The final stage of the dialogue is Diogenes’ continuous discourse; however, his discussion does not present the truth of a positive thesis, but is content to give a precise description of three faulty modes of life linked to the royal character. The first one is devoted to wealth, the second to physical pleasure, and the third to glory and political power.71 In that sense, we can understand how Foucault’s interpretation can be considered to instantiate a sceptical stance, or to combine a kind of militant ataraxia with a genuine epoche. Both themes of demetaphysicalisation and critique are displayed. Nature is demetaphysicalised. Although Foucault talks about a kind of moral duty that derives from nature, this very notion of nature is reinterpreted as it becomes subsumed within the practice of renouncing oneself for others. Thus, the exact content, the characteristics, and the possibility of the application of this duty qua moral fact are constituted by the context of the practice within which they appear. Although Foucault does not make this interpretative move, I think Cynic sovereignty leads to paradoxical qua self-refuting effects, similar to the ones we saw earlier. The notion of renouncing oneself that can even take the form of a quasi-sacrifice seems to be at odds with the value of autarky embraced by the Cynic stance itself. The fact that Cynic parrhēsia leaves the Cynic at the interlocutor’s mercy and actually close to his or her own demise manifests this paradox. Again, this paradox can be justified if placed within the practice of a radical critique. As before, the critique becomes internalist, as the Cynic exposes the precariousness of a ruler’s predicament according 68 FS: 129. 69 FS: 129. 70 FS: 130. 71 FS: 132 (emphasis added). 56 to the ruler’s own criteria. Hence, concrete practice in lieu of theoretical elaboration eliminates the metaphysical character of the foundation on which this very practice is supposed to be grounded. 1.3.3. Conclusion I would like to close this discussion of Foucault’s interpretation of Cynic parrhēsia as a manifestation of his own sceptical stance with some remarks on Raymond Geuss’ account of Cynic philosophy.72 His approach perfectly displays the tension between the Cynics and the traditional philosophical framework within which they emerged and against which they act, as well as the inherent problems of their approach. As Geuss’ reading can be seen to represent a philological orthodoxy on the matter, Foucault’s interpretative divergence is stressed and its sceptical character is brought to the fore. For our purposes, Geuss makes two interrelated points. First, he shows that the strong epistemological and ontological commitment (a robust notion of reason and a strict metaphysical distinction between nature and culture) necessarily entailed by the Cynic ideal of self-sufficiency is problematic. Second, he shows that the Cynic stance is inherently apolitical. Concerning the first point: The mere unvarnished advice, however, to try to reduce one’s desires and needs is not really sufficiently determinate and informative to be a useful guide on how to live one’s life. It is self-defeating to try to reduce one’s desire for food below a certain minimal level, and how then do I know which of my desires and needs I should try to reduce and in what level? On this issue Diogenes is a rationalist. He believes that “right reason” (ορθός λόγος) will show us that some needs and desires are unavoidable, necessary, and imperative, like the basic human bodily needs that must be satisfied if human life is to be maintained.73 According to Diogenes’ criterion, “[c]onventional or artificial needs are overwhelmingly those that we cannot easily satisfy by ourselves.”74 Next, Geuss remarks that, “[o]ddly enough, the Cynics had a theory of training to inure themselves to natural hardship but did not have a similar form of exercise for learning to ignore cultural norms.”75 The Cynics did not develop any relevant thought on the matter, since they thought that the (theoretical) understanding alone that something is not 72 GEUSS 2001: chapter II, “Shamelessness and the Public World”. 73 GEUSS 2001: 23–24. 74 Ibid.: 24. 75 Ibid.: 120, n. 24. 57 natural would be sufficient directly to produce the (actual) abolition of any kind of human social inertia like aversion, decency, or prudence. All these will disappear as soon as one realises they are based on false belief.76 Concerning the second point, according to Geuss, “[t]o follow the Cynic path is to be deeply unpolitical”.77 First, the Cynic idea of self-sufficiency entails an explicit and radical independence from other people. Second, “to behave in ways one knows other will find disgusting, is consciously to produce in others the experience of a barrier”.78 This stance contradicts the basic principle of politics, since any relation to the other is ab initio truncated. Consequently, Diogenes’ idea of ‘cosmopolitanism’ (that he is not a citizen of a particular city) should be considered only in negative terms: [I]t is not because he envisages an all-encompassing city of which he is a citizen; it is because he thinks that there is no such thing as a form of political organization concretely embodied anywhere, or even imaginable, of which one could even in principle rationally wish to be a citizen. Cynic “cosmopolitanism” thus amounts to no more than the rejection of any concrete political engagement in or with the world around him.79 Thus, in contrast to Diogenes, Geuss juxtaposes Socrates: His mode of life is a series of political acts par excellence, because his action is aimed not at filling the city with new harbors, new theaters and new stadia, or gaining Olympic victories, but at improving the souls of the Athenians. It is hard to see how Diogenes could have made a similar claim for his behavior.80 In light of Foucault’s approach, however, we might say these points play the role of an ad absurdum argument: exactly because (we can imagine Foucault arguing) there is no adequate epistemological, ontological, or political, all traditionally conceived, grounding of the Cynic stance, all these notions of reason, nature, or relation to others have to be reinterpreted in the context of the Cynic practice of radical critique. It is this radical critique that makes Foucault interpret Diogenes’ encounter with Alexander as relevant for the polis, as 76 Cf. “[Y]ou did not need to learn to masturbate and defecate in public, to eat human flesh, and so on. These later came “naturally” when you once saw that there was no ορθός λόγος against them.” (Ibid.: 121, note 24). 77 GEUSS 2001: 28. 78 GEUSS 2001: 28. 79 GEUSS 2001: 29. 80 GEUSS 2001: 30–31. 58 a struggle between two kinds of power: political power and the power of truth. In this struggle, the parrhesiastes accepts and confronts a permanent danger […]. And the main effect of this parrhesiastic struggle with power is to lead the interlocutor to internalize this parrhesiastic struggle –to fight with himself against his own faults, and to be with himself in the same way that Diogenes was with him.81 It is this radical critique that Foucault describes in terms of militantism: C’est une militance en milieu ouvert, en ce sens qu’elle prétend s’attaquer non pas seulement à tel ou tel vice ou défaut ou opinion que pourrait avoir tel ou tel individu, mais également aux conventions, aux lois, aux institutions qui elles-mêmes, reposent sur les vices, les défauts, les faiblesses, les opinions que le genre humain partage en générale. […] Mais il faut aussi reconnaître, dans ce militantisme, une forme particulière : un militantisme ouvert, universel, agressif, un militantisme dans le monde, contre le monde. C’est cela, je crois, qui constitue la singularité de cette souveraineté cynique.82 This interpretation of Foucault’s, I believe, constitutes the singularity of a sceptical stance. 81 FS: 133. 82 CV: 262. 59 1.4. Games of Truth, Problematisation, Experience: Foucault’s Sceptical Self- Descriptions I have so far argued that Foucault is best seen as developing a sceptical aesthetics of existence evidenced by his metahistorical remarks. I have argued that the ancient idea of an art of living can be understood in terms of a contemporary ethics as an aesthetics of existence; that this aesthetics of existence constitutes a sceptical ethics conceived as a nominalist, contextualist, and particularist stance; and that this stance describes Foucault’s own genealogical thought. In this section, I will discuss what is perhaps the most compelling evidence: Foucault’s own conceptualisations and reinterpretations of his whole work, which he presents as a coherent project, and the way they diverge from Heidegger. This section is structured as follows. First, I present some convergences that can be traced between Foucault’s approach of the care of the self previously discussed and Heidegger’s thought. Second, I discuss Foucault’s conceptualisations of his own work. I will show in which sense Foucault’s divergences from Heidegger’s thought provide further corroborating evidence for his nominalist and contextualist conclusion. 1.4.1. Convergences: Heideggerian themes in Foucault’s care of the self First, Foucault alludes to a Heideggerian conception of the self. His description of the Cartesian viewpoint is close to Heidegger’s thoughts on the predominance of modern metaphysics which he also identifies with, a Cartesian conception of the subject.83 According to Heidegger, As a metaphysics of subjectivity, modern metaphysics, under whose spell our thinking too stands, or rather inevitably seems to stand, takes it as a forgone conclusion that the essence of truth and the interpretation of Being are determined by man as the subject proper. More essentially though, however, it becomes clear that subjectivity is determined from the essence of truth as “certitude” and from Being as representedness. We saw how representation unfolds its full essence, and how only within it—as the essence of what underlies—man is transformed into the subject in a narrower sense, initially as “I”. That man thereby becomes the executor and the trustee and even owner and bearer of subjectivity in no way proves that man is the essential ground of subjectivity.84 83 See HEIDEGGER 1991b: chapters 15–17. 84 HEIDEGGER 1991b: 139. 60 In this passage, we can retrace the points made so far: the current intellectual landscape is dominated by metaphysics and, particularly, by a metaphysics of subjectivity; philosophy is a transcendental inquiry; the categories of this inquiry with which the relation between self and world are described are grounded in a specific structure of subjectivity; this structure is traced back to the Cartesian notion of certitude; and the identification of man and selfhood with this conception of subjectivity is a metaphysical postulation. Moreover, Heidegger’s references to a metaphysical interpretation of both truth and Being indicate that he also believes both notions can be conceived in a non-metaphysical sense. Second, Foucault’s notion of the being of the subject can be read in relation to Heidegger. In Heideggerian terms, the question about the being of the subject would be a question about the Sein of Dasein. According to Heidegger’s own description, Being and Time attempts “to determine the essence of man solely in terms of its relation to Being. That essence was described in a firmly delineated sense as Da- sein.”85 Thus, the transformation of the being of a subject is the transformation of a Dasein. Although we will elaborate Foucault’s relation to Heidegger later, a few brief remarks need to be made here. Dasein can be understood as being-in-the-world — that is, as thrown into a nexus of pre-existing contingent possibilities. Thus, the self is found within a network of possible ways of being and acting that it has not itself created. In that sense, the self is not understood in terms of an ahistorical entity, and Heidegger provides a holistic view of subjectivity according to which self and world are fundamentally linked. Heidegger’s ethics that derive from this description are approached in term of authenticity. The self is not a given, and Dasein becomes a self only when it adopts an authentic stance. This stance involves a self-referential character and is twofold. First, an authentic Dasein is a Dasein that understands itself as being-in-the-world, in the way described above. Second, an authentic Dasein understands its death as that which enables it to consider its life as a complete whole, that is, to appropriate its past and present by understanding them both in relation to its own death. In light of the above, we can associate Foucault’s description of the care of the self with Heidegger’s ethics of authenticity. The triple idea of a self that is not fixed, of a self that changes, and of a change that is set as a goal is fundamental to both 85 HEIDEGGER 1991b: 141. 61 views on selfhood. Furthermore, a telic, that is, a goal-oriented, aspect of authenticity and of the care of the self are central to each view. First, it describes an ethical aspect, broadly conceived. Second, in both cases, it is associated with a kind of self- referential knowledge. In both Heidegger and Foucault, the self understands something fundamental about the situation in which it is found. In Heidegger, it is the understanding of Dasein’s ontic and ontological condition. In Foucault, the very care of the self is described in epistemic terms, since (as we have seen in section 1.2) the transformation of oneself precedes, accompanies, and follows knowledge. Moreover, acquiring a specific knowledge also means understanding oneself as something that changes. 1.4.2. Divergences: Foucault’s self-description as a sceptical stance Foucault accompanies his later publications with a series of illuminating retrospective reinterpretations of his whole work in terms of a comprehensive and coherent schema. To refer to the most representative instances of these reinterpretations, Foucault describes his work in terms of a genealogy, a history of truth, a history of thought, analyses of games of truth, analyses of problematisations, and analyses of historical constitution of a field of experience.86 Furthermore, in almost all cases, these descriptions appear interconnected. Thus, Foucault talks about a history of thought as a history of problematisations, a history of the emergence of games of truth, “l’histoire des rapports que la pensée entretient avec la vérité ; l’histoire de la pensée en tant qu’elle est pensée de la vérité”,87 the relations among subject, truth, and the constitution of experience.88 In what follows, I will discuss three salient points arising from these descriptions. First, these descriptions refer to the same issue, and their differences concern complementary aspects. Second, they do not refer to any metaphysically conceived entities. All things described belong to the same ontological plane. Third, it is for these reasons that Foucault’s conceptualisations diverge from Heidegger’s thought. I will start by discussing two interrelated passages from Foucault’s L’usage des plaisirs. I consider them important for a series of reasons: they include Foucault’s main descriptions; these descriptions appear interconnected; his negative formulations 86 SV: 1489. See also PPP. 87 SV: 1488. 88 EE: 1550. See also SV. 62 (that is, what his work is not about) indicate the metaphysical conceptualisations that he both avoids and criticises; and, as we will explicitly see, there are some possible allusions to Heideggerian themes that are almost unique in the corpus. Thus, this set of passages will be used as a matrix of discussion for other similar instances in Foucault’s work. C’est pour ce dernier parti que j’ai opté, en réfléchissant qu’après tout, ce à quoi je suis tenu — ce à quoi j’ai voulu me tenir depuis bien des années —, c’est une entreprise pour dégager quelques-uns des éléments qui pourraient servir à une histoire de la vérité. Une histoire qui ne serait pas celle de ce qu’il peut y avoir de vrai dans les connaissances ; mais une analyse des « jeux de vérité », des jeux du vrai et du faux à travers lesquels l’être se constitue historiquement comme expérience, c’est-à-dire comme pouvant et devant être pensé. À travers quels jeux de vérité l’homme se donne-t-il à penser son être propre quand il se perçoit comme fou, quand il se regarde comme malade, quand il se réfléchit comme être vivant, parlant et travaillant, quand il se juge et se punit à titre de criminel ? À travers quels jeux de vérité l’être humain s’est-il reconnu comme homme de désir ?89 En remontant ainsi de l’époque moderne, à travers le christianisme, jusqu’à l’Antiquité, il m’a semblé qu’on ne pouvait éviter de poser une question à la fois très simple et très générale pourquoi le comportement sexuel, pourquoi les activités et les plaisirs qui en relèvent, font-ils l’objet d'une préoccupation morale ? Pourquoi ce souci éthique, qui, au moins à certains moments, dans certaines sociétés ou dans certains groupes, paraît plus important que l’attention morale qu’on porte à d’autres domaines pourtant essentiels dans la vie individuelle ou collective, comme les conduites alimentaires ou l’accomplissement des devoirs civiques ? […] Bref, l’interdit est une chose, la problématisation morale en est une autre. Il m’a donc semblé que la question qui devait servir de fil directeur était celle-ci comment, pourquoi et sous quelle forme l’activité sexuelle a-t-elle été constituée comme domaine moral ? Pourquoi ce souci éthique si insistant, quoique variable dans ses formes et dans son intensité ? Pourquoi cette « problématisation » ? Et, après tout, c’est bien cela la tâche d’une histoire de la pensée, par opposition à l’histoire des comportements ou des représentations définir les conditions dans lesquelles l’être humain « problématise » ce qu’il est, ce qu’il fait et le monde dans lequel il vit.90 I would like to begin the discussion by unpacking the main formulation of the first extract. According to Foucault’s self-description, his work constitutes “an analysis of the games of truth through which being is historically constituted as experience, as that which can and should be thought” This formulation is very important, as it is one of the rare cases in Foucault’s late work where his reference to being can be 89 UP: 13–14. 90 Ibid.: 17–18. 63 interpreted as an allusion to Heidegger. Thus, in Foucault’s formulation that “being becomes that which can and should be thought”, we recognise Heidegger’s idea that Dasein’s concern about who it is constitutes is, at the same time, a concern about Being. Below, I attempt to explicate the interrelated notions relevant to this idea. Specifically, I discuss successively the notions of games of truth, problematisation, and experience. This discussion shows Foucault’s nominalism and contextualism and his divergence from Heidegger’s thought. Both these two things feed into each other and indicate Foucault’s sceptical stance. 1.4.2.1. Games of truth The first notion concerns games of truth. Dasein’s concern about Being is Dasein’s thinking about Being, and Dasein’s thinking about Being occurs through games of truth. Games of truth refer neither to a discourse’s interrelated true statements, nor to the conditions of possibility that determine the truth or falseness of a statement within a specific discourse. Specifically, Foucault comes close to formulating a definition of games of truth in two instances. Games of truth are defined as “un ensemble de règles de production de la vérité. […] ; c’est un ensemble de procédures qui conduisent à un certain résultat, qui peut être considéré, en fonction de ses principes et de ses règles de procédure, comme valable ou pas, gagnant ou perdant.”91 They describe “non pas la découverte des choses vraies, mais les règles selon lesquelles, à propos de certaines choses, ce qu’un sujet peut dire relève de la question de vrai et du faux.”92 These rules and procedures should not be understood strictly in terms of traditional epistemology. According to Foucault, games of truth can take the form of a scientific discourse or found in institutions and practices of control.93 Elsewhere, responding to a question concerning the agency of these games, he talks about (among other things) “[d]es individus […] qui organisent un certain consensus et qui se trouvent insérés dans un certain réseau de pratiques de pouvoir.”94 In that sense, the notion of games of truth can be understood to describe the wider context within which specific discourses are formed, and can be depicted in in terms of a nexus of interrelated and overlapping, discursive, and non-discursive practices. 91 ESS: 1544. 92 “Foucault”: 1451. 93 ESS: 1527–1528. 94 ESS: 1545. 64 The notion of games of truth alludes to Heidegger’s reinterpretation of the notion of truth. According to Heidegger, the common assertoric usage of truth is derivative of a primordial truth or truth as disclosedness that, in turn, is grounded in the Dasein as being-in-the-world. Foucault’s reinterpretation of truth in terms of games of truth, however, diverges from Heidegger’s disclosedness. First, the idea that Foucault’s notion of games of truth can be identified with practices of power, epistemic discourses, and interpersonal relations, can be seen to make the distinction between the ontic and the ontological to collapse. Being, in Foucault’s thought, seems to be identified with the practices that constitute it; it thus becomes anthropologised. Foucault’s analysis also undercuts the possibility of a metaphysical interpretation of Heideggerian truth; it shows that Heidegger’s truth can only be ontologically nominalist and epistemically contextually on pain of relapse into metaphysics. The openness of the notion is indicative of Foucault’s sceptical stance. Although his description has so far presented suffices to support this conclusion, his inclusive and open-ended response when explicitly asked about the ‘problem of agency’ (“le problème du « qui »”) corroborates it further. Foucault’s response shows that the notion does not constitute a metaphysical construct: the ‘who’ of a game of truth is not, and cannot be, a priori specified; the changes can range from a single rule to the game in its entirety, and the imagery of practices is invoked again.95 This shows that certain questions and critiques should be rejected as meaningless: the demand of an a priori specification of agents, rules of change, and (to extend Foucault’s argument further) boundaries among epistemic, power, and interpersonal relations presupposes a metaphysical conceptualisation of the notions employed, a conceptualisation that Foucault’s notion of the game of truth contributes to its undoing. 1.4.2.2. Problematisation The second notion we can now approach is that of problematisation. The way it is associated with the notion of games of truth confirms the picture drawn so far. From the extracts we have used, we can understand that an analysis of a process of problematisation is the analysis of the process according to which something enters 95 ESS: 1544–1545. The formulation cited is of Foucault’s interlocutor. 65 into a field of thought.96 Since a field of thought cannot be outside of a game of truth, an analysis of a process of problematisation is the analysis of the process according to which something enters into a game of truth. This description is corroborated by an another rare instance in Foucault’s late work, where he comes close to providing a definition of the notion: Problèmatisation ne veut pas dire représentation d’un objet préexistent, ni non plus création par le discours d’un objet qui n’existe pas. C’est l’ensemble des pratiques discursives ou non discursives qui fait entrer quelque chose dans le jeu du vraie et du faux et le constitue comme objet pour la pensée (que ce soit sous la forme de la réflexion morale, de la connaissance scientifique, de l’analyse politique, etc.).97 It is important to see that, although (according to the above) a process of problematisation seems, in a sense, to precede games of truth, it does not hold a relation of precondition with them. Rather, they should be understood as having the same status and being on the same ontological plane. We can talk about a wider nexus of processes of problematisation within which the nexus of the practices of games of truth can be incorporated. Thus, first, we could say that processes of problematisation and games of truth correspond to a revised version of ontology and epistemology respectively. Foucault’s analysis of processes of problematisation is the analysis of the conditions according to which something acquires a specific ontological status — that is, the conditions according to which something becomes an entity to be referred to and discussed. In other words, it is the analysis of the way something becomes a possible reference to a series of statements. In turn, the notion of games of truth describes the rules according to which this entity is embedded and manipulated within a series of statements. This means the rules of the production of true statements (games of truth) follow the specification of what a statement refers to (problematisation). However, as the extract cited above indicates, and as we have seen in section 1.2., the referents of a set of statements (or the entities that a certain discourse talks about) do not impose themselves from the outside into this discourse; they thus do not have a different status from the very discourse within which they appear. Putting it succinctly, we can talk about a contextual epistemology all along, or about the ‘reduction’ of ontology to epistemology: the subject (that knows) and the object (to be known) do not have an 96 See also PPP: 1416. 97 SV: 1489. 66 independent ontological status, but they emerge as such from the same coextensive matrix of practices. Thus, the practices that make something enter into a field of thought are continuous with the practices that constitute this field of thought. Second, as is the case with games of truth, the practices that make something enter into a field of thought should not be understood as belonging to a single ontological kind (conceptual, material, political, or psychological). They are equally multifarious, and there is no stratification in their status.98 This is important for two reasons. First, it further corroborates Foucault’s nominalism as outlined in our Introduction. Things do not have a metaphysically distinct status from the contexts within which they appear, and those contexts are not a priori specified as belonging to the fields of ideas, of politics, or of the interactions of a self with oneself and with others. They belong to the undifferentiated nexus of overlapping practices. Second, this notion of undifferentiatedness indicates Foucault’s sceptical stance. Foucault does not have a theory about the process of problematisation, or the factors that make things enter into a field of thought and the things that enter into it. A theory of that sort would imply a metaphysical qua ahistorical stance about processes, factors, and things. Any claim about things is a matter of a specific perspective; it is a specific historical question, and a question for the genealogist. 1.4.2.3. Experience The third, and perhaps most important, notion in this context is that of experience. As we have already seen in Foucault’s formulation, Dasein’s thinking of Being involves the notion of experience: Dasein’s thinking of Being qua concern about Being constitutes an experience of Being. This point is crucial as it signals an immediate and important divergence from Heidegger. Heidegger is critical of the notion of experience in Being and Time, as it implies a Cartesian, metaphysical, conception of selfhood that is at odds with his holistic conception of Dasein.99 Two interlinked points therefore have to be made. First, Foucault’s divergence from the Heideggerian conception of Dasein’s concern about Being constitutes a non- metaphysical reinterpretation of the notion of experience, and as such does not relapse into a Cartesian conception of subjectivity. Second, according to Foucault’s formulation, the experience of Being seems to somehow come after both games of 98 See PPP: 1416. 99 Here, I follow INWOOD 1999: 62–64. 67 truth and processes of problematisation.100 More specifically, Foucault talks explicitly about the constitution and the opening up of a field of experience by games of truth.101 Thus, the question is whether these formulations entail a quasi-transcendental metaphysical structure according to which games of truth are the conditions of possibility of experience, which would compromise Foucault’s anti-metaphysical, anti-transcendental stance. In what follows, I argue that experience is not metaphysically conceived, and that it is neither the product of games of truth, nor of processes of problematisation. As we have seen at the beginning of this section, one of the descriptions Foucault uses for his work is structured in terms of the analysis of the relations between subjectivity and truth. This schema has special importance. First, it appears in a work that can be considered to introduce Foucault’s later thought.102 Second, Foucault’s elaboration of that schema shows that experience in not grounded in a transcendental structure; the self is therefore not identified with a Cartesian version of subjectivity. Foucault distinguishes three ways in which the relation between subjectivity and truth can be approached. Le premier façon, philosophique, de formuler les rapports « subjectivité et vérité », se résume en un mot : c’est la question de la possibilité d’une vérité pour un sujet en général. La deuxième façon que j’ai appelée positiviste, consiste à s’interroger sur la possibilité de dire vrai sur la subjectivité. Et la troisième façon, qu’on appellera si vous voulez historico-philosophique, c’est de se demander quels sont les effets sur cette subjectivité de l’existence d’un discours qui prétend dire sur elle la vérité.103 The third way of approaching this relation is described as follows. [Q]uelle expérience le sujet peut-il faire de lui-même, dès lors qui se trouve mis dans la possibilité ou dans l’obligation de reconnaître, à propos de lui- même, quelque chose qui passe pour vrai ? Quel rapport le sujet a-t-il à lui- même du moment que ce rapport peut passer ou doit passer par la découverte, promise ou imposée, de la vérité sur lui-même ? La question ainsi formulée est 100 Indicatively, as we recall, Foucault talks about “des jeux du vrai et du faux à travers lesquels l’être se constitue historiquement comme expérience” (UP: 13; emphasis added). 101 On the constitution of a field of experience, see PPP: 1415, cf. SV: 1489 and EE: 1550. On the opening up of a field of experience, see “Foucault”: 1453. 102 This is SV, Foucault’s 1981 cours at the Collège de France, that covers the material he will later publish in UP. Cf “une histoire critique de la pensée serait une analyse des conditions dans lesquelles sont formées ou modifiées certaines relations de sujet à objet, dans la mesure où celle-ci sont constitutives d’un savoir possible” (“Foucault”: 1451; emphasis added). 103 SV: 14. 68 […] une question fondamentalement historique. Je dirais que c’est une question de fait.104 The first two approaches can be grouped together. The first concerns the conditions of possibility of the subject’s knowledge of an object or of the world in general, while the second concerns the conditions of possibility of the subject’s knowledge of itself. The third approach differs crucially. First, it is described as historical in contrast to the first two that are par excellence philosophical qua transcendental. Second, the first two refer to onto-logical structures, while the third describes a psychological notion.105 Third, and most importantly, the first two ways describe the conditions of possibility of the experience of the subject and the world, while the third can be interpreted to describe the experience of these very conditions of possibility. Thus, it can be said that the third way is opposed to the first two. This element of opposition again manifests Foucault’s sceptical stance, as it can be seen as an acknowledgement of his nominalist and contextualist critique. I think the following passage, read in the light of our previous remarks, corroborates this claim: [D]ans une telle manière de poser la question « subjectivité et vérité » à travers ces problèmes historiques de la folie, de la maladie, de la mort et du crime, la subjectivité n’est pas conçue à partir d’une théorie préalable et universelle du sujet, elle n’est pas rapportée à une expérience originaire ou fondatrice, elle n’est pas rapportée à une anthropologie qui aurait une valeur universelle. La subjectivité est conçue comme ce qui se constitue et se transforme dans le rapport qu’elle a à sa propre vérité. Pas de théorie du sujet indépendante du rapport à la vérité.106 First, as we can see, the subject is not considered an ahistorical entity and Foucault’s approach is historically and socially specified. Thus, the rejection of a ‘prior theory’ and ‘an original and founding experience’ can be seen as an acknowledgement of nominalism.107 The rejection of a ‘universal theory’ and ‘universal value’ can be seen as an acknowledgement of contextualism. 104 SV: 13. 105 On the notion of psychologism and its philosophical significance, see KUSCH 1995. 106 SV: 15. 107 A possible interpretation according to which Foucault does not refer to ‘experience’ simpliciter, but to ‘fundamental experience’ as it appears, for example, in later Heidegger’s “The Origin of the Work of Art”, can be considered very unlikely in light of Foucault’s rejection of the equivalent notion of a founding experience. Moreover, given that this type of experience seems to be the experience of a hypostatised conception of being, it seems to acquire a metaphysical status itself, and thus to be completely at odds with Foucault’s stance (see HEIDEGGER 2002: 6). 69 Second, the experience of the conditions of possibility of the subject knowing itself means the experience of one’s own change through the encounter with the truth about oneself. This shows, not only that the self is not conceived as an ahistorical structure, but mainly that the conception of a specific view of subjectivity constitutes a dogmatic metaphysical postulation. It is metaphysical because it is considered ahistorical, and it is dogmatic because it does not do justice to the historical reality of the archive that manifests a self that changes. Thus, Foucault’s opposition between conditions of possibility and experience can be seen as a critique of the former. In that sense, what is seen as a psychologistic move is also an anti-metaphysical move; the distinction between the philosophical and the conceptual on the one hand and the historical and the factual on the other indicates that the former is nothing but a dogmatic theoretical abstraction of the latter. In that sense, Foucault shows two things. First, talking about a set of conditions of possibility of experience presupposes a specific, historically determined, description of experience of this set of conditions. Second, transcendental subjectivity qua a set of ahistorical conditions of possibility of experience is the decontextualisation and hypostatisation of this prior experience. Transcendental subjectivity is nothing but a historical fact about oneself made abstract. Third, in light of the nominalist idea of the self, we can now see the way in which experience is related to games of truth and processes of problematisation, without abandoning the idea of a contextualism. This means experience is not epiphenomenal to games of truth and processes of problematisation. The following three premises lead to this conclusion. First, as we have seen in our discussion of games of truth, not only do they not have different status from epistemic, power, and interpersonal relations; they are also inherent to, or manifested in, them. Second, according to Foucault, [C]es jeux [de vérité] ne s’imposent pas de l’extérieur au sujet selon une causalité nécessaire ou des déterminations structurales ; ils ouvrent un champ d’expérience où le sujet et l’objet ne sont constitué l’un et l’autre que sous certaines conditions simultanées, mais où ils ne cessent de se modifier l’un par rapport à l’autre, et donc de modifier ce champ d’expérience lui-même.108 108 “Foucault”: 1453 (emphasis added). 70 Thus, not only is a field of experience not conditioned from the outside, but it is modified by its own constituents.109 Third, as we saw in Section 1.1., the self should not be understood as an agent engaged in a series of activities, but as this very engagement in this set of overlapping practices. Thus, the self should be understood itself as a nexus. From these three premises, therefore, we can see that the nexus of selfhood is continuous with those of games of truth and processes of problematisation, and can be placed at the centre of the wider nexus these two concepts form. Finally, the sceptical element we have indicated concerning the games of truth and the processes of problematisation applies a fortiori to this wider nexus. Possible questions and critiques about the specification of the conditions under which a field of experience is modified, about the extent of its modification, or about the specific boundaries among games of truth, processes of problematisation, and fields of experience, are meaningless. Such questions imply a hypostatisation of these notions and go against the idea that these issues can be only answered contextually. 1.4.3. Conclusion I have used this section to argue that, for Foucault, games of truth, processes of problematisation, and fields of experience are not metaphysically understood. They must be conceived as forming the parts of a wider nexus, which renders questions that demand an abstract answer concerning the nature, the interrelation, and the boundaries of these parts meaningless. This further corroborates what I called Foucault’s sceptical stance. I would like to close this section with a final note on the way Foucault’s conception of the care of the self diverges from Heidegger’s authenticity. Although we will elaborate on this matter later, Foucault’s conception of both selfhood and ethics is closer to Nietzsche and Blanchot than to Heidegger. First, although the idea of understanding one’s own life from the perspective of one’s own death is found in the thought of both Heidegger and Foucault, for the latter the idea acquires a radical 109 Cf. “[D]ans le cas de la folie, j’ai essayé de rejoindre à partir de là la constitution de l’expérience de soi-même comme fou, dans le cadre de la maladie mentale, de la pratique psychiatrique et de l’institution asilaire. Ici [chez L’Usage des plaisirs et Le Souci de soi] je voudrais montrer comment le gouvernement de soi s’intègre à une pratique du gouvernement des autres. Ce sont, en somme, deux voies d’accès inverses vers une même question : comment se forme une « expérience » où sont liés le rapport à soi et les rapports aux autres.” (SV: 1489; emphasis added). This extract is important because, apart from the fact that it describes Foucault’s whole work in terms of the constitution of a field of experience, it refers to the way that the relation with oneself and others modifies this field of experience. 71 form. Death is not only understood as that which enables oneself to consider his or her life as a complete whole; it is also integrated in a series of practices that aim at its experience as an immediate possibility. In the case of the Stoic’s narration of the course of his or her day, the end of the day mirrors the end of one’s life,110 while the transgression of Socratic and, mainly (as we have explicitly seen), Cynic parrhesia practice nothing more than the internalisation of the experience of one’s death within life. Furthermore, death can become also a strong metaphor, and this kind of practice of death is also transferred to other practices. The relationships between Marcus Aurelius and Fronto, and between Socrates and Alcibiades, explicitly internalise their very end, as the erotic rapport cannot be continued after the younger participant reaches a certain age.111 In that sense, Foucault can be seen as making a triple point. First, he emphasises the radical contingency of selfhood. Second, fragmentations and incoherences, like failures and abandoned projects, are not things external to a self, but rather internal parts of it. These practices are thus reminders that the self is inherently fractured. Third, a self-referential ethical stance is presented. The void of groundlessness is filled by an act of writing that dwells on this groundlessness: Foucault’s dwelling takes the form of modelling his sceptical stance on Diogenes’ Cynical truth-telling, which is interpreted as sceptical to retrospectively justify Foucault’s own. In what follows, I will show how the discussion of Foucault’s later thought we have outlined so far can be described and rendered in terms of a sceptical ethics. 110 See “Technologies of the Self” (DE II, 363). 111 See “L’herméneutique du sujet” (DE II, 323): 1184, and, in light of this, see again the “Technologies of the Self” (DE II, 363) and “L’écriture de soi” (DE II, 329). 72 1.5. A Sceptical Stance: A Retrospective Justification of Foucault’s Aesthetics of Existence In this section, I will revisit the ancient scepticism of Sextus Empiricus. My main claim is that Sextus’ scepticism should be considered as the model for Foucault’s aesthetics of existence. I will argue that Sextus’ scepticism, if viewed correctly, can be understood as a practice of critical thinking: it amounts to a radical internalist critique of the traditional philosophical framework. This radical critique leads to a non-metaphysical phenomenalism, that is, a sceptical (nominalist and contextualist) stance that considers both ‘things’ and the way we talk about them as constituted by the very practices within which they are found. 1.5.1. The scepticism of Sextus Empiricus I will begin by presenting the relevant themes of Sextus’ thought with reference to the original text, followed by the reconstruction of the dominant interpretation of Sextus’ scepticism as advocated by the works of Jonathan Barnes and Myles Burnyeat.112 I will then present Michael Frede’s interpretation of Sextus’ ontology and epistemology, which I will in part endorse.113 Finally, I will expand Frede’s interpretation to analyse sceptical ethics and show the relevance of Sextus’ thought to a contemporary conception of aesthetics of existence as approached so far. 1.5.1.1. Sextus Empiricus’ Outlines of Pyrrhonism My exposition of scepticism mainly focuses on the first book of Sextus’ Outlines of Pyrrhonism.114 There, Sextus starts with an apophatic definition of scepticism put in epistemological terms. Scepticism is defined in opposition to dogmatism as a different attitude towards truth. More specifically, it is identified with the suspension of 112 BARNES 1997 [1982], BURNYEAT 1997 [1980], 1984 and BARNES 2005. 113 FREDE 1987. Cf. FREDE 1987 [1984]. 114 Henceforth PH. Any reference to ancient scepticism concerns Hellenistic scepticism. Hellenistic scepticism can be considered as being divided into three categories: the scepticism of Pyrrho, Academic scepticism (i.e. the scepticism of the late Academy), and (neo-)Pyrrhonian scepticism. The last variation is inspired by the figure of Pyrrho and distinguishes itself from the other Hellenistic philosophical schools, including Academic scepticism. The work of Sextus Empiricus belongs to this variation. For a classic, good general introduction to and discussion of ancient scepticism, see Long 1974. For a more modern introductory discussion of ancient scepticism, see Brunschwig and Sedley 2003 (and, specifically, pp. 152–154 and 175–182), and for a more detailed and informed account, see BRUNSCHWIG 1999 and SCHOFIELD 1999. For the life and work of Sextus (including accounts of the surviving works, distinction amongst individual works, textual tradition, and existing editions), see BURY (ed.) 2000 [1933], BARNES 2005 [2000], and BETT 2005a. 73 providing any conclusive belief in matters of philosophical inquiry, including the ‘confession of inapprehensibility’ itself.115 The objective of scepticism is further described in terms of an ethical practice. According to Sextus, “[t]he causal principle of scepticism […] is the hope of becoming tranquil.”116 This description is important, as it captures several elements that are essential to an aesthetics of existence as a sceptical practice. First, Sextus’ reference to a causal principle emphasises the ethical objective of scepticism. Second, the element of hope indicates more a directionality and a process, rather than any fixed achievable state. Third, tranquillity is also defined apophatically. Although it is described elsewhere as synonymous with ‘calmness of soul’117 (and it does indeed have that characteristic), it seems semantically closer to ataraxy, here considered to mean ‘freedom from disturbance’.118 Sextus relates the apophatic epistemological description to the ethical objective of scepticism. Scepticism is qualified as the ability to provide oppositional accounts for a specific issue, intending to the equipollence of the accounts provided. Equipollence of conflicting accounts, construed as equal in argumentative validity, results in suspension of judgement, which in turn leads to tranquillity.119 Sextus also gives a more positive account of a sceptical ethics of action: Thus, attending to what is apparent, we live in accordance with everyday observances, undogmatically, for we cannot be wholly inactive. These everyday observances seem to be fourfold, and to consist in guidance by 115 PH I, 1. I am using the translations of Annas and Barnes (2005 [2000]) and Bury (2000 [1933]). The cited passages are from Annas and Barnes’ translation, unless otherwise indicated. In the cases of a modified translation, the original used still comes the former text, even if some of the modifications constitute replacements of some of Bury’s adopted solutions. I think both works are equally accurate. Annas and Barnes’ translation, as the more contemporary, seems more fluent, and this is the main (if not the exclusive) reason why it is used. Nevertheless, it does adopt a certain position in current philosophical debates related to interpretative matters of ancient scepticism. In other words, it seems informed by a specific interpretative line in relevant philosophical issues (and sometimes even contemporary ones) that makes it locally anachronistic. Given this is not the case with Bury, his translation seems more distant and, thus, more useful. 116 PH I, 12. 117 PH I, 10. Annas and Barnes translate, I think very accurately, ‘γαληνότης’ [galēnotēs] as ‘calmness’. 118 PH I, 10. The term Sextus uses more frequently for ‘tranquillity’ is ‘αταραξία [ataraxia], and in §12 he uses the infinitive ‘αταρακτήσειν’ [ataraktēsein] from which the noun stems. The negative element, the notion of ‘freedom from’, derives mainly (apart from the context) from the morphology of the word and, namely, from the privative prefix “α-”, which denotes negation and/or opposition. I think the best translation of ataraxia is ‘tranquillity’. Although ‘ataraxy’ seems closer, I find it has too medical a resonance and is mainly obsolete. I think Bury’s solution of ‘quietude’ allows more allusion to the epistemological aspect of suspension of judgment than to the ethical objective of tranquillity. Equally, although the possible solutions of ‘untroubledness’, ‘undisturbedness’ or ‘unperturbedness’ retain the privative prefix and, thus, the negative connotation, I find them almost too artificial to be used. 119 PH I, 8. 74 nature, necessitation by feelings, handing down of laws and customs, and teaching of kinds of expertise. By nature’s guidance we are naturally capable of perceiving and thinking. By the necessitation of feelings, hunger conducts us to food and thirst to drink. By the handing down of customs and laws, we accept, in the conduct of life, that being pious is good and being impious bad. By teaching of kinds of expertise we are not inactive in those which we accept.120 Returning to sceptical epistemology, suspension of judgement is described as “a standstill of the intellect, owing to which we neither reject nor posit anything.”121 The character of the suspension of judgement constitutes the crux of the sceptical epistemological stance: whether the sceptic holds any beliefs and, if so, what kind of beliefs he holds. Sextus mainly addresses this issue in Chapter vii, entitled “Do sceptics hold beliefs?”, paragraph 13 (the locus classicus on that matter).122 Sextus distinguishes between two kinds of beliefs: a general and a specific kind. Sceptics hold beliefs in the general sense, while they suspend belief in the specific sense. The general species of belief is described in PH I, 13 as “acquiescing [eudokeīn] in something; for Sceptics assent to [sugkatatīthetai] the feelings forced upon them by appearances – for example, they would not say, when heated or chilled, ‘I think that I am not heated (or: chilled)’.” A belief is described as specific “in the sense in which some say that belief is assent [sugkatāthesin] to some unclear object of investigation in the sciences; for Pyrrhonists do not assent to anything unclear.”123 These two descriptions provide the material for understanding the epistemological status of the sceptic’s beliefs. Specifically, to understand the latter, we need to look at the notions of acquiescence and assent, the function and interrelation among appearance, feeling and assent, and the notions of ‘unclear object’ and ‘investigation of science’. This is a difficult hermeneutic task, given the existence of passages which seem (at least prima facie) to contradict other relevant descriptions. For example, when Sextus states that “we have been saying that tranquillity follows suspension of 120 PH I, 23–24 (translation modified). 121 PH I, 10. 122 The different translation offered by Bury, “Does the Sceptic Dogmatize?”, can be considered indicative of his different philosophical stance compared to that of Annas and Barnes (see relevant footnote, above). As is apparent from the text that follows, Bury’s translation orientates towards the adoption of a specific stance in the framework of that problematic. His stance is in accordance with the interpretation to be suggested and substantiated in the next sections. 123 PH I, 13. 75 judgment about everything”, he does not distinguish between general and specific beliefs, but instead refers to suspension of judgement without qualification.124 I consider it useful, therefore, to look at the beginning of his work, where Sextus offers the following qualification regarding the epistemic status of the sceptic’s statements: “On none of the matters to be discussed do we positively affirm that things certainly are just as we say they are: rather we report descriptively on each item according to how it appears to us at the time.”125 This is an important qualification that allows us to interpret scepticism as a reaction to dogmatism in both an epistemological and metaphysical sense: the sceptic rejects the dogmatic philosophical framework for truth and knowledge and describes reality without introducing or adhering to any metaphysical postulations. Later, I will refer to this as the sceptic’s ‘uncontentious description’ and his ‘phenomenalism’. I consider this interpretation both the most accurate and the most fruitful understanding of Sextus. Before I defend this reading, however, I will first look at the most dominant and, in my eyes, the most problematic interpretation of Sextus 1.5.1.2. A dominant interpretation of Sextus: radical scepticism In the provisional reading of PH I, 13 above, I alluded to the three main themes that concern Sextus’ scepticism: first, the sceptic’s notion of appearances and the statement that he lives according to them; second, the sceptic’s conception of belief, its nature or character, and the scope of its suspension; and third, the sceptic’s life, actions, ethics, and their relation to the other two themes. In short, these themes seem to correspond to the sceptic’s ontology, epistemology, and ethics. According to one of the dominant interpretations, Sextus’ thought should be understood as a form of radical scepticism. The sceptical epistemic stance is that of a universal suspension of belief. The sceptic suspends judgement without any qualification, and there is no differentiation between judgement and belief, opinion, or viewpoint. The sceptic does not have any beliefs about any subject. Those who interpret Sextus in this way deem this radical scepticism to be incoherent, logically possible yet unliveable, or both logically possible and liveable, but apparently inhuman. In short, even the best construal of scepticism is a failed scepticism. 124 PH I, 31 (emphasis added). 125 PH I, 4 (translation modified; emphasis added). 76 The ontology and the epistemology of the radical sceptic can be summarised as follows: 1. The sceptic’s statements which refer to, describe, or report appearances have no truth value. 2. Assent is defined as a forced acknowledgment of an unwilling affection or impression. According to the advocates of the radical reading of Sextus, the sceptic accepts the ontological and epistemological framework of classical thought. Classical ontology and epistemology are defined by the concept of identity. Something is real, i.e. something constitutes true reality, when it is identical to itself, and a belief or a proposition is true when it corresponds to reality. In that sense, this notion of identity not only indicates an independent reality as a precondition for truth, i.e. an ontological bedrock on which the intellect acts; it also mainly indicates the ontological structure this reality has to have (i.e., to be identical to itself) to be considered as the true one.126 The advocates of the radical reading further hold that: 3. The vocabulary Sextus uses in his example in PH I, 13 describes only the state or the process of perceptual affection. 4. Sextus’ example has the following logical structure: the sceptic cannot say either ‘y’ or ‘not-y’ when he has the perceptual affection y.127 5. The distinction between the notion of belief in a specific sense and the notion of belief in a general sense breaks down, since Sextus cannot have a criterion for distinguishing between the two. Sextus must therefore be seen as advocating a universal suspension of judgement. Sextus can only hold beliefs in a general sense, construed as non-epistemic assents, on pain of contradiction. 126 See ALLEN 1993: chapter 1. See BURNYEAT 1997: 121. Burnyeat qualifies the distinction between appearance and reality as “a purely formal one […] [t]he skeptic does not divide the world into appearances and realities so that one could ask of this or that whether it belongs to the category of appearance or to the category of reality” (BURNYEAT 1997: 128). In that sense, and given the ontological and epistemological framework described above, the distinction described between reality and appearance can be rendered as a distinction between reality and nothingness, between being and nothingness. Hence, the sceptic does not maintain a distinction between two separate ontological realms that would have been tantamount to adhering to two different kinds of reality. Barnes (1997) holds a similar interpretation. He describes his approach “as an alternative or as a complement to Burnyeat’s” (1997: 65, n21; emphasis added). 127 See BARNES 1982: 75. Barnes contends that it constitutes a non sequitur to move from a negative formulation to an affirmation. It is a non sequitur to interpret a statement of the form the sceptic would not say ‘non-y’ when y” as “the sceptic would say ‘y’ when y’”. 77 The ethics of the radical sceptic are to be understood within the framework of Hellenistic moral psychology, informed by Socratic ethics. Given the dependence of emotions on moral belief, removing beliefs within this framework results in removing the corresponding emotions. In this way, suspension of judgement regarding facts and values necessitates tranquillity. Although bodily needs and propensity to action due to natural and social endowments cannot be eliminated since they lack dependence on ‘reason and thought’, “they will be less disturbing without the added element of belief about good and bad, truth and falsity.”128 Given the description of the sceptic’s epistemic stance, a sceptic would never have reasons to choose something over something else. The criterion of action, then, becomes the equivalent of impressions occurring passively to him, to which he is then compelled to assent. As we can see, even if the radical reading overcomes its great difficulties to avoid the contradictions it itself creates in Sextus’ thought, it presents the sceptical stance as difficult to be lived. Barnes, however, holds explicitly that the desirability of scepticism does not threaten its possibility or coherence.129 I strongly disagree with Barnes here. One of the goals of Hellenistic thought as a philosophy of the art of living (sceptical or not) is to present a desirable position. The distinction between desirability and possibility is not applicable in this context. As we will see, other readings of Sextus are possible. In the next section, I will present Frede’s reading of Sextus. Frede’s reading brings out the problems with the radical interpretation and manages to characterise scepticism as a more desirable stance. 1.5.1.3. A new interpretation of Sextus’ scepticism Frede argues that the radical version of scepticism portrays the sceptical stance as inconsistent and unliveable. He points out that the sceptics were well acquainted with that objection, and actually argued against it.130 According to Frede, the sceptic not only cannot avoid believing and knowing, but he also seems to actively believe and know many things. Furthermore, the fact that he believes and knows many things is compatible with his scepticism. Although the sceptic suspends judgement on all matters, the suspension of judgement is qualified in such a way as to allow the assent 128 BURNYEAT 1980: 132–133. Similarly for Barnes (1982), sceptical everyday observance can be considered as being continuous with the sceptic’s universal suspension of judgment. 129 BARNES 2000: xxv. 130 FREDE 1987 [1979]: 180–181. 78 to “many beliefs and views, quite enough, at any rate, to lead a worthwhile life.”131 The sceptic suspends judgement only “on how things are in a certain respect”: when the description of reality becomes a matter of reason.132 Reason, in that sense, refers to the dogmatic discourse of reporting how things really are in their nature. Hence, the sceptic “can really believe something to be the case without believing this is how things are in reality” or without just recording his impressions.133 Frede provides textual evidence which supports that Sextus seems to hold both distinctions: between reality and its real nature,134 and between a descriptive and a philosophical account of reality.135 These distinctions are, however, dogmatic, and the sceptic’s acceptance of them is only tactical, as he wants both to expose the dogmatic position as contradictory, and to present his own stance in terms of the opponent’s, i.e. the dogmatist’s, vocabulary. According to the metaphysical and epistemic considerations of the radical interpretation, for example, the sceptic’s impression of a submerged oar that appears bent, could not be ‘corrected’, and considered really straight by a sceptic, in the light of his previous experience. In that sense, the absolute distinction between a reality in its nature and a purely subjective (non-epistemic) feeling cannot hold. Furthermore, according to the sceptic, any adherence to the metaphysical framework cannot but be contradictory. The dogmatist employs reason in order to go beyond the phenomena and resolve the contradictions they manifest. The privileging of reason to such an extent would make it impossible for the dogmatist to have beliefs about phenomena, as within the traditional framework phenomena could not have any objective status. This is inconsistent, as the dogmatist wants to attribute at least some objective status to phenomena.136 This is not threatening, because the sceptic is aware of this dogmatic problem and his suspension of judgement concerning the objectivity of phenomena enables him to circumvent it. Frede can thus show that, contra points 1 and 2 of the radical interpretation, the 131 FREDE 1987 [1979]: 181. 132 FREDE 1987 [1979]: 188 (emphasis added). 133 FREDE 1987 [1979]: 188 and 189 (emphasis added). 134 “physei, pros ten physin, kata ten physin – cf. P.H. I 27, 78, 140”, Frede 1987 [1979]: 186 (the transliteration of the original is maintained). 135 “We can see that such restrictions, “hoson epi + dative” occur again and again in the Outlines of Pyrrhonism (e.g. III 65, hoson epi to philosopho logo, cf. also II 26; 104; III 6; 13; 29; 65; 81; 135; 167)”: Frede 1987 [1979]: 188. 136 “[H]owever, the dogmatists, generally speaking, do not deny that the phenomena have at least some objective status”: FREDE 1987 [1979]: 190. 79 sceptics’ beliefs that refer to appearances can have a truth value, and the sceptical assent cannot be reduced to mere forced acknowledgement of impressions. According to Frede, the radical interpretation of sceptical assent also presupposes a theory of the self and, specifically, a theory of the psychology of impressions: their nature, the mechanism of their emergence, and their epistemic status. However, the sceptic adheres neither to a theory of the self, nor (specifically) to a criterion for deciding his assent to impressions. Thus, it follows that the sceptic’s use of dogmatic vocabulary does not entail his adhering to its metaphysical content. Sextus describes in dogmatic terminology the fact that he holds beliefs, while he does so only tactically. Based on the above arguments, the sceptic’s position should be reformulated as follows: 1*. The sceptic’s statements referring to, describng, or reporting appearances constitute beliefs and can be considered candidates for both truth and knowledge. 2*. Assent is defined as the acknowledgment of an involuntary impression only tactically, and constitutes a description of the sceptic’s notion of belief using dogmatic terminology. 3*. PH I, 13 provides an example of a sceptic’s belief concerning an impression in its most minimal and uncontroversial form. It does not, however, confine the sceptic to perceptual or affective beliefs, as this would presuppose a theory of the kind the sceptic rejects. 4*. The sceptic can say ‘y’ when he has the perceptual affection y. 5*. The distinction between the notion of belief in a specific sense and the notion of belief in a general sense breaks down if and only if Sextus is assumed to adhere to the metaphysical and epistemological framework of the dogmatists, rather than using it tactically. Frede’s argument, therefore, shows that the sceptic’s rejection of the dogmatic framework is compatible with a thick epistemic stance, and that this stance can be significantly more appealing because the sceptic does not have to live without beliefs. Given the anti-philosophical image drawn by Frede, one might ask whether there is a difference between the sceptic and the everyday person. Frede argues that the everyman could actually be considered dogmatic. The sceptic is, hereto, different from the everyman because he acknowledges the possibility of a difference between 80 the appearance of things and their real status.137 Finally, Frede examines the possibility of identifying scepticism with empiricism. According to an empiricist stance, a belief is only about evident matters, and evident matters are, in turn, those deriving from observation and experience.138 Frede refutes this interpretation as dogmatic. It is based on the controversial assumptions that different things are equally evident for different people, and that the perception of things is identified with their being evident. In fact, Sextus seems to refer to many things that are evident without being the outcome of observation qua sense perception. Such an identification would ascribe a criterion of truth to the sceptic, while his scepticism is defined in terms of a rejection of such a criterion. Frede concludes with a less apophatic description of the sceptical epistemic stance: “[w]hat fundamentally distinguishes the skeptic from other people are not the beliefs he has but his attitude toward them.”139 The beliefs the sceptic does not hold are those that are only grounded in the dogmatic employment of reason. His rejection of the dogmatic framework liberates him from the worry of the dogmatist, who fears the way things appear is not how things are. This is what makes scepticism superior. 1.5.1.4. Sextus’ sceptical tools Frede’s interpretation can be elaborated further regarding Sextus’ ethical stance to be clarified, to enable a better understanding of a contemporary aesthetics of existence. It follows from the above that Sextus uses two main argumentative tools. The first tool can be described as that of dialectical argumentation. By this, I mean the tactical use of dogmatic vocabulary. The second tool is perhaps best described as uncontentious description, and consists of the description of what would be generally agreed as basic situations of human experience. These two tools are related, as Sextus’ uncontentious description can function within the context of the dogmatic discourse. Uncontentious descriptions provide minimal requirements to be accepted. These requirements are minimal because they constitute the minimum that the sceptic can concede to, in the context of dogmatic vocabulary, without adhering to the theoretical engagements of the dogmatists. 137 This neither means nor entails that the sceptic does believe there is, in fact, a difference between how things appear and how things really are. That would be dogmatic. The sceptic, qua aporetic (see PH I, 1 and 10, and Section 1.5.1.1. above), cannot exclude it either, since that would be equally dogmatic. Thus, the sceptic has to assent to the possibility of difference. 138 FREDE 1987 [1979]: 198 (emphasis added). 139 FREDE 1987 [1979]: 199 (emphasis added). 81 In PH I, 19, Sextus writes that “[f]or as we said above, we do not overthrow the affective impressions which induce our assent involuntarily”.140 Equally, in PH I, 193, he concludes: “We say we neither posit nor reject anything which is said dogmatically about what is unclear; for we do not yield to things which emotionally move us and lead us necessarily to assent.”141 In these two examples, Sextus does not confine the sceptic’s belief to a compulsive assent; he merely indicates the minimal epistemic requirement to provide an uncontentious description of human experience in terms of dogmatic vocabulary. The fact that, in the second passage, the description indicates an explicit distancing of the sceptic from the dogmatic framework can be considered to corroborate that interpretation. It can thus be argued that the target of the sceptic’s argument is to refute the dogmatic programme on epistemology, ontology, and ethics in its own terms. The sceptic’s aim is to show that the dogmatic criteria for knowledge and tranquillity are invalid, and that (according to them) knowledge and tranquillity cannot be attained. Moreover, the sceptic working within the dogmatic discourse shows that the refutation of the dogmatic framework allows both a rich epistemic stance and an ethics of tranquillity. The sceptical stance should, therefore, be seen as critical. It functions both in opposition to and within the discourse against which is set. I would go as far as to describe the sceptical stance as phenomenalist. However, this phenomenalism presupposes neither the existence of an objective qua ahistorical and ontologically autonomous reality, to which the content of human experiences corresponds to, nor a distinction between appearances and things in themselves. It is in light of these remarks that Sextus can be compared to, and even seen as an inspiration for, Foucault’s thought. It could be argued that Sextus’ tool of uncontentious description, from which his phenomenalism derives, is a precursor to, and can be identified with, Foucault’s nominalism and contextualism. 1.5.1.5. Sextus’ ethics 1.5.1.5.1. Critique of previous interpretations and answers to possible problems 140 The fragment cited is from Bury’s translation. The translation is modified and the emphasis added. 141 The fragment cited is from Annas and Barnes’ translation. The translation is modified and the emphasis added. 82 I will now turn to the traditional interpretation of Sextus’ ethics. The traditional interpretation of the sceptical ethics of action misunderstands the apophatic and dialectical character of scepticism. Sextus’ description of sceptical action as adherence to the community has to be considered analogous to his epistemology, and not as the space to which the sceptic withdraws after a universal suspension of judgement. Instead, Sextus’ description of sceptical action has to be understood dialectically, as a kind of uncontentious description. He presents his ethics in terms of being as minimal as his epistemology: the fourfold ethical scheme is all the sceptic can concede without adhering to the theoretical engagements of the dogmatists, and it is what anyone would accept as the minimum necessary requirement for living. Sextus’ use of dogmatic vocabulary in PH I, 23–24 corroborates the dialectical interpretation. The dogmatic distinctions between ‘necessitation of feeling’ and ‘guidance by nature’, or ‘perceiving’ and ‘thinking’, have to be considered dialectical, i.e. tactically used, on pain of contradiction. Sextus’ demand to adhere to the prescriptions of the community should not be considered universalisable. Although he uses both the notion of laws and customs and their specific content in his oppositional arguments throughout his PH, he does so only to supply equipollent contrasting accounts. If we considered his ethics a universalisable prescription, then he would offer just another version of dogmatism, even if different in content. The dialectical and apophatic character of sceptical ethics does not, however, resolve two problems. First, sceptical ethics seems to deprive scepticism of a more affirmative stance. Second, a dialectical reading of sceptical ethics results in a conservative stance. It would amount to an uncritical acceptance of the customs of one’s community. Although, as we argued above, the sceptic cannot possibly be dogmatic, he can still be understood as promoting a strong conservative attitude. I think that this twofold problem can be equally refuted if one accepts the dialectical and apophatic character of sceptical ethics. For such a refutation, two things have to be taken into consideration. First, as we mentioned before, Sextus’ description of sceptical ethics should not be understood as the conclusion of a formal syllogism, whose premises are sceptical epistemology. Instead, it should be understood as an analogy. Second, while Sextus’ short fourfold scheme is repeated occasionally, without almost any variation, he never dwells on any specific content in any of the four branches, and their prescriptive content thus remains minimal. Based on these two points, I will argue that conservative sceptical ethics is either empty or 83 problematic. In its place, I will suggest a non-conservative construal of Sextus’ description. I will suggest that Sextus’ description should be understood metaphorically, and I will show that sceptical ethics is open and complex. A series of questions can make it apparent that a conservative ethics is problematic. What does the sceptic do when the customs and the laws of his community do not prescribe a possible rule of action? Does he follow the majority or the most persuasive opinion? And if he follows the most persuasive one, what are his criteria for the definition of persuasiveness? Does a sceptic ever put a value higher than custom? What about cases where his life, or the life of a friend, is in imminent danger? What about when one of his family or friends is about to perish? Is there a hierarchy of values? Even if there is, what are the criteria (if any) on which this hierarchy is based? What if the sceptic at some point fails to meet these values because of fear or weakness? Does he then cease to be a sceptic or become less of a sceptic than before, or does he even become a failed sceptic? Or does he become something else? Although there is little room to decide when to plough the field or harvest the crop, the decision concerning which oxen to buy and from which merchant does not seem to come so naturally. While it is easy to agree with the community on the colour of an object, it is far more difficult to decide whether one has to change one’s agricultural practices (or one’s occupation as a farmer altogether) after successive bad crops. If, on the one hand, a conservative prescription were as open and as undetermined as Sextus’ advice to follow the community evidently is, then conservatism is too empty to be a meaningful way of life. If, on the other hand, a conservative stance is fully worked out (as Sextus’ conservatism clearly is not), resulting in very detailed and rigid prescriptions of what to do in any given situation according to one’s community, the element of choice would no longer be part of the sceptical ethics, rendering this way of life decidedly inhuman. That said, the premises on which the above series of questions are based should be rejected. Ethics as a living practice does not allow for universal or even general answers to these questions. Any attempt at a general answer would indicate that the sceptic qua sceptic relied on theoretical presuppositions according to which he decides what to do. This, however, would render him dogmatic, which is precisely what is avoided in such an epistemology and ontology. Regarding Sextus’ ethics as conservative would, therefore, be problematic. I suggest we must read Sextus’ ethics in the same apophatic and dialectical way that we 84 saw as being necessary for his epistemology and ontology to arrive at a more productive interpretation. This is also hermeneutically and historically more accurate, considering that Sextus was participating in an ongoing discussion about what kind of ethics one should adopt. It is highly unlikely to see Sextus’ contribution as a mere call to conservatism. Rather, as I want to show, his thought on ethics constitutes a critique of his contemporary’s ethical theories and a desire to change the way we think about the question of how to live. 1.5.1.5.2. Sceptical ethics: the possibility of a positive stance Read apophatically and dialectically, then, Sextus’ goal is to trace and refute metaphysical contents and transcendental groundings. It can be argued that, in the same way that ‘belief qua assent to impressions’ is to be understood as ‘belief qua non-dogmatic belief’, ‘decision and action qua following the needs of nature and the practice of community’ needs to be equally understood as ‘decision and action based on non-theoretical qua non-dogmatic grounds’. In that sense, sceptical ethics is no longer understood as a prescription of adherence to the customs of the community, but it issues the recommendation to avoid any metaphysical and dogmatic theories concerning how one has to act. When Sextus says ‘go to the community’, he does not suggest we ask our fellow citizens for specific guidelines and prescriptions; he urges us to guard ourselves against the metaphysical dogmatism of these prescriptions. Therefore, the community should no longer be understood as the source of ethical guidelines, but as the metaphor for the concrete non-theoretical, non-metaphysical human realm in which ethics takes place. We recall that Sextus’ epistemology is phenomenalist, in the sense that it provides non-dogmatic reports. Sextus’ ethics should be understood in the same way, and the fourfold matrix of actions should be considered a phenomenalist description of concrete human behaviour. This matrix could be simplified further. ‘Perceiving and thinking’, described as ‘guidance by nature’ and ‘necessitation of feelings’, describing needs like hunger and thirst, could be considered natural regulations, while laws and customs and ‘kinds of expertise’ could be considered cultural prescriptions. A non- dogmatic interpretation of this description renders the two components into the notions of facticity and situatedness. In this context, the notions of facticity and situatedness resemble Foucault’s neutralising description of Sextus’ distinction. According to that neutralisation, and as the quasi-pragmatist and quasi-Heideggerian 85 aspect of the terms reveals, the natural element is not opposed to the social, historical, and cultural one. On the contrary, they are considered in terms of a continuous spectrum that describes the human condition. Thus, facticity can be considered as part of situatedness, and scepticism as critical phenomenalism can be interpreted as the non-dogmatic, non-metaphysical, and non-transcendental analysis of situatedness. This neutralising description can be traced in Foucault’s tool of demetaphysicalisation, instantiated in his interpretation of Diogenes’ approach to nature. This kind of analysis of situatedness can also be identified with the contemporary notions of ontological nominalism and epistemological contextualism: it describes the approach of selves and things in terms of the very practice within which they are found interacting. 1.5.2. The sceptical relevance of Foucault Finally, before we move on, I would like to close this chapter by drawing the attention to Foucault’s own consideration of his thought in sceptical terms. Foucault’s last answer in his final interview with G. Barbedette and A. Scala explicitly describes his objective in sceptical terms.142 As a response to the question “êtes-vous un penseur sceptique ?”, he answered with a clear “ – Absolument.” Dans la mesure où vous n’affirmez aucune vérité universelle, où vous levez des paradoxes dans la pensée et où vous faites de la philosophie une question permanente, êtes-vous un penseur sceptique ? – Absolument. La seule chose que je n’accepterai pas dans le programme sceptique, c’est la tentative que les sceptiques ont faite de parvenir à un certain nombre de résultats dans un ordre donné – car le scepticisme n’a jamais été un scepticisme total ! Il a essayé de lever des problèmes dans des champs donnés, puis de faire valoir à l’intérieur d’autres champs des notions effectivement considérées comme valable ; deuxièmement, il me semble bien que, pour les sceptiques, l’idéal était d’être des optimistes sachant relativement peu de choses, mais les sachant de façon sure et imprescriptible, alors que, ce que je voudrais faire, c’est un usage de la philosophie qui permette de limiter les domaines de savoir.143 Here, Foucault strongly identifies his thinking with a sceptical stance which does not affirm any universal truths, raises paradoxes within a philosophical discourse and constitutes an inquisitive qua interrogative philosophical attitude. It is in this sense that Foucault distances himself from the traditional version and interpretation of scepticism, which could be considered perhaps to refer to the scepticism of 142 “Le retour de la morale” in DE II, 1984, 354, esp. pp. 1525–1526. Henceforth RM. 143 RM: 1525–1526, emphasis not added. 86 Carneades, in favour of an even more radical sceptical stance. According to Foucault, this traditional scepticism does not reject the very framework within which the sceptical critique takes place. Despite its critique of a series of beliefs and propositions, it results in the assertion of ethical conclusions, within, however, the same theoretical framework. In that sense, this sceptic retains the same Platonic goal of the discovery of an objective truth, and retreating to and being content with a position of minimal veridical performance, he attempts to acquire the same kind of certainty. Thus, when Foucault talks about his different, opposing intention ‘to limit the domains of knowledge’, I take him to refer to the aim of a more pervasive scepticism regarding any epistemological foundationalist attempts. 87 2. Foucault’s Geistesgeschichte 2.0 Introduction 2.0.1. The role of Foucault’s Geistesgeschichte In the previous chapter it was argued that the philosophy of an individualist art of living can only be sceptical. As we saw, a sceptical aesthetics of existence is epistemologically contextual and ontologically nominalist. Contextualism and nominalism define the apophatic and positive aspects of scepticism: scepticism constitutes a therapeutic critique of metaphysics and suggests a concrete analysis of human situatedness. The methodology of this stance lies in the sceptical tropes of dialectical argumentation, uncontentious and neutralising description, and pragmatism. The case of Sextus, delineating a tradition that starts with a specific interpretation of Socrates, exemplifies these characteristics. When we come to Foucault, the question arises of what kind of sceptic he is. Given the nominalist premise, the answer would be tautological since the identity of a sceptic is defined by his sceptical practice. However, an initial circumscription of Foucault’s scepticism is possible because the sceptical stance is defined by three parameters: the targets of his sceptical attacks, the exact premises or the standpoint from which his critique is launched, and the ontology which he seems to ascribe to or use, as manifested in the two other parameters. In the previous chapter, we defined a sceptical aesthetics of existence as a critical stance that reflects on the question of the good life. The aspects of that question are derived from a specific philosophical tradition. We then identified this with Rorty’s idea of a Geistesgeschichte. This identification and the three defining parameters (especially the second) necessitate a consideration of Foucault’s immersion within a tradition. The example of Sextus can be considered as a point on a line defining the tradition. This chapter outlines the tradition that Foucault’s thought can be situated in and from which his work emerged. 88 2.0.2. The three aspects of Foucault’s Geistesgeschichte Foucault’s Geistesgeschichte, the narrative fabric of themes and thinkers from which his thinking emerges, has three aspects: one biographical, one autobiographical, and one hermeneutical. The first concerns Foucault’s actual historical placement within a particular intellectual, cultural and philosophical milieu. The second concerns Foucault’s own acknowledgment of influences upon him. The third provides an interpretative connection between the first two. It presents, in a relatively autonomous and analytical way, the relevance that these themes and thinkers have for Foucault. These three aspects should be considered interlinked, with no ontological, metaphysical, or explanatory priority attached to any of the three. Using a pragmatist metaphor taken from geology, we should not consider them as stratified, with one grounded in another, but as placed alongside one other in the ‘seamless web of language’.1 The hermeneutic aspect attempts to guarantee this ‘horizontal’ relation between the autobiographical and the biographical. This ‘horizontal’ relation between the three aspects can be considered to lay the ground for the solution of an additional problem. In the previous chapter, it was argued that a successful interpretation would be one that would also refute Gutting’s objections concerning the reading of Foucault’s work in the light of the aesthetics of existence.2 It would have to show, first, that Foucault’s philosophical objective is, in fact, constant and that the changes in his thought are methodological, and, second, that Foucault’s philosophical objective can be rendered in terms of an aesthetics of existence, without reducing the latter to a biographical or autobiographical account. This chapter will show that Foucault’s place in a specific philosophical tradition is in accordance with the sceptical premises we developed in the first chapter. Foucault’s relation to a specific tradition defines his metaphilosophical identity and guarantees the constancy of his philosophical objective: what the previous chapter attempted to do in terms of family resemblances (in the case of Sextus), is attempted here in terms of history and theory. As regards the second objection, the lack of any ontological and/or explanatory priority to either the autobiographical or biographical aspect avoids any reductionism: each aspect ‘checks’ the other. Autobiographical elements are used to indicate a direction or a horizon of interpretation. At the same time, the possible interpretative exclusivity that could be 1 Again, in the terms of Blackburn (1998: 157). See 1.3.1.1. 2 See sections 1.1.4.2. and 1.3.2., above. 89 attributed to the autobiographical aspect is mitigated by the other two, avoiding both the ‘intentional fallacy’3 and anachronism. Biographical elements are used to provide the intellectual background without any reduction to psychological or social factors and events. The hermeneutic aspect is in dialogue with the other two and so checks and balances them. Simultaneously, autobiographical and biographical aspects prevent the hermeneutic aspect from becoming a dogmatic narrative of ideas, and thus an exclusive account of the philosophical tradition. The following account is neither the only possible one, nor does it attempt to be exhaustive. It is merely the most applicable for the purposes of this study.4 The Geistesgeschichte I develop starts with Heidegger and ends with Blanchot and Nietzsche. The reasons for this selection are again related to the functional role of the account. It could be argued that such an account should involve the discussion of other thinkers, like Kant and Hegel, thus pushing the starting point further back into the past. Similarly, it could be argued that Bataille should be part of such a Geistesgeschichte, especially given Foucault’s references to him, as we will see, which are usually made when he mentions Blanchot. However, involving more people and ideas would not necessarily make such an account more complete. The criterion of completeness presupposes the idea that there is only one accurate account, which has a fixed beginning and end, irrespective of the question a narrative is designed to tackle. Such a presupposition would violate the contextualist premise defended in the previous chapter. The themes of Bataille’s thought in particular that would be of interest for our purposes do appear in any case in our discussion of Blanchot’s thought. Moreover, as we will see, I consider Blanchot as occupying a more central place in Foucault’s Geistesgeschichte. His place is indispensable for the understanding of Foucault’s reception of Heidegger and of his earlier reading of Nietzsche, as they are instantiated especially in his approach to Binswanger and in his Histoire de la folie. Finally, the account that follows is not a ‘teleological’ one. It does not presuppose any necessary progress or fixed chain of influences. Its static or episodic character is intended to achieve two things: first, to indicate the possibility of different alternative strands, and, second, to map or even mimic Foucault’s anti-Hegelian 3 For the ‘intentional fallacy’, see WIMSATT and BEARDSLEY 1946. 4 Other accounts could be equally persuasive. Indeed, Gutting (1989), for example, relates Foucault’s archaeology to the intellectual tradition of the French épistémologues, and specifically to that of Bachelard and Canguilhem. 90 philosophy of history – so that Foucault’s anti-Hegelian thought is described in an anti-Hegelian way. However, it does not follow from these last two points that any account or that any selection of thinkers and themes would be equally accurate and valid. The criteria for assessing the success of an account are not to be found in anything external. In describing the relation between the three aspects as ‘horizontal’, I want to guard against considering the autobiographical and biographical elements as an external standard for the success or failure of an interpretation. In the case of Foucault, the success of the account will depend both on its internal coherence and on its ‘fit’ with the sceptical framework I outlined in the first chapter and with the cases I present in the third one. 2.0.3. The content of Foucault’s Geistesgeschichte Foucault’s intellectual trajectory could be roughly described as a break from his contemporary philosophical horizon: a movement from Heidegger, through Blanchot and Bataille, to Nietzsche. This trajectory can be understood in terms of successive reconceptualisations of two main themes: subjectivity and ethics. First, Foucault conceives Heidegger’s thought in Being and Time as a radical critique of his own (Foucault’s) contemporary philosophical environment. The conception of Dasein as being-in-the-world is a radical critique of subjectivity, and Dasein’s being-towards-death circumscribes both an anti-Kantian and anti-Hegelian ethics. It is these themes that link Foucault with Sextus and retrospectively illuminate our earlier interpretation of scepticism. Heidegger’s critique of subjectivity inspires Foucault’s analysis of Binswanger’s existential psychoanalysis.5 Second, Foucault’s reception of Heidegger’s conception of authenticity is mediated by Blanchot’s radicalised account. In Blanchot, literature becomes associated with an elaboration on the experience of groundlessness. Foucault’s analysis of Binswanger must be understood in the light of this radicalised conceptualisation. Third, the Heideggerian view of subjectivity and the Blanchotian radicalised view of authenticity receive a more elaborate analysis in Foucault’s first approach to Nietzsche. The early analysis of Nietzsche retrenches the discussion of subjectivity in 5 See Chapter 3.1. 91 the context of a radical critique of the metaphysical underpinnings of any possible ontology, and enriches the ethics of authenticity. Foucault’s Nietzsche views both subjectivity and ethics from the perspective of a radical historicity and therapy. Authenticity, historicity and therapy will characterise Foucault’s thought throughout his whole life. A qualification has to be added here. It has been argued that Foucault belongs to a post-Kantian and anti-Kantian critical tradition.6 His thinking could also be conceived in terms of critical undoing.7 I believe that it can be also argued that this kind of critical thinking can be understood according to three axes. It can range between more or less theoretical and more or less therapeutic forms, between more or less immanent criteria for human action, and between more or less historicist forms of critique.8 I am inclined to run these last three distinctions together and argue that the immanent, historicist, therapeutic critique can be considered conceptually opposed to a more or less transcendental, non-historicist theory. Foucault’s stance exemplifies critique as immanent, historicist, and therapeutic. This opposition can be considered to mark the chronology of Foucault’s intellectual trajectory. The movement from Heidegger to Nietzsche, through Bataille and Blanchot, constitutes not only a reconstruction of Foucault’s trajectory of readings, but also a move away from a theoretical and quasi-historicist form of thinking towards a more therapeutic critique. My account presents the successive conceptualisations of the two main themes in the context of Foucault’s main influences. The autobiographical and biographical aspects will be presented first. 6 See GEUSS 2005b. According to Geuss, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Marx, Nietzsche, Lukács, Heidegger, and Adorno “while obviously in some sense deeply concerned with human life in its practical aspects, are very difficult to situate in the established contexts of what we usually think of as “philosophical ethics””. (Ibid.: 40). 7 Cf. HACKING 2002a. “Roughly speaking, speculative philosophy confronts a problem by constructing a theory that will solve the problem. Critical philosophy confronts a similar problem by showing that the problem is of a sort that cannot have an answer, and explains why we should have been misled into supposing that it has an answer. The distinction is crass, for of course Kant had a ‘theory’ to resolve the problems of philosophy, just as Leibniz did, but there is at least this much truth in the distinction: Kant’s theory worked by ruling some questions out of order, whereas Leibniz wanted to answer every question that occurred to him.” (HACKING 1975: 93–94, emphasis added). Although he does not refer to Foucault in this context, Hacking also makes the following distinction between two different ways of critique: “[t]here are two ways in which to criticise a proposal, doctrine, or dogma. One is to argue that it is false. Another is to argue that it is not even a candidate for truth or falsehood. Call the former denial, the latter undoing.” (HACKING 2002a: 57). We have to note that Geuss’ ‘outside ethics’ thinkers do not necessarily constitute ‘undoers’ in Hacking’s sense. 8 For the distinction between more and less immanent criteria for human action, see GEUSS 2005b. For the distinction between more and less historicist forms of critique, see HACKING 2002a. 92 2.1. Foucault’s Geistesgeschichte: Philosophical Auto/biography The constellation of fragments we find in the interviews Foucault gave throughout his life form his philosophical autobiography. Foucault acknowledges two lines of intellectual influence: both of these have their end point in Nietzsche’s thought. As I will argue, not only do they not contradict each other, they are complementary. We will begin with the trajectory from Heidegger to Nietzsche. 2.1.1. From Heidegger to Nietzsche The locus classicus for Foucault’s acknowledgement of Heidegger’s influence is a pair of interviews given towards the end of his life.9 Foucault acknowledges immediately, and affectionately, the influence of Heidegger.10 He acknowledges that Heidegger has always been the essential philosopher for him, indeed that his philosophical development has been determined by his reading of Heidegger.11 He even claims that nobody in France, before Dreyfus and Rabinow, had underlined this aspect of his thought.12 According to Foucault, his discovery of Heidegger is associated with his attempt to overcome his reading of academic philosophy, mainly Husserl and Merleau-Ponty.13 In light of these remarks, one can understand Foucault’s description of his trajectory from Hegel to Marx and then to Heidegger, and his claim that the notes he had taken of his reading of Heidegger had exceeded the ones on every other philosopher.14 His reading of Heidegger, a first rupture with the contemporary philosophical status quo, led to his discovery of Nietzsche. Foucault acknowledges that his reading of Nietzsche was conditioned by his reading of Heidegger: “Il est probable que si je n’avais pas lu Heidegger, je n’aurais pas lu Nietzsche. J’avais essayé de lire Nietzsche dans les années cinquante, mais Nietzsche tout seul ne me disait rien ! Tandis que Nietzsche et Heidegger, ça a été le choc philosophique !”.15 And although he presents 9 The first interview was conducted by R. Martin, at the University of Vermont, on 25 October 1982, and was published in English in HUTTON , GUTMAN, and MARTIN (eds.) 1988, “Vérité, pouvoir et soi”, DE II, 1988, 362, trans. F. Durant-Bogaert. (Henceforth VPS). The second interview is “Le retour de la morale” (RM), the one we saw earlier in section 1.3.3. It was conducted by G. Barbedette and A. Scala on 29 May 1984, and was published in Les nouvelles littéraires, n° 2937, 28 June–5 July 1984, pp. 36– 41, DE II, 1984, 354. 10 RM: 1522 and VPS: 1599. 11 RM: 1522. 12 VPS: 1599. DREYFUS and RABINOW 1982. The book appeared in French in 1984. 13 VPS: 1599. 14 RM: 1522. 15 RM: 1522. 93 this combination in terms of a philosophical shock, it is Nietzsche whom he describes as a revelation.16 For Foucault, Nietzsche surpassed Heidegger. He quickly adds that he does not know Heidegger’s work enough. “Je ne connais pas suffisamment Heidegger, je ne connais pratiquement pas L’Être et le Temps, ni les choses éditées récemment. Ma connaissance de Nietzsche est bien meilleure que celle que j’ai de Heidegger.”17 In Foucault’s description of his encounter with Nietzsche, he appears to have discovered a very different author than the one he was taught. He describes how passionately he read him but also how this reading affected his life; how it liberated him from the entrapment of his intellectual environment.18 Biographical information available for this period seems to corroborate the autobiographical description. The dates that Foucault himself provides are also validated by other sources. He places his reading of Heidegger between 1951 and 1952, and his encounter with Nietzsche between 1952 and 1953.19 Foucault’s biographers, mainly based on the account of Maurice Pinguet, Foucault’s friend from the ENS, confirm his description of his familiarity with both Heidegger and Nietzsche. Macey, on the basis of Pinguet’s description of the summer of 1950, makes a brief reference to Foucault’s familiarity with Heidegger.20 For all Foucault’s biographers, Pinguet is the main source for Foucault’s 1953 Nietzschean revelation, which was prompted by this reading of Nietzsche’s Untimely Meditations.21 2.1.2. From Blanchot to Nietzsche Foucault describes his encounter with Nietzsche as the result of a chain of readings: “Je sais très bien pourquoi j’ai lu Nietzsche : j’ai lu Nietzsche à cause de Bataille et 16 “Nietzsche a été une révélation pour moi. ” (VPS: 1599). 17 RM: 1522. 18 VPS: 1599. 19 RM: 1522. 20 “The word Dasein figured prominently in the snatches of conversation Pinguet overheard.” (MACEY 1993: 29). 21 The consensus of Foucault’s biographers is striking. “Maurice Pinguet dates the crucial encounter with Untimely Meditations to the summer of 1953”, (ibid.: 34). “When they were not sightseeing, Foucault was reading Nietzsche producing a bilingual edition of the Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen (Untimely Meditations) whenever they sat down in a café, and reading it on the beach at Civitavecchia.” (Ibid.: 55). ““We scarcely had time to read,” recalls Pinguet, “engrossed as we were by everything there was to see every step of the way. But from time to time, during a half hour of rest, on the beach, or on the terrace of a café, I would see him open his book, a bilingual edition, and continue his reading.”” (MILLER 1993: 66 and 405). Eribon and Defert refer to the source from Pinguet (ERIBON 1991: 72, DEFERT et al. 1994: 22). Eribon adds “Paul Veyne confirme : il eut en 1983 des longues conversations avec Foucault qu’il a notées dans son journal. Foucault lui a précisé la date à laquelle il s’était mis à lire Nietzsche : 1953.” (ERIBON 1991: 72). 94 j’ai lu Bataille à cause de Blanchot.”22 There are two possible ways of combining the two lines of influence. Either Foucault moved from Heidegger to Nietzsche with an interpolation of Blanchot and Bataille, or Foucault moved from Heidegger to Nietzsche with a parallel discovery of, or immersion in, Blanchot, who determined his further development. Given that any answer to these kinds of questions is an indication of their relative unimportance, it is clear that Blanchot determined crucially Foucault’s later exegesis of Nietzsche. Retrospectively, Foucault presents his rupture with his academic and intellectual milieu in the following terms. “J’étais comme tous les étudiants de philo à cette époque-là, et pour moi, la rupture est venue avec Beckett : En attendant Godot, un spectacle à vous couper le souffle. Puis j’ai lu Blanchot, Bataille, Robbe-Grillet”.23 The importance of Beckett’s performance for Foucault is underscored by almost every one of his biographers.24 This performance constitutes an indication of Foucault’s immersion into the avant-garde circles that culminated in his relationship with the composer Jean Barraqué. Two philosophically interesting points emerge from his remark. First, there are a number of elements that justify and corroborate Foucault’s link with Nietzsche. Second, it seems that Foucault’s knowledge of Blanchot was established, if not initiated, through his relation with Barraqué. On the first point, it is alleged that Nietzsche’s presence in Barraqué’s musical production of that time, especially in the latter’s Séquence, which was based on Nietzsche’s poetry and which Barraqué was reworking from 1953 to 1956,25 was Foucault’s idea. Second, Foucault suggested to Barraqué the reading of Herman Broch’s Der Tod des Virgil, which appeared in French translation in 1954. Broch’s themes of death, the impossibility of absolute knowledge, and the vanity of human creation fascinated both Foucault and Barraqué, who started working on a composition based on Broch’s work.26 What is perhaps most interesting in this is that Foucault’s familiarity with the book was due to Blanchot’s essays on Broch’s book in Nouvelle Revue Française,27 and confirms that, “[b]etween 1953 and 1956, he 22 “Structuralisme et poststructuralisme”, DE II, 1983, 330: 1256. 23 “Archéologie d’une passion”, DE II, 1984, 343: 1427, emphasis added. The interview was held in 1983. It was published in 1984, as an appendix in the English edition of Foucault’s (1963) Raymond Roussel. (Raymond Roussel, Death and the Labyrinth, New York, Doubleday, 1984, pp. 169–186.) 24 MACEY 1993: 41. MILLER 1993: Ch. 2, “Waiting for Godot”, 63–65. DEFERT et al.: 21. 25 MACEY 1993: 50–53, MILLER 1993: 80–81 and particularly 89–90. DEFERT et al. 1994: 21. 26 MILLER 1993: 84–85, and 408, n. 68. 27 MACEY 1993: 53 and DEFERT et al. 1994: 24. Blanchot published two essays on Broch in Nouvelle Revue Française in 1955, “Broch” (1955a) and “La mort de Virgile” (1955b), later republished in 95 [Foucault] also followed closely the book reviews published each month in Nouvelle Revue Française by Maurice Blanchot”.28 2.1.3. Foucault’s Nietzsche and his elaboration of the themes of his Geistesgeschichte As already mentioned, most commentators underscore the significance of Foucault’s reading of Nietzsche, and they name Nietzsche’s Untimely Meditations as the pivotal factor in Foucault’s philosophical transformation. This detail is important and helps to explain Foucault’s influences and his autobiographical fragments. Foucault’s Nietzsche of 1953 is the Nietzsche of Untimely Meditations. Although all biographical elements converge on this point, Macey and Miller focus on the importance of different essays in the work. Without providing any explicit justification, Macey holds a plausible – and coherent with Foucault’s thought – claim: “It is the second of the ‘Meditations’ that Nietzsche makes the case against Hegel that was to mean so much to Foucault.”29 Miller makes another suggestion based on, ostensibly at least, stronger data: “the marked copy of the Untimely Meditations that he [Foucault] kept in his personal library. In “Schopenhauer as Educator,” Foucault singled out one of Nietzsche’s key formulations: “The riddle which man must solve, he can only solve in being, in being what he is and not something else, in the immutable.””30 A more accurate understanding of Foucault’s thought requires us to take both essays into account. What Miller presents as Foucault’s influence is Foucault’s first conceptualisation of Nietzsche’s later elaboration of Pindar’s dictum “to become what one is”. It also indicates his conception of Nietzschean philosophy in terms of an aesthetics of existence. Macey’s account, on the other hand, emphasises Foucault’s acquaintance with Nietzsche’s early critique of Hegel, which comes to inform Foucault’s histories of truth. Foucault’s reading of the Untimely Meditations encapsulates the two aspects of scepticism: a sceptical ethics as an aesthetics of existence, and a sceptical epistemology as a historicising critique. Blanchot’s Le Livre à venir (1959), as “Broch, 1: Les somnambules: le vertige logique” and “Broch, 2: La mort de Virgile: la recherche de l’unité”, respectively. 28 MILLER 1993: 82. 29 MACEY 1993: 55. 30 MILLER 1993: 68. “Daniel Defert allowed me, during our interview on 25 March 1990, to examine the copy of the book Foucault later added to his library: the cited passage was one of the few underlined boldly, and was also marked in the margin.” (Ibid.: 405, n. 6.). 96 One of the best of Foucault’s autobiographical attempts at combining these two aspects is found in his interview with Trombadori (1978).31 This interview is important for several reasons. First, it is one of the richest loci of Foucault’s account of his reading of Nietzsche, and is one of the best interviews with Foucault, taking up 54 pages in the two-volume edition of his Dits et écrits. Trombadori’s questions are exemplarily thorough: they inquire into elements of continuity and difference in Foucault’s whole work up to that point (Trombadori was informed about contemporary receptions of Foucault’s work) and they focus on detail, on the distinctions and clarifications Foucault provides in his answers. Second, this interview develops Foucault’s relation with his academic, intellectual and philosophical environment, and explains his reasons for turning against it. Again, it elaborates the intellectual influence of Bataille and Blanchot, and makes explicit how certain themes contributed to Foucault’s reception of Nietzsche. It will become clear how this resulted in Foucault’s overcoming of Heidegger’s influence. Foucault’s contemporary academic and philosophical environment is best described as a horizon delimited by the two poles of the history of philosophy and the philosophy of the subject. The first pole was dominated by Hegel, and the second by phenomenology and existentialism.32 These two “grandes machineries philosophiques”33 include, respectively, Marxism and non-existential phenomenology, which inquired into the foundation, the rationality, and the history of science. Foucault includes Husserl and Alexandre Koyré in the non-existential branch of phenomenology, and refers to Maurice Merleau-Ponty as attempting to capture both the existential and the non-existential dimensions of phenomenology.34 Foucault qualifies these two poles further. He defines phenomenology as the inquiry that grounds the meaning of everyday experience in the structure of the human, perceiving, subject. In other words, the subject constitutes the set of conditions of possibility for the meaning of everyday experience.35 In that sense, 31 “Entretien avec Michel Foucault” in DE II, 1980, 281: 860–914. The interview was conducted in Paris, at the end of 1978. It was first published at the review Il Contributo (n° 1, January-March 1980, 4th year, pp. 23–84), with the title “Conversazione con Michel Foucault”. Henceforth CMF. 32 CMF: 867. 33 CMF: 862. 34 CMF: 872. 35 CMF: 862. 97 phenomenology is defined by the Cartesian “postulat fondamental”36 of the category of the subject and “sa suprématie” as a “fonction fondatrice”.37 Foucault sees Hegelianism, strongly penetrated by phenomenology and existentialism, as the rationalist attempt to come to terms with the tragedy of recent history,38 which, in order to achieve this, offers a model of history that enables continuity and intelligibility.39 Foucault’s presentation of this philosophical matrix contains not only the reasons for his attempt to overcome it; these reasons again indicate the sceptical themes previously presented. Philosophy is either a philosophy of the subject or a philosophy of history. Both cases seem to be involved with a transcendental inquiry into the conditions of the possibility of human individual experience and collective historical experience, respectively. In the first case, it is based on the postulation of an ontological and epistemological foundation, an ahistorical subject. In the second case, the ontological and epistemological foundation lies within the idea of an ahistorical reason that unifies and makes intelligible the fragmentation of actual historical reality. Both inquires are metaphysical and dogmatic. From a nominalist perspective, the complexity of temporal, individual and collective, reality cannot necessarily be reduced to the universal and ahistorical schemes these inquiries employ. It is here that we meet Rorty’s reading of Foucault: according to Foucault’s Nietzschean critique both Cartesianism and Hegelianism, belong to the same metaphysical tradition. According to Foucault himself, it was his reception of Bataille, Blanchot, and Nietzsche that enabled him to break with the philosophical tradition delineated above. Given the two poles of the philosophical horizon, Foucault’s break occurs in both the philosophy of subject and the history of philosophy. We will present these two breaks successively. Concerning his break with the philosophy of the subject, according to Foucault’s own pithy formulation, “[c]e qui m’a le plus frappé et fasciné chez eux, et qui leur a donné cette importance capitale pour moi, c’est que leur problème n’était pas celui de la construction d’un système, mais d’une expérience personnelle.”40 He qualifies further the two terms of the opposition more analytically: 36 CMF: 871. 37 CMF: 867. 38 CMF: 867. 39 CMF: 868. 40 CMF: 862. 98 Qu’est-ce qu’ils [Bataille, Blanchot, and Nietzsche] ont représenté pour moi ? [§] D’abord, une invitation à remettre en question la catégorie du sujet, sa suprématie, sa fonction fondatrice. Ensuite, la conviction qu’une telle opération n’aurait eu aucun sens si elle restait limitée aux spéculations ; remettre en question le sujet signifiait expérimenter quelque chose qui aboutirait à sa destruction réelle, à sa dissociation, à son explosion, à son retournement en tout autre chose.41 Pour Nietzsche, Bataille, Blanchot, au contraire [compared to experience in phenomenology], l’expérience, c’est essayer de parvenir à un certain point de la vie qui soit le plus près possible de l’invivable. Ce qui est requis est le maximum d’intensité et, en même temps, d’impossibilité.42 En revanche, [compared to experience in phenomenology] l’expérience chez Nietzsche, Blanchot, Bataille a pour fonction d’arracher le sujet à lui-même, de faire en sorte qu’il ne soit plus lui-même ou qu’il soit porté à son anéantissement ou à sa dissolution. C’est une entreprise de dé-subjectivation.43 These series of qualifications are important for our understanding of the two sceptical aspects of Foucault’s thought. First, they introduce the anti-foundationalist function of his critiques. Second, his emphasis on a non-phenomenological, non-foundationalist experience introduces the aspect of practice. The opposition between spéculation and expérimentation suggests that Foucault thinks it is insufficient for a thinker to confine his critique to a mere epistemic doubt or the negation of the concept of subject and its foundationalist function. Rather, he should be engaged in a practice that reinforces that doubt or negation. Although the content of the practice is not specified, Foucault’s description allows an initial approximation. First, it can involve one’s actual, first-person, experience of the dissolution of one’s self, as it occurs in dreaming, drunkenness, madness and death. Second, it can involve a self-reflective stance, the experience of self-transformation through the reflection on one’s own selfhood or, more specifically, on the effects that these ‘limit-experiences’ can have for our understanding of subjectivity. Writing itself can become the process that transforms the self-reflective stance into a practice. Concerning his break with the history of philosophy, Foucault admits the role of his reception of Nietzsche. He uses the Nietzschean theme of historical discontinuity against the Hegelian unbroken intelligibility of history.44 He claims that 41 CMF: 867, emphasis added. 42 CMF: 862. 43 CMF: 862. 44 CMF: 868. 99 the reflection on the history of science is in fact not separated from his reception of Bataille, Blanchot, and Nietzsche.45 Foucault asks: “Dans quelle mesure cette histoire [of science] pouvait-elle contester ou manifester son fondement absolu en rationalité ?”46 Foucault is critical of the idea that a history of science has to take into account and accommodate all the contingencies within a rational scheme which, rather than threaten, would in fact corroborate the rational foundations and truth of science. He again states that it was Nietzsche who radicalised his line of inquiry: C’est là où la lecture de Nietzsche a été pour moi très importante : il ne suffit pas de faire une histoire de la rationalité, mais l’histoire même de la vérité.47 Ce qui m’a paru frappant chez Nietzsche, c’est que, pour lui, une rationalité – celle d’une science, d’une pratique, d’un discours – ne se mesure pas par la vérité que cette science, ce discours, cette pratique peuvent produire. La vérité fait elle-même partie de l’histoire du discours et est comme un effet interne à un discours où à une pratique.48 These two aphorismes reveal the sceptical and nominalist premises of Foucault’s philosophy of history and, a fortiori, of his critique of Hegelian metaphysics. If we take the example of scientific discourse, the distinction between rationality and truth can be mapped onto the distinction between, on the one hand, epistemology or scientific method, and, on the other, ontology or the desideratum of that scientific method. A critical history of science that investigates only the rationality of that science can be considered to leave intact the ontological foundations of its scientific goal. Thus, in the second passage, Foucault elaborates on the content of his more radical view. Even if truth is conceived as immanent in quasi-idealist and not in Cartesian terms (in other words, if truth does not refer to an ontological datum out there, but is instead produced by the scientific practice, discourse, or community), a history of that scientific practice, discourse, or community that considers this truth as necessarily unchanging presupposes certain metaphysical assumptions concerning the nature of the history of that scientific practice, discourse, or community. In the Cartesian case, the truth does not change because it is grounded in a metaphysical assumption about subjectivity combined with a realist ontology. In the quasi-idealist, 45 CMF: 872. 46 CMF: 872. 47 CMF: 873. 48 CMF: 873. 100 Hegelian, case, truth does not change since it is grounded in the scientific practice, discourse, or community, and is then projected into the past and future of that practice, discourse, or community, which is roughly what Hegel means by the ‘objective spirit’. In this, what changes is only the rationality, qua method, and not the truth, qua the goal, of the inquiry. Again, we meet the Nietzschean critique of Hegelian metaphysics as a variation of the Cartesian one. Foucault’s critique of the philosophy of the subject and of the metaphysical history of philosophy should not be considered as separate: they both share the same set of Nietzschean, sceptical, and nominalist premises. However, this set should not be considered as another, different, metaphysical postulation. The twofold critique emerges from an ethical practice: the experience of self-transformation through writing. According to Foucault himself, this kind of experimental experience is a constant and unifying theme of his thought.49 He defines his books in terms of experience, which, in turn, he defines as a process of transformation of one’s thought and self.50 This theme is revealed in his very first response to Trombadori, which ends with the following aphorism: Je suis un expérimentateur et non pas un théoricien. J’appelle théoricien celui qui bâtit un système général soit de déduction, soit d’analyse, et l’applique de façon uniforme à des champs différents. Ce n’est pas mon cas. Je suis un expérimentateur en ce sens que j’écris pour me changer moi-même et ne plus penser la même chose qu’auparavant.51 Foucault qualifies this experience further. First, he acknowledges the importance direct, personal experience has had in inspiring the main themes of his books.52 Second, this experience of self-transformation is not only confined to the author. It applies equally to his readers: Une expérience est quelque chose que l’on fait tout à fait seul, mais que l’on ne peut faire pleinement que dans la mesure où elle échappera à la pure subjectivité et où d’autres pourront, je ne dis pas la reprendre exactement, mais du moins la croiser et la retraverser.53 The value and effectiveness of Foucault’s books lie in making that experience available for others to undergo themselves.54 He refers to the ‘effet paralysant’ that 49 CMF: 860. 50 CMF: 860–1. 51 CMF: 861, emphasis added. 52 CMF: 865. 53 CMF: 866. 54 CMF: 865. 101 Surveiller et punir had for some readers, mainly for those professionally involved with prisons. To him, this indicates the book’s successful function.55 Moreover, the experience of transformation of both writer and reader through writing and reception constitutes the transformation of a previous, shared attitude towards an aspect of modernity. Each of Foucault’s books describes an aspect of modernity, and both writer and reader establish a new relationship with this theme.56 Finally, this communication between writer and reader, and the transformation of both, using as a reference point a previous shared experience of modernity, should be able to inspire, or at least be useful for, a relevant collective practice.57 In that sense, his sceptical epistemology is grounded in his sceptical ethics. 2.2. Foucault’s Geistesgeschichte: Heidegger As we have seen, Heidegger is the first of Foucault’s influences. He provides him with the tools to break with the intellectual horizon dominated by Husserlian phenomenology and Hegelian metahistory. This section approaches the Heideggerian ideas that were of prime importance to Foucault. I will first present an overview of Heidegger’s critique of metaphysics. Second, I will outline Heidegger’s categories of Being and Time that are in accordance with the two guiding themes of our Geistesgeschichte; subjectivity and ethics. Heidegger’s categories of being-in-the- world and being-towards-death correspond to his critique of subjectivity and his delineation of an ethics. Third, focusing on his later work on Hölderlin, I attempt to show how Heidegger retains his conception of subjectivity, while his ethical notion of authenticity undergoes a significant change. The discussion of Heidegger’s later thought is important for the Geistesgeschichte. Blanchot uses Heidegger’s later association of ethics and aesthetics, while retaining and reconceptualising Heidegger’s earlier link between ethics and death. Finally, it remains an open question whether Foucault’s description of Nietzsche’s influence as surpassing that of Heidegger can also mean that Heidegger becomes part of the tradition which Foucault breaks from. If this is the case, Nietzsche’s thought, together with Blanchot’s, would be used to turn critically against 55 CMF: 866. 56 CMF: 863. 57 CMF: 865. 102 Heidegger. Just as Heidegger inscribes Nietzsche in the metaphysical tradition he criticises, Foucault’s Nietzschean influence would inscribe Heidegger in the tradition he attempts to overcome. 2.2.1. Heidegger’s thought as a critique of metaphysics Heidegger’s project is a critique of the entire Western philosophical tradition, which he conceives as a history of metaphysics. The rejuvenation of culture he has in mind implies a relation between the destruction of philosophy and its significance for life.58 The central themes of Heidegger’s thought are as follows: Being and the relation of Being with philosophy qua metaphysics, the impact of that relation to the conception of history, the bearer (i.e. Dasein) of the experience (obstructed by metaphysics) of Being and its placement in history, the transformation of that Dasein after the destruction of philosophy, or, in other words, how the destruction of metaphysics would enable a different relation of Dasein to Being. Thus, we need to understand how these themes hang together. First, we need a better understanding of Being. Being can be considered to encapsulate implicitly a double meaning: “[Being] is that through which alone we are human and are able to encounter anything in the world.”59 It might be helpful to understand Heidegger’s idea with reference to Kierkegaard, to whom he was indebted. The first part of the definition above can be considered to allude to an identification of Being with God:60 According to Kierkegaard, although a human 58 See GUIGNON 1993a: 2 and passim. In that light, Dastur (1994) claims that Heidegger’s assertion that he does not belong to metaphysics necessitates placing him outside what the West calls philosophy. For a different claim, according to which (especially later) Heidegger belongs to philosophy, see YOUNG 2002: 18–21. I think that Young constructs a scarecrow argument and that his point is in accordance with both Guignon and Dastur. In that sense, Young agrees with Dreyfus: “Heidegger is not against theory. He thinks it is powerful and important–but limited. Basically he seeks to show that one cannot have a theory of what makes theory possible. If he is right about this his analysis calls into question one of the deepest and most pervasive assumptions accepted by traditional philosophers from Plato to Descartes to Kant to Edmund Husserl, Heidegger’s own mentor. Since this assumption plays a crucial role in our thinking, questioning it implies questioning current work in philosophy and in all other disciplines that study human beings.” (DREYFUS 1991: 1–2, emphasis added). In that sense, the difference between these scholars is either a matter of formulation or of degree. Finally, for the relation of Heidegger to Lebensphilsophie, see GAIGER 1999, SCHNÄDELBACH 1984, and FEHÉR 1994. 59 GEUSS 2003: 498. This double meaning is not explicit, in the context of the specific formulation or elsewhere in the account. However, I think that the “and” of the quoted passage is distinct from, and thus not synonymous with, a possible “as”: that through which alone we are human is not only that which enables us to encounter anything in the world. For a detailed account of the double meaning of ‘Being’, see also YOUNG 2002: chapter 1, passim, and especially pp. 12–25. 60 Cf. “[Being] is obviously some kind of successor concept to God.” (GEUSS 2003: 498, emphasis not added). For additional information and an adequate overview of similar interpretative approaches, see 103 being is qua a mere human being not yet a self, it seems to be in the process of becoming one. A human being seems to have by definition a divine element, a vestigium dei.61 In that sense, “we are human” because of our participation in that divine element. According to the second part of the definition, being is identified with the conditions of possibility of human knowledge and action. This double description mirrors Heidegger’s double usage of ‘being’. One could say roughly that being, as the set of conditions of possibility or any actually existing entity, in which Dasein is considered as already ‘thrown’, covers Heidegger’s usage of ‘being’ in Being and Time. Being, as the God of negative theology and as the unconceivable Ur-ground of that being, constitutes the usage of Being in Heidegger’s later works.62 However, the differentiation between being and Being should not be considered exclusively corresponding to Being and Time and Heidegger’s later works. Rather, the element of ‘grounding’ describes the essential relation between the two, and is all-pervasive in the Heideggerian corpus. This indicates also a kind of continuity in his work. Given the above, Heidegger’s critique can be summarised as the claim that metaphysics considers being in terms of beings: “[T]he first mistake of metaphysics […] regards the being of beings as if it were “itself” an entity”.63 As a result, philosophy understands the nature of reality in terms of substance ontology.64 CAPUTO 1993 and especially 1993: 272–276, GEUSS 2003, KISIEL 1994, PÖGGLER 1987, VAN BUREN 1994a and 1994b, YOUNG 2002. 61 Latin in the text; it means ‘vestige of God’. 62 See Being and Time (HEIDEGGER 1962 [1927]): ¶1, esp. pp. 4/23–24. Henceforth BT. Cf. “Being is “that on the basis of which beings are already understood.” Being is not a substance, a process, an event or anything that we normally come across; rather it is a fundamental aspect of entities, viz. their intelligibility.” (DREYFUS 1991: xi, emphasis added). 63 ALLEN 1993: 74. Cf. “What is Metaphysics?” (HEIDEGGER 1998 [1929]), henceforth WIM, and “On the Question of Being” (HEIDEGGER 1998 [1955]). 64 Philosophy constitutes “the view that what is ultimately real is that which underlies properties – what “stands under” (sub-stantia) and remains continuously present throughout all change. Because of its emphasis on enduring presence, this traditional ontology is also called “metaphysics of presence”. It is found, for example, in Plato’s notion of the Forms, Aristotle’s primary substances, the Creator of Christian belief, Descartes res extensa and res cogitans, Kant’s noumena, and the physical staff presupposed by scientific naturalism. Heidegger’s goal is to […] challeng[e] the idea that reality must be thought in terms of the idea of substance at all.” (GUIGNON 1993a: 4). The emphasis of the non- Latin terms is added. For Heidegger’s critique of metaphysics and its relation to his reception of Nietzsche, see JAMES 2006: 15–21, and especially 16–17. 104 2.2.2. Being and Time 2.2.2.1. Dasein as being-in-the-world Daseinanalytik is Heidegger’s analysis of the human being, considered as the only entity that has access to and understanding of Being.65 Dasein means the self- reflective human being situated in a social nexus of spatiotemporal contingency.66 Any other definition or conceptualisation of human being, and especially any decontextualisation, is a derivative theoretical reduction and (mis)construction. The following remarks will elucidate one by one the concepts used in my quasi- definitional formula. Dasein is concerned about who it is and it is concerned about Being, i.e. it asks the question of Being. It is in this way that Dasein is self-reflective. This idea of concern presupposes that Dasein has an understanding of itself, of the world, of beings, and of Being. This understanding is not the intellectual capacity of having or acquiring propositional knowledge. It rather concerns Dasein’s practical engagements and interactions with its world.67 Dasein’s interaction can be considered the preliminary definition of understanding. As being-in-the-world Dasein is Heidegger’s own term for the description of this much more holistic view of subjectivity, according to which world and self are fundamentally linked and can no longer be separated. The subject is a Dasein, or a ‘being-in-the-world’. More specifically, for Heidegger, world is not a thing or a set of things but can be understood as the referential structures that are directed toward certain human goals.68 This kind of ‘teleological’ structure indicates that one ‘thing’ is ‘for the sake of’ another; it constitutes a possibility of human action or use. These referential 65 My discussion of early Heidegger is greatly indebted to Geuss’ 2003 lectures on Heidegger’s Being and Time. 66 In this subsection I discuss BT, Division I, especially ¶¶9–38. This identification of human being with Dasein is not uncontroversial, especially given the pains taken by Heidegger to refuse this equation. I have opted for such an interpretation in order to show the way in which Blanchot’s, Nietzsche’s, and Foucault’s conceptions of selfhood that follow are differentiated from Heidegger’s. Moreover, some recent scholarship (GEUSS 2003, RORTY 1991b) tends to identify the two, although it could be seen as an attempt to recontextualise Heidegger’s thought. For a recontextualisation of his thought that, though, avoids this equation and focuses on the idea of Dasein as a way of being in the world, see DE BEISTEGUI 2004. 67 See OKRENT 1988, HALL 1993 and BRANDOM 2005. At this point also lies the difference between Heidegger’s categories and Kant’s transcendental approach. On how Heidegger’s ‘correction’ of the assumption of an independent mind or consciousness as a privileged standpoint constitutes a break with Kant’s ‘Copernician revolution’, see GUIGNON 1993a: 6. Cf. also BLATTNER 2006, BOEDEKER JR. 2005, CROWELL 2005, DOSTAL 2006, and HAN-PILE 2005. 68 This is a slight variation of Geuss’ description of Heidegger’s ‘world’ in Being and Time. 105 structures are possible ways of being and acting, and they enable Dasein to understand the way it behaves in the world, which means, consequently, that they enable Dasein to understand itself and to be understood by others.69 In that sense, Dasein understands itself relative to its possibilities. This explains Heidegger’s definition of Dasein as a thrown project: Dasein as project refers to the futural aspect, the not yet- fulfilled goals, of the possible ways of being and acting in which Dasein is engaged. These structures of possibility are already there, they pre-exist Dasein, and, thus, Dasein finds itself thrown into them. 2.2.2.2. Dasein as being-to-death Heidegger’s ethics is approached in terms of authenticity.70 Inauthenticity constitutes the mode of being in which Dasein understands itself in terms of the world qua pre- existing (anonymous) projects. Authenticity would define a uniquely individuated existence, the way of being of genuine selfhood. This uniqueness would entail one’s freedom from both the already pre-existing structure of possibilities (the past qua thrown-ness) and the yet to be fulfilled possibility (the future qua projection). Dasein’s demand of uniqueness is the attempt to liberate itself from the first aspect and implies the fulfilment of the future possibilities. Thus, as total fulfilment would be synonymous with the wholeness of one’s life, the relation between Dasein’s demand for wholeness and death now becomes apparent. However, this creates a paradox. Death as the completion of Dasein’s possibilities, deprives Dasein of its existence. A dead Dasein can be considered a complete Dasein only from an external perspective. However, this is opposed to Dasein’s project of achieving uniqueness, which necessarily requires an internal perspective. The resolution of the paradox is to be found in Heidegger’s concept of being- to-death. Death should not be understood as an external event, an objective event that occurs to human beings as biological entities, but instead as a possibility of being complete from an internal perspective. Authentic stance, as this possibility of completeness, can be understood in terms of the following interrelated characteristics. First, an authentic stance involves a self-referential element. Dasein comes to understand itself in both its contingent and futural aspects. It comes to understand 69 On the spatial aspect of Dasein’s understanding, see also JAMES 2006: 80–89, where this idea is also traced in Heidegger’s later works. 70 In this subsection I discuss BT, Division II, especially ¶¶45–66. 106 itself as thrown project. Second, Dasein understands death as radically individuating. Death is the negation not of anything indeterminate, but of a particular Dasein. Finally, Dasein understands that death cannot be considered as part of the referential structure of being-in-the-world. It is a kind of absolute that terminates this structure, and it is not related to anything in that structure. For example, the description of one’s suicidal death as sacrificial for the sake of some higher ideal would be an instrumental, and consequently inauthentic, description of death. Subsuming death under some goal would treat it as an external event in the world. However, it can be viewed authentically only if it is conceived as a project relative to the project of giving one’s life an appropriate kind of closure qua absolute meaning. Thus, authentic Dasein understands its death as that which terminates its life (seen) as a complete whole. Dasein’s individuated, authentic stance means the appropriation of its past and present by understanding both of these relative to its own death. 2.2.2.3. Conclusion Before I briefly discuss Heidegger’s later thought, which will be important for our understanding of Blanchot’s influence on Foucault, I would like to raise the question of whether Foucault’s later Nietzschean ‘overcoming’ of Heidegger is due to the latter relapsing into a new kind of ahistorical, theoretical, quasi-metaphysical way of thinking. Is Dasein an ahistorical universal category? If it is historical, does Heidegger relapse into his own version of Hegelianism? In order to defend Heidegger against such criticism, his early thought would have to be coupled either with a kind of dialectical move, like the Wittgensteinian ladder, or with what we called earlier a sceptical stance of neutralisation. In the case of Heidegger’s thought, one wonders whether, in the end, its transcendental aspects become too prominent. I think that there is a distinction between form and content, a distinction between a horizon and the entities that emerge within it, in Heidegger’s conceptualisation that seems to compromise its historicist and sceptical core. In other words, if the horizon is no longer conceived merely as a scheme for the critique of metaphysics, which we could later dispose of as a heuristic tool, but is instead posited as a (metaphysically conceived) ontological fact, then the question arises whether Heidegger’s conception of Dasein is merely a variation of Hegelian metaphysics. This question deserves further attention but would go beyond the scope of this study. Nonetheless, it shows 107 that Foucault might have had reasons to abandon Heidegger’s thought for a more radical sceptical stance he finds in Nietzsche. 2.2.3. Heidegger’s later thought Despite significant differences, Heidegger’s early schema is retained in his later writings. He focuses now more on the relation between man and language,71 and relates authenticity to art. Art seems to replace death as the criterion against which human authenticity is measured. In that sense, Heidegger’s lecture “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry” is a representative example of this reformulation, as well as of a number of related topics that will be important for Blanchot. Furthermore, this lecture is particularly important for our purposes because it anticipates Heidegger’s later formulations, while at the same time clarifying his earlier conceptions.72 Finally, it seems to constitute one of the key texts that Blanchot seems to have in mind in his own discussions of Hölderlin and his tacit critique of or differentiation from Heidegger’s reading. The main point of “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry” can be considered a phenomenological analysis of the process of the appearance of beings and the role the poet plays in that process. Although Heidegger’s analysis is distinguished in five sections, based on the analysis of five relevant passages of Hölderlin’s poetry, his text can be divided into two main themes: first, man’s groundedness in language and the world, which could be considered as Heidegger’s later equivalent of Daseinanalytik as being-in-the-world, and, second, an analysis of the ontology (as essence) of language considered both in terms of conversation and the establishing act of poetry, and an analysis of the role of the poet in relation to the essence of language. This final point is centrally important for our understanding of Heidegger’s later view of authenticity, the relation between man and the divine, and, hence, of Heidegger’s ethics in general. I will briefly discuss the latter theme before turning to Blanchot’s response to Heidegger. 2.2.3.1. Heidegger’s later ethics 71 See On the Way to Language (HEIDEGGER 1982 [1959]). 72 Heidegger’s lecture (HEIDEGGER 1949 [1936]), henceforth HEP, was first published in 1936. I consider the works of roughly the same period, WIM (lecture delivered in 1929) and “The Origin of the Work of Art” (first published in Holzwege in 1950, based on lectures of 1935 and 1936), and the later introduction and afterword to WIM (first published in 1949 and 1943, respectively), and “Why Poets?” to address the same issues in a similar way. 108 Language in general constitutes the condition of possibility for the emergence of human existence. This possibility of emergence is actualised in the mode or use of language Heidegger calls conversation [Gespräch]: “The being of men is founded in language. But this only becomes actual in conversation.”73 Conversation can be defined as the essentially poetic language game which opens up and, in a sense, inaugurates historical existence and, consequently, the world in the ontological sense. First, the core of this poetic language game is found in what Heidegger calls genuine poetic saying, and especially in its function or act of establishing. But what exactly is to be established? The poet establishes what Heidegger characterises as ‘world’. The saying of the poet establishes being by illuminating beings, or a region of beings, in a specific way. This should not be interpreted in terms of the discovery of an already pre-existing reality, but in terms of a creative redescription as radical reinterpretation of the world that man is already in. Yet, second, the poetic saying as establishing is not exhausted as an act of creation. Instead, it involves simultaneously the element of conservation. The repeated manifestation of the creating saying constitutes the further step that sustains the created world and preserves being as being. Heidegger’s description of conversation, his choice of term, indicates the necessity of interaction or interplay between artist and people, as well as among artworks. A kind of repetition is necessary for the weaving of a culture’s horizon. Even in the most apocalyptic act of creation and world-building or, better, world-emerging, a kind of repetition (of the artwork, the poetry or the temple, which are currently considered as the ground of that world) is necessary for both the proliferation of the instances of the artwork’s meaning and for its embeddedness within a culture.74 Finally, Heidegger qualifies the creative redescription of the world, in the ontic sense, as something that does not stem from a mere act of individual, singular, and subjective will, but as something that stems from or is, to some extent, dependent upon and embedded in the community one is found in.75 Thus, when Heidegger writes that “[t]he establishment of being is bound to the signs of the gods. And that the poetic word is only the interpretation of the “voice of the people””,76 he does not 73 HEP: 301. 74 Ibid.: 305. 75 Ibid.: 303. 76 Ibid., 311, emphasis added. 109 contradict his previous description: he is mitigating the Promethean aspect of the poet, emphasising his thrownness and embeddedness. 2.2.3.2. Conclusion As we saw, Heidegger uses a set of interrelated distinctions, for example poet and gods, and creative act and voice of the people. I interpret these as his attempt to overcome the metaphysical distinction between realism and antirealism, in particular concerning the values that the poet establishes. Nevertheless, I think that the problem of a possible relapse into theory could be considered as emerging again here. For example, Heidegger talks about the foundationalist function the poet performs. However, it seems that what is grounded is contingent, and there is no ultimate ground for that contingent foundation. Heidegger describes this groundlessness as follows: “We never find the foundation in what is bottomless. Being is never existent.”77 Heidegger’s description of the relation among gods, men and the poet is decisive in this context. The interpretation of the signs of the gods is identified with the voice of the people. Even if we do not diagnose any relapse into theory, questions remain. What makes a poetic saying genuine? Is it when it encapsulates the voice of the people, or when it is accepted and becomes embedded within a community? In other words, is there a Volksgeist that the poet is attuned and receptive to, or does he somehow create or, better, project such a spirit? Finally, if the criterion of the authenticity of the poetic saying is ultimately its embeddedness in a culture, then why is there no invoking of other characteristics, like social factors, or political interests, or, in short, of power? The Hegelian answer to that almost Hegelian question (i.e. if everything is a matter of history, then how can we tell that something is more right or moral compared to something else?) is a kind of metahistorical ontology, which, from a Nietzschean perspective, is metaphysical. I do not think that we can provide a definite answer to these questions here. On balance I think it is more productive and more accurate to interpret his thinking as displaying aspects of a sceptical stance. Heidegger moves (perhaps too) quickly from a critique of metaphysics to the need for new, contingent, values, without dwelling on their foundationlessness, considering a new valuation as part of the poetic function, and without elaborating on the political and social elements inherent in it. Blanchot 77 Ibid.: 305. 110 and Foucault will crucially emphasise these two aspects, respectively. However, these are not reasons for considering Heidegger’s stance theoretical. 2.3. Foucault’s Geistesgeschichte: Blanchot As we saw earlier, according to Foucault’s Nietzschean perspective, philosophy in the traditional sense oscillates between the Cartesian and the Hegelian paradigm. Both are considered to share the same metaphysical presuppositions, and thus are to be rejected. In spite of the fact that Blanchot himself is not using traditional philosophical terms, his thinking must be considered an attempt to overcome the Hegelian tradition. Blanchot belongs to an intellectually important historical moment when the impasses of both Cartesian and Hegelian thought were recognised and when an attempt was made to overcome them. Interestingly, this attempt was itself inspired by a reading of Hegel. The French reception of Hegel in the twentieth century interpreted Hegel’s philosophy as a kind of non-totalising dialectics, thereby stripping it of its most problematic Cartesian and metaphysical assumptions.78 Blanchot’s thinking initially uses the tools of Kojève’s phenomenological apparatus in order to discuss literature and, consequently, language. He attempts to overcome both Kojève’s own Hegelian position and Heidegger’s conclusions.79 As I will argue, the relation between Kojève and Blanchot is, at least structurally, similar to that between Hegel and Kierkegaard. Early Blanchot can be considered as an 78 Baugh’s reading of the reception of Hegel’s philosophy in France in the twentieth century seems to encapsulate that theme. His analysis has as a thread Hegel’s theme of the unhappy consciousness. The fact that it can lead to a non-synthetic conclusion seems to trigger a set of variations. As he puts it, “Hegel’s description of how a reality divided against itself continually passes from one opposed term to the other, without finding repose or reconciliation, constitutes a dominant theme in French philosophy from the 1920s up to the present.” (BAUGH 2003: 2, emphasis added). For the reception of Hegel in France, see also BUTLER 1999, DESCOMBES 1979, and ROTH 1988. For the emphasis of that reception in non-totalising, non-synthetic dialectics, see GUTTING 2001: Chapter 4, section “Toward the concrete”, 102–117. 79 See KOJÈVE 1947 and, his especially relevant for Blanchot last chapter, “L’idée de la mort dans la philosophie de Hegel”, pp. 529–575. Kojeve’s approach of Hegel is explicitly informed by his reading of Marx and, mainly, Heidegger. For a discussion of death in Hegel with specific reference to Kojève, see DASTUR 1994: II, 2. Kojève’s Hegelian attempt to overcome both poles of Platonist realism and coherentist relativism is perfectly encapsulated by Roth’s succinct phrasing: “[f]rom the 1930s through the post-war period in France, Hegelian philosophers such as Jean Hyppolite, Alexandre Kojève, and Eric Weil turned to history as the source of truths and criteria of judgment.” (ROTH 1988: ix). The criteria of epistemological and moral judgment are not any more to be found in either any kind of ahistorical plane or contingent practice, but in history, or in a specific all-inclusive, the most all- inclusive possible, reading of history, of history as History. This last aspect of ultra-coherentism is necessary in order to avoid the possibility of competing coherent reconstructions, and, thus, of relativism. For an analysis of his thought and its constancy, from his early work on Soloviev to his later exchange with Leo Strauss, see ROTH 1988. For an analytical discussion of Kojève’s ontology and epistemology, see DESCOMBES 1979. I think that Descombes’ analysis shows how Kojève’s Hegelianism is grounded in Cartesian conceptions, and, in that sense, corroborating the idea of its belonging to the metaphysical tradition from which it stems. 111 inquiry into the foundations of language. He examines the nature of literature using Kojève’s Hegelian conception of negativity, but without adhering to the belief in the end of history, and, consequently, without a metaphysical ultra-coherentist view of truth and justification.80 Blanchot concludes that there is no absolute foundation of language, that the bedrock of language is nothingness. The experience of this absence constitutes the limit-experience of writing which can be paralleled to that of dying.81 In his earlier works, Blanchot uses Kojève’s vocabulary. In his later work, he seems to acquire a more Heideggerian perspective, and qualifies the more abysmal aspects of that lack. Thus, he overcomes both Kojève’s Cartesian methodology and conclusions, and must be distinguished also from Heidegger’s focus on the foundational role of the poet. This results in Blanchot’s acceptance of a double movement. First, language is seen as a nexus of differences and, from a metaphysical perspective, meaning is unstable, as it lacks any absolute foundation. This is also an argument against phenomenology. However, there is, at the same time, a positive evaluation of this experience; namely, writing is considered a way of experiencing that foundationlessness. As we will see, these two points constitute the equivalent of the critical and therapeutic aspects of Foucault’s thinking. 2.3.1. Blanchot’s later thought: L’espace littéraire L’espace littéraire is perhaps the one work of Blanchot that is most relevant to Foucault’s thought.82 It pervades all three aspects (autobiographical, biographical, hermeneutical) of Foucault’s Geistesgeschichte. First, the period when Foucault reads Blanchot corresponds to the publication of the études that were to comprise 80 See also the previous footnote. Blanchot’s essay “La littérature et le droit à la mort” can be considered as the most representative early work of Blanchot on the philosophy of literature. This essay is one of the first texts of Blanchot that encapsulates all the themes that are to be developed and remain dominant in his thought. There seems to be a consensus concerning the importance of that text. See HILL 1997: 103–114 and CRITCHLEY 1997: 48–63. For a similar problèmatique concerning the relation between ordinary and poetic language, see BLANCHOT 1942. 81 This last point is crucial. Not only does it seem to indicate a possible indebtedness of Foucault’s scepticism to Blanchot’s negative rhetoric, but it indicates a difference of Blanchot’s thought from the more irenic yet similar conclusions of contemporary literary theory. Cf. the following claim: “We are reminded that American neopragmatism including the anti-theory movement begins to develop in response to the Grübelei, if not the sick shriekings, of post-Heideggerian theory and the admirers of Maurice Blanchot, for whom the euphoric certainty is a suspicious human feature at best.” (LATIMER 2001: 361, referring to MITCHELL (ed.) 1985). Nevertheless, even critics within the so-called Continental tradition might share similar reservations. See for example Wood’s claim: “the sense that both Blanchot and Derrida have of a kind of abyssal alternative to dialectic is itself in need of a certain deconstruction – that the idea of absolute loss is a kind of dialectical misunderstanding.” (2002: 29). 82 Henceforth EL. 112 L’espace.83 Second, as we will see in chapters 3.1 and 3.2, the ontology, epistemology and ethics of the experience of groundlessness define Foucault’s early thought, from his essay on Binswanger to L’archéologie du savoir, and can be traced in Blanchot’s L’espace.84 Third, L’espace is Blanchot’s only work that appears in the two instances where Foucault discusses Blanchot’s theoretical work.85 Finally, L’espace has a central place in the hermeneutic geography of Foucault’s Geistesgeschichte, between the two poles of Heidegger and Nietzsche. Namely, first, L’espace provides an approach to Heidegger’s ethics, involving both the experiences of death and literary creation.86 Second, Blanchot’s imagery of Orpheus conceived as a function of Nietzsche’s Dionysus enables the understanding of both the relation between Nietzsche’s Genealogy and the Birth of the Tragedy, and the status of Foucault’s own genealogical inquiries.87 The main point of L’espace, especially in light of its influence on Foucault, is best described in terms of a sceptical stance and can be summarised as follows. First, Blanchot holds that language is grounded in nothingness, that language does not have any metaphysical foundation. This nothingness can be considered a development of Heidegger’s notion of being. Second, this ontological claim is accompanied by certain epistemological considerations. Blanchot’s epistemology involves the experience of 83 See section 2.1.2, and Hill 1997: 287–288. 84 Blanchot’s influence on Foucault’s early thought is verified both biographically and autobiographically. First, see section 2.1.2. Furthermore, both Daniel Defert and Frédéric Gros agree that Blanchot was present in Foucault’s thought up until the 1970s, (personal communication). Second, the following exchange from Foucault’s first interview, in 1961, fully dedicated to HF, is representative: “– Influences? – Surtout des œuvres littéraires… Maurice Blanchot, Raymond Roussel. Ce qui m’intéressé et guidé, c’est une certaine forme de présence de la folie dans la littérature.” (DE I, 1961, 5: 196). See also DE I, 1967, 50: 642–643; DE II, 1978, 234: 589. For Foucault’s own acknowledgement of a strong relation between his ‘archaeological’ works and this branch of modernist literature (with Blanchot also being mentioned), see DE I, 1964, 23: 423; DE I, 1966, 39: 571–572; DE I, 1971, 85: 1033–1034; DE I, 1973, 119: 1280; DE I, 1973, 124: 1293. This strong relation is finally corroborated by Foucault’s acknowledgement of Blanchot’s endorsement of HF. (DE I, 1971, 95: 1076–1077; DE I, 1974, 136: 1392; DE I, 1975, 152: 1588; DE I, 1975, 161: 1668; DE II, 1976, 174: 88; CMF: 878). Moreover, most of Foucault’s essays on literature during the 1960s refer explicitly to this triple aspect of Blanchot’s thought. (See, e.g., in chronological order, Foucault on Hölderlin (DE I, 1962, 8: 229), Bataille (DE I, 1963, 13: passim), Roger Laporte (DE I, 1963, 15: 296), Klossowski (DE I, 1964, 21: 357), the novel (DE I, 1964, 22: 367), Nerval (DE I, 1964, 29: 465), Breton (DE I, 1966, 43: 585), Duras (DE I, 1975, 159: 1631–33)). And how could we not acknowledge the presence of EL in the following quasi-aphorism from Foucault’s “Le langage à l’infini”? “L’œuvre de langage, c’est le corps lui-même du langage que la mort traverse pour lui ouvrir cet espace infini où se répercutent les doubles.” (DE I, 1963, 14: 282). 85 DE I, 1966, 38: 546; DE I, 1970, 82: 991–995. Cf. Foucault’s essay with the telling title “Le langage de l’espace”; literature is approached in terms of space (DE I, 1964, 24: 435), in which he also mentions Blanchot (ibid.: 436). 86 For Foucault’s relation to Blanchot’s approach in both his earlier and later conceptions of the self, see chapters 3.1 and 3.2, passim, and 4.1, respectively. 87 See sections 2.4 and 3.2.1, and chapter 4, passim. 113 that lack of bedrock. That occurs through the experience of writing or certain limit- experiences in writing. Blanchot approaches this experience as equivalent to the experience of dying. Blanchot’s approach consists in a reconsideration of Heidegger’s concept of authentic death. Third, the consequence of nothingness as the absence of a bedrock to language results in a certain conception of interpretation. Although Blanchot does not present his point in these terms, the issue of interpretation links Blanchot to Foucault’s reading of Nietzsche in Nietzsche, Freud, Marx. The grounding of language, and hence literature, in nothingness is identified with the foundationlessness of both language and literature and an indication of the impossibility of that grounding. The impossibility of that grounding endangers the meaning of the text: it destroys the stability that was hitherto assumed to exist. However, as already mentioned, this destruction has a positive aspect, and Blanchot seems to allude to a more conciliatory conception of this foundationlessness.88 In fact, Blanchot seems to allude to an image concerning literature, language and communication paralleling a Wittgensteinian language game. The dissolution of the stability of meaning, conceived as grounded in an ahistorical bedrock, and more specifically in the bedrock of an ahistorical Being, entails the dissolution of other possible metaphysical postulations and versions of Being like the Author or the Reader (with capitals) conceived of as fixed entities. Blanchot’s positive description orientates towards a dynamic nexus that includes all the elements of art and artwork, as well as, in the case of literature, the author and the reader (no capitals). Finally, Blanchot’s work is characterised by a number of Kierkegaardian motifs. Blanchot refers explicitly to Kierkegaard in L’espace littéraire, and Kierkegaard predominates Blanchot’s earlier essay “Le Journal de Kierkegaard”.89 Both employ a post-Hegelian, dialectical, yet non-totalising style of thinking, a first, strong family resemblance that indicates that they both belong to and emerge from the same anti-Hegelian tradition. Kierkegaard’s thought can be used as a tool to illuminate and explain certain ideas and concepts that Blanchot uses. In particular, his implicit critique of Kojève and, probably, later Heidegger can be explained with the help of Kierkegaard. 88 We will elaborate on this double theme, that is, the groundlessness and the experience of writing in the context of Foucault’s early approach to Nietzsche, and we will show the way it manifests a sceptical stance. 89 BLANCHOT 1943 [1941]. 114 Leslie Hill is right to describe Blanchot’s approach in L’espace littéraire as “driven […] less by a system and concept than by acute attention to the writing experience of a number of exemplary yet irreducibly singular literary figures, such as Mallarmé, Kafka and Rilke.”90 In my exposition I will try to do justice to Blanchot’s philological meticulousness and deliberate avoidance of systematisation, while at the same time provide an analytical philosophical exegesis. In the section “Puis-je mourir?”,91 Blanchot focuses on the possibility of an authentic stance towards death. First, he seems to allude to the Heideggerian paradox of death and, specifically, to Dasein’s impossibility of having an internal perspective on its own death. Second, he associates the epistemological aspect of the experience of death, as the realisation of one’s own finitude, with the ontological aspect of nothingness, that which is, by definition, outside the world’s possibilities. Just as in Heidegger, this opens up the possibility of an authentic and inauthentic stance towards death. Blanchot then talks about two versions of inauthenticity, although he does not disambiguate them and does not name them as such. The first one is to try to hide from death, to avoid thinking of death. The second is the stance of grand religious systems, which extend the world in their attempt to make death an event immanent to the world. The question of whether I can die, whether I can have an authentic stance towards my own death, is meaningful only once these two versions of inauthenticity have been rejected. Thus, death, as the attempt to achieve an authentic attitude towards it, is described in the following terms: “C’est là sa vocation humaine. La mort dans l’horizon humain, n’est pas ce qui est donné, elle est ce qui est à faire : une tâche, ce dont nous nous emparons activement, ce qui devient la source de notre activité et de notre maîtrise.”92 It is this problématique that occupies Blanchot in his readings of Kafka, Dostoievski, and Rilke. I discuss Blanchot’s approach to each of these writers in turn. Blanchot’s approach to Kafka, which precedes the other two, encapsulates all of the above themes, and indicates their relevance to a sceptical stance. His discussion of Dostoievski’s Kirilov and Rilke’s imagery of Orpheus provide an important supplement to Blanchot’s insights into Kafka. Kirilov represents an inauthentic or 90 HILL 1997: 115. 91 EL: 117–119. 92 Ibid. 115 failed attempt of authenticity, while the imagery that Rilke employs is a more explicit elaboration of the theme of nothingness and links Blanchot’s interpretation directly to Foucault’s early approach to Nietzsche. 2.3.1.1. Kafka In one of his diary entries, Kafka discusses the importance of dying happy and he claims that what he has written is grounded in the possibility of dying that way. Kafka seems to suggest that we cannot write unless we achieve or maintain a certain kind of self-mastery towards death, unless we have established a relation of domination towards death. Blanchot comments that Kafka’s statement does not suggest that this grounding of writing in that possibility of dying means a mere exploration of the possibility of that experience through writing. Rather, it implies a stronger kind of mastery of death. Blanchot approaches this stronger kind of mastery by stating a paradox: Kafka writes in order to be able to die, in order to be able to achieve or maintain an authentic stance towards death. However, in order to be able to write he has to have achieved or established that relation to death already. In other words, the possibility of writing presupposes an authentic relation to dying: the possibility of writing in order to die authentically depends on the very possibility of an authentic death.93 Blanchot’s reading of Kafka, interestingly set out in the previous chapter just before the formulation of this paradox,94 can help us to understand it as defining an authentic stance towards death. According to Blanchot, what compels Kafka to write is despair, which increases during the course of his life, and the increasing number of problems he encounters. This despair is not to be conceived of as a psychological state. It is an existential condition, in that his despair is linked to the question of the salvation of the soul. In what follows I try to analyse Kafka’s paradox, and explicate Blanchot’s interpretation with reference to Kierkegaard. Finally, I will provide a possible resolution of the paradox that involves the practice of writing. I will try to explain in what sense the practice of writing reveals the contingent and precarious character of any practice and, especially, itself. 93 Blanchot presents that paradox in terms of circularity. See EL: 113–114, and, as the section’s title indicates, “Le cercle”, 114–116. 94 EL: Ch. III, II. “Kafka et l’exigence de l’œuvre”, 63–101. 116 Kafka’s situation can be understood in Kierkegaardian terms, terms to which Blanchot explicitly refers when he compares Kafka’s case to that of Kierkegaard.95 He compares Kierkegaard’s breaking-off his engagement to Regina to Kafka’s similar action, and he alludes to the three stages of being, the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious, of Either/Or and of Sickness unto Death, as well as to the figure of Abraham in Fear and Trembling. According to the Kierkegaardian scheme, the condition of despair enables one to turn both against the morality of one’s community, (described as the ‘ethical’ in Either/Or, and as the ‘general’ in Fear and Trembling), and towards a religious way of being, exemplified in the figure of Abraham. It is despair that distances Kafka from his community. However, according to Blanchot, this distance is not a necessary precondition of faith, as is the case in a traditional reading of Kierkegaard’s scheme. In contrast, it constitutes a detachment from it, since the community not only indicates the way for a religious life, but actually consists of the practices of that religious life itself. Kafka’s anxiety is coupled with his distress: “Dans cette nouvelle perspective, celle de la détresse, l’essentiel est de ne pas se tourner vers Chanaan.”96 The community in question seems not to be the one he is already living in, but is related to the question of Zionism.97 At the same time, Kafka has to invent his own religious way, and Blanchot refers to Kafka’s description of his own writings as an equivalent to “«une nouvelle Kabbale», «une nouvelle doctrine sécrète»”.98 Kafka’s ordeal is similar to that of Abraham in both existential quality and intensity. Neither Kafka nor Abraham finds refuge in an inauthentic doubling of the world. Their sacrifices do not aim at a salvation in a different realm, at regaining what is sacrificed in an eternal realm.99 In order to make clear the difference from this inauthentic perspective, Blanchot calls it “la perspective de l’ «Abraham»”.100 Finally, Blanchot’s references to Kafka’s oscillation between madness and salvation of the 95 EL: 69. Although Blanchot refers explicitly to Kierkegaard, to his fiancée Regina, and to the figure of Abraham, he does not make any specific reference to any of his works, and he does not proceed to any elaboration of the schemas that Kierkegaard seems to employ. The reconstruction of Kierkegaard’s thought and the tracing of further Kierkegaardian motifs in Blanchot are ours. 96 EL: 91 97 See EL: “L’expérience positive”, 81–86, mainly, 81–84. 98 EL: 83. 99 EL: 69. 100 “[…] la privation du monde se renverse en une expérience positive, celle d’un monde autre, dont il est déjà citoyen […]. Cependant, pour ne pas altérer le sens de telles images, il est nécessaire de les lire, non pas selon la perspective chrétienne commune (selon la quelle il y a ce monde-ci, puis le monde de l’au-delà, le seul qui aurait valeur, réalité, et gloire), mais toujours dans la perspective de l’ «Abraham»”, (EL : 81–82). 117 soul, and his wondering whether writing is self-delusional and evil can be compared to Abraham’s silence, an indication of the radical impossibility of communication and his momentary questioning whether the voice of God is merely a hallucination.101 Nevertheless, a possible structural difference seems to be obliquely described by Blanchot. It illuminates the difference in content and meaning of Abraham and of Kafka in the context of Kierkegaard’s and Blanchot’s essays. Although Blanchot does not use the following terms, the Kierkegaardian scheme can illuminate this difference. In Fear and Trembling, Abraham’s stance is described as two moves. His turning against the community is described as the move of the infinite resignation, while his submitting to God’s will is described in terms of faith proper. In Kafka’s case, the decision of exile denotes infinite resignation, and writing becomes its affirmation: Kafka’s leap of faith is his affirmation of the infinite resignation of his exile.102 Blanchot’s comments become clear when understood in these terms: L’art est la conscience de « ce malheur ». Il décrit la situation de celui qui est perdu lui-même, qui ne peut plus dire « moi », qui dans le même mouvement a perdu le monde, la vérité du monde, qui appartient à l’exil, à ce temps de la détresse où, comme le dit Hölderlin, les dieux ne sont plus et où ils ne sont pas encore. Cela ne signifie pas que l’art affirme un autre monde, s’il est vrai qu’il a son origine, non dans un autre monde, mais dans l’autre de tout monde (c’est sur ce point, on le voit, – mais dans les notes qui traduisent son expérience religieuse plutôt que dans son œuvre – que Kafka accomplit ou est prêt à accomplir le saut que l’art n’autorise pas).103 We can now return to the paradox and cast it in Kierkegaardian terms. Kafka’s paradox, according to which the achievement of an authentic stance towards death through writing presupposes that same authentic stance, parallels the paradox of transition from the ethical to the religious sphere. According to the paradox, if despair leads towards a religious stance then one must have already achieved or maintained a certain relation or attitude towards this stance. It seems that one must have acquired a level of certainty concerning at least the possibility of the religious stance to resolve this condition of despair. In Kierkegaard, the paradox is resolved through the existence of a vestigium dei, which is inherent in human beings, and which is elicited by the condition of despair.104 101 EL: 97. 102 For the presence of this theme in Foucault, see section 3.2.1. 103 EL: 89–90. 104 However, this vestigium seems to describe more the ontological precondition of such a move and not its epistemological aspect: the question of how I can know such a possibility before I experience it 118 I think that a different solution can be found in Kafka’s aspect of practice considered as a kind of askesis in the context of an attempt. The distance from a community opens up a field of possibilities of being. These possibilities are pre- existing, and one is more or less accustomed to them as they are more or less central to the community into which one is, or, given the acquired distance, was, embedded. Kafka’s possibility is that of writing, writing about his experience of writing. Practicing a possibility, dwelling on and in it, on the one hand, offers a kind of minimal necessary coherence which internally justifies and orientates towards a concrete or specific direction of that practice. On the other, however, it also entails an irresolvable uncertainty on whether this possibility is the one that would respond to despair, and whether it would amount to an authentic stance towards death. This element of uncertainty seems to be inherent and present in any possibility of life. However, it seems that the necessarily self-reflective practice of writing not only brings out this element of danger and uncertainty, but, at the same time, exhibits the greatest uncertainty concerning its own status. Blanchot approaches writing initially in terms of a practice that creates both reality and coherence of a self.105 The madness to which Blanchot refers must be also understood as what shatters the minimal necessary coherence of a self. Creating a self entails, for Blanchot, an aspect of construction and self-reflection that understands writing as a precarious activity. For a better grasp of that conclusion concerning writing and its link with authenticity, we have to turn to Blanchot’s reading of Kafka’s Das Schloss. Blanchot observes a change of perspective in Kafka’s journals, which he attributes to Kafka’s writing of Das Schloss.106 According to Blanchot: K. veut toujours atteindre le but avant de l’avoir atteint. Cette exigence d’un dénouement prématuré est le principe de la figuration, elle engendre l’image ou si l’on veut l’idole, et la malédiction qui s’y attache est celle qui s’attache à l’idolâtrie.107 This interpretation is centrally important and illuminates the way Kafka approaches the experience of writing as precarious and uncertain. K. attempts an inauthentic leap, or live it through arises, and, in that sense, the paradox remains unresolved. Again, although this element of eliciting could be considered as invoking a certain epistemological dimension and, thus, answer to that aporia, we might still consider a gap between, acknowledging the possibility of a salvation through the move to a different mode of being, on the one hand, and experiencing it, on the other. 105 EL: 74–75. 106 See EL: 74. 107 EL: 96. 119 in his moves towards a pre-existing, unreflective, or metaphysical solution. K.’s attitude thus describes the opposite of Kafka’s own stance, his affirming of the dwelling outside the community, his affirming of the infinite resignation of exile. This affirmation, as I think Blanchot suggests, constitutes a practice of critical rejection of any metaphysical solution to the problem of death. The community seems to offer either an unreflective, inauthentic living, which would make the question vanish into the oblivion of the everydayness, or it offers all-encompassing metaphysical schemes, like the grand religious systems. The practice of this critique reveals its own precarious status: Et la plus humble réalité du monde n’a-t-elle pas une consistance qui manque à l’œuvre la plus forte : « Manque d’indépendance du fait d’écrire : il dépend de la servante qui fait du feu, du chat qui se chauffe près du poêle, même de ce pauvre vieil homme qui se chauffe. Tous sont des accomplissements autonomes, ayant leur loi propre ; seul écrire est privé de tout secours, ne demeure pas en-soi même, est plaisanterie et désespoir » (6 décembre 1921). Grimace, grimace du visage qui recule devant la lumière, « une défense du néant, un cautionnement du néant, un souffle de gaieté prêté au néant », tel est l’art.108 It is in this passage that the sceptical stance is made explicit. The practice of writing is presented as an almost parasitic, meta-activity. Not only does it depend on what we could call material conditions, it also – and mainly – depends on the description, re- presentation, and alteration of what is already physically and socially given. Life conceived either in terms of nature or in terms of ongoing embedded practices seems to have a kind of autarky and meaning that writing inherently lacks. The precarious status of writing can be considered as deriving from Kafka’s metaphysical critique, as explored above. If any metaphysical solution is a fiction, if it is an escape, then even a critique that exposes it as such cannot be grounded anywhere. This is why Blanchot uses the image of the grimace, and reduces writing to it. The imagery employed is important as it indicates the limits of language as a meaningful activity. It points towards the danger of meaninglessness that results from the groundlessness of language. The grimace is the signal of the uncertainty and precariousness of meaning, and of the lack of meaning, from a metaphysical perspective. It signals the lack of a metaphysical, ahistorical bedrock in which meaning could ultimately be grounded. In that sense, writing does not only understand itself as the most precarious practice 108 EL: 85–86, emphasis added. 120 because it discovers itself as groundless, but it enables us to understand the groundlessness of everything else. Writing, however, is not just despair; it is a practice that deals with this despair. The positive aspect of Kafka’s writing is to be found in his description of his own writing aim: “Écrire, oui, écrire encore, mais seulement pour « élever dans la vie infinie ce qui est périssable et isolé dans la domaine de la loi ce qui appartient au hasard ».”109 Kafka’s Abrahamian uncertainty about everything that he himself instantiates, including his own ability to write and writing as a possible salvation, is the epistemological, experiential, aspect of that ontological contingency. Everything is uncertain because everything is groundless. Thus, Kafka’s wandering becomes the only authentic attitude towards groundlessness. His authenticity consists in dwelling in this experience, through writing, and understanding the radical contingency of human selfhood.110 Kafka’s move of infinite resignation is really the affirmation of, or dwelling, through writing, in that experience of groundlessness. Blanchot’s aphorism that “L’art est d’abord la conscience du malheur, non pas sa compensation” describes exactly that very content of Kafka’s authentic stance towards death. This conscience du malheur as an experiential affirmation and understanding of the contingency of the human self is something that Foucault will never forget and will never move away from. And although his biographers mention that by the beginning of the eighties, he is no longer keen to talk about René Char, and is enthusiastic about Marcus Aurelius, thus indicating a move from a Heideggerian- informed modernism to a more concrete, historical interest, I would argue that this ostensible change is actually a variation of the very same theme. As we will see in chapter three, Foucault’s writing on Cynic parrhēsia, for example, instantiates in Diogenes’ risking his life in challenging Alexander a variation of the same theme of one’s relation to death. Even more so, Foucault’s approach to the Stoic writings of hypomnēmata is not a mere step in the genealogical investigation of the practices of the self; it describes nothing other than the inherent, irresolvable, all-too-human and 109 EL: 85, emphasis added. 110 Namely, Kafka’s self-reflective precarious practice of writing makes him understand the elements that illustrate human contingency, both internal and external to oneself: the understanding of the crisis that the war and his engagement produced, the acknowledgement of his guilt, of his vices bureaucratiques, and of the other aspects of the self that he has ignored in expense of his devotion to writing, as he mentions in a very interesting diary entry with a Nietzschean resonance, the radical uncertainty of his ability as a writer, the consideration of his undertaken projects only as failures are to be understood in light of the perspective above. See EL, “Changement de perspective”, 72–81. 121 all-too-painful rupture in every human relation and, consequently, every human being. 2.3.1.2. Kirilov Blanchot’s analysis of Dostoievski’s hero Kirilov is another variation of this theme. It examines suicide as another attempt at authentic dying. Blanchot concludes that suicide cannot establish such an authentic relation to finitude. Since this is a variation of a theme we have already discussed, I will be very brief in my discussion. Moreover, we will return to this theme in Chapter Three, in the context of Foucault’s discussion of Binswanger, where the issue of suicide is raised again. Kirilov wants to commit suicide in order to prove the inexistence of God. His suicide would be the ultimate affirmation of his freedom since it would prove the right to his own death, his mastery of death, the experience of the possibility of dying one’s own death. It would prove that the self is ultimately free. To those who confront him with the claim that others have already committed suicide, Kirilov responds that they did not do it authentically as their act was not based on the ideal for which he is going to die. What differentiates his death from that of others lies in the fact that “il aura été conscience de disparaître et non pas conscience disparaissante, il aura entièrement annexé à sa conscience la disparition de celle-ci, il sera donc totalité réalisée, la réalisation du tout, l’absolu.”111 This passage explicitly presents the tension and the ultimate difference between a ‘consciousness of vanishing’ and a ‘vanishing consciousness’. Kirilov believes that committing suicide will enable him to achieve the former – put in Heideggerian terms, an internal perspective on his own death. However, for Blanchot, who follows Heidegger, only the latter is a human possibility. A conscience that includes its own disappearance would amount to the unattainable whole, the absolute itself. Blanchot justifies his verdict on Kirilov by introducing the idea of a double death. If one commits suicide, one selects one death in expense of another. Although it is an attempt to master the non-present death, the one that would provide ultimate closure to one’s life, one necessarily selects the death within the spatiotemporal continuum of reality. In Heideggerian terms, the internal perspective is necessarily exchanged for the external one. Kirilov’s exercise of freedom does not only attempt to 111 EL: 119, emphasis added. 122 prove the inexistence of God, but it attempts to prove the grounding of his freedom in an absolute conception of the subject. Instead of being freed from any attempt at metaphysical grounding, Kirilov seems to replace one bedrock with another. His critique of a metaphysical God is identified with the affirmation of an equally metaphysical God-like conception of man. Again, Blanchot’s critique of Kirilov and his allusion to an alternative stance can be explained in Kierkegaardian terms, to which Blanchot alludes. Kirilov’s suicide would be tantamount to a leap of faith for a metaphysical self. In Kirilov’s case, the authenticity of an infinite resignation would be an affirmation of the impossibility of acquiring such an internal perspective, and of dwelling on and in the anxiety and despair rather than attempting to master nothingness through metaphysical constructions. Finally, Blanchot argues that immortality should not be considered a privilege. If immortality were one’s essence, then it would be a limit that would have been necessarily set for me. It would not reflect my decision and it would not be the result of my exercise of freedom. In this context, Blanchot claims that, in light of a technological future, suicide would be the only way for humanity to remain human. Blanchot’s association of Kirilov with a certain kind of experience of modernity is something that, as we saw in his Trombadori interview and as we will see again in his interpretation of Binswanger, does not leave Foucault unmoved. An authentic suicide would not be one that would try to affirm, prove or establish the metaphysical sovereignty of an absolute subject. It would constitute an attempt to affirm contingency, rather than establish a new metaphysical technological scientism. Suicide would be an affirmation of mortality, of human inconclusiveness and contingency, against the possibility of technological domination. Suicide would be the reflective choice in favour of an inconclusive ‘up-to-here-and-no-further’. Thus, Blanchot’s critique of Kirilov should be interpreted not as an outright critique of suicide but as a critique of a specific metaphysical conception of selfhood that a certain kind of suicide attempts to prove and establish. 2.3.1.3. Rilke Finally, I will very briefly say a few words on Blanchot’s reading of Rilke, as this augments his reading of Kafka and Dostoievski. In his approach to Rilke, Blanchot focuses again on the difficulty of the subject’s reflective closure, on the problem of 123 the ‘consciousness of vanishing’. According to Blanchot, when Rilke talks about “surmonter la mort”, he inquires into the possibility of an authentic death. For Rilke, the link between death and authenticity is again twofold: to die faithful to oneself and to die faithful to death. For Blanchot, Rilke’s work seems to encapsulate a dialectics: one strives, on the one hand, to die a death that does not betray oneself, and, on the other, to die without betraying the truth and essence of death. Blanchot presents the characteristics of an authentic death in a series of negative descriptions. First, he refers to the anxiety of the anonymous death, the death of the big cities, the death that is experienced by everyone in the same way, the death of the masses. This kind of death violates the possibility of an individuated death. Second, Blanchot discusses the relationship between death and art. According to Rilke, art is the way to a death of one’s own. However, Blanchot claims that although a work of art has its origins in the self, it belongs to a part of oneself that one cannot reach and cannot master. Blanchot seems to conclude that Rilke’s notion of the Open can be considered, as in Kafka, as the dwelling into the space of literature, using art to approach death and groundlessness. According to Blanchot, Rilke’s Open is to be understood in terms of “l’exigence de l’existence ou l’intimité excessive, sans limite, de cette exigence.”112 This “intimité excessive” is described by Blanchot in terms of the transformation of the poet. This transformation has the characteristics that Blanchot seems to have already developed: it constitutes the dwelling in the space of literary practice,113 death and dying are approached in terms of the Kafkaesque paradox,114 and the experience of art is explicitly paralleled to an ecstatic experience.115 The Open is not to be understood in metaphysical terms. The association between the Open and nothingness is made apparent in Blanchot’s invocation of the image of Orpheus. The quest for a personal death through art reaches a point where one is no longer oneself. It reaches the point where the poetic voice is not one’s own voice any more, and this point is exemplified through Orpheus.116 Blanchot also tacitly invokes Nietzsche’s vocabulary in The Birth of Tragedy. His link with Greek mythology invokes Nietzsche’s early distinction between the Apollonian and the Dionysian. In 112 EL: 178. 113 See “L’espace de la mort et l’espace de la parole”, EL: 181–183. 114 See “L’intimité de la mort invisible”, EL: 191–193. 115 See “L’ expérience extatique de l’art”, EL: 196–200. For a reading of Blanchot’s work with in relation to a similar theme, see HART 2004. 116 EL: 226. 124 Blanchot’s description, the Dionysian stands for the artwork’s depth. However, at the same time, Orpheus seems also to stand for that function of the Dionysian which makes the distinction itself break down between Apollonian and Dionysian, between the work of art and its precondition. The depth or the precondition of the work of art, which the Dionysian or the figure of Orpheus symbolises, dissolves the work of art itself. Thus, Orpheus becomes the undoing of the work of art, the experience of that undoing and the experience of the groundlessness of the work of art due to which this undoing occurs. The function of Orpheus and the association with the Dionysian can be understood in the same terms as Kafka’s experience. As we saw in the case of Kafka, the writing experience has a double function: it constitutes an experience of groundlessness, considered as an experience of the lack of metaphysical bedrock for both human self and world, and as an experience of the very precariousness of the writing activity itself. In the same way that there is no metaphysical grounding for any of our interpretations of the world, the meaning and reference of our language, too, is not anchored in any realm of metaphysical objectivity. Blanchot’s reading of Rilke’s Orpheus stands for this experience. Orpheus is an extension of the Dionysian: if the Dionysian describes the ontological lack of a bedrock, then Orpheus is its epistemological function – he is the aspect of understanding and experiencing that lack. Blanchot’s approach to Rilke, therefore, adds to his interpretation of Kafka. With Rilke he understands that the fragmented and the incoherent are not aspects external to a self. They are not to be found only in its unfinished projects, abandoned practices and failures, but are inscribed in the self, are part of the self that, eventually, becomes inherently fractured. This is important for two reasons. First, Blanchot belongs to a tradition ranging from early Romantic philosophy to Freud and Lacan which associates this experience with the unconscious. Second, Blanchot does not only suggest a meta-aesthetical perspective or evaluation; he, in fact, analyses an experience of modernity and an ethical stance. This experience of modernity of an inherent fracture within oneself is what will interest Foucault. In his own works, he will associate the experience of death with that of madness, as an experience that belongs to the same structure of the experience of nothingness. At this point, an important note needs to be made on the way the notion of authenticity is employed. Specifically, as it is used not only in reference to Heidegger, 125 but also in order to describe an equivalent stance in the cases of Nietzsche, Blanchot and Foucault, such a usage raises salient objections. Moreover, such an inflationist use is rendered paradoxical, especially when applied to Blanchot and Foucault. Blanchot uses the notion in contradistinction to Heidegger, and it acquires the opposite valorisation.117 Equally, as we saw in our first chapter, Foucault avoids the use of the term in order to dissociate himself from a quasi-phenomenological conception of the subject and an equivalent metaphysically realist moral position that he associates more with Sartre than with Heidegger. I hope that the following points could justify and qualify its usage. First, I tend to use the notion in terms of a relation between genus and species, or type and token. Namely, I tend to use the concept of authenticity in order to refer to a general ethical stance or attitude that is positively valorised, and which, even if it does not refer to a life as a whole, at least it refers to a cluster of elements, a context, or a holistic structure that opposes the (Cartesian or Kantian) idea of correspondence between singular actions or dispositions, on the one hand, and values or duties, on the other. In that sense, the conception of authenticity of each thinker is a particular, different instantiation (a species or a token) of this general formulation (genus or type). Second, given that we use the description of the individual ethical stances of Blanchot, Nietzsche, and Foucault at the backdrop of Heidegger’s own conception of authenticity, I hope that this general use can illuminate their nuances.118 Third, as we have seen this common usage enables us to associate the notion of experience (of madness, of death, of nothingness, of groundlessness), a notion with a more epistemic and psychological content, with a positively qualified ethical stance.119 2.3.2. Conclusion This brief analysis of some of Blanchot’s central ideas helps us to understand his central role in Foucault’s Geistesgeschichte, situated between his reading of Heidegger and his reception of Nietzsche. We saw that, in his approach to author and reader,120 Blanchot follows a Heideggerian conception of subjectivity. The self is not 117 See Crowley’s (2000) analysis of Blanchot’s divergence from Heidegger. 118 Moreover, such a move enables us to understand Heidegger’s earlier and later thought on ethics under a single, yet general, concept. 119 Gutting criticises Foucault’s distance from Sartre’s notion of authenticity and suggests that “betray[s] a clear anxiety of influence” (2011: 72). For a discussion of Foucault in relation to a non- metaphysical conception of authenticity, see GUIGNON 2004 and CIS. 120 EL: Chapter V. 126 considered a metaphysical entity, and the very suggestion of a continuum from the inspiration of an author to the function of the reader constitutes a critique of that metaphysical conceptualisation. Thus, subjectivity becomes a nexus of overlapping practices. We further saw that Blanchot’s approach to an authentic stance towards death is informed by Heidegger’s early insights. However, Blanchot’s conception of authenticity in terms of infinite resignation, instantiated in a practice of writing that affirms metaphysical groundlessness, seems to complicate, if not alter, Heidegger’s early notion of Dasein’s link to the fate of its community, and to move away from Heidegger’s later notion of authenticity. Both Heidegger and Blanchot comment on Hölderlin’s saying on the role of the poet. For Heidegger, the role of the poet is associated with a kind of prophetic establishing of values, in the absence of any foundation. For Blanchot the task is not somehow to overcome this lack, but to face it and continuously experience it. For both Heidegger and Blanchot, this stance has a normative aspect: it is a response to the nihilism they foresee and detect, following the critique of metaphysics. In lieu of Heidegger’s suggestion of new values, Blanchot calls for a kind of affirmation and preservation of the empty space that this critique of metaphysics has disclosed. This latter aspect is what Blanchot bequeaths to Foucault. Foucault’s view of subjectivity is Heideggerian but is enriched with Blanchot’s Rilkean aspect that locates a fracture in the interiority of the self, which the practice of writing can affirm and experience. Thus, in order to talk about the experience of that version of subjectivity and groundlessness, and about the ethics of an authentic stance, Foucault shifts his focus away from anything that would retain any possible trace of foundationalism, even Heidegger’s implicit distinction between content and form, and he turns to Nietzsche. As I will show in the following section, he abandons even Blanchot’s Kierkegaardianised Hegelian negativity, and approaches groundlessness through Nietzsche’s genealogical critique of metaphysics. Foucault’s move involves a change in the conceptual apparatus as it introduces the notion of interpretation as the precarious, all-too-timely discourse that occupies that lack. This change entails a richer understanding of that experience, undertaken now in terms of the two aspects of diagnosis and therapy. Nitzschean genealogy allows Foucault to provide a historically richer story for the diagnosis of modernity. The notion of interpretation supplements a positive aspect to the experience of writing. It retains the element of uncertainty and contingency, since it is not 127 metaphysically grounded, but at the same time it discloses the perspective we can use to understand ourselves. In that sense, Foucault’s Geistesgeschichte can be interpreted as a movement away from the late Heidegger’s hope for a ‘foundationless foundation’, towards Blanchot’s malheur as affirmation of foundationlessness, and Foucault’s own interpretation as diagnostic, critical therapy. It is only in this double function that we can see the critical aspects of Foucault’s aesthetics of existence as a sceptical ethics. 2.4. Foucault’s Geistesgeschichte: Nietzsche I consider Foucault’s reception of Nietzsche as exemplified in his essay “Nietzsche, Freud, Marx” a possible end point of this Geistesgeschichte.121 It shows the way in which his influences are assimilated and formulated, and exhibits a sceptical scheme behind his aesthetics of existence. Foucault’s essay reveals his sceptical stance in its ontological, epistemological and ethical aspects. It reveals his main epistemological and ontological premises, specifically the primacy of interpretation over truth, and his account of authenticity related to the experience of nothingness, identified here with the experience of madness. First, I will present the main structure of the essay’s argument. Then I will turn to the Nietzschean themes that are most important to Foucault’s reading. Finally, I explain what I see as Foucault’s suggested version of authenticity. 2.4.1. Foucault’s Nietzsche Foucault’s essay is divided into two, uneven in length, sections. In the first, he presents a short account of a revised history of modern philosophy, while in the second he discusses the themes that are most important to him. He is interested in the technique of interpretation in Nietzsche, Freud and Marx, presented in the context of this essay as a tentative and provisional outline of a possible future encyclopaedia of the history of interpretative techniques. He starts with the presentation of two suspicions inherent in language: first, language never means explicitly what it says and, second, aspects that are commonly not considered language also speak and so, in some sense, are language. He then traces these suspicions in the interpretative 121 DE I, 1971, 84. Henceforth NFM. 128 techniques of the sixteenth century, which he uses as reference points for the discussion of the differences brought about by Nietzsche, Freud and Marx. The classical theory of the sign is based on the set of all possible types of resemblance relations. These, in turn, ground two distinct types of knowledge, cognitio, the transition from one resemblance to another, and divinatio, the transition from a superficial resemblance to a deeper one. Interpretation reappears as an important topic in the nineteenth century after the interval of the Baconian-Cartesian philosophy. The first theme Foucault presents concerns modern (i.e. nineteenth century onwards) hermeneutics, and it constitutes the critique of depth: the revival of sixteenth century philosophy qua interpretation occurs through a critique of divinatio, the alleged depth that interpretation is meant to decipher. This results in the critique of the ‘vertical’ axis of interpretation in favour of an extended ‘horizontal’ plane of possible interpretative connections. The second theme can be considered to be the outcome of the first and constitutes the idea that interpretation has become an infinite task. Signs “s’enchaînent en un réseau inépuisable […] infini”.122 Since they are no longer grounded in the set of all possible resemblance relations, there is “béance et ouverture irréductibles”.123 Although this is not explicitly stated, it seems that these two themes constitute Foucault’s philosophical aim. The third and the fourth themes or principes are qualifications of the second. The third theme concerns the relation between sign and interpretation and assumes the primacy of the latter over the former. The fourth theme elaborates on the infinite aspect of interpretation; this consists of two consequences – the involvement of the interpreter in interpretation and the qualification of that infinity in terms of circularity. Although Foucault refers to three philosophers, his perspective is distinctively and almost exclusively Nietzschean. The description of modern hermeneutics constitutes the unbounded revival of both hyponoia and allēgoria. The difference between classical interpretation and genealogical Nietzschean philology, considered as the double movement of the critique of divinatio, on the one hand, and the infinity of interpretation, on the other, is supposed to be read in light of that revival. The ‘death of God’ entails the death of His world. All the categories of resemblance manifest the consensus of the world on which they are based and which, in turn, is 122 NFM: 597, emphasis added. 123 Ibid. 129 itself grounded in God.124 Hence, God is both the ground of the world and of the relation between words and things. In that sense, divinatio is not another kind of knowledge but the deciphering of the ground of interpretation itself.125 The critique of depth exposes how the death of God shatters the consensus of the world that was needed to ground truth and knowledge. It follows that both the horizontal cohesion and the vertical ground vanish and interpretation becomes an infinite task. The irreducible openness that Foucault observes justifies the assumption of an essential incompleteness of interpretation. According to Foucault’s pithy formulation: si l’interprétation ne peut jamais s’achever, c’est tout simplement qu’il n’y a rien à interpréter. Il n’y a rien d’absolument premier à interpréter, car au fond, tout est déjà interprétation, chaque signe est en lui-même non pas la chose qui s’offre à l’interprétation, mais interprétation d’autres signes.126 This aphorism encapsulates a series of interesting points. First, it refers to Nietzsche’s critique of depth, and his careful distinction between origin and beginning, and, in that sense, focuses on the absence of bedrock as the cause of the incompleteness of interpretation. Second, the passage becomes more specific, elaborating more on the nature of signs and interpretation. It follows from the premises that every interpretation is not an interpretation of signs but an interpretation of further interpretations which themselves constitute interpretations of other interpretations: the primacy of interpretation entails that hyponoia is not only prior to facts, it is an inherent property of language that creates and shapes them. Consensus is replaced by an (infinite) play of differences. Third, in that way, Foucault presents interpretation as an act of violence, mainly exemplified in his idea that interpretation does not approach any external fact to be interpreted, but it usurps, transforms and/or destroys an already existing interpretation.127 And when Foucault writes “[l]es signes sont des interprétations qui essaient de se justifier, et non pas l’inverse”128, one cannot but recognise Nietzsche’s claim that the superiority of his genealogical interpretation of morality over others is to be assessed by the criteria that his own genealogy has 124 Ibid.: 594. Cf. “le fait que les choses se ressemblaient prouvait simplement la bienveillance de Dieu, et n’écartaient que par un voile transparent le signe du signifié.” (Ibid.: 600). 125 See the equivalent analysis of divinatio in MC: 33–34. 126 NFM: 599, emphasis added. 127 “[E]lle [interpretation] ne peut que s’emparer, et violemment, d’une interprétation déjà là, qu’elle doit renverser, retourner, fracasser à coups de marteau” (Ibid.) 128 Ibid.: 600. 130 established. Fourth, this claim elucidates the antithesis between truth and interpretation. Truth, conceived as the unique interpretation of a natural qua ahistorical sign, can no longer justify and support the conclusions of a critical philosophy that results in acknowledging the infinity of the interpretative task in the absence of a ground. In that sense, truth appears in a different light: it is that which attempts to cover up interpretation.129 Foucault’s approach of interpretation as a critique of truth conceived in ahistorical terms reveals his sceptical stance. In what follows, I aim to show that his scepticism is linked to his reading of Nietzsche’s idea of eternal recurrence. 2.4.2. Nietzsche’s sceptical philology Foucault’s idea of the circular movement of the infinite interpretation is informed by Nietzsche’s conception of eternal recurrence and can be seen as a commentary on Nietzsche’s idea. Although Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence does not appear to be as central in Foucault’s work as it is in that of Klossowski and Deleuze, it is, along with other closely related notions and imageries (e.g., recurrence, repetition, return, double, duplication, mirror) distinctly present. It exemplifies both a critique of Platonic ahistorical metaphysics, and an affirmation of the practice (and experience) of interpretation.130 A short analysis of this Auseinandersetzung is necessary as it shows how Foucault uses Nietzsche to underwrite his own sceptical methodology. It also allows us to understand the way philology informs Foucault’s own genealogical method and his philosophical project in general. More specifically, it enables the 129 Ibid.: 600. These themes have a constant presence in Foucault’s thought of that period. For example, to mention, only indicatively, those essays –so divergent in terms of subject– where Foucault does not refer explicitly to Heidegger, Nietzsche, or Blanchot, see his essays on Crébillon and Saint-Cyr (DE I, 1962, 11), Raymond Roussel (DE I, 1962, 10: 241–243, and FOUCAULT 1963: 17–20), and Jules Verne (DE I, 1966, 36). For a historical instantiation of Foucault’s analysis, see our discussion in section 3.2.4. 130 Cf. “Le retour nietzschéen a clos une bonne fois la courbe de la mémoire platoniciene” (DE I, 1964, 24: 435), and “L’être, […] c’est le Revenir de la différence” (DE I, 1970, 80: 964; see, especially, ibid.: 963–967), respectively. Moreover, discussing this modernist branch of literature where he finds aspects that exemplify his ‘archaeological’ thought, Foucault explicitly includes experiences “comme la répétition, le double, […], le retour” into “expériences spirituelles ([…]) – comme le rêve, comme la folie, comme la déraison” (DE I, 1964, 22: 366). Cf. also Foucault’s remark on Blanchot, “la mort ouvre indéfiniment sur la répétition du commencement.” (DE I, 1966, 38: 567, emphasis added). Cf. his discussions of Deleuze (DE I, 1969, 64: passim), Binswanger (DE I, 1954, 1: 127), Roger Laporte (DE I, 1963, 15: 293–296). Finally, we should not forget Klossowski’s possible influence on the matter. “Les auteurs qui m’ont, je ne dirais pas formé, mais permis de me décaler par rapport à ma formation universitaire, ont été des gens comme Bataille, Nietzsche, Blanchot, Klossowski” (CMF: 861–862). See also, Foucault’s own approach to Klossowski, DE I, 1964, 21. Although it is beyond the scope of this study to reconstruct the interrelation among Nietzsche, Klossowski and Foucault, for an excellent discussion of this issue, see JAMES 2000a, 2000b, and 2001. 131 understanding of the status of Foucault’s genealogical discourse, and the way in which (genealogical) historicism is associated with a non-metaphysical (if not anti- metaphysical) naturalism.131 Furthermore, what follows elucidates the premises of Foucault’s critique of the Cartesian tradition, as instantiated in his critique of Husserl’s thought.132 Finally, it illuminates Foucault’s conception of the self, enabling us to understand the way this conception remains more or less constant throughout his work.133 I briefly introduce Nietzsche’s late critical thought, including his conception of eternal recurrence, before I return to Foucault’s critical adaptation of Nietzsche’s ideas. Nietzsche’s argument can be reconstructed as based on four premises from which a conclusion derives. First, a set of theological beliefs grounds an ethical stance and a set of moral values. Second, these values result both in the acquisition of an epistemic stance and in the attribution of value to a specific conception of truth. Third, this epistemic perspective entails a specific conception of the world: it is construed either as teleological, or as mechanistic, or as a kind of pantheistic, Spinozist nature synonymous with God. Fourth, Nietzsche’s critical analysis attempts to explain away the theological stance by exposing its historical (i.e. linguistic and psycho- physiological) origins. Consequently, in questioning the presumed metaphysical, ahistorical bedrock, the whole apparatus of Western morality and science loses its foundation and collapses. Thus, the third premise concerning the understanding of the world needs to be revised. Following from his critique, Nietzsche casts his solution in the imagery of eternal recurrence, to which we now turn. 2.4.2.1. Nietzsche’s conception of the world as eternal recurrence The genealogical critique necessitates the undoing of the world conceived as Being (with a capital). For Nietzsche, the world is a world of becoming. His description of becoming is multifarious. Becoming constitutes the description of the world in terms 131 See sections 3.1.1.3, 3.2.1 and 3.3.1, especially 3.3.1.2. The notion of repetition is present in his discussion of Nietzsche’s genealogy: “En un sens, la pièce jouée sur ce thêatre sans lieu est toujours la même : c’est celle qui répètent indéfiniment les dominateurs et les dominés.” (DE I, 1971, 84: 1012– 1013, emphasis added). The same motif takes place in his discussion of different “identités réapparues ; […] tous ces masques – Frédéric de Hohenstaufen, César, Jésus, Dionysos, Zarathustra peut-être –” (ibid.: 1021). See our discussion in section 3.3.1. 132 See sections 3.1.1 and 3.1.1.1. 133 See section 4.1. 132 of motion, struggle, “determination of degrees and relations of force”, change.134 Two posthumously published late fragments135 contain the most elaborate description of becoming as synonymous with world. Nietzsche’s world is described as “a certain definite quantity of force and as a certain definite number of centers of force”,136 which constitute a self-contained and self-transforming cosmos.137 The element of infinity in that world is to be found in its ceaseless, immanent play of forces of different degrees, where an increase in one place requires a decrease elsewhere. This world of magmatic becoming neither exhibits any qualities that would justify or ground human valuations138 nor does it seem to tend towards a goal.139 The only qualification that Nietzsche appears to allow is the association of the world of becoming with his imagery of eternal recurrence. He describes this play of forces as a circle which turns eternally.140 In his unpublished notes, Nietzsche attempts to elaborate, justify and prove the idea of recurrence through a mathematical syllogism.141 He asserts that given the finite amount of forces, the number of combinations that can occur is also finite and, hence, calculable. Provided the time span is infinite, all possible combinations will be realised. Finally, Nietzsche concludes, since between every combination and its next recurrence all other possible combinations would have to take place, and each of these combinations conditions the entire sequence of combinations in the same series, a circular movement of absolutely identical series is thus demonstrated: the world as a 134 WP 552 (12:9[91]) and 507 (12:9[38]). The standard edition for Nietzsche’s works and Nachlass is the Kritische Studien-Ausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (henceforth KSA). For all notes from the ‘Will to Power’ (henceforth WP, NIETZSCHE 1968), a selection not made by Nietzsche but by later editors, I also provide the KSA volume number, followed by notebook number, and in square brackets the note number, e.g. WP 626 (10:24[10]). Cf. also The Gay Science §109, (henceforth GS, NIETZSCHE 2001). Foucault embraces the importance of Nietzsche’s Nachlass both as an editor (with Deleuze of Nietzsche’s Œuvres philosophiques complètes) and as a thinker. Concerning the first, see their interview and “Introduction générale” to the work, DE I, 1966, 41, and ibid., 1967, 45, respectively. In this introduction, moreover, they make specific reference to “[t]out un cahier de 1881 […] [qui] concerne L’Éternel Retour” (ibid.: 590). Concerning the second, Foucault, in one of his main exegesis of Nietzsche, uses La Volonté de puissance in order to support his analysis of Nietzsche’s critique of consciousness that he also traces in GM. (DE I, 1974, 139: 1418–1419). 135 WP 1066 (13:14[188]) and 1067 (11:38[12]). 136 WP 1066 (13:14[188]). “– and every other representation remains indefinite and therefore useless”. Ibid. 137 “a firm, iron magnitude of force […] of unalterable size […] enclosed by “nothingness” as by a boundary”. WP 1067 (11:38[12]). 138 WP 708 (13:11[72]). 139 “a becoming that knows no satiety, no disgust, no weariness”. WP 1067 (11:38[12]). 140 “a sea of forces flowing and rushing together, eternally changing, eternally flooding back, with tremendous years of recurrence […], and then again returning home to the simple out of this abundance, […] blessing itself as that which must return eternally”. Ibid., emphasis added. 141 WP 1066 (13:14[188]). 133 circular movement that has already repeated itself infinitely often and plays its game in infinitum.142 From the point of view of a strict mathematical and statistical combinatorics,143 this argument is clearly invalid. For his conclusion to be valid, two additional, implicit, assumptions would have to be made. First, it needs to be specified what Nietzsche means by ‘combination’. Second, it should be made clear that each combination would condition not only “the entire sequence of combinations in the same series”144 but also every other subsequent series. Alternatively, it could also be postulated that each series, defined as the realisation of a full set of possibilities, conditions any other series that follows. Whatever the result of such speculative attempts to explain Nietzsche’s conception, he implies a strong interconnecting relation among the quanta of power to the extent that the exhaustion of all possible combinations would necessitate the repetition and the return of that cosmos to its starting conditions. As we will see later, this element of panholistic interconnectedness is important for the ethical implications that Nietzsche attaches to his model. 2.4.2.2. Nietzsche’s critique of metaphysics In order to make better sense of Nietzsche’s argument, and, in particular, his fourth premise concerning the historical and psycho-physiological origins of metaphysics, we need to elaborate on the first two premises. We need to explain the stratification of values (God – morality – epistemic stance – scientific worldview – realist ontology) which Nietzsche traces. In particular, what is needed is to understand Nietzsche’s critique of the theoretical transition from the epistemic stance to a realist ontology. This will help us to understand Nietzsche’s own epistemological and ontological stance and shed light on the idea of eternal recurrence. Nietzsche’s style characteristically interlinks his criticisms with his own positive postulations and suggestions, but his main goal should be understood as a critique of metaphysics. First, I will describe his critique of epistemology and ontology,145 and then extract the philosophical alternative to that critique, which constitutes Nietzsche’s own epistemological and ontological convictions. 142 Ibid., emphasis added, apart from the terms in Latin. 143 Cf. “in the great dice game of existence”. Ibid. 144 Ibid., emphasis added. 145 Regarding this critique, I follow NEHAMAS 1985. 134 Nietzsche’s main line of argument targets the tacit ontological postulations on which the epistemological considerations of traditional philosophy rest. He is not interested in postulating any neutral bedrock in which an objective ahistorical ontology could be grounded. From early on, Nietzsche argues that the decision of whether something is real or not is based on a preconception of what Being is.146 In order to find evidence for this critique, Nietzsche shows how in Descartes, for example, the belief in a subject grounds the belief in reality. The Cartesian methodology can be considered as analysing the grounding activity of the subject. Specifically, Descartes’ analysis of consciousness is based on the phenomenological description of one action, of the action of thinking.147 The action of thinking seems to be an instantiation of the action of will.148 The postulation of an epistemological function, an action of reflection, leads Descartes to make a further, this time ontological, postulation, namely to assume an entity as the bearer of this function.149 With this gesture, Descartes commits to a proliferation of entities and also ascribes a further stratum of arbitrary connections amongst them. The primary connection is that of a relation of causality. In the context of the initial theoretical move, Descartes assumes a res cogitans as cause of that function of reflecting. Nietzsche’s choice of Descartes as his target is not accidental. On the one hand, Descartes formulates the paradigm on which modern philosophy is based.150 On the other hand, he inherits and transmits the philosophical apparatus of medieval scholasticism. His distinction between res cogitans and res extensa directly recalls Aristotelian categories. In Nietzsche’s history of philosophy, Descartes is explicitly conceived to posses the same pedigree as, what he calls, “[t]he great methodologists”, a category that includes Aristotle, Bacon, Descartes, and Auguste Comte.151 Nietzsche not only claims that they share the same methodology, he also traces a historical lineage, according to which the (faulty) Cartesian conception of philosophy is projected into past and future, namely, from Aristotle to Kant.152 146 WP 486 (12:2[87]). 147 WP 476 (11:26[49]) and 477 (13:11[113]). 148 WP 476 (11:26[49]). 149 WP 477 (13:11[113]). 150 Nietzsche’s subsequent critique of Kant, in the context of his critique of logic and propositions, e.g. in WP 508 (10:24[5]) and 544 (12:10[159]), is based on the same observations. For Foucault’s similar critique of the Cartesian tradition as instantiated in his critique of Husserl, see sections 3.1.1 and 3.1.1.1. 151 WP 468 (12:9[61]). 152 Cf. WP 466 (13:15[51]) and 467 (12:9[47]). 135 Nietzsche’s main justification for this critique is based on psycho- physiological and linguistic remarks. He claims that these ontological postulations are misinterpretations of certain psycho-physiological and linguistic functions. Alluding directly to Hume, he claims that “[a]ll our categories of reason are of sensual origin: derived from the empirical world.”153 At the same time, in the context of a direct critical reference to Cartesian philosophy and the origin of the cogito, Nietzsche claims that the identification of the existence of thinking with a thinking thing “is simply a formulation of our grammatical custom that adds a doer to every deed.”154 However, the psychological justification and the grammatical remarks do not seem to have the same status. The invoking of psychological (or sometimes biological) criticism and justification constitutes, for Nietzsche, who is equally opposed to any new metaphysical grounding, more a kind of ad hoc tool. Although Nietzsche might have toyed with the idea of an independent, ahistorical, psycho-physiological reality in order to explain human behaviour and morality, it seems clear from many of his remarks that, for him, language explains every epistemological and ontological postulation, including psychology and physiology themselves.155 He explicitly asserts: “The same equalizing and ordering force that rules in the idioplasma, rules also in the incorporation of the outer world: our sense perceptions are already the result of this assimilation and equalization in regard to all* the past in us”.156 Irrespective of the possible biological allusions in Nietzsche’s formulation, the terminology consists of linguistic tropes. This dependence of epistemology on language is apparent also in the following aphorism: “The entire apparatus of knowledge is an apparatus for abstraction and simplification”.157 Every cognitive function is reduced to and explained with rhetorical schemes.158 This series of criticisms of traditional philosophical epistemology and ontology lead to Nietzsche’s own more positive epistemological views. He summarises his own criticism in the assertion that metaphysics is meaningless because it attempts “the derivation of the conditioned from the unconditioned.”159 According to Nietzsche, even if one assumes the existence, or better postulates the 153 WP 488 (12:9[98]), emphasis added. 154 WP 484 (12:10[158]), emphasis added. 155 For the presence of this idea in Foucault, see sections 3.1.1.3, 3.2.1 and 3.3.1, especially 3.3.1.2. 156 WP 500 (12:2[92]), emphasis added, save the marked term. 157 WP 503 (11:26[61]), emphasis added. 158 See, in relation to the function of memory, WP 502 (11:40[29]). 159 WP 574 (10:8[25]). 136 existence of unconditioned things, then by definition it would not be possible to know these things, since knowledge necessitates a kind of relation that conditions the thing we come to know.160 The application of this line of argument to the example of Descartes reveals that the things towards which the epistemic function is directed are conditioned by that very function. This directionality shapes and creates the things to which it refers. Additionally, Nietzsche’s critique of the postulation of unconditionality entails the interconnectedness of all things. He claims that “[a] “thing” is the sum of its effects, synthetically united by a concept, an image.”161 This “image” or “concept” constitutes the linguistic framework within which objects arise, i.e. interpretation. Hence, Nietzsche famously concludes that there are no facts but only interpretations, and in that sense, as we saw earlier, interpretations upon other interpretations.162 2.4.3. Foucault’s Nietzschean scepticism Given these considerations, two main conclusions can be derived. First, the interconnectedness of things and the ontological primacy of interpretation can be understood in light of the claim that there are no natural qua ahistorical, necessary and metaphysically independent facts. Nietzsche described, as we saw, synthetic unity in terms of an image. If we think of a painting as an example, then the interconnectedness of things refers to the relation that exists among the shapes inside the painting: the painting is the interconnected sum of these elements and it cannot be conceived without them. In the same way that we cannot claim that the landscape of a painting has a causal relation to the objects that it represents, or that they are grounded in it, we should consider the elements of an interpretation as the interpretation itself. Second, Nietzsche’s conception of eternal recurrence could be conceived as being modelled on these epistemological considerations. When Nietzsche claims that there are no gaps in his world of force,163 what he means is mainly that there is nothing, i.e. nature or things-in-themselves, which is not an interpretation. Consequently, it seems very likely that Foucault’s description of interpretation is not only based on a specific reading of Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence, but it also allows us to reinterpret Nietzsche’s imagery in terms of 160 WP 555 (12:2[154]). 161 WP 551 (13:14[98]), emphasis added. 162 WP 481 (12:9[63]), 604 (12:2[82]), 605 (12:9[48]). 163 WP 1066 (13:14[188]). 137 Foucault’s own conception of interpretation. The strong relation of interconnectedness among the quanta of power, to the extent that the spatial alteration of one determines the alteration of every other, could again be interpreted using the interconnected shapes of a painting or as the interlinked elements of an interpretation. In Foucault’s reading, Nietzsche’s quanta of power are interpretations. In that sense, the eternal recurrence is the eternal recurrence of the same as other. It is the same, because what returns has no other form than that of an interpretation; and it is something other because each interpretation returns, as form, with a different content. However, Foucault’s reading of Nietzsche not only constitutes an elaboration on the latter’s epistemological issues but also seems to provide the guidelines of an ethics. In the context of his discussion of the second theme of modern hermeneutics, Foucault refers to an ‘absolutely dangerous region’. This region is a metaphorical description of the possible annihilation of both the interpretation and the interpreter. Foucault concludes that “[l]’existence toujours approchée du point absolu de l’interprétation serait en même temps celle d’un point de rupture.”164 Foucault’s formulation, and, especially, his terms ‘absolute point’ and ‘point of rupture’, can be clarified further in connection with his analysis of the theme of the incompleteness of interpretation in Nietzsche. Foucault observes, in a rhetorical question, that for Nietzsche philosophy was nothing but a kind of philology in continuous suspension, a philology without end that would never be absolutely fixed. In order to explain his statement, Foucault quotes and analyses from Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil: “parce que « périr par la connaissance absolue pourrait bien faire partie du fondement de l’être ». Et pourtant, cette connaissance absolue qui fait partie du fondement de l’Être, il a montré dans Ecce Homo combien il en était proche. De même, au cours de l’automne 1888 à Turin.”165 The point absolu is linked with the idea of absolute knowledge. Similarly, the point of rupture can be considered the tension between the absolute point of interpretation and the absolute knowledge, since the idea of absolute knowledge belongs to metaphysics, to which interpretation is opposed by definition. The point of rupture is further qualified in Foucault’s concluding remarks concerning that second theme of hermeneutics: “Ce qui est en question dans le point de rupture de l’interprétation, dans cette convergence de l’interprétation vers un point qui la rend 164 NFM: 598, emphasis added. 165 NFM: 598, emphasis added. Foucault’s citation is from Beyond Good and Evil: § 39, (henceforth BGE, NIETZSCHE 1990a). 138 impossible, ce pourrait bien être quelque chose comme l’expérience de la folie. Expérience contre laquelle Nietzsche s’est débattu est par laquelle il a été fasciné”.166 Moreover, the conclusion of Foucault’s essay can be construed as the emphatic recapitulation of the same idea: “une herméneutique qui s’enveloppe sur elle-même entre dans le domaine des langages qui ne cessent de s’impliquer eux-mêmes, cette région mitoyenne de la folie et du pur langage. C’est là que nous reconnaissons Nietzsche.”167 Foucault elaborates further on these issues in the discussion following the presentation of his paper. The questions fall into three groups. The first concerns Foucault’s grouping of Nietzsche with Freud and Marx, the second concerns the link between interpretation and madness, and the third concerns the possibility of an ethics. The main point of the first group of questions corroborates the idea that Foucault’s primal focus is Nietzsche, since the objections raised concerned whether Foucault’s reading of Nietzsche could apply to Freud and Marx. The second group of questions is focused on the experience of madness. To Demonbynes’ question whether the experience of madness is the closest point to absolute knowledge, whether Foucault means consciousness, prescience and premonition of madness and whether this experience of madness is the property of a grand esprit, Foucault answers yes. Although at the end of their discussion, Demonbynes adopts a sarcastic stance to indicate that he himself cannot fully grasp this point since he is not a grand esprit, Foucault’s initial answers to Demonbynes’ questions indicate an acceptance of a mystical character in that absolute knowledge, while the connection between a grand esprit and the experience of madness means that the latter is an aesthetic property. The painful experience of the abysmal vertigo generated by the interpretative function is often attributed to the figure of the artist.168 Finally, Foucault’s answer to Kelkel’s question orientates towards a different kind of ethics, aside from an aesthetics of madness. Kelkel asks whether Marx, Freud and Nietzsche can be considered in terms of therapy for society, individual and humanity, respectively, and whether Foucault considers the techniques of interpretation a possible succession to, if not a substitute for, philosophy. Foucault remarks that these techniques of interpretation were indeed therapeutic techniques in 166 NFM: 598–599, emphasis added. 167 Ibid.: 602. 168 Ibid.: 607. 139 the nineteenth century, and he contrasts them with interpretation in the sixteenth century, which was closer to revelation and salvation. Foucault even quotes the phrase of the historian Garcia: “« De nos jours – dit-il en 1860 – la santé a remplacé le salut. »”169 Foucault’s corrective remark – “Il ne faut pas confondre histoire de la philosophie et archéologie de la pensée”,170 – should be interpreted in the same light. The archaeology of thought is also linked to his Nietzschean interpretation of Marx, by which changing the world depends on the interpretation of the world. Yet interpretation, in turn, is identified with the end of philosophy in the traditional sense: “[l]e texte sur l’interprétation concerne la philosophie, et la fin de la philosophie.”171 These remarks can be considered as suggesting a twofold ethics. First, Foucault seems to adhere to a kind of aestheticisation of madness. Madness involving the perishing of the subject is qualified with a strong epistemological property. It constitutes the almost apocalyptic acquisition of knowledge concerning the ‘nature’ of being. Furthermore, madness is conceived in terms of artistic creation. Thus, Foucault provides a version of the affirming Dionysian artist as presented in Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols as a blueprint of authenticity.172 As we will see in the next chapter, Foucault will qualify further and deepen this version in his Histoire de la folie. However, it is possible to trace a second version of authenticity. Foucault’s Nietzschean thesis of the primacy of interpretation over truth opens up possibilities for philosophers who would explore the consequences of this thesis.173 In that sense, Foucault seems to describe and justify his own sceptical stance as a genealogist philosopher. The end of philosophy means its replacement with this version of philological scepticism. 2.4.4. Conclusion Foucault’s reception of Nietzsche’s philological scepticism seems to correspond to the critical, epistemological and the ethical aspects of Sextan scepticism that we analysed in the first chapter. As I have tried to show in this short attempt at a Geistesgeschichte, the epistemological aspect of scepticism as a critique of metaphysics links Foucault with Heidegger and Blanchot, the figures that enabled him 169 Ibid. 170 Ibid.: 603. 171 Ibid.: 602. 172 Twilight of the Idols (NIETZSCHE 1990b): xi, passim and xi, §10. 173 Cf. GS: “Preface,” §§ 78 and 107. 140 to overcome the horizon of traditional philosophy. Nietzsche’s critique of epistemology and ontology entails a view of subjectivity that is close to that of the early Heidegger. Furthermore, the twofold ethical stance corresponds to both Blanchot’s experience of nothingness and its more affirmative aspect. Madness becomes an instance of an experience of nothingness, the result of the realisation of groundlessness. At the same time, the very practice of critique that leads to this realisation allows a precarious approach to this experience of nothingness. This approach now takes the form of an inquiry into the historical emergence of that experience conceived as an experience of modernity. As I will show in the next, final chapter, Foucault’s thinking can be viewed as grounded in these sceptical aspects that remain unchanged throughout his work and define his ethics as an aesthetics of existence. 2.5. Conclusion Foucault’s Geistesgeschichte corroborates, I believe, our description of his thinking as a sceptical aesthetics of existence. I would like to return briefly to an issue that I mentioned in 2.1.3, namely Foucault’s sceptical but nevertheless real endeavour to transform himself and his readers through the experience and the practice of writing. Foucault’s distinction between theory and experimentation mirrors his distinction between speculation and experience. This distinction between, on the one hand, experience and experimentation, and, on the other, philosophy, theory, and analytical and deductive methods for the construction of systems, is exhaustive. The self- transformative experience of (living in) writing that we saw exemplified in Heidegger, Blanchot, and Nietzsche is opposed to any form and attempt of abstract theorising. Foucault’s sceptical aphorisme “[j]e ne me considère pas comme un philosophe. Ce que je fais n’est ni une façon de faire de la philosophie ni de suggérer aux autres de ne pas en faire”,174 should be read as a truthful, parrhesiastic, and sceptical self- description. In the interview we discussed earlier, Foucault acknowledges the importance of personal experience as a factor leading him to the specific themes of his studies. It is this notion of experience that I regard as particularly important in our context. 174 CMF: 861. 141 Experience conceived either as a first-person-perspective, autobiographical datum or as indicator of a self-transformative process should not be misconstrued as any new ontological or epistemological foundation. In fact, Foucault can be seen to provide a description of experience that is deliberately neutralising. While experience undeniably entails an irreducible first-person-perspective aspect (pain would be an example), Foucault acknowledges and points towards another aspect that is public and shared. Significant aspects of what philosophers today might call the ‘content’ of an experience can be communicated. Someone else will be able to undergo a similar experience, and feel roughly the same ‘things’ when being roughly under the same ‘circumstances’, in the broadest sense of the words ‘feeling’, ‘same things’, and ‘being under the same circumstances’. Again I see strong evidence here that Foucault uses a more or less accepted, platitudinous view about the two aspects of experience without committing to any metaphysically realist claims. He abstains from any jargon, and he makes no use of any of the terms and distinctions (i.e. ‘content’, ‘feeling’, ‘things’, ‘circumstances’) used here. In a distinctively Nietzschean way, he uses non- philosophically laden vocabulary as much as possible when he talks about an issue that traditionally belongs to philosophy. His view of experience could be described almost as externalist and behaviourist, and his discourse often consists mainly of reports of patterns of response regarding both himself and the reader. He acknowledges a kind of communicability of the experience between writer and reader without attributing any ontological or epistemological priority to either. Significantly, the experience of transformation he describes emerges within a shared and irreducibly social matrix that involves both writer and reader against the backdrop of a common, shared experience (of an aspect of modernity) which, he assumes, has shaped both writer and reader. It is in this sense that Foucault’s thinking constitutes an aesthetics of existence. First, an aesthetics of existence can be defined as the reflection on the good life that involves the experience of self-transformation through the practice of critical writing on selfhood. Second, the fact that such experimental thinking brackets theory and relies on a neutralising, nominalist and contextualist, notion of experience indicates that Foucault’s aesthetics of existence indeed remains sceptic. According to Foucault’s own account, the two poles of subject-centred phenomenology and Hegelian philosophy of history delimited the intellectual horizon that he criticises. As we saw, thinkers who, in different ways, inspire this twofold 142 critique of a metaphysics of subjectivity and a metaphysics of history shape his thinking. More specifically, the hermeneutic path from Heidegger via Blanchot to Nietzsche can be understood in terms of two transitions. The first transition from Heidegger to Blanchot constitutes a radicalisation of nominalism. It signifies not only a radicalisation of the critique of any metaphysical conception the self, its world and its history, but also a sceptical vigilance with regard to those conceptions that can or tend to become metaphysical. The second transition from Blanchot to Nietzsche constitutes a radicalisation of contextualism. The notion of interpretation is further elucidated and expanded, and denotes the ontological primacy of the context. Thus, the context becomes almost synonymous with both the discourse that occupies the lack that the critique of metaphysics has created, and with the self in its ethical practice. Foucault’s critical attitude therefore demands and utilises a different conceptualisation of human experience that informs an ethical stance. It is this scepticism of Foucault’s critical discourse that enables transformation to remain a real possibility. In light of the elaboration above on Foucault’s nominalism and contextualism, I would like to conclude with a pre-emptive defensive note concerning a possible critique of Foucault’s stance that would become more pressing in the chapters that follow. Namely, it can be argued that Foucault’s early genealogical investigations are contradictory: on the one hand, they constitute sceptical attempts to expose and debunk the hypostatisation of a conception of selfhood, but, on the other, though, they become compromised by a kind of hypostatisation of the absence of ground that could be used as an ontological, epistemic or normative foundation. Moreover, the invoking of an experience of groundlessness can be seen to corroborate this element of contradiction, since a version of a metaphysically conceived self seems to be posited. I think, however, that Foucault’s sceptical stance is not compromised. First, Foucault’s references to the experience of groundlessness should not be understood to refer to a double metaphysical fact, that is, to an ahistorical subjectivity and a hypostatisation of the abyss. Rather, they should be understood to refer to the historically localised experience of the collapse of a discourse that has been constitutive of our everydayness. In that sense, it would be, for example, the scholastic experience of the collapse of the Aristotelian worldview before the prevailing of the Galilean one. This depiction removes the pathos, to remember Derrida, of Foucault’s rhetoric, but at least compensates us with the fragile, and in a 143 sense aesthetically pitiful, pleasure that a contradiction has been, for the time being, avoided. 144 3, Foucault’s Sceptical Aesthetics of Existence 3.1. Critique of Psychological Reason I: Foucault on Subjectivity 3.1.0. Introduction, or d’écrire seulement en marge Foucault’s essay on Ludwig Binswanger’s “Traum und Existenz”1 can be seen as the first exemplification of his sceptical stance, and an arguably underappreciated one. I will show that Foucault’s essay can be interpreted as a striking example of his twofold critique of Cartesian subjectivity and Hegelian metahistory, and of his consequent development of a nominalist and contextualist stance in ontology and epistemology, respectively. Binswanger shifts the philosophical investigation from the deciphering of the meaning of dream, conceived as a hermeneutics of symbols, to the comprehension of the existential structures present in it. In Binswanger’s analysis, dreaming reveals Dasein’s ontological structure as being-in-the-world, manifesting the contingency of Dasein’s thrownness and situatedness. Ethics as an authentic stance emerges as the attempt to impose a kind of coherence onto one’s life, given the realisation of that contingency. Later in his thought, Binswanger supplements this framework with a more concrete content. He reinterprets Heidegger’s care structure in terms of a specific, and ontologically grounded, interpersonal relation, that of love.2 1 Foucault’s text, entitled simply “Introduction”, was the accompanying introductory essay of the French translation of Binswanger’s essay. Foucault’s essay and the translation in French were first published in 1954, (see BINSWANGER 1954). Here, we use the edition of DE I, 1954, 1, “Introduction”; henceforth IRE. It should be noted that Foucault’s text is almost five times longer than the essay it accompanies. For the original publication of Binswanger’s essay, see BINSWANGER 1930a and 1930b. A standard edition of the text can be found in BINSWANGER 1947. To my knowledge, the only available English translation is Needleman’s. It can be found either in NEEDLEMAN 1963: 222–248, or in HOELLER (ed.) 1993. 2 For Binswanger’s main work, in which a revisionist reading of Heidegger is attempted, see BINSWANGER 1942. It can be found in the more recent edition of BINSWANGER 1993. For a short biography of Binswanger in English, see ZUSNE 1984: 48. For an index of his early publications, see MURCHISON 1932: 1164–1165. One of the more detailed and informed indexes of Binswanger’s works is found in BINSWANGER 1994: 543–547. The two main studies on Binswanger’s work in English are NEEDLEMAN 1963 and FRIE 1997. Frie’s work is more complete. Needleman’s approach is important since it reveals a firsthand early reception of Binswanger’s work in the Anglo-American world. May, Angel, and Ellenberger’s (1958) work is one of the first books on existential psychology and psychotherapy in English. Aside from its historical importance, its controversial, as we will see below, association between Medard Boss’ and Binswanger’s approaches, has to be noted. Finally, a last remark concerning Binswanger and Foucault on the notion of love. It seems that according to the popular reception, Foucault’s thought, centred around the notion of power and allied notions, is far from, if not alien to, this specific kind of interpersonal relation that Binswanger argues for in his later work. However, I think that Foucault’s thought can, and in fact does, support precisely this kind of 145 Foucault undertakes what amounts to a reinterpretation of Binswanger. He employs the idea of the manifestation of Dasein’s ontological structure in dreaming, but departs significantly from the actual argument of Binswanger’s essay in both form and content, and from his early and late thought, stripping it of its Heideggerian underpinnings.3 Foucault’s argumentation is developed in three parts. First, in the context of his elaboration of Binswanger’s critique of subjectivity, he develops his critique of Freud and Husserl. He refutes their shared underlying Cartesian ontology and epistemology, manifested in the atomistic, i.e. non-coherentist, metaphysical premises of their approach to meaning; he argues instead for a nominalist view of subjectivity. Second, he provides what I wish to call a proto-archaeological history of dreaming which reveals the content of that nominalist conception of the self through a radical reinterpretation of the relevant Heideggerian categories. Third, in the final part of his argument, Foucault focuses and elaborates on the function of the imagination, under which dreaming is subsumed as a special case. Imagination reveals the groundlessness of human existence, i.e. the absence of any metaphysical ground for it. I will argue that Foucault’s sceptical stance acquires a highly complex, deliberately self-referential character, becoming a first example of his practice of critique of metaphysics of subjectivity and ethics. Although I think that an analysis of Foucault’s proto-archaeological history of dreaming and of his approach to imagination would cohere with the conclusions of his Geistesgeschichte we saw above, such an analysis would go beyond the scope of this study, I focus exclusively on Foucault’s critique of Husserl. Thus, in what follows, I discuss only the first part of Foucault’s argumentation, and offer a paradigmatic reconstruction of his critique of Cartesian subjectivity. 3.1.1. Foucault’s critique of Cartesian subjectivity ethical relations. The main difference from Binswanger, of course, lies in the absence and critique of any metaphysical grounding, which changes the very content of the concept of love. 3 Cf. “Il ne s’agit pas, dans ces pages d’introduction, de refaire, selon le paradoxe familier aux préfaces, le chemin qu’a tracé Binswanger lui-même, dans Le Rêve et l’Existence.” (IRE: 93). Furthermore, the very end of Foucault’s introductory remarks affirms this divergence: “Cela nous dispense d’une introduction qui résumerait Sein und Zeit en paragraphes numérotés, et nous rend libre pour un propos moins rigoureux. Ce propos est d’écrire seulement en marge de Traum und Existenz.” (IRE: 96, emphasis added, save the titles of works). 146 Both Freud’s and Husserl’s work are variations on the fundamental themes that identify the neo-Kantian tradition, itself belonging to what we described earlier as Cartesian tradition. Concerning ontology, we can say that Freud’s conception of selfhood corresponds more to a naturalised, transcendental structure of subjectivity, while Husserl’s remains more idealist. As such they follow the two different branches of the Cartesian structure of subjectivity. Recall that according to the Cartesian, substance dualist conception of selfhood, the subject is constituted by two substances, ‘mind’ and ‘body’, or res cogitans and res extensa, respectively. Thus, we could say that Freud focuses on the res extensa, while Husserl on the res cogitans. In their epistemology, Freud follows a more empiricist line, while Husserl takes a more rationalist line.4 As explored in Foucault’s approach to Nietzsche earlier, Cartesian epistemology is grounded in certain ontological postulations. In the essay on Binswanger, Foucault exposes this metaphysical structure, showing how Freud’s and Husserl’s philosophical conception of meaning is underpinned precisely by this problematic Cartesian ontology and epistemology. The targets of Foucault’s critique can be viewed also as two complementary aspects in the philosophy of meaning. Freud’s work constitutes a philosophical elaboration of unconscious meaning, while Husserl’s focus is on conscious meaning. Υet, crucially for Foucault, both Freud and Husserl share the same underlying assumptions and therefore lapse into the same problem. Put in the idiom of modern analytic philosophy, they both equate the meaning of a proposition with its truth conditions, and define these conditions in terms of a relation of correspondence to reality. Foucault’s critique is sceptical. Both structurally and substantively, he undertakes an internalist critique of Freud and Husserl’s theses. From a structural perspective, both Freud and Husserl are grounded in metaphysical qua dogmatic foundations. From a substantive perspective, Foucault’s critique of Freud shows that the relation of correspondence is unexplained and opaque. His critique of Husserl shows that a transcendental attempt to save the relation of correspondence cannot overcome what has been known since Quine as the problem of inscrutability of 4 As shown in the first chapter, the distinction between ‘rationalism’ and ‘empiricism’, albeit used in histories of philosophy rather uncontroversially, can be obscuring. The distinction, again, should be set in terms of a difference in degree, rather than considered describing a conceptual difference. The defining criterion is not whether the self is construed as a tabula rasa, but to what degree this subjective structure is naturally engraved. 147 reference. If successful, a critique of Husserl would undermine at the same time any possibility of a further elaboration and reconsideration of Freud’s psychoanalysis in terms of phenomenology. Thus, I will present Foucault’s critique of Husserl as more representative and fundamental. Since the Cartesian underpinnings of Husserlian ontology and epistemology arguably define the entire modern metaphysical tradition, Foucault’s critique is both timely and relevant. Foucault’s critical approach to Husserl not only prefigures his forthcoming critique of Les mots et les choses,5 archaeological par excellence, but also constitutes one of the most dense and intricate texts in the Foucauldian corpus. Foucault’s text bears a striking stylistic similarity with these later studies: his text becomes almost a palimpsest – Foucault approaches Husserl, in the light of Heidegger, who is approached, in turn, in the terms of his own sceptical stance discussed above. It is this form of argumentation that gives Foucault’s text his ethical qua therapeutic quality. My argument is developed in the following three subsections. First, I reconstruct Foucault’s approach to Husserl’s thought, and show how it lies within the foundations of neo-Kantian tradition. Specifically, I reconstruct Foucault’s reading of Husserl’s conception of meaning and truth, and show how it is grounded in the post- Kantian conception of the relation between self and world. Second, I show how Heidegger’s thought is invoked in Foucault’s critique. I show how Foucault’s rhetoric can be seen to allude to Heidegger’s insights, and, mainly, how a holistic view of truth and meaning derives from a holistic view of selfhood. Third, I reconstruct his critique proper, analysing the main argument with which he undermines Husserl’s structure, thereby showing the specifically sceptical character of Foucault’s critique. Specifically, I analyse the critical example that Foucault uses and show how it undermines the post-Kantian conception of the relation between self and world, and a fortiori Husserl’s epistemology. Again I argue that Foucault’s argument is best read as an instantiation of his sceptical stance. He performs an internalist critique with the use of, as we have termed in the first chapter, the trope of uncontentious and neutralising redescription. Moreover, I argue that his use of a holistic view of truth and meaning is only tactical, and, thus, can be read as a sceptical attempt to strip naturalism of any metaphysical content. In what follows I use the tools of contemporary analytic philosophy in order to elucidate Foucault’s argument as clearly 5 See particularly Ch. IX, “L’homme et ses doubles”. 148 as possible. I hope to show that Husserl’s conception still belongs to and continues the wider Cartesian tradition, thereby corroborating the timeliness of Foucault’s critique. 3.1.1.1. Foucault’s approach to Husserl Foucault’s approach to Husserl can be traced in the following extracts: (1) D’une manière plus positive, l’acte significatif même le plus élémentaire, le plus fruste, le plus inséré encore dans un contenu perceptif, s’ouvre sur un horizon nouveau. Même lorsque je dis « cette tache est rouge », ou même dans l’exclamation « cette tache », même enfin lorsque les mots me manquent et que du doigt je désigne ce qu’il y a devant moi, il se constitue un acte de visée qui rompt avec l’horizon immédiat de la perception et découvre l’essence significative du vécu perceptif : c’est der Akt des Dies- meinens.6 (2) Cet acte ne se définit pas ([…]) par quelque « activité judicatoire » : mais par l’unité idéale de ce qui est visé dans la désignation significative ; cette unité est la même chaque fois que l’acte significatif est renouvelé, quels que soient les termes employés, la voix qui les prononce, ou l’encre qui les fixe sur le papier. Ce que signifie le symbole, ce n’est pas un trait individuel de notre vécu, une qualité de répétition, une propriété de « réapparaître identique à soi », comme dit Husserl ; nous sommes en présence d’un contenu idéal qui s’annonce à travers le symbole comme unité de signification.7 (3) Mais il faut aller plus loin, si on ne veut pas réduire l’acte significatif à une simple visée intentionnelle. Ce dépassement de la visée dans la plénitude significative où elle prend corps, comment peut-on le concevoir ? […] lui donner le sens d’un acte supplémentaire, […] comme acte d’effectuation ? Ce n’est là au fond que baptiser le problème, c’est lui donner un statut à l’intérieur de l’activité de la conscience, mais ce n’est pas lui découvrir un fondement.8 (4) [E]n s’effectuant dans l’actualité du signifiant, la virtualité intentionnelle s’ouvre sur de nouvelles virtualités. Cette actualité en effet se trouve située dans un contexte spatio-temporel ; les mots s’inscrivent dans notre monde ambiant, et ils désignent des interlocuteurs à l’horizon des implications verbales.9 6 IRE: 104, emphasis added, save the expression in German. 7 IRE: 104–105, emphasis added. 8 IRE: 105, emphasis added. 9 IRE: 105, emphasis added. 149 (5) Finalement, c’est l’acte expressif lui-même qu’une analyse phénoménologique met au jour sous la multiplicité des structures significatives.10 (6) Mais, replacé ainsi dans son fondement expressif, l’acte de signification est coupé de toute forme d’indication objective ; aucun contexte extérieur ne permet de le restituer dans sa vérité ; le temps et l’espace qu’il porte avec lui ne forment qu’un sillage qui disparaît aussitôt ; et autrui n’est impliqué que d’une manière idéale à l’horizon de l’acte expressif sans possibilité de rencontre réelle. La compréhension ne sera donc définie dans la phénoménologie que comme une reprise sur le mode d’intériorité, une nouvelle manière d’habiter l’acte expressif ; elle est une méthode pour se restituer lui-même. Ce problème de la compréhension devient central dans toute psychologie de la signification et il est placé au cœur de toute psychopathologie. Mais dans la ligne d’une phénoménologie pure, il ne peut trouver le principe de sa solution.11 (7) La phénoménologie est parvenue à faire parler les images ; mais elle n’a donné à personne la possibilité d’en comprendre le langage.12 I have selected this series of extracts as it constitutes Foucault’s presentation of the transcendental structure of Husserl’s thought. This structure can be summarised in the following four theses:13 (FH1) Consciousness intends towards the world. The aim of conscious acts is to be fulfilled. (FH2) The meaning of conscious acts determines the intended object or state of affairs, and thus defines the conditions for the act’s fulfilment. (FH3) The non-subjective ideal aspect of meaning, or the ideal content of meaning of the conscious act, guarantees the universality and communicability of meaning. (FH4) The non-subjective real aspect of meaning, or the real content of meaning of the conscious act, guarantees that the relation of fulfilment is not idealist: the intended object affects consciousness, and contributes to the constitution of the act’s meaning. These four theses can be unpacked as follows. Husserl’s structure of (the content of) the conscious act is parallel to the structure of linguistic meaning. As in 10 IRE: 106, emphasis added. 11 IRE: 106–107, emphasis added. 12 IRE: 107. 13 The abbreviation (FH) that follows stands for ‘Foucault’s interpretation of Husserl’. 150 Frege, meaning is distinguished from its reference. That is, two expressions can refer to the same thing, but have different meaning.14 Meaning enables us to determine the things we refer to, and, as we saw in our first chapter – according to Dummett’s interpretation – the meaning of an expression is thus identified with the conditions that make the expression true or false.15 The aim is the avoidance of relativism in all its forms, from J. S. Mill’s identification of meaning with reference to psychologism, and from the consequences of Lockean realism to Cartesian and Berkeleyan solipsism. However, the fact that meaning is dissociated from reference retains the possibility that meaning is contextually determined in such a way that different contexts ascribe different meanings to the same expression. It follows that referents are equally contextually determined, which leads to the dilemma between an idealist bracketing of reality and a radical pluralism of realist candidates. Either horn of the dilemma entails the very relativism that both Frege’s and Husserl’s structures are set to avoid. One solution to this problem is meaning atomism, which can be understood in terms of two theses: (MA1) Meaning is a property of individual propositions referring to an individual fact or state of affairs. In the case of other acts of consciousness, besides linguistic expressions (such as perceptual experiences, for example), the same structure applies. Meaning is a property of (the content of) individual experiential states referring to an individual fact or state of affairs. The meaning of experiential states is reducible to the meaning of propositions that describe them. (MA2) The relation between the meaning of an expression and the state of affairs it refers to has metaphysical independence from and priority to the relation between the given expression and other expressions in the language in which it appears.16 Put differently, meaning atomism attempts to undercut the unilateral determination of reference by meaning, and to defend Frege’s and Husserl’s 14 According to Frege’s famous example, the expressions “morning star” and “evening star” refer to the same entity, the planet Venus, but have different meaning. 15 See DUMMETT 1978. See section 1.2.1. 16 DE ROSA and LEPORE 2004: 65. The breakdown of meaning atomism into two theses is mine, as I think that the first thesis is a prerequisite of the second. In De Rosa and Lepore’s analysis, meaning atomism is identified with the second thesis. 151 transcendental accounts against a contextual determination of the intended object, by establishing an ontological and metaphysical connection between meaning and reference. Frege opts for a Platonist version of meaning atomism. He describes meaning not as the ultimately subjective idea, formed in the speaker’s or hearer’s mind, but instead as a Gedanke, a thought, which is “common property of many” and part of “a common store of thoughts which is transmitted from one generation to another.”17 Husserl opts instead for a more empiricist version, according to which the real content becomes the conceptual interface which enables and explains the connection between the abstract entities of meaning and the concrete extra-linguistic reality.18 The relation between ideal content and real content is that between a species and its instances. In the case of meaning of linguistic expressions, the ‘species’ – ‘Napoleon’, for example – can be instantiated as the real content of two different linguistic acts – here, either as ‘the victor of Jena’ or as ‘the vanquished at Waterloo’.19 Let us now return to Foucault’s critique. The first two theses above, (FH1) and (FH2), describe the structure of the relation between the subject and the world, and correspond to (MA1), the first thesis of meaning atomism. The second two theses, (FH3) and (FH4), describe the necessary and sufficient conditions for that structure, and correspond to (MA2), the second thesis of meaning atomism. The last two theses, (FH3) and (FH4), describe the universality of meaning, and the assumed realist grounding of the referent. Incidentally, here we can see how Engel, who we discussed in our first chapter, participates in a Husserlian Geistesgeschichte. Engel’s twofold premise concerning the function of veridical speech, first, that truth is the norm of communication, and, second, that it requires minimal realism, perfectly corresponds to the last two theses.20 Foucault’s points (1)–(5) correspond to theses (FH1)–(FH4). A first reading of points (1)–(3) shows that they constitute a shorthand version of a transcendental argument that corresponds to theses (FH1)–(FH3). In point (1), Foucault can be interpreted as relating the act of signification of a visual experience to that of 17 FREGE 1952a: 58–59. 18 See HINTIKKA 1995. 19 See SMITH and SMITH 1995a and SIMONS 1995. For that example specifically, see SIMONS 1995: 123 and SMITH and SMITH 1995a: 17. 20 See section 1.2.4. 152 linguistic meaning. In doing so, he achieves a number of things. First, he shows that meaning pertains to every intentional act, and, second, focuses on linguistic meaning in order to disclose the structure of signification more clearly, as signification is traditionally associated with linguistic practice par excellence.21 Third, Foucault’s example reveals the first aspect of meaning, its object-directedness or ‘aboutness’. The fact that he uses an expression of ostentation should not be understood as describing a particular case of linguistic use, but rather one of the most basic, i.e. both common qua uncontroversial, and fundamental, linguistic functions. Fourth, most importantly, ostentation as a form of assertoric speech is used here to illustrate an example of meaning atomism. Points (2) and (3) elaborate on the aspect of object-directedness and introduce the second aspect of meaning, that of fulfilment. Foucault outlines the necessary and sufficient conditions which enable expressions to be meaningful. The aspect of the structure of meaning which enables the act to refer to objects and states of affairs is this contenu idéal. It allows and guarantees the stability, universality and independence of meaning from the specific conditions of its production. It is independent of the expressive means, written or oral, which produce it, and it is not reducible to one’s own singular, subjective perception. This is what Foucault means in point (2). Further, this aspect of meaning, determining the reference of the act, sets the conditions under which the act of experience is fulfilled. Thus, in the case of linguistic expressions and, especially, in that of veridical speech, the meaning of an expression aims at being satisfied by the object or state of affairs that it describes. This is what Foucault describes in point (3). Foucault’s reference, in points (4) and (5), to the actuality of the act of signification, as situated in its specific spatiotemporal context, and revealed in the very expressive act that performs it, corresponds to (FH4). It is therefore clear that Husserl belongs to and in fact lays the foundation of a neo-Kantian tradition which continues from Frege to Engel: post-Fregean philosophy (including Husserl), at least in its neo-Kantian version, can be understood as the attempt to insulate meaning against any contextual influence. It attempts to bridge the gap between meaning and reference, and, from a closer perspective, to provide a 21 In this way, Foucault belongs to the interpretative line which stresses the link between Husserl’s phenomenology of meaning of conscious acts and linguistic meaning. 153 foundation to the relation of correspondence between propositions and facts. The fundamental characteristic of this tradition, as seen in the first chapter (and recalled just now by bringing in Engel) concerns the structural relation between mind, or language, and world. 22 In Hacking’s Geistesgeschichte of analytic philosophy of language, Chomsky’s species-specific innate structure of ‘universal grammar’, Russell’s theory of descriptions filled in with the epistemology of experiential acquaintance, Wittgenstein’s Tractarian grammar of isomorphism between the structure of a true sentence and the structure of the state of affairs it refers to, and Ayer’s verificationist empiricism were strong adherents to this twofold doctrine of the relation between the language and the world.23 Hacking’s Geistesgeschichte of this branch of philosophy of language, which in this context we called neo-Kantian and which belongs, more widely, to the Cartesian tradition presented in the previous two chapters, can thus be extended to include the approaches of Kripke and Putnam’s causal theory of reference as well as Engel’s minimal realism. Kripke and Putnam’s approach, in particular, constitutes the most metaphysically robust attempt to undercut the determination of reference by meaning. According to this approach, roughly put, there is a causal link between a natural kind and its meaning. The reference of the term causes and thus grounds its meaning, in such a way that certain expressions can have the same object of reference in every possible world. For example, it is the molecular structure of water as H2O that determines the meaning of the terms ‘water’, ‘eau’, ‘Wasser’, ‘aqua’ and, thus, conditions them to refer necessarily to that entity.24 This extension of the tradition shows that it continues to be robust, which makes Foucault’s critique of Husserl necessary, timely and relevant to both continental and analytic philosophy. His critique of the very premises of that tradition attempts to undo its foundations, questioning the validity even of its more recent Cartesian variations.25 22 See section 1.2.1. 23 “[T]he structure of human language will tell us something profound about the nature of the human mind […] [and] the structure of language is related to the nature of reality beyond the mind.” (HACKING 1975: 69). See ibid.: part B, “The heyday of meanings”. 24 See PUTNAM 1975. For an excellent discussion of these attempts in the context of the history of science, see ARABATZIS 2006. 25 According to Smith and Smith, “[i]n this way Husserlian horizon-analysis can be seen as anticipating the analysis of meaning in terms of possible world semantics developed by Saul Kripke, Jaakko Hintikka, and others in the 1950s and 1960s and inspired in part by Rudolf Carnap’s method of state 154 It is useful to see how Rorty’s critical description of a conception of selfhood accommodates both Husserl’s structure and Engel’s twofold premise as instances of a wider post-Kantian tradition. Rorty’s mapping illustrates the targets of Foucault’s critique, and enables us to envisage the holistic view of subjectivity, which is to replace the post-Kantian, metaphysical conception. In other words, roughly put, Rorty’s reconstruction of the post-Kantian conception of selfhood is useful for two reasons. First, it shows that the conception of meaning and truth of the tradition from Husserl to Engel presupposes an equivalent conception of the way the self is related to the world. It further shows that the undoing of the conception of the relation between self and world entails the undoing of the conception of meaning and truth that is based on this relation. According to Rorty, this post-Kantian conception of selfhood is: conceived as having three layers: an outermost layer consisting of empirical, contingent, beliefs and desires, a middle layer which contains necessary, a priori, beliefs and desires and which “structures” or “constitutes” the outer layer, and an ineffable inner core which is, roughly, the True Self of the Platonic-Christian model. […] This ineffable core – the Inner Self – is what “has” the beliefs and desires which form the Middle and Outer Selves.26 The relation, then, between the self and the world can be expressed in the following three theses:27 (RPK1) The outer self qua set of contingent and empirical beliefs and desires holds a relation of representation with the physical world. (RPK2) The middle self qua set of necessary and structural beliefs and desires holds a relation of constitution with the physical world. (RPK3) The outer self qua set of contingent and empirical beliefs holds a relation of truth-making with the physical world.28 descriptions.” (SMITH and SMITH 1995a: 26). In the footnote to this point, they refer to the works of HINTIKKA 1962, 1969a, 1975a, and SMITH and MCINTYRE 1982, and express their reservation that Husserl would not have accepted it. See also HINTIKKA 1995 and 1989, the title of which (“The Cartesian cogito, epistemic logic and neuroscience: some surprising interrelations”) is particularly telling. However, my point here is that although the link between Husserl, on the one hand, and possible world semantics and game theory semantics, on the other, might seem rather weak, the family resemblances between the two ostensibly diverse and different philosophical styles are grounded in the same fundamental metaphysical doctrine of an isomorphism between language and world. 26 RORTY 1991a(ii): 118. 27 The abbreviation (RPK) that follows stands for ‘Rorty’s post-Kantian’ conception of selfhood. 28 RORTY 1991a(ii): 118–119. 155 If we compare Husserl’s and Engel’s theses with Rorty’s reconstruction of post- Kantian selfhood, the following points derive. First, all three structures are similar. Theses (FH1) and (FH2) can be considered as describing a structural relation of representation between consciousness and the world, as encapsulated in (RPK1). Consequently, the relation of constitution between self and world (RPK2) can be considered to describe the ideal aspect of the Husserlian meaning (FH3), especially given its relation with the role of the interface that the real aspect, (FH4), plays. Finally, the truth-making relation can be considered to describe thesis (FH4) and specifically the necessary precondition of fulfilment. Second, and this is something that Rorty does not state explicitly, the relation of representation (RPK1) is informed and comprised by the two relations of constitution and truth-making, (RPK2) and (RPK3). We can now understand more clearly and in more detail the importance of the mapping of Husserl’s and Engel’s theses onto Rorty’s reconstruction of post-Kantian selfhood. In the first chapter, the main objection to Engel’s account was not the negation of the conceptual interrelation between assertion, belief and truth, but the metaphysical content ascribed to the latter.29 Similarly, a critical approach to Husserl, if successful, would entail the refutation of (FH3) and (FH4), or of (RPK2) and (RPK3). It is clear then that thesis (RPK3) is epistemologically grounded in (RPK2). This means that a truth-making relation between beliefs and facts presupposes the distinction of beliefs into necessary or structural, on the one hand, and contingent and empirical, on the other. In other words, the metaphysical postulation of a middle self as the set of structural beliefs is now responsible for constituting the world, cutting the world at the joints, in a way that enables contingent beliefs to be made true by correspondence to this constituted world. Thus, it is precisely the breakdown of the distinction between structural and empirical beliefs that would render the truth- making relation (RPK3) void and debunk the relation of representation (RPK1). This is precisely what Foucault’s critique attempts to achieve, i.e. the dissolution of the distinction between structural and empirical beliefs. The resultant collapse of the relation of representation means, first, that the two poles of subject and world are no longer metaphysically indistinct, and, second, that the debunking of meaning atomism, held in (RPK2) and (FH3) and (FH4), would 29 See section 1.3.1.1. 156 show, contra (RPK3), that it is not the world that makes beliefs true but the justification provided by the coherence amongst beliefs. The result is a holistic view of subjectivity in which a holistic view of meaning can be considered non- metaphysically grounded. Foucault’s direct allusion to Heidegger shows that a truth- making relation involves a rich and complex consideration of subjectivity from which the transcendental self of (RPK2) derives as, at best, a distorting abstraction. As I try to show in my reconstruction, Foucault proceeds in two steps. First, his invocation of Heidegger on truth reveals a holistic view of subjectivity and opens up space for the critique of truth-making relation. This view of subjectivity is revealed properly in his commentary on Binswanger’s history of dreaming, and provides a retrospective justification for this critique. Second, a holistic view of meaning derives from a sceptical use of Heidegger’s views on truth developed in the series of counter- examples to Husserl. In what follows, I present Foucault’s two steps. 3.1.1.2. Foucault’s invocation of Heidegger Recall that in point (1) above, Foucault related the act of signification of visual experience to that of linguistic meaning, by using the example of the expression of ostentation as a case of an uncontroversial description of propositional truth. At the same time, however, Foucault’s formulation alluded directly to Heidegger’s approach to truth. Foucault thus created an effect of dissociation between the visual and the linguistic, which are closely linked in Husserl. Recall also that in the same point (1), Foucault argues that even the simplest ostentative use ‘opens up a new horizon of meaning’. The simple use of a speaker showing something as something ‘breaks with the immediate horizon of perception’ in which this very use is, according to Husserl, supposed to be grounded. Foucault’s dissociation from Husserl is similar to Heidegger’s own formulations. For Heidegger, as we have seen in our approach to his later thought, language constitutes the necessary precondition for the emergence of human existence. 30 In this way, propositional truth and truth in general are approached in terms of an apocalyptic experience.31 In the light of Foucault’s remarks, Heidegger’s approach to truth in ¶44, ‘Dasein, Disclosedness, and Truth’, can be considered as developing in three steps. 30 See section 2.2.3.1. 31 Although Heidegger’s approach to propositional truth is mainly developed in BT: ¶44, see also his “Introduction”, II, ¶7, A and B, and especially, pp. 32–33/55–57. 157 First, Heidegger presents the traditional conception of propositional truth as registered in the beginning of the metaphysical tradition. Second, he proceeds with a critique of the most recent metaphysical rendering of that traditional structure of truth, and, third, he concludes with what he considers the ontological foundation of truth, revealed by his dwelling on the traditional structure. Again it is useful to render Heidegger’s first step in terms of Engel’s triangular conception of truth. Any assertion describes, and in that sense – phenomenologically speaking – intends to, a state of affairs. The function of this ‘intentional’ element, or, in Heidegger’s terms, the being-of-assertion, is to aim at truth, and in that case the truth of assertion is its confirmation by the state of affairs it describes.32 However, and this constitutes his second step, he reinterprets confirmation as uncoveredness. For Heidegger, the uncovering that the assertion performs does not refer to or presuppose a function of representing qua setting confirmation conditions. Rather, it is the confirmation of the assertion itself: “To say that an assertion “is true” signifies that it uncovers the entity as it is in itself. Such an assertion asserts, points out, ‘lets’ the entity ‘be seen’ (απόφανσις) in its uncoveredness.”33 This encapsulates Heidegger’s critique of Husserl’s conception of intentionality. According to Dreyfus’ analytic reconstruction, “Heidegger seeks to show” two things: (1) that intentionality without the experience of intentional content is characteristic of the unimpeded mode of everyday activity, whereas Husserl’s ([…]) mentalistic intentionality is a derivative mode that occurs only where there is some disturbance, and (2) that both these modes of intentionality presuppose being-in-the-world, a more fundamental form of intentionality that Heidegger calls originary transcendence, and that he claims is the condition of the possibility of both active and contemplative intentionality.34 The first point shows that Heidegger’s approach to truth is situated in the context of his attempt to overcome the traditional view of subjectivity, elaborated in section 2.2.2.1. The second aim of his attempt is revealed in the third step of his argumentation, concerning the ontological foundation of truth. In the words of Tugendhat’s astute analysis: “The decisive step beyond Husserl is no longer substantiated through argumentation; indeed, it is not even recognizable as an 32 BT: 218/261. 33 BT: 218/261, emphasis in the original. 34 DREYFUS 1993: 22. 158 independent step.”35 Tugendhat observes that Heidegger has moved from talking of disclosedness or the ‘uncovering of the entity just as it is in itself’ to the ‘uncovering of the entity’, and then to ‘uncovering’ simpliciter.36 According to Heidegger, the traditional view of truth from Aristotle to Husserl, and to contemporary analytic philosophy, signifies “the Being-uncovered [Entdeckt-sein] of the entity itself – that entity in the “how” of its uncoveredness.”37 This means that a proposition of the ‘cat is on the mat’ type, when true, reveals the ‘how’ of the entities it describes. However, that ‘how’ presupposes the ‘what’, or, in other words, assertoric truth and falsehood presuppose the undisclosedness of entities before any specification, and before their being considered candidates for propositional truth. The presupposition of the truth of assertion as uncovering is truth as uncovering tout court: These entities become that which has been uncovered. They are ‘true’ in a second sense. What is primarily ‘true’ – that is uncovering – is Dasein. “Truth” in the second sense does not mean Being-uncovering (uncovering), but Being-uncovered (uncoveredness).38 In short, for Heidegger, the common assertoric usage of truth is derivative from a first, primordial one.39 Primordial truth is grounded in Dasein as being-in-the-world, in Dasein’s immersion in and emergence from a nexus of spatiotemporal contingency.40 We now understand the estranging effect that Heidegger’s rhetoric creates as he describes the marvelousness in the banality of plain speech, and it is to this that Foucault alludes when he refers to the necessary presence of an opened-up world of significations before any possible assertoric talk can take place. This enables us finally to appreciate the different levels of Foucault’s argument, and specifically the way he differs from Heidegger. For Foucault, meaning is a matter of discursive context. His difference from Heidegger in his ‘Introduction’ to Traum und Existenz lies, as we have seen in 2.2.3.2, in the latter’s possible relapse into a transcendental stance. 35 TUGENDHAT 1993: 251. 36 BT: 218–219/261. 37 BT: 218/261, emphasis in the original. 38 BT: 220/263, emphasis added. 39 Cf. “It is worth emphasizing that Heidegger does not think that the “correspondence theory of truth” is wrong but only superficial. If truth requires correspondence, correspondence requires presencing, and presencing requires ontological difference, which is not apart from the Ek-sistenz of Dasein.” (ALLEN 1993: 89). 40 See sections 2.2.2.1–2.2.2.2 and 2.2.3.1. 159 3.1.1.3. The sceptical character of Foucault’s critique In what follows I wish to illustrate in more detail the sceptical character of Foucault’s critique. I wish to argue that in his ‘Introduction’ this is evident in his tactical usage of a holistic view of meaning as derived from a holistic view of subjectivity. For this it is necessary to quote key passages from his text: Dans la première des Logische Untersuchungen, Husserl a justement distingué l’indice et la signification. Sans doute les phénomènes d’expression se trouvent-ils intriqués au point qu’on incline à les confondre. […] Par lui-même, l’indice n’a pas de signification, et il ne peut en acquérir que d’une manière seconde, et par la voie oblique d’une conscience qui l’utilise comme repère, comme référence ou comme jalon. Je vois des trous dans la neige, des sortes d’étoiles régulières, des cristaux d’ombre. Un chasseur y verra, lui, les traces fraîches d’un lièvre. Ce sont là deux situations vécues ; il serait vain de dire que l’une comporte plus de vérité que l’autre ; mais dans le second schéma se manifeste l’essence de l’indication, dans le premier non. C’est pour le chasseur seulement que la petite étoile creusée* dans la neige est un signe. Ceci ne veut pas dire que le chasseur a plus de matériel associatif que moi et qu’à une perception il sait associer l’image d’un lièvre qui me fait défaut dans la même situation. L’association y est dérivée par rapport à la structure d’indication : elle ne fait que repasser en traits plains le pointillé d’une structure qui est déjà marquée dans l’essence de l’indice et de l’indiqué : « L’association rappelle à la conscience des contenus en leur laissant le soin de se rattacher aux contenus donnés suivant la loi de leurs essences respectives. » […] Une phénoménologie du rêve ne saurait manquer, pour être rigoureuse, de distinguer les éléments d’indication qui pour l’analyste, peuvent désigner une situation objective qu’ils jalonnent et, d’autre part, les contenus significatifs qui constituent, de l’intérieur, l’expérience onirique.41 Foucault’s visual example, the star-shaped hole in the snow that ‘is a sign’ (‘est un signe’) only to the hunter (that a hare that has just passed), is used to illustrate the distinction between index and signification, and to show that the very phenomenological perspective which sets it cannot prevent its collapse. His approach to this distinction aims to expose Husserl’s structure as incapable of explaining how signification works, that is, why something acquires or has meaning and something else does not. He shows that Husserl’s transcendental structure cannot accommodate the possibility of the subject’s forming different experiences from the same empirical 41 IRE: 103–104, emphasis added, save the marked word. 160 data. In other words, it cannot explain how the same state of affairs can produce two different experiential states. In the example above, the same visual impression, i.e. the visual encounter with the same thing (the holes in the snow) by two different viewers (a hunter and a non-hunter), results neither in the same experience nor in the same meaning: the same visual impression has two different horizons of expectation. Thus, the ideal content cannot provide the necessary constitution; it cannot provide the same horizon of fulfilment. This means either that the same fact creates different meanings for different subjects, or that for some subjects there is a meaning while for others there is not. 42 To put it more formally, two subjects with the same psychophysical constitution, i.e. equipped with the same transcendental structure, when subjected to the same visual stimuli, either produce two radically different real aspects of meaning which cannot be accommodated under the same ideal aspect, or produce two radically different meanings altogether. In either case, Husserl’s structure is compromised as it does not allow for either of these possibilities. Foucault’s argument is similar to Quine’s argument of the inscrutability of reference and the meaning holism he holds in his “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”. I will briefly summarise Quine and then show how Foucault’s approach can be translated into Quine’s analytical version. Quine’s critical revision of empiricist epistemology consists in the refutation of its two basic dogmas: One is a belief in some fundamental cleavage between truths which are analytic, or grounded in meanings independently of matters of fact, and truths which are synthetic, or grounded in fact. The other dogma is reductionism: the belief that each meaningful statement is equivalent to some logical construct upon terms which refer to immediate experience. Both dogmas, I shall argue, are ill-founded. One effect of abandoning them is, as we shall see, a blurring of the supposed boundary between speculative metaphysics and natural science. Another effect is a shift toward pragmatism.43 According to De Rosa and Lepore’s reconstruction of Quine’s argument for meaning holism: It is moreover, a common view in the critical tradition that, in “Two Dogmas” and elsewhere, Quine holds that verificationism together with confirmation 42 There is a deliberate hyperbola created by putting the dilemma in this way, and especially regarding the second term of the dilemma. According to Husserl’s structure, it seems that in a conscious act there is always some meaning. Such a hyperbolic formulation, however, is close to Foucault’s example and, mainly, captures the radical difference between the two viewers. 43 QUINE 1980a: 20. 161 holism (sometimes called the Quine-Duhem thesis) entails meaning holism. […] (P1) The meaning of a sentence consists in its (dis)confirming experiences (or empirical content) – that is, in what counts as evidence for its truth (verification about meaning). (P2) Sentences of a scientific theory do not have their range of (dis)confirming experiences individually but have them only as a corporate body – that is, they lack empirical content in isolation from the other sentences of the theory (Duhem’s thesis). (C) The sentences of a language do not have meaning individually but have it as a corporate body – that is, they lack meaning in isolation from the other sentences of the language (meaning holism).44 Husserl’s meaning atomism, as instantiated in (FH3) and (FH4), is equivalent to (P1). As we have seen, (FH3) and (FH4) describe the adherence to the first thesis of meaning atomism, associated with an epistemologically empiricist trend, “according to which the meaning of a statement and its truth could be ascertained from its connections to experiences.”45 In this case, “if one equates the meaning of a sentence with its truth conditions, and if the truth conditions are the verification conditions, then one can move from a verificationist conception of truth to a verificationist conception of meaning.”46 Thus, in Foucault’s interpretation Husserl holds something like (P1). I will now show that Foucault’s hole-hare example indicates support for (P2). Here we do not have the case of a scientific theory, but instead a simple case of visual experience. What is almost uncontroversially illustrated in our example of the interpretation of the holes in the snow as hare tracks is how a potentially infinite number of background assumptions, which cannot be included in the ideal content of meaning or in the subject’s transcendental structure, is involved in the hunter’s judgement. To provide just a very small sample of these assumptions: the knowledge of the existence of the hare as an animal, the ability to recognise the paw imprint of a hare, the knowledge to distinguish similar traces produced by animals of equivalent shape and size, the ability to extrapolate the full shape of the trace when it does not survive in one piece, and so on. This brief list includes none of further presuppositions (of the assumptions above), for example that animals leave traces, that an imprint between an object and a surface occurs when a series of criteria 44 DE ROSA and LEPORE 2004: 67 45 ENGEL 2002: 30. 46 ENGEL 2002: 30. 162 concerning both object and surface are fulfilled, etc., nor any more complex assumptions such as the understanding of when traces are genuine, whether there are any reasons for the traces to be fabricated, and so forth. The fact that a non-hunter does not share the same assumptions and that, as a result, he does not see what a hunter sees, but does see something different, shows that sensory perception, at this level, depends not so much on one’s psychophysical constitution as on one’s cultural upbringing, practices and expectations, manifested in one’s theoretical and practical, explicit and tacit, knowledge. Today, numerous examples – ranging from studies on visual perception in non-Western populations to substantiated cases from contemporary scientific practice and the history of science – corroborate this conclusion. 47 Foucault’s example thus provides evidence for his support of (P2), which, together with his support for P1, allows us tentatively to infer his support of (C). We can now understand what Foucault means when he concludes that the problem does not arise from a lack of ‘associative material’. When he states that, for Husserl, “[l]’association y est dérivée par rapport à la structure d’indication”, he means that the faculty of association (along with the mental contents of each act) are grounded in the structure of ideal content. In other words, association is grounded in a non-psychological, non-contingent, universal structure. However, as the hole-hare example shows, the ideal content, or the set of necessary beliefs, is precisely not universal. For Foucault, Husserl’s attempt to insulate a phenomenological account of human experience from contingent, non-universal factors by assuming an inherent, ahistorical, universalist structure is, as we have seen, problematic. Given this analysis, we can understand the conflict between (C) and both (FH3) and (FH4), and (RPK2) and (RPK3): even the simplest proposition describing the simplest visual experience does not take its meaning from any universally available and shared ideal content, but instead from a potentially infinite pool of contingent background assumptions and propositions. And this is precisely what the debunking of the reductionist thesis by meaning holism achieved. The debunking of 47 See CHALMERS 1992: chapter 3.2, and chapter 3, passim. For an example of the cultural impact on visual perception, see SEGALL, CAMPBELL, and HERSKOVITS 1963 and 1966. For a graphic description of the change a medical student undergoes during the process of learning to diagnose from an X-ray, see POLANYI 1973: 101. For established examples from the history of science, see HUNSON 1958, KUHN 1970 [1962], and FEYERABEND 1975. 163 reductionism involves the collapse of the distinction between contingent qua empirical and necessary qua structural truths. The difference between what the hunter and the non-hunter see ceases to be a difference in metaphysical substance, and becomes a difference in degree of entrenchment in the web of beliefs. Thus, (RPK2) and (RPK3), that is the post-Kantian subject, are debunked. But in which sense is Foucault’s attempt sceptical? His argument is dialectical, and he uses the trope we described in section 1.4.1.3 as uncontentious description. The phenomenologist is bound to accept Foucault’s uncontentious example. The language that Foucault uses in order to describe the visual experience is important. The seemingly disinterested description, in uncontentious neutralised terms (‘holes in the snow’) gives way to a double literary gloss which verges on the poetic (‘kind of regular stars’, ‘crystalline shadows’). Here Foucault does not at all use a fully naturalised discourse. He does precisely not employ the naturalising discursive modes of physics and geometry in order to translate and reduce ‘the holes in the snow’ into something like ‘quasi-symmetrical rectangles in unified background of contrasted colour’. Foucault continues to work within the phenomenological discourse as, according to the later Husserl, experience of such sort does not come, even (and especially) prima facie, in the analytical language of classical empiricism, but as part of a Lebenswelt. The double qualification (‘kind of regular stars’, ‘crystalline shadows’) then orientates towards such an uncontentious description. All that Foucault offers is a possible, legitimate and minimal expansive description of an everyday Erlebnis equipollent to the hunter’s, to paraphrase Shakespeare, ‘distinct regard’.48 I take Foucault’s style to be indicative of his sceptical stance. He does not adhere to either (P1) or (P2). Instead, he uses them tactically. He does not hold any theory of truth or meaning. However, rendering Foucault’s argument in terms of Quine’s is important, as the contrast between them enables us to appreciate another dimension of Foucault’s sceptical stance. Quine’s thesis of meaning holism is related to his view that philosophy is continuous with science, interpreted as philosophia 48 Montano to three gentlemen in Othello: “Let’s to the seaside (hoa)/ As well to see the vessel that’s come in;/ As to throw our eyes for the brave Othello,/ Even till we make the main, and th’ aerial blue,/ An indistinct regard.” (II, 1, emphasis added). 164 ancilla scientiae.49 However, although naturalism corroborates holism, holism does not necessitate naturalism. In fact, Foucault’s example is a neutralised redescription: the Quinean naturalised stance is used but deprived of its clear metaphysical presuppositions. As in Rorty’s non-reductive physicalism, premised on a Wittgensteinian reappropriation of Quine, naturalism qua physicalism becomes a specific discourse for a specific purpose, and nothing more. For Foucault, as for Rorty, the consequence of holism is the demetaphysicalisation of naturalism. The shift towards pragmatism, to which we saw Quine referring at the beginning of his ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’, is complete only in this way.50 Furthermore, Foucault’s neutralised redescription as an instance of his sceptical stance is manifested in yet another rhetorical trope. According to his description, the index (Husserl’s ‘Anzeichen’) acquires signification, in that something becomes an index of something else, in virtue of the oblique way of consciousness which uses it ‘comme repère, comme référence ou comme jalon’.51 Here Foucault employs Nietzsche’s trope of using philosophical terms in a non- philosophical way, and vice versa.52 Not only can the casual, en passant qualification of index as ‘référence’ be read as prefiguring the contextual determination of reference by an equally contextually determined meaning, but, more importantly, index and reference are also trivialised, de-theorized, becoming ‘repère’ and ‘jalon’, thereby reducing the language of foundationalist metaphysics to the level of everyday talk. In that way, everyday talk and metaphysics become indistinct, revealing that the substance attributed to the latter is nothing but a rhetorical trope of the former. In that way, to use the metaphor of language as a landscape in our first chapter, référence, 49 “In short, naturalism, verificationism, and behaviourism are deeply interrelated in Quine’s philosophy. It is within this framework that Quine’s meaning holism, in the shape of his thesis of the indeterminacy of translation, is best understood.” (DE ROSA and LEPORE 2004: 68.) 50 The difference between Wittgensteinian therapy and Quinean naturalism encapsulates the difference between Foucault and Quine and enables the former’s sceptical stance to be revealed. For an illuminating comparison between Wittgenstein and Quine, see ARRINGTON and GLOCK (eds.) 2005. Specifically, for similarities between Wittgenstein’s and Quine’s holism, see GIBSON 2005. For illuminating differences, involving Quine’s scientistic naturalism, see CANFIELD 2005, HOOKWAY 2005, and HACKER 2005, who provides a Wittgensteinian critique of Quine. POST 2005 is equally illuminating as he explicitly aligns Rorty with Wittgenstein, and criticises both Wittgenstein and Quine from a post-Quinean, scientistic naturalistic (non-Rortian) perspective. 51 IRE: 103. 52 NEHAMAS 1985. See, for example, the very first lines from Beyond Good and Evil: “Supposing truth to be a woman – what? is the suspicion not well founded that all philosophers, when they have been dogmatists, have had little understanding of women? that the gruesome earnestness, the clumsy importunity with which they have hitherto been in the habit of approaching truth have been inept and improper means for winning a wench?” (BGE: 31). 165 the queen of metaphysical variables, loses her privileged status. The contingency of a farmer using a jalon to mark his field or to construct a scarecrow points to the contingency of references emerging as nothing but thicknesses, frequencies of linguistic uses, as foldings in the seamless web of language. These remarks must suffice here to indicate that already in this early text Foucault’s approach, here to Husserl’s conception of meaning, reveals his response to the twofold (epistemological and ontological) problem of the metaphysical tradition since Plato. Truth, the truth of the sign, of the expression, of the image, was defined in terms of its correspondence to something which is not a sign, not an expression, not an image. In ancient philosophy the correspondence was guaranteed by the essences of a structured cosmos. In post-Cartesian philosophy, it is guaranteed by the intentional structure of a transcendental subject. In both cases, metaphysical structures are postulated. In fact, what we see is the replacement of one metaphysical structure by another. The essentialist structure of the world ‘out there’ has been transplanted into the equally essentialist structure of the mind ‘in here’.53 Foucault’s reference to ‘the interior of the activity of consciousness’ and ‘the mode of interiority’, in points (3) and (6) respectively, is nothing other than the critique of this move of internalisation. These structural, critical conclusions are supplemented by the more substantive conclusions contained in points (6) and (7) that, as we saw, register the debunking of meaning atomism. From the perspective of the Husserlian structure, Foucault tries to show that even a singular ostensive proposition is rendered meaningless. Meaning is cut off from any ‘indication objèctive’ as no “contexte extérieur” that is always ultimately shaped by individual and public beliefs and practices can be used as the interface between world and subject that the ‘real’ aspect of meaning is supposed to play. It follows that the possibility of “rencontre réelle”, of a contact between the expression and the world is precluded. Foucault’s aphorism that phenomenology gave to images a language that nobody can understands describes perfectly the impossibility of the Husserlian account to either (a) accommodate and justify the existence of multiple efficacious descriptions for a single reality, or (b) conclude that the multiple efficacious descriptions are to be identified with numerous efficacious realities. 53 See ALLEN 1993: chapters 1 and 2. 166 Much more needs to be said about Foucault’s analysis of Binswanger. In this section I have merely tried to show what kind of analysis is required to unlock Foucault’s dense but intriguing and timely analyses. In a nutshell, I have tried to show the three steps of Foucault’s argument. First, Husserl’s conception of meaning and truth is grounded in a specific conception of the relation between self and world that is strongly associated with the Cartesian tradition. Second, Foucault invokes Heidegger’s insights, and, specifically, the emergence of a holistic view of truth and meaning from a holistic view of selfhood. Finally, reconstructing Foucault’s critical example, I showed that his argument exemplifies his sceptical stance. His use of quasi-phenomenological descriptions and a holistic view of meaning and truth are only tactical. They are the two tools with which he achieves his dual goal: first, an internalist critique of Husserl, and second, the freeing of naturalism from residual metaphysics. Instead of a more formal conclusion to this section on Foucault’s early critique of Husserl, I suggest we allow our imagination to conjure up the almost Heraclitean image of children setting (jalonner) goalposts with a couple of sticks (jalons), and juxtapose this image with the scientistic imagery of a metaphysically structured reality with fixed references. Thus, we can see again Foucault’s Nietzschean stance: the contemporary views on truth and meaning are metaphysical cover-ups, distortions qua metaphysical abstractions of linguistic uses.54 Metaphysics, as the falsification of the quotidian, is truth as the falsification of interpretation. 54 For Foucault’s reading that truth is that which attempts to cover up interpretation, see NFM: 600 and our analysis in sections 2.4.1, and 2.4, passim. For juxtaposition as a critical tool, cf. GEUSS 2010. 167 3.2. Critique of Psychological Reason II: Histoire de la folie 3.2.0. Introduction In his essay on Binswanger, Foucault not only criticised Husserl’s aspirations for phenomenology, he also argued that the imagination, and especially dreaming, as an instance of the function of imagination, reveals Dasein’s structure as being-in-the- world. As such, dreaming is viewed as the manifestation of the contingency of human existence. Dreaming becomes an experience of the groundlessness of human existence, conceived as the absence of any metaphysical ground. Dreaming thus becomes an experience of nothingness. As we have already seen in his approach to Nietzsche’s conception of interpretation, and, in the previous chapter, in his critique of phenomenology, Foucault’s sceptical stance consists in a critique of any metaphysical attempt to cover up this nothingness. In this chapter I will argue that Foucault’s Histoire de la folie constitutes the extension of his sceptical stance towards any covering-up of the experience of nothingness. Madness, or, better, the experience of madness, is conceived as an instance of the experience of nothingness, and this experience of nothingness is approached in terms of a historical investigation. The argument of Histoire de la folie can be roughly summarised as follows. Foucault distinguishes between two fundamental, historical conceptions of madness: the pre-modern and the modern. These two conceptions differ to such an extent that they must be considered as referring to different entities. The modern conception of madness considers itself ahistorical, and in presenting itself as the only true and meaningful conception, it aspires to eliminate any previous or alternative conceptions of madness. I wish to show that Foucault’s sceptical stance is twofold, exhibiting both a critical aspect and a more constructive one. On the one hand, Foucault’s historical investigation is the critique of the metaphysical, i.e. the modern, scientistic and dogmatic, attitude towards madness, which Foucault believes emerges in modernity and forms the basis for the scientific discourse on madness.1 On the other, Foucault attempts to uncover the structure of the pre-modern experience of madness as, in his view, a more authentic experience of nothingness. 1 See 2.4.4. For a short account of Foucault’s notion of experience in relation to modernity, see 2.5. 168 In this subchapter 3.2, I will show how Foucault’s sceptical stance can be exemplified in a series of representative passages from the first chapter of Histoire de la folie. It is beyond the scope of this investigation to offer an exhaustive interpretation of this work, and, thus, I focus exclusively on the pre-modern experience of madness. The idea that the pre-modern experience of madness is an experience of nothingness is illustrated at the beginning of Histoire de la folie in the most representative way. Specifically, I will show: (1) how the structure of the experience of madness qua nothingness is uncovered by Foucault’s actual historical analysis; (2) how it corresponds to the experience of nothingness we saw in “Nietzsche, Freud, Marx”; and (3) how it is related to Foucault’s sceptical stance. According to Foucault’s historical investigation, the pre-modern experience of madness can be distinguished into, on the one hand, the cosmological or tragic experience of madness, which he traces mainly in painting (in the works of Bosch and Dürer), and, on the other, the critical, moral or ironic experience of madness, which he traces mainly in the work of Erasmus and Montaigne. The cosmological experience of madness corresponds roughly to the ‘experience’ in Blanchot’s Kafka and Rilke, and in Foucault’s Nietzsche. The critical experience of madness can be seen as the more pragmatist stance towards nothingness. It constitutes the discursive hiatus which enables Foucault to launch his critique of the metaphysical conceptions of madness and selfhood, in order to present both these two pre-modern types of experience as authentic, and to associate his work with the latter. This association manifests a self-referential aspect, necessary for and corroborating of a sceptical stance. Section 3.2.1 focuses on the experience of leprosy as an instance of the experience of nothingness. Section 3.2.2 approaches the experience of madness in terms of the practice of exclusion and the artistic topos of the ship of fools. Section 3.2.3 discusses Foucault’s analysis of the ironic experience of madness as a structural transformation of the theme of death. Finally, section 3.2.4 analyses the tragic experience of madness in the context of gothic symbolism in manuscript iconography. As my approach requires some analysis of Foucault’s rhetoric, I will now introduce some terminology for the rhetorical categories that I will use frequently. First, there are two notions that I borrow from the field of semiotics: isotopy and 169 allotopy.2 Isotopy can be understood as the rhetorical function that “mak[es] possible the uniform reading of” a sentence or a text.3 Specifically, it can be defined as the recurrence of a minimal unit of meaning that enables the coherent understanding of a sentence or a text. Using the distinction between type and token to explain how isotopy works, we can say that the type is the specific meaning instantiated in a series of tokens, a series of elements which are either lexical, in the case of a sentence, or sentential, in the case of a text. For example, in the sentence “l’aboiement du chien est fort,” the subject of the sentence (l’aboiement), the subjective genitive (du chien) and the predicate (est fort) are the lexical tokens that instantiate the meaning category of ‘canine behaviour’. The effect of coherence is achieved through the actualisation of a semantic possibility. The actualisation of a possible meaning occurs when a series of tokens are interpreted as manifestations of a possible type, of a possible meaning. From the reader’s perspective, this idea can be formulated as follows: the effect of a coherent interpretation of a text or a sentence is achieved through the semantic fulfilment of a semantic expectation. Allotopy should not be understood as the opposite of isotopy but as a variation on it. Allotopy is best understood as the function of disturbing a series of initial expectations, of decentring a semantic possibility from its usual place in the web of linguistic use, thereby undermining or postponing a semantic fulfilment. Allotopy is thus the generation of unexpected meaning and the introduction of radical metaphors. For example, since canine behaviour as a metaphor for human comportment is well entrenched in our linguistic usage, the sentence “l’aboiement du commissaire est fort” works as an isotopy. The sentence “l’aboiement de l’arbre est vert,” however, generates unexpected meanings and radical metaphors, and, thus, works as an allotropy. Thus, allotopy is the structure that enables the generation of all these tropes, such as fragments, contrasts, tensions, ironies, contradictions and paradoxes, that can be encapsulated under the categories ‘unexpected meaning’ and ‘radical metaphor’. Second, Foucault divides his text into sections, employing the modernist technique of the line break between two paragraphs of text. (The fact that the sections 2 See ECO 1980, and GREIMAS 1987 [1970]. 3 GREIMAS 1987 [1970]: 188, emphasis added. 170 are not numbered can be seen to corroborate the modernist character of the technique.) Often sections can be treated as relatively autonomous textual units, as at times they treat a specific topic. I will generally use ‘section’ as unit of reference. Third, I would like to suggest an ad hoc heuristic for mapping the tropes that Foucault employs. Of course, these tropes do not exhaust Foucault’s formulations, and should be considered more as overlapping clusters of characteristics rather than distinct categories. Foucault often begins the discussion of a topic with an empirical generalisation confined to a specific temporal and spatial context, and expressed in one or a few interlinked sentences. This constitutes a trope which I call a historical generalisation. His examples of it are usually backed up by specific historical references, which I call juxtapositional justifications or narrative justifications. The first corroborates the historical claim through a juxtaposition of facts, while the latter justifies it in the form of a narrative. For example, the very first line of Foucault’s text, “À la fin du Moyen Âge, la lèpre disparaît du monde occidental”, constitutes a historical generalisation.4 The lines that open the third section of this chapter play the same role: Commençons par la plus simple de ces figures, la plus symbolique aussi. Un objet nouveau vient de faire son apparition dans le paysage imaginaire de la Renaissance ; bientôt il y occupera une place privilégiée : c’est la Nef des fous, étrange bateau ivre qui file le long des calmes fleuves de la Rhénanie et des canaux flamands.5 The two paragraphs that follow function as juxtapositional and narrative justifications respectively. The importance of these tropes lies in their genealogical function. They describe the empirical domain which the metaphysical perspective has usurped, and in which it is grounded. As such, they circumscribe a discursive space in which the metaphysician and the (Foucauldian) nominalist can meet. It is this domain that supplies the material used in the critical genealogical inquiries. Finally, another rhetorical trope that Foucault uses is that of the scholium. Specifically, I have in mind here Deleuze’s reading of the trope in his approach to Spinoza’s style.6 In the same way as Spinoza’s commentary on his propositions is a 4 HF: 15. 5 HF: 21–22. 6 “These are the “scholia,” which are nonetheless inserted into the demonstrative chain, even though the reader quickly realises that they have a completely different tone. They have another style, almost 171 derivation from his apodictic, more geometrico style of argumentative exposition in order to make more idiosyncratic comments, Foucault’s scholia distance him from the expository style of factual description in order to provide a ‘philosophical’ exegesis. Although it is difficult to sub-divide the scholia further, they can be distinguished into historical and philosophical kinds. For example, Foucault’s discussion of the disappearance of leprosy and the structural importance of the rituals that accompanied it constitutes a historical scholium.7 The infamous discussion of the symbolism of the Narrenschiff would be an example of a philosophical scholium.8 The scholia, as interpretative interruptions, often provide an exposition of the main perspective and valuation from which Foucault develops his genealogical analyses. The stylistic contrast between the scholia, on the one hand, and the tropes of historical generalisation, and juxtapositional and narrative justification, on the other, emphasises the significance of the material in the scholia. It is the experience of leprosy as nothingness to which we will now turn. 3.2.1. The experience of leprosy as experience of nothingness I shall begin with an analysis of Foucault’s conclusion of his discussion of the disappearance of leprosy in the West. His conclusion, in the excerpts below, is a series of interconnected scholia. [1] Étrange disparition qui ne fut pas sans doute l’effet longtemps cherché d’obscures pratiques médicales; mais le résultat spontané de cette ségrégation, et la conséquence, aussi, après la fin des Croisades, de la rupture avec les foyers orientaux d’infection. [2] La lèpre se retire, abandonnant sans emploi ces bas lieux et ces rites qui n’étaient point destinés à la supprimer, mais à la maintenir dans une distance sacrée, à la fixer dans une exaltation inverse. Ce qui va rester sans doute plus longtemps que la lèpre, et sa maintiendra encore à une époque où, depuis des années déjà, les léproseries seront vides, ce sont les valeurs et les images qui s’étaient attachées au personnage du lépreux; c’est le sens de cette exclusion, l’importance dans le groupe social de cette figure insistante et redoutable qu’on n’écarte pas sans avoir tracé autour d’elle un cercle sacré. [3] Si on a retiré le lépreux du monde, et de la communauté de l’Eglise visible, son existence pourtant manifeste toujours Dieu puisque tout ensemble another language. […] The scholia are ostensive and polemical. […] If the scholia are inserted into the demonstrative chain, it is therefore less because they form a part of it than because they intersect and reintersect with it, by virtue of their own nature. It is like a broken chain, discontinuous, subterranean, volcanic, which at irregular intervals comes to interrupt the chain of demonstrative elements, the great and continuous fluvial chain.” (DELEUZE 1998 [1993]: 145–146). 7 HF: 18–19. 8 HF: 25–26. 172 elle indique sa colère et marque sa bonté: [...]. Les lépreux de Brueghel assistent de loin, mais pour toujours, à cette montée du Calvaire où tout un peuple accompagne le Christ. Et, témoins hiératiques du mal, ils font leur salut dans et par cette exclusion elle-même: dans une étrange réversibilité qui s’oppose à celle des mérites et des prières, ils sont sauvés par la main qui ne se tend pas.9 In scholium [1], Foucault provides possible real causes for the disappearance of leprosy. He explains the disappearance as a consequence of both the segregation of lepers and the breaking of contact with the main loci of contagion in the East after the end of the Crusades. I consider Foucault’s presentation of this explanation important in at least two ways. First, the rhetoric of the explanation is interpretatively significant. Second, the explanation itself raises a metaphilosophical point concerning Foucault’s genealogy. First, the position of the sentence that expresses this explanation is important. Foucault does not present the causes at the beginning of the discussion, but instead places them in what can be seen as the inaugural line of his conclusion. The presentation of this explanation as a historical justification takes the form of a negative description. First, he describes the disappearance in negative terms: it is not the outcome of ‘obscure medical practices’. Then, he presents the actual causes as broad macroevents, such as segregation and the end of Crusades. These take more the form of describing a correlation rather than determining a specific causal relation. Although it might seem that Foucault is making a rather en passant claim, the place of the sentence and its negative structure imply a different interpretation. Namely, Foucault emphasises here the difference between the above practices and the actual causes of the disappearance of leprosy. Given the brevity of the positive description, Foucault’s presentation of the disappearance of leprosy as an accidental fact makes an emphatic distinction between the way leprosy was then understood and the material counterpart of this understanding. Second, Foucault’s positive description is itself indicative. In light of his critique of a metaphysical conception of madness as an ahistorical entity, the presence of his own naturalistic explanation seems paradoxical. Is it possible that for Foucault 9 HF: 18–19, the emphasis and numbering are my own. The indexes divide the text into what I see as different but overlapping scholia. 173 madness is historically constructed while leprosy is not? I think that there are two possible lines of defence of Foucault’s description. According to a first line of defence, the fact that Foucault’s genealogy undoes the metaphysical conception of madness does not necessarily entail that any kind of physical entity should be considered as historically constructed. Foucault himself, in the context of a different genealogical inquiry, is very careful not to associate every scientific discourse with the possibility of radical breaks, to the extent that he seems to attribute a kind of unbroken linearity to the history of mathematics.10 According to another line of defence, Foucault’s brevity could be seen as indicative of another strategy. His devoting so little space to the issue can be read as a case of ellipsis. The reason he does not provide any further justification or explanation is not because he thinks that his analysis of the causes of the extinction of leprosy is conclusive. This kind of ellipsis is a frequently used and arguably necessary characteristic of genealogy. Genealogical lines of inquiry come to an end not because they reach any ahistorical bedrock, but either because there is no further information available, or because further pieces of information are unnecessary given the scope and the objectives of a particular genealogical inquiry.11 Thus, one could argue here that there is no apparent need to invoke more information on the issue of the extinction of leprosy. (In the same way, there is no obvious reason to present additional information on the other issues that Foucault does not develop, such as the treatment of leprosy before the existence of lazar houses, the relation between royal and ecclesiastic power regarding the issues of confronting leprosy, the institutional organisation of such an enterprise, the Menippean origins of the Medieval soties,12 or the experience of death before the artistic representations of death in the danse macabre themes.) Two points derive from the consideration of Foucault’s brevity on the matter as indicative of his genealogical inquiry. First, I believe that these brief quasi- explanations should more plausibly be considered to have the status of a historical platitude, allowing the (Foucauldian) nominalist, who opposes any alternative dogmatic qua metaphysical explanations, to be able to argue with the metaphysician. 10 See DE I, 1968, 59, “Sur l’archéologie des sciences. Réponse au Cercle d’épistémologie”. 11 See GEUSS 1999a. 12 On this issue, see Bakhtin’s “From the prehistory of novelistic discourse”, in BAKHTIN 1982. See also BAKHTIN 1984. 174 Not only does the brevity cum incontestability of Foucault’s explanation corroborate this reading, but, more importantly, it can be considered as a tactical concession to the metaphysician: the naturalist character of the explanation can (only ostensibly) be seen to retain a (quasi-)ahistorical, (quasi-)metaphysical aspect and thus enable the metaphysician to accede to it more easily. Second, this last point leads to a more general question concerning the metaphysical status of naturalism, that is, whether naturalism is a variation of the same metaphysical tradition that we discussed in the previous chapters. While any detailed discussion is beyond the scope of this enquiry, I would like to say a few words here about this issue. If naturalism conceives itself as opposed to speculative metaphysics, and contends that “all there is is the world studied by science”,13 and if we accept, following Foucault, first, that there is actually no substantive difference between speculative metaphysics and the Cartesian tradition up to Husserl and Engel, and, second, that science should not be conceived of in terms of this Cartesian tradition, then naturalism can only be synonymous with pragmatism. 14 The first scholium can thus be seen as exemplary of Foucault’s argumentative strategy to draw in the dogmatist by using the kind of naturalistic descriptions that would appeal to him. And yet, we know that (for Foucault) naturalism, seen through a sceptical and historicist perspective – in short, through a pragmatist one – can only be nominalist. Scholium [2] elaborates on the distinction made in the first. Again, he approaches the matter with a negative description as he specifies the aim of the segregation and the religious rituals concerning leprosy: they were not destined to eliminate leprosy but to retain it. This deliberate antithesis creates an emphatic effect. It accentuates and clarifies the distinction between the understanding of leprosy (what suffering from leprosy means) and its material counterpart (the practices of containment). The distinction created between elimination and conservation illustrates a further distinction between, on the one hand, a gesture of power, the material act of segregation, and, on the other, the theological meaning of this practice: “les valeurs and les images” attached to the person of the leper. Foucault’s presentation of this distinction is important. I first discuss the rhetorical aspect of his presentation, and 13 PRICE 2004: 73, quoted in RORTY 2007a(iv): 151. 14 See RORTY 2007a(iv). 175 then I explain in which sense it can be seen to constitute part of his philosophical qua genealogical inquiry. Concerning the rhetorical aspect, Foucault’s presentation culminates in a double allotropy, as he deliberately disturbs common semantic expectations: distance is described as sacred, and exaltation is fixed. First, these allotopies can be seen as oxymora. The first one seems to differentiate significantly, if not outright contradict, the traditional topos, according to which the sacred is related to notions of proximity and presence. This proximity should not be understood ontologically, as the identification of the sacred itself with human practices. On the contrary, it should be understood as describing an ethical stance, that is, man’s relation to it. Specifically, the criterion of faith traditionally conceived as one’s proximity qua participation in the religious community, is reversed, and what is now sacred is a distance held. In the second allotopy, exaltation, traditionally conceived in terms of transgression, is presented as having a bounded fixity. The same structure reappears at the end of the scholium, as the movement of expulsion (“cette figure [...] qu’on n’écarte pas”) is juxtaposed with that of circumscription (“sans avoir tracé autour d’elle un cercle sacré”). Second, Foucault’s formulations of distance sacrée and exaltation inverse create a chiasmus, and the fact that both formulations are introduced by two synonymous verbs (“à la maintenir dans” and “à la fixer dans”, respectively) emphasises this. Thus, we have exaltation sacrée and distance inverse: the distance at which the lepers are held is inverse because it describes the structure of the limit- experience of the leper, the sacred exaltation. We can now return to the philosophical aspect of Foucault’s rhetoric. His rhetoric achieves a double effect. On the one hand, he emphasises the distinction between the material aspect of segregation and its meaning, and on the other, he indicates how this distinction reveals the experience of the leper. Foucault’s distinction has, most of all, a genealogical function that is best explained through a similar move in Nietzsche’s genealogical investigation. 15 Nietzsche distinguishes between an ethical practice, exemplified in the life of Jesus, and its Pauline interpretation, that is, between, on the one hand, the abstaining from defending oneself against one’s enemies and from casting moralising charges, and 15 See GEUSS 1999a. 176 unconditional forgiveness and love,16 and, on the other, the Pauline interpretative appropriation of Christian practice.17 These two interpretative layers – along with the historical dynamics of different interpretative ‘wills’ – creates the impression of a historical unity of practice and theory considered as the, more or less, archetypical version of the Christian faith. Nietzsche’s genealogical gesture consists in tracing the different layers of interpretation and attempting to untangle them. Foucault’s distinction between the power structure of an imposed segregation, and the ethical- theological meaning of the related practices performs a similar genealogical gesture. Scholium [3] elaborates on the experience of the leper, and constitutes, rhetorically, the culmination of the discussion on leprosy. It is characterised by two features. First, it takes the form of an explicit commentary on original quotations, and, second, it is a juxtaposition of allotopies: the leper is removed from the world, but he manifests God. In Brughel’s painting, he is present only from afar but is forever present in Christ’s way to the cross; he is to be saved by the hand that is not extended to him. This last formulation – saved by the hand that is not extended to him – is not only the rhetorical culmination of Foucault’s philosophical viewpoint, and one of the best aphorisms in his whole work, it is actually one of the best lines ever written in the history of philosophy. In its paradoxical formula, it summarises in the most succinct way possible the reversal of one of the most important topoi of Christianity. Salvation is commonly related to philanthropy, benevolence and love towards fellow humans, the practice of which is instantiated in a non-reciprocal, unconditional offer. In Foucault’s description of the leper the very opposite becomes the necessary condition of true salvation. Foucault’s aphorism can be seen as summarising perfectly the ordeal of the Kierkegaardian religious pathos. The perspective he adopts is that of the person to whom a hand is not offered, and as such it instantiates the stance of authentic religiousness. The hand that is not extended illustrates the radical break with the community, metaphorically involving the impossibility of communicating the experience of exclusion in which the leper dwells. This lack of a relationship with others is not just an additional characteristic of faith. On the contrary, it becomes in Kierkegaard, and in Foucault’s description of the leper, its main precondition: 16 See The Anti-Christ (NIETZSCHE 1990b): § 35. 17 See On the Genealogy of Morality (NIETZSCHE 1997b): III. 177 salvation comes from the hand that is not there. In this way, Foucault illustrates, deliberately or not, the Kierkegaardian description of the believer who is going to encounter not only indifference, but persecution. The expulsion of the leper is the movement of the knight of infinite resignation of Fear and Trembling; it is the religious transcendence of the ethical. Thus, in light of this, scholium [1] can be read to describe the leper’s manifesting of a vesitgium dei. We should remember at this point that the leper, as a knight of infinite resignation, can be structurally identified also with Blanchot’s Kafka. The expulsion of the leper is analogous to Blanchot’s discussion of Kafka’s diaspora, as the eventual non-return is a salvation through exclusion. Blanchot’s diaspora is not the outcome of a reflective qua consequentialist or utilitarian choice. Rather, I would argue again that it is better understood as an expression of an overall sceptical stance. According to Blanchot, this notion of the diaspora describes exactly the impossibility of grounding metaphysically the practices one finds oneself in. A lot more could be said about the rich allusions contained in Foucault’s carefully crafted opening section of Histoire de la folie, but this would go beyond of what is possible here. It is the irreducible uncertainty due to the absence of a metaphysical foundation, characteristic of Foucault’s overall sceptical stance, which, as I will show next, is illustrated also in his discussion of the ship of fools, the first example of the exclusion of madness in Histoire de la folie. 3.2.2. The experience of madness: Stultifera navis The third section constitutes the inaugural section of Foucault’s discussion of madness. The figure he selects from Renaissance imagery for his approach to madness is the ‘ship of fools’, which he describes as the simplest and most symbolic image of madness. Foucault’s discussion can be divided into three thematic parts. The first is an introduction of the issue. The second discusses the meaning of this practice. Foucault indicates here the historical conjunction of the material and interpretative aspects that constitute the practice of the ship of fools, showing how the experience of madness can be structurally identified with that of leprosy. The third part, a scholium in the above sense, elaborates on the interpretative aspect of the practice. I analyse these consecutively in this section. The first part covers the first two paragraphs (three, including the paragraph- like introductory line) and constitutes Foucault’s introduction to the theme of the ship 178 of fools. He refers to its origins, describes it in terms of an artistic topos, and, in a ‘historical justification’, provides a list of artworks that present the ship in different thematic variations. According to his summarising comment, La mode est à la composition de ces Nefs dont l’équipage de héros imaginaires, de modèles éthiques, ou de types sociaux, s’embarque pour un grand voyage symbolique, qui leur apporte sinon la fortune, du moins, la figure de leur destin et de leur vérité.18 Here, Foucault does two things. First, he alludes to the conception we briefly encountered in his analysis of Binswanger, that dreaming reveals the structure of existence. Second, he makes an indirect prolepsis: he anticipates the analysis of this conception in the new context of the ship of fools. Concerning the first, the artistic topos of the ship replaces the epistemic topos of the dream. Both are manifestations of the imagination and, as such, both reveal, according to Foucault’s argument, the structure of existence. Concerning the second, although Foucault refers to the topos of the ship in general, it is the specific case of the ship of fools that can be seen as the means par excellence through which the structure of existence manifests itself. Namely, as Foucault argues, one’s truth is one’s destiny, and the destiny of the passengers of the ship of fools is the experience of groundlessness. Thus, the experience of groundlessness becomes the discovery of every man’s groundlessness. The second part of Foucault’s analysis covers the next four paragraphs, and consists in his attempt to understand the practice of the ship of fools, “le sens précis de cette coutume”.19 The first paragraph argues for its actual existence. His opening sentence is telling as it dissociates the case of the ship of fools from the artistic topos of other ships, affirming that it is the only one having an actual, historically verified existence.20 Then Foucault approaches the understanding of the practice of the ship of fools in a negative way. His argumentation takes a kind of ‘trial and error’, expository form, as he suggests certain interpretations concerning the meaning of the practice, and then contradicts them by providing relevant historical material. In this way, as Foucault does not reject these suggestions in toto, but only their exclusivity as factors 18 HF: 22, emphasis added. 19 HF: 23, emphasis added. 20 “Mais de tous ces vaisseaux romanesques ou satiriques, le Narrenschiff est le seul qui ait eu une existence réelle”. HF: 22. 179 for understanding this practice, he underlines the complexity of the phenomenon at hand. He concludes his argumentation as follows, Le souci de guérison et celui d’exclusion se rejoignaient ; on enfermait dans l’espace sacré du miracle. Il est possible que le village de Gheel se soit développé de cette manière – lieu de pèlerinage devenant enclos, terre sainte où la folie attend sa délivrance, mais ou l’homme opère, selon de vieux thèmes, comme un partage rituel. C’est que cette circulation des fous, le geste qui les chasse, leur départ et leur embarquement n’ont pas tout leur sens au seul niveau de l’utilité sociale ou de la sécurité des citoyens. D’autres significations plus proches du rite s’y trouvaient certainement présentes ; et on peut encore en déchiffrer quelques traces.21 This conclusion shows Foucault’s structural identification of the nexus of practices concerning leprosy with that of the ship of fools. The practice of the ship of fools that cannot be exclusively reduced either to a mere practice of exclusion or to a single religious practice of purification, manifests the conjunction of the material power of the practice of segregation with its theological and religious interpretation that we saw in the case of leprosy. Furthermore, in this way, Foucault retains the genealogical gesture of showing and emphasising the material and the interpretative aspects of the two phenomena of leprosy and madness. Finally, we can see that the rhetoric of his argumentation is retained too, as his conclusion is characterised by the allotopic paradoxes (internment and the sacred space of miracle, enclosed pilgrimage) already encountered in his approach to leprosy. The final, third part of this section is a scholium that elaborates the interpretative and theological aspect of the ship of fools. It is less related to the genealogical, critical aspect of Foucault’s inquiry, than to what we have earlier called its ethical aspect that reveals his own perspective and valuation. The scholium has two parts. The first is the interpretative commentary proper, and the second is its conclusion, in which Foucault provides a series of five literary references instantiating the relation between madness and water. In the first part, Foucault presents his interpretation of the significance of the navigation and the value of the water attributed to the whole practice. He starts with the element of purification, directly associated with the role of the water, and then focuses on the navigation itself, which leaves man to his unknown destiny, perhaps 21 HF: 24–25. 180 one’s last trip. Although Foucault’s text abounds with spatial metaphors, the reigning trope is again that of allotopic paradox: the madman, leaving for the other world, while coming already from there, being a prisoner of the departure, belonging neither to the land he embarks from nor to the one he travels to, belongs to the constant between. C’est vers l’autre monde que part le fou sur sa folle nacelle ; c’est de l’autre monde qu’il vient quand il débarque. [...] la situation liminaire de fou ou l’horizon du souci de l’homme médiéval – situation symbolique et réalisée a la fois par le privilège qui est donne au fou d’être enfermé aux portes de la ville : son exclusion doit l’enclore ; s’il ne peut et ne doit avoir d’autre prison que le seuil lui-même, on le retient sur le lieu du passage. Il est mis à l’intérieur de l’extérieur, et inversement. [...] L’eau et la navigation ont bien ce rôle. Enfermé dans le navire, d’où on n’échappe pas, le fou est confié à la rivière aux mille bras, à la mer aux mille chemins, à cette grande incertitude extérieure à tout. Il est prisonnier au milieu de la plus libre, de la plus ouverte des routes: solidement enchaîné à l’infini carrefour. Il est le Passager par excellence, c’est-à-dire le prisonnier du passage. Et la terre sur laquelle il abordera, on ne le connaît pas, tout comme on ne sait pas, quand il prend pied, de quelle terre il vient. Il n’a sa vérité et sa patrie que dans cette étendue inféconde entre deux terres qui ne peuvent lui appartenir.22 The ship that does not land, destined to perpetual journey, is the closest imagery so far to Kierkegaard’s conception of the knight of infinite resignation. The knight’s stance instantiates the radical distance from the community that reaches the impossibility of communication. Again, this is structurally identical with the experience of the ship of fools. And again we can understand the ship of fools in terms of Blanchot’s Kafka. Both Kafka’s diaspora and his work as an instantiation of an anti-metaphysical stance should be understood as continuous with, and described by, the imagery of the ship of fools. It is here that we encounter the crux of Foucault’s approach to the ship of fools. The rhetoric, and in particular the use of allotopies, reveals an epistemic aspect. The ontological status of le Passager par excellence is defined in epistemological terms: the constant between of the passenger is the passenger’s truth, and this truth is, in turn, defined in terms of the unknown of both the beginning and the destination of the journey. And most importantly, the very space where the ship of fools navigates is simply “cette grande incertitude extérieure à tout”. 22 HF: 26. It is worth noting that the emphasis is not added. 181 The madman’s incertitude embodies Blanchot’s antimetaphysical stance. Thus, a close reading of Foucault’s text suggests that embarking on the ship of fools is dwelling in the hiatus of the absence of gods. Revising the late Heideggerian conception of authenticity, according to which the poet traces the vestige of the lost or forthcoming gods, and becomes the equivalent of a law-giver, Blanchot emphasises the absence of the divine, and describes authenticity proper as a dwelling in distress. Whereas Heidegger’s poet writes (about) the absence of the presence, that is, whereas he attempts to trace values, Blanchot’s writer writes (about) the absence of the presence of the absence, that is, he dwells in the absolute lack of foundation. Foucault’s ship of fools signifies his acceptance of Blanchot’s ethics, opposed to any possibility of metaphysical grounding, and thus his description of the predicament of the madman indicates his sceptical stance. 3.2.3. From the danse macabre to the ironic experience of madness The fourth section introduces the ironic experience of madness, and can be understood in at least two complementary ways. First, keeping in mind the distinction between the material and interpretative aspects constitutive of the phenomenon of madness, we can say that this section constitutes a further elaboration of the latter. Second, in this section, another genealogical gesture takes place, as Foucault seems to change the level of analysis. In the previous section, he approached the pre-modern experience of madness in terms of its instantiation in the practice of the ship of fools, distinguished between the material and the interpretative aspect of the practice, and elaborated on the latter. Here, he adopts a wider perspective, analysing the pre- modern conception of madness as instantiated in a range of artistic and philosophical cases. In this section, Foucault does two things. First, he approaches the conception of madness, ranging from the late Middle Ages to Erasmus, mainly in terms of the ironic experience of madness. Specifically, he traces a change in the conception of madness from, roughly, the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. Second, he shows that this experience of madness is structurally identical to the theme of death. Accordingly, the structure is twofold. First, again in the form of a scholium, Foucault provides a general description of the pre-modern conception of madness, followed by 182 a historical justification, that is, a series of related artistic and philosophical references.23 The second part of the section follows an inverse structure.24 Foucault starts with a chain of dates indicating the transition from the imagery of death to that of madness. The rest of the section is a scholium on this transition. In what follows, I focus only on this second part. Foucault again starts with a juxtapositional justification. He provides a chain of dates displaying the transition in the cultural landscape from the imagery of death to that of madness. He observes that from the second half of the 15th century – up to which point death had been almost the exclusive theme, especially registered in the series of Danses macabres – madness becomes the dominant theme. Foucault approaches this transition in another elaborate scholium. He makes three points. First, the transition from one theme to another is, in a sense, a surface transition only, a transformation within the same structure. The constant, underlying theme is nothingness. In the cultural landscape, Foucault argues, nothingness in the form of death is succeeded by nothingness in the form of madness. When Foucault writes that “[l]a substitution du thème de la folie à celui de la mort ne marque pas une rupture, mais plutôt une torsion à l’intérieur de la même inquiétude”,25 he means that both Medieval and Renaissance man are talking about death in its different forms. Foucault’s allotopic constructions (“La tête est déjà vide, qui deviendra crâne. La folie, c’est le déjà-là de la mort. [...]. C’est que la mort démasque, n’était que masque, et rien d’autre”) indicate his belief in this continuity.26 However, and second, these different forms of nothingness are not identical in content. In the case of madness, nothingness no longer constitutes the external limit of human finitude, but rather an internal gap within human existence. The grimaces of everyday madness, which indicate that it is a universal aspect of human existence, signal the internalisation of death in the form of madness. The third point that Foucault makes is again ethical and related to the distinct content of nothingness qua madness. In lieu of the previous meletē thanatou that shows to people that they should not forget they are mortal, the prudent stance now becomes to show the universality of madness, to show that madness is everywhere. 23 HF: 28–30. 24 HF: 30–32. 25 HF: 31. 26 HF: 30. 183 These three points encapsulate the content of Foucault’s scholium. Its importance is suggested by three emphatic remarks. First, in the context of his description of madness as a form of nothingness, Foucault provides the following footnote: “En ce sens, l’expérience de la folie est en rigoureuse continuité avec celle de la lèpre. Le rituel d’exclusion du lépreux montrait qu’il était, vivant, la présence même de la mort.”27 The rhetoric of these lines is telling. First, he associates and qualifies madness and leprosy as an experience. Second, he describes their connection in terms of a rigoureuse continuité, thus emphasising the common structure of nothingness that underlines both the experiences of death and madness.28 Third, the footnote ends in another allotopy. The living leper, as the presence of death, concludes an allotopic footnote added to the allotopies of the main text. Second, the concluding lines of this section ought to be read as an emphatic comment on the same point of structural continuity: “Ce lien de la folie et du néant est noué d’une façon si serrée au XVe siècle qu’il subsistera longtemps, et qu’on le retrouvera encore au centre de l’expérience classique de la folie.”29 Here, Foucault, using a prolepsis, underscores the link between the two experiences, and, again, the markers that he uses (“noué”, “si serrée”, “subsistera longtemps”, “au centre”) corroborate the emphatic effect.30 However, and third, the most emphatic gesture is found in Foucault’s penultimate remark, in which he comments on the internalisation of nothingness: Les éléments sont maintenant inversés. Ce n’est plus la fin des temps et du monde qui montrera rétrospectivement que les hommes étaient fous de ne point s’en préoccuper; c’est la montée de la folie, sa sourde invasion qui indique que le monde est proche de sa dernière catastrophe ; c’est la démence des hommes qui l’appelle est la rend nécessaire.31 This remark achieves a double effect. It shows both the real meaning of this internalisation, that is, the incorporation of nothingness within human existence, and the importance of this conceptualisation of madness qua death for Foucault’s whole work. This internalisation puts the emphasis precisely on the universality of the presence of nothingness. This internalisation of nothingness is thus a move rendering 27 HF: 31, n. 1. 28 Specifically, Foucault accentuates this emphasis by inverting the adjective–noun word order. 29 HF: 32. 30 It is indicative that both these emphatic remarks, i.e. the previous footnote and this final paragraph, are missing from the later abridged 1964 version of the text. 31 HF: 32 184 what we can call ‘temporal distance’, the limit of one’s life, into a kind of ‘spatial closeness’. In this sense, the talk of madness is an accentuated meletē thanatou. Nothingness becomes more difficult to be forgotten, and, simultaneously, this internalisation indicates the imminence of nothingness. These two aspects, i.e. the emphasis on the universality of nothingness and its imminence, must again be viewed in light of our interpretation of Blanchot. The transition from the theme of death to the theme of madness, this course of internalisation of nothingness, parallels the move from Blanchot’s Kafka and Dostoyevsky to Blanchot’s Rilke. As we have seen, Kafka and Dostoyevsky, according to Blanchot’s reading, instantiate the critique of a metaphysical conception of selfhood. In case of Kafka, the move of infinite resignation is a move away from and against both the everyday and the elaborated metaphysical schemas. In case of Dostoyevsky’s Kirilov, the attempt to achieve with his suicide a ‘vanishing conscience’, instead of a ‘consciousness of vanishing’, is the replacement of a metaphysical God with an equally metaphysical conception of a God-like man. Blanchot’s Rilke supplements his interpretation of Kafka and Dostoyevsky with an additional element: the contingency of a life, manifested in unfinished projects, abandoned practices and failures, is internalised, and becomes part of the self. The self as a non-metaphysical entity is identified with the narrative of a life, and ‘external’ failures amount to ‘internal’ gaps. Rilke’s idea was manifested in his imagery. As we have seen, Orpheus is the epistemological counterpart of the Dionysian. Where the Dionysian describes the ontological lack of a metaphysical bedrock, Orpheus describes the understanding and experiencing of that lack. We can therefore understand the transition from nothingness qua death to nothingness qua madness in terms of a shift of emphasis from the Dionysian to Orpheus. Its imminence intensifies Foucault’s sceptical point as it underscores the need for caution and vigilance in order to avoid any metaphysical conception of the self. 3.2.4. From foundationalism to holism: imagination as experience of madness Foucault begins his discussion of the tragic experience of madness with an analysis of “le délabrement du symbolisme gothique”, which for him constitutes its most fundamental instantiation. In what follows, I focus on this discussion, as it constitutes one of the most representative exemplifications of this experience, and illustrates his overall sceptical, ethical stance. 185 This discussion takes place, supported by four justificational references, in the first part of the fifth section. The section again takes the form of a long scholium. I think that this interpretatively significant scholium is one of the densest and most complex fragments in Foucault’s work. First, we recognise the historical instantiation of Foucault’s argument in his first essay on Nietzsche. Second, we recognise the same structure that will be employed in his later description of the relation between power and knowledge. The scholium describes a transformation process that can be analysed into the following points: (1) [L]e réseau des significations spirituelles était si serré [...]. (2) [L]e réseau [...] commençait à se brouiller [...]. Les formes gothiques [...], peu à peu, elles deviennent silencieuses [...]. (3) [C]ette libération vient d’un foisonnement de signification, d’une multiplication du sens par lui-même [...]. (4) [U]ne multiplication du sens par lui-même, qui tisse entre les choses des rapports si nombreux, si croisés, si riches, qu’ils ne peuvent plus être déchiffrés que dans l’ésotérisme du savoir, et que les choses de leur côté se surchargent d’attributs, d’indices, d’allusions où elle finissent par perdre leur figure propre. Le sens ne se lit plus dans une perception immédiate, la figure cesse de parler d’elle-même ; entre le savoir qui l’anime, et la forme dans laquelle elle se transpose, un vide se creuse.32 (5) Voilà l’image surchargée de sens supplémentaires, et contrainte de les livrer. Mais la rêve, l’insensé, le déraisonnable peuvent se glisser dans cet excès de sens.33 In my analysis of Foucault’s scholium, I will employ the distinction of signifier, signified, and referent. Roughly, the signifier is the image, the signified the meaning of the image, and the referent the entity to which the image and its meaning, as a sign, refers. Point (1) can be understood in terms of a two-layered stratification. The first layer takes the form of a nexus that constitutes gothic art, and consists of a series of correspondences. In the same way that signifiers and signifieds are interrelated within a linguistic system, in gothic art images correspond to specific meanings, images correspond to other images, and meanings to other meanings. The core of this first layer is another network – a solid corpus of theological and religious knowledge formed by tradition. The relations of correspondence that constitute gothic art are thus grounded in this sedimented tradition of knowledge. This tradition determines what types of images correspond to what types of meanings, thereby providing the rules of 32 HF: 34. 33 HF: 35. 186 artistic creation and of interpretation. In this sense, artistic creation and the tradition of knowledge constitute the external and internal layers of a single homogeneous nexus, respectively. It is important to appreciate the interrelatedness of the two layers: images and meanings may move within the nexus, and older artistic creations may become more entrenched and become part of the tradition. However, although the coherence of the nexus corroborates the validity of the interpretative procedure, it does not guarantee its truth. The tradition of knowledge is at the centre, and can legitimately provide the rules for artistic creation because it is itself grounded in another layer, namely a second layer of referents. These referents are the theological entities to which the images as signs refer, and they constitute the ahistorical bedrock in which both meanings (as signifieds) and their relation with images (as signifiers) are grounded. In that sense, we can say that Medieval art employs a foundationalist, and not a coherentist, schema of interpretation. Point (2) describes a gradual process embedded within the greater process of transformation of gothic symbolism that Foucault presents in the scholium. It also constitutes the first distinct step in a triple move described in the subsequent two points. Some images begin to lose their ‘fixed’, or, better, ascribed meanings, and become signifiers without signifieds. In terms of the above schema, this situation describes a lack of knowledge of the relevant relation of correspondence between signifier and signified, and of the rule that would indicate it.34 In point (3), this situation is described as a liberation. These now-mute forms, i.e. these signifiers without signifieds, images devoid of meaning, now become invested with and linked to new ones. Put differently, the now-void placeholder of a signified, due to the lack of knowledge of rules and relations, is filled in with a series of new possibilities. Point (4) completes the triple move. This proliferation of meanings of the previously meaningless images results in the alteration of these images. The new meanings with which the images have been invested, alter their form accordingly. The triple move can be put in more abstract terms. First, some signs become opaque. There are no longer any signifieds to correspond to these signifiers. Second, new signifieds are created in order to correspond to these signifiers. Third, in turn, the 34 We describe the problem in terms of a lack of knowledge, as we interpret se brouiller more epistemologically than ontologically. In other words, Foucault’s description seems to refer more to a lack of knowledge of a rule than to a lack of rule itself. 187 signifiers that have been associated with these new signifieds change. They alter their form according to the signifieds they have been associated with. Thus, we can say that both the proliferation of meanings and the altering of images consist in a radical proliferation of correspondence relations: among images, among meanings, among things, and among images, meanings and things. This situation does not only indicate a quantitative alteration in the amount of possible associations. On the contrary, what Foucault describes is a radical change in the Medieval interpretative schema. The fact that some images become meaningless entails that they become devoid of reference, or, more specifically, that their reference can no longer be known. In terms of the imagery of the two layers that we used above, an image without meaning constitutes an epistemological lack both in the core of the nexus of gothic art, and in the nexus of theological and religious entities to which these images refer. The creation of new meanings implies the creation of new relations within the core of the nexus of gothic art, and, given that the creation of new meanings also entails a different conceptualisation of things, it also entails the creation of new referents. In other words, the gap created is filled with a radical multiplicity of interconnections. Thus, the imagery of stratification within which the layer of theological references grounds the meaning of religious iconography, is replaced with a single nexus in which the theological references emerge from the interrelations of the meanings of images. In that sense, Foucault describes here a transition from a kind of foundationalist conception of interpretation to a coherentist one. Finally, according to point (5), the last two steps of this triple move, i.e. the radical multiplicity of meanings and the respective re-elaboration of the corresponding images, are described as the artistic form of madness itself. The transition to a different conception of interpretation is the outcome of artistic imagination qua madness. It should now have become clearer in which sense Foucault’s interpretative schema is the historical instantiation of his reading of Nietzsche. Namely, what Foucault describes in “Nietzsche, Freud, Marx” is exactly this transition from a foundationalist to a coherentist conception of interpretation. As we saw in his first essay on Nietzsche, classical epistemology was grounded in a theory of interpretation. The classical theory of the sign was based on the relation of resemblance. This relation grounded two types of knowledge, cognitio and divinatio, the ‘horizontal’ 188 transition from one resemblance to another, and the ‘vertical’ transition from a superficial resemblance to another deeper one. According to Foucault, sixteenth- century philosophy becomes a critique of divinatio, a critique of the vertical axis of interpretation in favour of an extended horizontal plane of possible interpretative connections. Thus, it becomes clear that the two nexuses of interrelations, of signs and referents, describe the two layers of superficial and deeper resemblances, and that the critique of divinatio starts with this brouillement de réseau. Similarly, the description of the consequences of the critique of divinatio indicates that Foucault discusses here the same issue. The critique of the foundational nexus results in the openness and circularity of the interpretative task. Interpretations are not fixed and, thus, become susceptible to reinterpretation ad infinitum. In that sense, the “béance et ouverture irréductibles” with which Foucault will later characterise interpretation,35 refer to the “vide [qui] se creuse”, “entre le savoir qui l’anime [la figure], et la forme dans laquelle elle se transpose”.36 Equally, Foucault’s description that “[l]ibérée de la sagesse et de la leçon qui l’ordonnaient, l’image commence à graviter autour de sa propre folie”,37 refers to this element of circularity. According to Foucault, Nietzschean genealogy is actually nothing other than the nineteenth-century revival of the practice of interpretation. And it becomes clear now that his approach to Nietzschean genealogy is actually again nothing other than the further exploration and reinterpretation of the consequences of this critique of divinatio that he discusses as part of the historical analysis of Histoire de la folie. Put in the terms of Nietzsche’s sceptical philology, the critique of depth consists both of a critique of a metaphysical conception of truth, and of its replacement by holism. A metaphysical conception of truth entails a relation of representation between man and a distinct, independent, ahistorical world, and a relation of correspondence between propositions and facts, grounded in this former relation of representation. According to Nietzsche’s argument, a metaphysically independent reality means an unconditioned qua unconditional reality. However, this particular reality cannot be unconditional: any epistemic, practical, or other relation of man with the world, entails by definition its being conditioned by man. Knowing the world means in part also creating it, and, thus, ‘things’ is merely the name given to previous creations. In 35 NFM: 597. 36 HF: 34. 37 HF: 34. 189 this sense, creating the world means interpreting previous interpretations: all there is is a web of interrelated interpretations. The idea of an ahistorical world constitutes, for Nietzsche and Foucault, a misinterpretation of the human condition. The dissolution of this idea, i.e. the breakdown of the metaphysical conceptions of representation and correspondence, leads to a radical interpretative holism. We can see that this transition from a foundationalist to a coherentist interpretative practice that Foucault describes here is inspired by his reading of Nietzsche. Another element strongly corroborates this reading. In both this extract from Histoire de la folie and Foucault’s first 1964 exegesis of Nietzsche, the critique of metaphysics is made from an epistemological vantage point. In Histoire de la folie, in the case of late Medieval interpretative practices, the epistemological point is the lack of knowledge of signs. In the case of Nietzsche, it is the creative interrelatedness of man and world. As we saw, Foucault’s first approach to Nietzsche was not only confined to epistemological and ontological matters, but charted the possibility of a twofold ethical stance of authenticity. Concerning the first, Foucault describes the knowledge of the lack of any metaphysical grounding of interpretation as the experience of madness. This experience of madness he sees present in artistic creation, and the artist who experiences and manifests the Dionysian becomes a blueprint for authenticity. The second type of authenticity is twofold. First, it is a self-referential one, and consists of the elaboration and interpretation of the authenticity of the Dionysian artist. Second, it consists of the undoing of the metaphysical presuppositions and postulations of specific discourses. It is in this way that the first and second type of authenticity correspond to the tragic experience of madness, the origins of which Foucault traces in the decline of gothic symbolism and in the ironic experience of madness. I would like to conclude with a note on the reasons why I think this interpretative link with Nietzsche is significant. Foucault links the emergence of Renaissance scepticism and Nietzschean genealogy, as, for him, they both constitute instances of the critique of Western metaphysics. Foucault’s rhetorical gesture, in “Nietzsche, Freud, Marx”, of suggesting the writing of an encyclopaedia of interpretative techniques is also performed here where he associates the practice of interpretation with therapeutic scepticism. The family resemblances between the Medieval, metaphysical approach to interpretation, on the one hand, and the 190 contemporary analytic realism of the kind of Kripke and Engel, on the other, show not only the timeliness of but also the imminent need for Foucault’s Nietzschean therapeutic scepticism. 191 3.3. Genealogy as a Sceptical Critique 3.3.0. Introduction Kathryn Wilkes in her book Real People, which has nothing to do with Foucault or Nietzsche, history or genealogy, quotes the following joke from an anonymous author: “A neurotic is a man who builds a castle in the air. A psychotic is the man who lives in it. And a psychiatrist is the man who collects the rent”.1 I think that the interest of this joke lies in the specific relation depicted between the madman and the doctor, the illness and the institution, as the anonymous author seems to underscore the economic qua political aspect of this relation. Furthermore, the psychiatrist as rent collector is not just an attentive listener to the two patients, but, on the contrary, he contributes to the acknowledgement of the existence, if not the construction and maintenance, of the imaginary castle. These two elements, the political relation and the construction of a reality, and, mainly, their strong interrelation – i.e. that politics qua power is constitutive of reality – are the subject matter of Foucault’s genealogical critique. According to Raymond Geuss’ reconstruction, Nietzsche holds that contemporary decadence stems from three fundamental mistakes of Platonism that are embedded in our thinking. First, everything in the world has a fixed, non-historically constructed and determined, unchanging essence. Second, this essence can be determined by and formulated in a definition. Third, knowledge, and specifically propositional knowledge, has a supreme value and should be placed at the centre of human life and action. From these three premises, an ethical conclusion follows. The good life is a matter of knowledge. The good life is identified with the knowledge of the essences that are related to the good life.2 As his genealogical investigations manifest, Foucault accepts Nietzsche’s critique of these points, and he will never move away from it. These genealogical investigations constitute a kind of historical discourse that challenges two things: the metaphysical hypostatisation of philosophical and scientific concepts, and the consideration of methodological approaches as unique devices for tracking metaphysically objective truths. 1 WILKES 1988: 75. 2 GEUSS 2005d: 206–207. 192 In this subchapter I discuss Foucault’s so-called ‘genealogical’ period in two parts. The first part is mainly centred around Foucault’s conceptualisation of genealogy, as depicted in his 1971 exegesis “Nietzsche, la généalogie, l’histoire”, and the second around his conceptualisation of power, as depicted in writings from the same period. The discussion of these metahistorical remarks of Foucault has both a hermeneutic and a ‘philosophical’ objective. I will argue for the coherence of these considerations, and attempt to show how they manifest a nominalist and contextualist stance. 3.3.1. Nietzsche’s sceptical philology revisited 3.3.1.0. Preliminary remarks Foucault’s exegesis starts with an oblique definition of genealogy: La généalogie est grise ; elle est méticuleuse et patiemment documentaire. Elle travaille sur des parchemins embrouillés, grattés, plusieurs fois récrits.3 Genealogy is a philological enterprise par excellence. First, it deals with tracing the meanings of words as found in their dynamic contexts. As these contexts change through time, genealogy is also a historical enterprise. Second, and more specifically, genealogy can be defined as “repérer la singularité des événements”.4 An event is the historical occurrence of something. This something can be anything. It can be an actual, concrete object (like a tool, for example a knife), or a more abstract thing. It can be a phenomenon (like a plague or an inflation), a relationship (like friendship), an emotion (like love), a value (like truthfulness), a practice (like studying), an institution (like school) or a concept (like justice or freedom, but also like ‘plague’, ‘inflation’, ‘friendship’, ‘love’, ‘truthfulness’, ‘studying’, or ‘school’). I use the word entity, defined as something that exists as a discrete unit, to refer to all these things. To return to Foucault’s definition, the notion of the ‘singularity of events’ describes the inherently anti-metaphysical character of the genealogical enterprise. A metaphysical understanding of history is either essentialist or teleological. The appearance of an entity in time is considered either as a historical realisation of a non- historical, atemporal essence, or as a phase in the entity’s temporal development or 3 “Nietzsche, la généalogie, l’histoire” in DE I, 1971, 84: 1004. Henceforth, NGH. 4 NGH: 1004. 193 evolution, led by an ahistorical ‘Reason’, towards some idealised form. In contrast, the notion of ‘singularity’ indicates the tracing of events outside any metahistorical metaphysics. In that sense, the tracing of the recurrence of events is not interpreted as the recurrence of different instances of the same entity. On the contrary, it is interpreted as the recurrence of something that only appears as identical to an entity, but constitutes something altogether different. From these characteristics Foucault draws a twofold conclusion. First, given the ‘singularity of each event’, the genealogist focuses on, in Foucault’s terms, “la minutie du savoir” considered as, quoting Foucault quoting Nietzsche, “petites verités sans apparence”.5 Second, this genealogical aspect has a critical function because these details in some way undo the metahistorical metaphysics. 3.3.1.1. Herkunft and Entstehung: genealogy as anti-essentialist and anti- teleological history The remainder of Foucault’s exegesis constitutes an elaboration of these characteristics, as, more specifically, he explicates genealogy in terms of the opposition of genealogical investigation to metaphysical inquiry. His approach consists in the elaboration of the notions of Herkunft and Entstehung. Herkunft is defined in terms of “descent” and corresponds more to an apophatic, negative presentation of genealogy focusing on the aspect of anti-essentialism. Entstehung is defined in terms of “emergence”; it corresponds more to the anti-teleological aspect of genealogy and suggests some positive methodological considerations. I present the two notions consecutively. Foucault addresses the classical ontological and epistemological framework that was introduced in the first chapter.6 Essences, the elementary entities of nature, are defined in terms of self-identity, in terms of an identity that they exhibit due to themselves. The existence and self-identity of other entities, properties and relations are due to the relation they bear with these elementary entities. Furthermore, essentialist ontology results in the creation of a relevant set of epistemological possibilities. Given the above, an essentialist metahistory is what we can call ‘a metaphysics of descent’ – the inscription of these elements into a diachronic axis. 5 NGH: 1004, emphasis added. 6 See 1.4.1. 194 This can be broken down into a series of points. First, according to this view, the temporally distinct instances or appearances of an entity are considered necessarily related to that entity. Second, this last point entails the concept of an unbroken continuity of (the existence of) an entity in time. Third, in consequence, the value that the entity has is retained in the different instances of that chronological continuum. Fourth, the hierarchy of the classical ontology is in some way transcribed in metahistorical metaphysics, meaning that the ontological or other value of something depends on the kind of the relation it has with its ideal or essentialist form. Genealogy as descent constitutes the absolute reversal of this metaphysics of descent. First, Foucault refers to genealogical inquiry in terms of the tracing of “marques subtiles, singulières, sous-individuelles”.7 As we will see, these singular elements are the working material that genealogy then uses in its enterprise of undoing. Namely, genealogy disassembles the unity of an entity into these elements. We have to note here that the distinction between ‘entity’ and ‘element’ is local and not employed here in a metaphysical sense. An element is an entity too, since it is something that exists as a discrete unit. However, in the context of the genealogical narrative, the notions of ‘elements’ and ‘entity’ are used to indicate a part–whole relationship. This is what Foucault’s term subindividual means. They are sub- individual in relation to the (metaphysically conceived) entity which, in this case, is the individual. Thus, as we will see in more detail, both the metaphysician and the genealogist believe that an entity is comprised of elements. They differ crucially, however, in two respects. First, they (almost always, but not necessarily) disagree on which these elements are. Second, they (necessarily) disagree on the status of the elements. The metaphysician thinks they are necessary properties and attributes; the genealogist – and here lies the crucial difference – takes them to be contingent elements, things that came together accidentally. Second, genealogy thus presents the formation of an entity by numerous, different, dispersed singular events. As before, an event here is the historical occurrence of an element. Given the difference and the singularity of the events involved, the formation created is radically different from that of the narrative of continuity. Third, equally, there is no value in the entity retained or in the created formation affirmed. Finally, this heterogeneity, i.e. the radical difference among the 7 NGH: 1009, emphasis added. 195 events involved in the formation of an entity, contradicts and, as we will see, undermines any notion of foundation or foundationalism. Thus, as can be derived from the above, genealogy as descent is different from and opposed to the metahistorical metaphysics of identity. An exactly equivalent conclusion applies to genealogy as emergence, which is different from and opposed to the metahistorical metaphysics of teleology. In the same way that, according to the metahistorical metaphysics of essentialism, an entity retains its identity through time, the metahistorical metaphysics of teleology replaces the concept of an ahistorical identity with the confined, predetermined development or evolution of an entity towards a specified, recognisable, and, ultimately, equally ahistorical end. It is in that sense that I conceive of teleological metaphysics as structurally identical to essentialist metaphysics: the telos of the former is nothing but the essence of the latter. Foucault provides some more positive characteristics of genealogy. First, emergence is described as the production of “un certain état des forces”.8 The interaction of these forces is described in terms of struggle. The emerging event constitutes the outcome of that struggle. It constitutes a dynamic solidification of forces, a certain temporal configuration of certain prevailing forces at the expense of others. Third, emergence does not occur on any kind of fixed metaphysical plane. The plane on which it occurs constitutes “une pure distance” created by the oppositional, struggling forces at play.9 Fourth, in that sense, the only identity that can be observed is the fact that this space is created by the effect of the struggle. This metaphor seems to explicate Foucault’s initial description of the recurrence of the ostensibly identical. In other words, in order also to link the idea of singularity with that of emergence, we can see that the identity of phenomena through time is only formal: although they are referred to using the same name, the only thing that is the same between two or more historical phenomena is that they occur as the outcome of a play of forces. Finally, the metaphors used and the imagery that Foucault employs are very important. The alienating effect they produce indicates that they do not refer or correspond to any specific ontology, let alone a metaphysical ontology. Forces are empty placeholders that can be populated by the elements of any interpretation we apply in history. The description of their function is the description of the mechanics 8 NGH: 1011. 9 NGH: 1012. 196 of a non-metaphysical and anti-metaphysical history. In that sense, forces can take on any form: they can be interpretations, concepts or values; they can be singular individuals, groups of individuals or subindividual material entities.10 3.3.1.2. Genealogy as critique: the three critical functions of genealogical history Finally, the conclusion that Foucault draws from the above constitutes an analytical recapitulation of the critical function proper of genealogical investigation. Namely, he distinguishes three critical functions of genealogy, three uses of history, devised according to their specific target, “qui s’opposent terme à terme aux trois modalités platoniciennes de l’histoire.”11 While Foucault does not himself employ this imagery, essentialist ontology can be conceived in terms of a stratified structure comprised of (at least) two main nexuses. In short, essentialist metaphysics has a foundationalist structure. The first stratum constitutes the foundation and the second part of the edifice or superstructure. The first stratum qua nexus constitutes the set of the interrelated elements or characteristics that comprise an entity. In other words, an entity is identified with a nexus of elements. The essentialist aspect lies in the fact that the entity and the elements are considered ahistorical, and that the interrelation among the elements is considered necessary. For example, ‘madness’, conceived as an ahistorical entity, constitutes a nexus comprised of necessary elements such as ‘behavioural pattern x’ or ‘delusion type z’. The second stratum consists of the historical manifestations of that entity, and constitutes a series of individual nexuses. Each nexus constitutes a different and distinct manifestation of the entity. It has the form of the entity it manifests, and, thus, consists of a set of interrelated elements. Apart from the relations among the elements of each individual nexus, there are two main types of relations that characterise this second stratum. The first type is what we may call a ‘vertical’ relation. It is the relation by which the second stratum is connected with and grounded in the first one, 10 By ‘subindividual’ I do not mean ‘smaller’, i.e. of a lower ontological class, than an entity. I mean smaller than a human being. Furthermore, in a genealogical narrative the use of a force of a certain kind (e.g. forces qua particular people) does not necessitate sticking to the same kind throughout. A narrative can, and almost always does, make use of forces of different kinds. For example, as we saw in the case of Histoire de la folie, Foucault used the force of leprosy qua subindividual natural entity along with other kinds of forces, such as events (the end of the Crusades), individual persons (Erasmus) and works of art (the Narrenschiff). 11 NGH: 1020. 197 the relation that defines and groups things as elements of distinct manifestations of the entity. It is a relation of correspondence according to which the entity and its elements correspond to each individual manifestation of the entity and of its elements. The second type of relation is what we may call a ‘horizontal’ relation. It is the set of interrelations connecting each individual manifestation and its elements with the other manifestations and their elements. Thus, the individual nexuses form a larger nexus; this larger nexus is what we call second stratum, and this second stratum is grounded in the first one. This means that the internal relations among the elements in each manifestation and the ‘horizontal’ interrelations among the manifestations are necessary, and that they are necessary because they derive from the necessary ‘vertical’ relation that defines the entity with its manifestations. For example, ‘Ajax’s rage’ in Sophocles and ‘Hercules’ mania’ in Euripides are two different manifestations of ‘madness’. They constitute two different nexuses, include elements like ‘Ajax’s delusion type z’ and ‘Hercules’ delusion type z’, and are grounded in the (allegedly, from a genealogical perspective) essential entity of ‘madness’. From the foundationalist structure of the essentialist metaphysics two interlinked points derive. First, the first critical function of genealogy aims at undoing the foundations of the metaphysical edifice. Thus, the other two functions can be understood as describing the consequences of the first. Second, although I present them as distinct, all three functions are involved in a genealogical approach. It does not seem possible for the genealogist to choose to perform one function and not the others. As will be illustrated in what follows, the undoing of the foundations entails the undoing of the edifice (that is, the different historical instantiations of an entity, say ‘madness’ metaphysically conceived), and the undoing of a part of the edifice presupposes the undoing of the foundations. We can now move to the presentation of the three functions of genealogy. The first critical function of genealogy, “c’est l’usage dissociatif et destructeur d’identité qui s’oppose à l’histoire-continuité ou tradition”.12 In Foucault’s dissociative use of history, l’histoire ne découvrira pas une identité oubliée, toujours prompte à renaître, mais un système complexe d’éléments à leur tour multiples, distincts, et que ne domine aucun pouvoir de synthèse [...][.] L’histoire, généalogiquement dirigée, n’a pas pour fin de retrouver les racines de notre identité, mais de s’acharner au contraire à la dissiper ; elle n’entreprend pas de repérer le foyer 12 NGH: 1020–1021. 198 unique d’où nous venons, cette première patrie où les métaphysiciens nous promettent que nous ferons retour; elle entreprend de faire apparaître toutes les discontinuités qui nous traversent.13 What Foucault says here is that genealogy functions as the critique of the metaphysical identity of entities. It exposes the identity of entities as historically constructed, and de-constructs them into the parts of which they have been composed. It thus performs an anti-foundationalist function, and thereby destroys history understood in terms of continuity. The dissociative use of history and its anti-foundationalist aspect can be understood in the light of the imagery of the stratified structure sketched above. The exposition of an entity as the result of the combination, throughout history, of a series of different elements indicates the historicity of the entity and strips it of its essentialist characteristics. The interrelations between the different elements that comprise it are exposed as contingent and the entity becomes a historical construction. Thus, the whole first nexus becomes disentangled, and the elements that comprise it become dissociated from each other. Furthermore, the dissolution of the first nexus entails the dissolution of the second. The continuity of history, or the conception of history as continuity, is registered in the two relations (‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal’) between the first and the second nexus. The vertical relation grounds the second nexus in the first. It is the relation that defines historical combinations of elements as historical manifestations of a specific entity. Thus, this type of relation assumes and refers to the existence of an ahistorical entity in history. The horizontal type of relation is the relation of interconnection of the various historical manifestations of the entity in an unbroken series. This type of relation indicates the continuity of the historical presence of the entity. Thus, if the first nexus dissolves, the two relations break down. First, the vertical type of relation breaks down when genealogy exposes that there is no such essential entity of which individual nexuses of elements can be manifestations. Second, the horizontal type of relation breaks down too. Since there is no essential entity, the individual nexuses of elements that were considered manifestations of it become disentangled; and as they become disentangled, there are no longer individual, re-identifiable groups of elements to be connected with one another. In 13 NGH: 1022. 199 that sense, the outcome of the dissociative function is the radical dispersion of things. The constituents of the two nexuses, i.e. the elements of the entity and the elements of its individual manifestations, become dissociated from each other, and, from the now- undone metaphysical perspective, become again unspecified elements qua things. The second critical function of genealogy, “c’est l’usage parodique et destructeur de réalité, qui s’oppose au thème de l’histoire-réminiscence ou reconnaissance”.14 According to Foucault, Usage parodique et bouffon [...]. A cet homme emmêlé et anonyme qu’est l’Européen – et qui ne sait plus qui il est, quel nom il doit porter – l’historien offre des identités de rechange, en apparence mieux individualisées et plus réelles que la sienne. Mais l’homme du sens historique ne doit pas se tromper sur ce substitut qu’il offre : ce n’est qu’un déguisement. [...]. Le bon historien, le généalogiste, saura ce qu’il faut penser de toute cette mascarade. Non point qu’il la repousse par esprit de sérieux ; il veut au contraire la pousser à l’extrême : il veut mettre en œuvre un grand carnaval du temps, où les masques ne cesseront de revenir. Plutôt que d’identifier notre pale individualité aux identités fortement réelles du passe, il s’agit de nous irréaliser dans tant d’identités réapparues ; et en reprenant tous ces masques – Frédéric de Hohenstaufen, César, Jésus, Dionysos, Zarathoustra peut-être –, en recommençant la bouffonnerie de l’histoire, nous reprendrons en notre irréalité l’identité plus irréelle du Dieu qui l’a menée.15 Foucault’s dense analysis reveals three main points, which, as we said before, describe the consequences of the dissociative function of genealogy. The first point is related to the notion of ‘reality’, the target of the parodical function of genealogy as defined above. The second and third points register a move away from ontology, which was the exclusive focus of the dissociative function of genealogy, to what I wish to call the experiential aspect of genealogy. Namely, the second and third points are related to the experience of the genealogist as writer and reader, respectively. First, given the preceding analysis, reality can be understood in terms of the kind of structure I described above. Reality is the structure of relations formed by the manifestations of an entity, itself related to the manifestations of other entities. I will first elucidate this abstract description, and then illustrate it with an example. Our description above focused on a single entity, conceived as a double nexus of elements and manifestations. The structure that I refer to now is the structure that occurs from the interconnection of the manifestations of an entity with the manifestations of other entities. For example, the metaphysically conceived entity of 14 NGH: 1020. 15 NGH: 1021. 200 ‘justice’, is interlinked with a series of other, equally metaphysically conceived, entities like ‘parity’, ‘fairness’ and ‘equality’. The fabric that is created from the interconnections of the historical manifestations of these entities, when taken at face- value – or, better, ‘mask-value’ – is what Foucault means by reality. The parodical function of genealogy is defined as destructive of this reality. The dissolution of each entity into a series of elements, which we witnessed in the dissociative use, entails the tearing apart of the fabric of reality. In short, as entities become elements, the interconnections of assumed correspondence among them and among their manifestations collapse. Reality becomes a space of scattered things, a space of scattered singularities, no longer artificially held together by horizontal and vertical relations of correspondence. Second, Foucault refers explicitly to the experience of the genealogist as a writer, as an author of a genealogy, by specifying a more constructive aspect of genealogy. As we have seen so far, genealogy constitutes a negative qua critical enterprise: it is explicitly defined in terms of usages destructives, the parodical function, specifically, is a function of irrealité, according to which the genealogist is to irrealise or un-realise our identity, and the notion of God refers to the metaphysical bedrock that is to be exposed as constructed. Genealogy’s positive aspect lies in the creative element of the genealogist’s work. The scattered things cannot but be reassembled in new formations. This means two things. First, there can be no genealogical narrative without the construction and postulation of some entities and elements. Even the most minimalist genealogical account, that is, an account that attempts only to spot the logical inconsistencies of a metaphysical story, and wishes to refrain from accepting any empirical-historical input, assents to some empirical- historical claims.16 Second, what distinguishes the genealogical and the metaphysical story is the status of the formations used and created. Despite the discrete existence of the entities postulated by the genealogist, they have neither any necessary status nor any metaphysical grounding. I take the last phrases of the above quotation, concerning the replacement of the metaphysical bedrock with new formations, to describe exactly that. Third, Foucault invokes the experience of the genealogist as a reader. The description of the parodical function as opposed to “l’histoire-réminiscence ou 16 On this issue, which manifests the relation between scepticism and nominalism, see chapter 1.4. 201 reconnaissance” refers to this kind of experience. The destruction of the historical continuity of the manifestations of entities, and of their interconnection with others entails the realisation of things as different entities, but not as different manifestations of something. The experience of a metaphysical connection between a presently occurring thing, on the one hand, and a past or a future projection, on the other, is no longer possible. Although an entity can clearly be reminiscent of something in the past, or can be seen as foreshadowing something in the future, the association is neither necessary nor metaphysically grounded. Moreover, as everything in the past becomes different, the experience of it becomes different too. Put differently, the experience of the past becomes the experience that everything is – now – different. Finally, the third critical function of genealogy, “c’est l’usage sacrificiel, et destructeur de vérité qui s’oppose à l’histoire-connaissance.”17 Troisième usage de l’histoire : le sacrifice du sujet de connaissance. En apparence, ou plutôt selon le masque qu’elle porte, la conscience historique est neutre, dépouillé de toute passion, acharnée seulement à la vérité. Mais si elle s’interroge elle-même et si d’une façon plus générale elle interroge toute conscience scientifique dans son histoire, elle découvre alors les formes et transformations de la volonté de savoir qui est instinct, passion, acharnement inquisiteur, raffinement cruel, méchanceté ;18 [L]e vouloir-savoir {sc. Wille zum Wissen} n’approche pas d’une vérité universelle ; il ne donne pas à l’homme une exacte et sereine maîtrise de la nature; au contraire, il ne cesse de multiplier les risques ; partout il fait croître les dangers ; il abat les protections illusoires ; il défait l’unité de sujet ; il libère en lui tout ce qui s’acharne à le dissocier et à le détruire. Au lieu que le savoir se détache peu à peu de ses racines empiriques, ou des premiers besoins qui l’ont fait naître, pour devenir pure spéculation soumise aux seules exigences de la raison, au lieu qu’il soit lié dans son développement à la constitution et à l’ affirmation d’un sujet libre, il emporte avec soi un acharnement toujours plus grand ; la violence instinctive s’accélère en lui et s’accroit ; les religions jadis demandaient le sacrifice du corps humain ; le savoir appelle aujourd’hui à faire des expériences sur nous-mêmes [Aurore, § 501], au sacrifice du sujet de connaissance.19 Foucault immediately proceeds with a long quote from Nietzsche’s Daybreak (§ 429) which explains the notion of experimenting on oneself, and continues as follows: 17 NGH: 1021. 18 NGH: 1022–1023. 19 NGH: 1023 (the square brackets at the end display Foucault’s footnoted bibliographical references). 202 Les deux grands problèmes qui se sont partage la pensée philosophique du XIXe siècle (fondement réciproque de la vérité et de la liberté, possibilité d’un savoir absolu), ces deux thèmes majeurs légués par Fichte et Hegel, il est temps de leur substituer le thème que « périr par la connaissance absolue pourrait bien faire partie du fondement de l’être » [Par-delà le bien et le mal, § 39]. Ce qui ne veut pas dire, au sens de la critique, que la volonté de vérité {sc. Wille zum Wissen} est bornée par la finitude de la connaissance ; mais qu’elle perd toute limite, et toute intention de vérité dans le sacrifice qu’elle doit faire du sujet de connaissance.20 The sacrificial function describes the consequences of the anti-foundationalist, dissociative function of genealogy. More specifically, it describes the consequences that the dissociative function produces for a specific kind of entities, a kind we could call ‘epistemic entities’. Foucault’s remarks above elaborate on this. Again, as with the parodical function, he makes three main points. The first describes the specific target of the sacrificial use, while the other two describe a more positive aspect of the genealogy, with the third one dwelling more on the experience of the genealogist. In what follows, we attempt to approach these points in more detail. First, as is traditionally the case, an essentialist ontology implies an essentialist epistemology, and vice versa. I use the term ‘essentialist epistemology’ because I think that an epistemology grounded in an essentialist ontology constitutes an epistemic stance that employs a series of interrelated metaphysical, equally essentialist entities, the ones we earlier called epistemic entities. As we have seen in both chapters 1 and 2, essentialist metaphysics come in two versions, Cartesian and Hegelian. Similarly, epistemic entities can be either of Cartesian or Hegelian stock. In the first case, the fundamental epistemic entities would be those of a ‘transcendental subject’, of a ‘world’ external to it, and of a ‘relation of representation’ that relates the one to the other. In the second, Hegelian case, the distinction between the two Cartesian entities of subject and world is only ostensibly replaced by a couple of other fundamental epistemic entities: by the entity of ‘history’, conceived as an inclusive whole that incorporates both subject and world, and by the entity of ‘Reason’, which drives history and eventually brings (the tacitly split) subject and world together (Hegel’s “substance becoming subject”). As we saw, genealogy aims at disentangling the nexuses of entities, of their manifestations, and of the interconnections among them. Consequently, the nexuses 20 NGH: 1023–1024 (the square brackets display Foucault’s footnoted bibliographical references). 203 of epistemic entities that derive from the other nexuses of entities become equally disentangled. Furthermore, a series of other related epistemic claims that are grounded in the Cartesian and Hegelian fundamental entities become equally debunked. Namely, other epistemic entities, like ‘truth’ and ‘knowledge’, become not only unfounded, but also contentless, while epistemic and ethicoepistemic values, such as veracity, truthfulness or accuracy, are equally hollowed out.21 In short, the collapse of the ontological foundations results in the collapse of the epistemological possibilities (in the broadest sense) which these foundations made possible and opened up in the first place. In that sense, we reach Foucault’s definition that the consideration of history in epistemic terms, conceived as progress, knowledge accumulation or truth- finding mechanism, is undone. The second point qualifies genealogy positively. Namely, according to the genealogical perspective, knowledge formations, like discourses and practices, constitute emergent indications and outcomes of an underlying will to knowledge. This will to knowledge does not constitute a metaphysical construction, and should be understood in a deflationist and apophatic way. As explained, genealogy destroys both the notion of a transcendental subject that holds a relation of epistemic correspondence with a world external to it, and the notion of an ahistorical reason that accumulates knowledge as history unfolds. The will to knowledge does not replace this metaphysical (subject-centred or reason-centred) epistemic function with an equally metaphysical, equally ahistorical psychophysical function. On the contrary, it constitutes a general description that negates the postulation of an ahistorical and decontextualised epistemic function and exposes it as metaphysical. Thus, what Foucault provides as forms and transformations of the will to knowledge (“instinct, passion, acharnement inquisiteur, raffinement cruel, méchanceté”) is far from a list of ahistorical, quasi-metaphysical entities. Rather, he provides a series of indicative 21 Both epistemic concepts (like transcendental subject, relation of representation, or truth) and epistemic values (like trust or truthfulness) are grouped under the category of epistemic entities. This is because of a twofold premise. First, as we said, in the context of a metaphysical, essentialist framework, epistemic concepts and categories cannot but be metaphysical entities. Second, the metaphysician holds a distinction between facts (here essential entities) and values, and postulates possible ways in which they are related (ranging, for example, from causation and supervenience to reduction and elimination). However, from our nominalist perspective, any distinction between fact and value – and any postulation of an interrelation between them – is metaphysical and dogmatic. For the nominalist, there is a difference between ‘fact’ and ‘value’, yet it is a difference of usage in different contexts, and not a difference in essence. 204 elements that negate the idea of a disinterested epistemic function, and which a genealogy can use and reveal. The third point dwells on the experience of the genealogist that we described earlier. According to Foucault, this final, third function of genealogy is called ‘sacrificial’ because it ‘sacrifices’ the subject of knowledge, as he states it in its very definition. Elaborating on the definition, Foucault makes a twofold point that focuses on genealogy as a critical practice. The first point is a negative one, and the other is more constructive. First, Foucault traces the consequences of the undoing of essentialist epistemology. The debunking of truth metaphysically conceived means the undoing of epistemic entities and, thus, of the whole structure of essentialist epistemology. Namely, the undoing of epistemic entities entails the breaking down of the relation of representation between man and world; truth ceases to be a matter either of correspondence between propositions and facts, or of metaphysical coherence among statements. Thus, the status of genealogy – its method, its tools and its entities – changes and genealogy becomes, in a positive sense, groundless. This means that the genealogical perspective as a cluster of propositions becomes an interpretation, lacking, by definition, any metaphysical foundation. The sacrifice of the subject of knowledge is the knowledge of the groundlessness of the genealogist himself. This negative point is the same we saw in “Nietzsche, Freud, Marx”, and as was the case with Foucault’s earlier Nietzschean essay, it is supplemented with the same positive one. There are two aspects in this positive or constructive point. First, in Foucault’s long quotation from Nietzsche’s Daybreak (§ 429), this kind of knowledge, the knowledge of man’s groundlessness, is qualified in positive terms. Foucault associates it with passion, which, in turn, he contradistinguishes from weakness. Second, the notion of the sacrifice of the subject of knowledge is identified with experimentation on oneself. This means that the lack of a metaphysical ground does not entail in any way the collapse of human existence. On the contrary, it means that the breakdown of the transcendental subject opens the space for the construction of a novel kind of selfhood. This kind of selfhood is the self of the genealogist: the grounding that the metaphysical bedrock provided is now replaced by the contextual coherence of the nexus that the genealogical narrator weaves. Thus, the positive aspect of genealogy lies in this self-referential element: critique as the practice of a critic is the critic practising it. 205 Finally, we should not forget that the sceptical stance of the genealogical practice that is revealed here not only has a nominalist aspect but also a particularist one. This aspect is underlined by Foucault’s rhetoric, apparent in the contradistinction between the descriptions of metaphysics and the descriptions of genealogy. In lieu of “la constitution et [...] l’affirmation d’un sujet libre” and “fondement réciproque de la vérité et de la liberté, possibilité d’un savoir absolu”, Foucault proposes “à faire des expériences sur nous-mêmes”.22 The first person pronoun manifests clearly and starkly the opposition between the ahistoricity of metaphysical constructs (like that of ‘subject’ in particular), and the concreteness of the self. In this first part (3.3.1) I attempted to show how Foucault’s conceptualisation of genealogy manifests a nominalist and contextualist stance. We can now move to the second part of our discussion of Foucault’s metahistorical remarks, that is, his conceptualisation of power, as depicted in writings of the same period. I attempt to show how this conceptualisation coheres with what we have said previously about genealogy, and how it manifests the same sceptical stance. 3.3.2. Genealogy as Foucault’s metahistory: genealogy as analytics of power Foucault can be read to approach the notion of power in both an apophatic and a more affirmative way. The apophatic approach to power constitutes a critical presentation of the model of sovereignty, i.e. of the conception of power in terms of sovereignty, and, a fortiori, of the political theory grounded in this conception. Thus, the apophatic approach constitutes the presentation of the conception of power to which Foucault is opposed. The more affirmative approach to power is nothing less than the very structure of genealogical history, the structure that explains and provides the undoing of the metaphysical underpinnings of the conception of power qua sovereignty. The two sections that follow discuss these two approaches successively. 3.3.2.1. Power as sovereignty: towards a critique of a metaphysics of power The sovereign theory of power, or the juridical model of the conception of power, is associated with the ‘social contract’ model of political theory. According to this model, people in one way or another decide the establishment of a main source of power as the sovereign one (a king, a state, etc.) and at the same time define the limits 22 NGH: 1024, emphasis added. 206 within which this power should be exercised. This model derives from a specific historical situation developed from the medieval, feudal monarchic regime onwards: power is conceived as the juridical form of the king’s right. According to Foucault’s own encapsulating expression, “le droit en Occident est un droit de commande royale”.23 The political debates of the eighteenth century maintain this theoretical framework. Power is conceived either as the legitimisation of the sovereign power of the king, as in Hobbes, or as the limitation of his power with recourse to certain rules of right, as in Locke or Rousseau. According to this theoretical framework, a series of characteristics is attributed to power. Sovereignty is conceptualised as the distillation of a single will that derives from the multiplicity of individual wills.24 This means the conceptualisation of power in terms of an ‘internal point of view’, that is, in terms of a singular consciousness that intends and decides.25 This reduction of power to a singular source involves a series of interrelated things. First, power is identified with domination. Second, power is homogeneous. It is unified, and its application, applicability, and distribution are universal. This means that power is exercised in the same way on every level and in every domain of society.26 In that sense, every institution displays a central binary power structure: it is either the subject or the object of domination – it either dominates or is dominated. Third, power is conceived only in negative terms: it is only something that prohibits. As Foucault states: “Cette réduction à la loi [...] permet de ne jamais penser le pouvoir qu’en termes négatifs: refus, délimitation, barrage, censure. Le pouvoir, c’est ce qui dit non.”27 23 « Il faut défendre la société ». Cours au Collège de France, 1976: 23. Henceforth, IFDS. Foucault’s discussion of the notion of power in IFDS displays an autonomy whose importance and influence is manifested in two things. First, the lectures, where this discussion mainly takes place, were transcribed, translated and published for the first time in Italian in Alessandro Fontana and Pasquale Pasquino’s influential 1977 Microfisica del potere. Interventi politici, a compilation, edition, and translation of a series of Foucault’s texts, many of which were being published for the first time. Second, these lectures were published in English in Colin Gordon’s 1980 famous, influential and now classic edition Power/Knowledge, under the auspices of Foucault himself: “We are grateful to Michel Foucault for his friendly assistance and co-operation throughout the preparation of this volume.” (Gordon 1980 (ed.): xi). These lectures were published in French in 1994 in the DE. (DE II, 1977, 193 and 194. See also the editorial notes of pp. 160 and 175, respectively.) 24 IFDS: 25–26. 25 IFDS: 25. Albeit rather free, Kate Soper’s rendering, “power at the level of conscious intention or decision” (Gordon 1980 (ed.): 97, emphasis added), glosses very well the issue of consciousness present in Foucault’s “du côté intérieur’. 26 “Pouvoirs et stratégies”, DE II, 1977, 218: 423. Henceforth PS. 27 PS: 423. 207 This conception of power has some methodological consequences that suggest its limited explanatory capacity. Power is conceived as the homogeneous mechanism of the dominance of one class or group over another, which is itself concentrated in and derives from a main, single source. This conception informs a kind of inquiry that focuses on how power reproduces itself and permeates the whole social body. This kind of “analyse descendante” is highly problematic.28 Foucault takes as an example the hypothesis that the internment of the insane in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was due to the desire of the dominant class to rid themselves of all the people it considered useless for industrial production. Such a hypothesis is empty since its exact opposite could be argued at the same time. This problem is highly apparent in the case of the repressive hypothesis of infantile sexuality. In this case, one can argue that the dominant class, instead of repressing sexual discourses, augmented their number in order to train the oppressed class sexually, and thus ensure the procreation of the working class and the increase in the workforce. At this point we must clarify that Foucault does not argue against the existence of classes (which he himself uses).29 What he is opposed to is this notion of social stratification as an explanatory tool for historical developments. Moreover, as he observes, and earlier showed in Surveiller et punir, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were characterised by the emergence of methods, techniques, processes and apparatuses for the formation and accumulation of knowledge that are exegetically incompatible with the conception of power as a sovereign.30 The reduction of mechanisms of power to a central authority is impossible. The concept and the function of the state do not cover the whole nexus of actual power relations. Rather, the opposite is the case: L’État est superstructurel au regard de toute une série de réseaux de pouvoir qui passent à travers les corps, la sexualité, la famille, les attitudes, les savoirs, les techniques [...]. [...] Je dirais que l’État est une codification de relations de pouvoir multiples qui lui permet de fonctionner.31 28 IFDS: 28, emphasis added. 29 For example, cf.: “Ce nouveau type de pouvoir, qui ne donc plus du tout transcriptible dans les termes de la souveraineté, c’est, je crois, l’une des grandes inventions de la société bourgeoise. Il a été l’un des instruments fondamentaux de la mise en place du capitalisme industriel et du type de société qui lui est corrélatif.” (IFDS: 32–33, emphasis added). 30 Surveiller et punir: passim, and IFDS: 30. 31 “Entretien avec Michel Foucault”, DE II, 1977, 192: 151, emphasis added. (In its full form, it was first published as “Intervista a Michel Foucault”, in Italian, in 1977. Henceforth IMF.) Thus, as we will see later, Foucault does not ascribe to either the ontological or the epistemological presuppositions of a Marxist approach, which he would want to avoid as metaphysical. In the light of our earlier footnote, cf.: “Il y a eu des marxistes pour dire que j’étais un danger pour la démocracie occidentale – ça a été 208 According to Foucault, the multiple power relations constitute the necessary condition of the state, and not vice versa. This contrasting, dense description entails a positive conception of the notion of power. However, before we proceed to our approach to this positive conception, we will close this negative account with two short points. First, Foucault’s critique of the sovereign theory of power, of power conceived in juridical terms, constitutes an internalist critique. The sovereign conception of power is inadequate. It is not inadequate, though, according to an external, different criterion, but according to criteria that this conception itself needs to accept. Namely, this juridical conception is incoherent as it provides historical explanations whose contraries are equally true. Second, these methodological consequences show that the juridical conception of power is not only non-historicised or non-historical, but is mainly ahistorical qua metaphysical. As presented in the beginning of our discussion of power, this theoretical framework stems from a particular constellation of power relations in the Middle Ages. This means nothing less than that modern political theory, from Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau to contemporary communitarianism and human rights discourse, conceives power in terms of the legitimisation of a main sovereign source. Thus, modern political theory transforms a contingent historical situation into an analytical, theoretical framework. Political theory as we know it can be seen, according to Foucault’s analysis, as simply the successive decontextualisation and hypostatisation of a certain historical contingency. From this we can understand two things. First, Foucault’s critique and his positive conception of power must be situated within the genealogical framework. Second, the genealogical conception of power describes the way in which the metaphysical conception of power can be undone. It is to this that we will now turn. 3.3.2.2. A genealogical conception of power Foucault’s conception of power qua metahistorical structure is presented here in two parts. First, we present the main characteristics of power. Second, in the next two écrit –, un socialiste a écrit que le penseur qui m’était le plus proche, c’était Adolf Hitler dans Mein Kampf. J’ai été considéré par des libéraux anarchiste de gauche ; un professeur américain a demandé pourquoi on invitait dans les universités américaines un crypto-marxiste comme moi qui était manifestement un agent du K.G.B., etc.” (DE II, 1984, 341, “Politique et éthique : un interview”: 1406. Henceforth PE). 209 subsections we provide a series of clarifications and conceptual distinctions concerning these characteristics. Power can be defined as “la multiplicité des rapports de force qui sont immanentes au domaine où ils s’exercent, et sont constitutifs de leur organisation”.32 Foucault’s analytical elaboration of this conception of power can be reconstructed as follows. (1) Power is understood in terms of a nexus schema. The multiplicity of relations of force that Foucault describes forms a nexus. In other words, the nexus consists of – is nothing over and above – these relations.33 (2) This nexus covers the whole social body to the extent that there is no place outside power.34 Relations of power are not external to other relations. On the contrary, they are immanent to “processus économiques, rapports de connaissance, relations sexuelles”.35 (3) Power cannot be paralleled to a commodity held by one sovereign individual, one group or one class at the expense of and against another.36 On the contrary, it is the force exercised to and from the innumerable points of the nexus that define these relations and comprise the nexus.37 This constitutes the “[o]mnipresence du pouvoir”.38 Thus, Foucault’s schema enables the understanding of power in a dynamic way, in both spatial and temporal terms. Power is what is produced everywhere and simultaneously, from one point of the relation to another, from one instance to another.39 (4) Relations of force are characterised by modifications, enhancements and reversals. They can be articulated in strategic chain formations and can form disjunctions and contradictions.40 Thus, institutions are this swarming and solidification of relations of force.41 The points from where and upon which force is exercised, along with the relations of which they are constitutive, are not fixed; they can concentrate or scatter, diminish or proliferate, emerge or vanish. 32 Histoire de la sexualité I. La volonté de savoir: 121–122, emphasis added. Henceforth VS. 33 IFDS: 26. 34 PS, 425. 35 VS: 123. 36 IFDS: 26. Cf. VS: 123. 37 VS: 123. 38 VS: 122. 39 VS: 122. Cf. IFDS: 26. 40 VS: 122. 41 VS: 122. 210 (5) Power relations should be considered as intentional and yet non-subjective: they are intentional because “pas de pouvoir [...] s’exerce sans une série de visées et d’objectifs”, and they are non-subjective because they are not the result “du choix ou de la décision d’un sujet individuel”.42 The rationality of power is the rationality of the various tactics in which power is embedded.43 (6) Genealogy can be seen as the methodological outcome of these considerations: Je crois qu’il faut [...] – c’est une précaution de méthode à suivre – faire une analyse ascendante du pouvoir, c’est-à-dire partir des mécanismes infinitésimaux, lesquels ont leur propre histoire, [...] et puis voir comment ces mécanismes de pouvoir, [...], ont été et sont encore investis, colonisés, utilisés, infléchis, transformés, déplacés, étendus, etc., par des mécanismes de plus en plus généraux et des formes de domination globale.44 We can now proceed to unpack these six points. The elaborations, clarifications and conceptual distinctions that follow attempt to indicate Foucault’s nominalism. This nominalism underpins Foucault’s various conceptions of genealogical history and thus provides the necessary constancy for him to be considered a sceptical artist of living.45 In that sense, it is indicative that in one of his inaugural, summarising remarks on his own method he states: Il faut sans doute être nominaliste : le pouvoir, ce n’est pas une institution, et ce n’est pas une structure, ce n’est pas une certaine puissance dont certains seraient dotés : c’est le nom qu’on prête à une situation stratégique complexe dans une société donnée.46 3.3.2.3. Power, force, domination Foucault uses three main terms: power, force, and domination. It is necessary to discuss two subtle conceptual distinctions that Foucault makes: first, the distinction between power and force; and, second, the distinction between power and domination. Concerning the first, power is the more general phenomenon and is the effect of a series of microprocesses of forces. This seems to describe the relation between the two notions as presented in Foucault’s introductory quasi-definitions of power cited above. In the first, power is described as the multiplicity of relations of force, 42 VS: 124–125. 43 VS: 125. 44 IFDS: 27. 45 On constancy as a criterion for art of living, see the Introduction and chapter 1. 46 VS: 123. It is found at the top of the third page of a section appropriately entitled “Méthode”. 211 and in the second – in which his nominalist stance is explicitly stated – as the name given to a complex strategic situation, or, in other words, the name given to a specific solidification of forces. However, in some other later instances, the two notions seem to be used almost interchangeably. In the “certain nombre de propositions”, in which Foucault distils his conception of power, the notion of force remains the unit of a microlevel analysis.47 Nevertheless, first, situations of domination are defined as effects of rearrangements of relations of force, while any reference to a level of power relations is bypassed or omitted. Moreover, second, it is relations of power, and not of force, that are described as exercised to and from innumerable points, and as inherent to other types of relation, by being both their effect and condition.48 The solution to this tension that I propose retains or satisfies both phenomena. In other words, it attempts both to keep the distinction between the two notions and to allow for their interchangeability. Our earlier breakdown of Foucault’s conception of power into points was made in the light of this attempt. The solution stems from Foucault’s nominalist stance and suggests a kind of ontological monism. Power is and should be read as identified with force, since both notions do not designate or refer to a different entity or property metaphysically conceived. Thus, the distinction between the two is a twofold distinction in linguistic use. On the one hand, force can be seen indeed as referring to power of a lower level, that is, of a more elementary level of analysis, according to which power relations are comprised of relations of force. On the other, power is used to refer to institutions, to recognised and established crystallisations of forces, while force is retained to refer to things that can range, for example, from one’s specific intention to raise one’s arm to a set of more subtle processes within a family power structure. In that sense, the notion of power is used to refer to all the things that the juridical model of sovereignty was referring to when employing the same word. We can now move to our second distinction, the one between the notions of power and domination. The distinction is similar in structure to the one between power and force. First, they do not refer to different entities. Second, domination refers to a different level of analysis. Third, it indicates a difference in degree; it is used to indicate a specific relation of power characterised by a certain intensity. 47 VS: 123, emphasis added. 48 VS: 124. 212 Fourth, the distinction between the two is important because it enables us to understand a further qualification in Foucault’s conceptualisation of the notion of power, namely its relation to freedom. In what follows, we attempt to show how these points are present in Foucault’s work.49 According to Foucault, La domination, c’est une structure globale de pouvoir dont on peut trouver parfois les significations et les conséquences jusque dans la trame la plus ténue de la société ; mais c’est en même temps une situation stratégique plus ou moins acquise et solidifiée dans un affrontement à longue portée historique entre des adversaires.50 Three points are important here. Domination is defined as a generalised structure of power. Thus, first, the notions of power and domination do not refer to different entities, but domination constitutes a specific variation of a power relation. It is in light of this idea that Foucault’s following response, in a related interview question, should be read: il me semble que, dans beaucoup d’analyses qui ont été faites par Arendt ou, en tout cas, dans cette perspective-là, on dissociait assez constamment la relation de domination de la relation de pouvoir ; mais je me demande si cette distinction n’est pas un peu verbale ; on peut bien en effet reconnaître que certaines relations de pouvoir fonctionnent de telle manière que globalement elles constituent un effet de domination, mais le réseau constitué par les relations de pouvoir ne permet guère de distinction tranchée.51 Second, as a global structure of power, domination describes a different, higher and possibly more extensive, level of analysis. Moreover, earlier in the same essay, Foucault himself distinguished the forms of domination into ethnic, social and religious.52 A third point concerning the distinction between power and domination is that of a difference in degree, and specifically the idea that domination is a limit case of power. According to Foucault, Lorsqu’un individu ou un groupe social arrivent à bloquer un champ de relations de pouvoir, à les rendre immobiles et fixes et à empêcher toute réversibilité du mouvement – par des instruments qui peuvent être aussi bien 49 Although as we have seen Foucault uses the notion of domination in both VS and IFDS, in what follows we focus mainly on “Le sujet et le pouvoir” (DE II, 1982, 306; henceforth SP), PE, and “À propos de la généalogie de l’éthique : un aperçu du travail en cours” (DE II, 1984, 344; henceforth APGE). 50 SP: 1062. 51 PE: 1408, emphasis added. 52 SP: 1046. 213 économiques que politiques ou militaires –, on est devant ce qu’on peut appeler un état de domination.53 This quasi-definition of domination that Foucault provides can be understood as an elaboration of point (4) above. As we have seen, a power relation can be reversed. However, the relation of domination is presented as the situation in which this possibility of reversal is precluded. Thus, an additional proposition on the characteristics of power can be derived: (7) Power relation constitutes a relation between at least two poles, in which both poles can, qua have the irreducible potency to, exercise force on one another. Thus, as we can now see, the relation of domination is the breaking point of a power relation: it constitutes the limit where a power relation qua relation breaks down. The notion of potency is constitutive of Foucault’s conceptualisation of the notion of power relation, and the notion of irreducibility qualifies potency as constitutive of the relation qua relation. 3.3.2.4. Power and/as knowledge As we saw in (1) and (2) above, power constitutes a nexus of relations of force that are coextensive with and constitutive of the social body. This means that there is no place outside power, and that power relations are constitutive of other relations. This implies that abstract entities, too, as things that are deeply implicated in human interaction, are part of the social fabric. Thus, epistemic concepts and values, such as truth and knowledge, as species of abstract entities, are not and cannot be considered as located outside the nexus of power relations. A classic presentation of this idea is found in the following extract from La Volonté de savoir: les relations de pouvoir ne sont pas en position d’extériorité à l’égard d’autres types de rapports (processus économiques, rapports de connaissance, relations sexuelles), mais […] elles leur sont immanentes ; elles sont les effets immédiats des partages, inégalités et déséquilibres qui s’y produisent, et elle sont réciproquement les conditions internes de ces différenciations ; les relations de pouvoir ne sont pas en position de superstructure, avec un simple rôle de prohibition ou de reconduction ; elles ont, là où elles jouent, un rôle directement producteur.54 53 DE II, 1984, 356, “L’éthique du souci de soi comme pratique de la liberté”: 1530, (henceforth ESS). 54 VS: 123–124. 214 Foucault elaborated further on this idea in an interview that took place the same year. This interview is significant for two reasons.55 First, Alessandro Fontana and Pasquale Pasquino, who conducted the interview, were Foucault’s associates and knowledgeable about his work and perspective.56 Second, most importantly, Foucault’s text can be seen as relatively autonomous. More specifically, his last response was given in writing and constitutes a long and continuous text.57 Moreover, the multiplicity of the editions of Foucault’s interview, within a relatively short time frame, is largely based on this fact, and can be seen to corroborate its autonomous character.58 Thus, as Foucault’s style itself also manifests, his last response constitutes an autonomous short essay analysing the role of the intellectual in contemporary society. It is in this context that he provides one of the most careful and analytical elaborations of the concept of truth, and specifically of the way that it is related to power. The following two extracts are from the conclusion of the interview. They encapsulate both his argument and his rhetoric, and elucidate significantly his relevant description in La Volonté de savoir: Il [l’intellectuel] fonctionne ou il lutte au niveau général de ce régime de la vérité si essentiel aux structures et au fonctionnement de notre société. Il y a un combat pour la vérité, ou du moins autour de la vérité – étant entendu encore une fois que par vérité je ne veux pas dire l’ensemble de choses vraies qu’il y a à découvrir ou à faire accepter, mais l’ensemble des règles selon lesquelles on démêle le vrai du faux et on attache au vrai des effets spécifiques de pouvoir ; étant entendu aussi qu’il ne s’agit pas d’un combat en faveur de la vérité, mais autour du statut de la vérité et du rôle économico-politique qu’elle joue.59 55 See the editorial note, IMF: 140. 56 The interview was included in their influential Microfisica del potere. Interventi politici. Moreover, as Foucault’s associates, Fontana and Pasquino participated with exposés in Foucault’s series of Collège de France cours. (Pasquino is referred in Foucault’s course content summaries of “Sécurité, territoire, population” (DE II, 1978, 255: 723) and “Naissance de la biopolitique” (DE II, 1979, 274: 825), and Fontana in the latter (ibid.).) Furthermore, Foucault gives one of his last interviews to Fontana (“Une esthétique de l’existence”, DE II, 1984, 357; see also the editorial note, p. 1549), while his responses to criticisms concerning the notion of power are provided in the context of an interview with Pasquino (“Précisions sur le pouvoir. Réponses à certaines critiques”, DE II, 1978, 238; see also the editorial note, p. 625). 57 See GORDON 1980 (ed.): 133, n. 1. This editorial remark is absent from DE. Foucault’s last response can be found in IMF: 154–160. 58 The following milestones characterise the interview’s bibliographical history. It was conducted in June 1976, and, in its full form, was first published in Italian, in 1977 (see IMF: 140, ed. note). At the end of 1976, however, before the Italian publication, Foucault’s last response was published as an autonomous text entitled “La fonction politique de l’intellectuel” (DE II, 1976, 184; see the editorial note, p. 109). In 1977, the same year as the Italian edition, an abridged version was published in French, as “Vérité et pouvoir”, in L’Arc, no 70 (see LAGRANGE 2001: 1654). Three years later, an English translation of its full form was published in Gordon’s edition. 59 IMF: 159. 215 Tout cela doit paraître bien confus, et incertain. Incertain, oui, et ce que je dis là, c’est surtout à titre d’hypothèse. Pour que ce soit un peu moins confus cependant, je voudrais avancer quelques propositions – au sens non des choses admises, mais seulement offertes pour des essais ou des épreuves futures : – par vérité, entendre un ensemble de procédures réglées pour la production, la loi, la répartition, la mise en circulation, et le fonctionnement des énoncés ; – la vérité est liée circulairement à des systèmes de pouvoir qui la produisent et la soutiennent, et à des effets de pouvoir qu’elle induit et qui la reconduisent. Régime de la vérité ; – ce régime n’est pas simplement idéologique ou superstructurel ; il a été une condition de formation et de développement du capitalisme. Et c’est lui qui, sous réserve de quelques modifications, fonctionne dans la plus part des pays socialistes (je laisse ouverte la question de la Chine que je ne connais pas) ; – le problème politique essentiel pour l’intellectuel, ce n’est pas de critiquer les contenus idéologiques qui seraient liés à la science, ou de faire en sorte que sa pratique scientifique soit accompagnée d’une idéologie juste. Mais de savoir s’il est possible de constituer une nouvelle politique de la vérité. Le problème n’est pas de changer la conscience des gens ou ce qu’ils ont dans la tête, mais le régime politique, économique, institutionnel de production de la vérité. Il ne s’agit pas d’affranchir la vérité de tout système de pouvoir – ce serait une chimère, puisque la vérité est elle-même pouvoir – mais de détacher le pouvoir de la vérité des formes d’hégémonie (sociales, économique, culturelles) à l’intérieur desquelles pour l’instant elle fonctionne. La question politique, en somme, ce n’est pas l’erreur, l’illusion, la conscience aliénée ou l’idéologie ; c’est la vérité elle-même. De la l’importance de Nietzsche.60 Foucault’s argument here can be understood in terms of four points. First, he rejects the metaphysical conception of truth. As we have seen, this view on truth derives from a twofold thesis. First, there is a distinction between world and subject, according to which the existence and constitution of the world are independent of the subject that perceives it. Accordingly, the subject represents the world in such a way that the structure of the world is mirrored in the structure of the mind or the language.61 Second, truth is a property of propositions and is based on this relation of representation. A proposition is true if and only if it corresponds to the fact or the state of affairs it describes. Foucault’s description of what truth is not is the description of this thesis of metaphysical realism. His formulation “choses vraies qu’il y a à découvrir”, focusing 60 IMF: 159–160. 61 See HACKING 1975: 69. 216 more on the first part of the relation, that of the world, describes the facts of reality, and the propositions or sets of propositions that refer to them, as pre-existing qua metaphysically objective and independent. Equally, the formulation “choses vraies […] qu’il y a à […] faire accepter” can be seen to focus on the other part of the relation, that of the subject. Referring to the subject’s act of endorsing a truth, the formulation describes not only the transformation of a proposition that describes a discovered fact into a belief, but also the almost inevitable reception of a truth, that is, of something that one cannot but assent to as soon as it is uncovered. Thus, Foucault’s rejection of the metaphysical conception of truth is the rejection of the metaphysical realism in which it is grounded. The second point concerns the consequences of the first. Namely, the rejection of metaphysical realism entails a coherentist and, specifically, contextualist view of both meaning and truth. Given the rejection of a metaphysically independent world or subject in which truth and meaning could be grounded, the truth of a proposition depends on its meaning, the meaning of a proposition depends on the conditions of its enunciation, and the conditions of enunciation determine the fact that will make the proposition true. In other words, the conditions of enunciation cut reality into chunks and determine the facts as referents for the propositions. In terms of the Platonic definition of knowledge as justified true belief, knowledge becomes justified belief simpliciter, and truth is identified with justification. As there is no metaphysical qua ahistorical bedrock in which a belief can be grounded, justification is simply a matter of discursive thickness. The distinction between proposition and truth becomes a distinction between a statement and the text in which we found it. Thus, and this is the important conclusion that Foucault draws, ‘truth’ is no longer a propositional predicate but describes the conditions of possibility of true statements. Truth becomes the text.62 Third, Foucault’s view on truth is a reinterpretation of this contextualism. Context should not be understood in strictly discursive, non-material, terms, but instead in terms of power relations. The conditions of possibility of true statements should not be understood in terms of discourse or discursive rules, but instead in terms of politics. If truth is determined by the discourse in which it is found and 62 On these two points, i.e. the rejection of metaphysical realism and the contextualism this rejection entails, see our interpretative framework in section 1.3.1.1, and the way in which they are instantiated in other occurrences in Foucault’s thought in sections 2.4.3, 3.1.1.3, and 3.2.4. 217 anchored, then this discourse, in turn, is conditioned by the specific power relations from which it has emerged. In other words, con-text becomes a nexus of power relations. This describes Foucault’s idea that power conditions knowledge. Finally, fourth, epistemology and politics, as discourse and nexus of power relations respectively, should not be metaphysically conceived, as, say, metaphysically fixed entities. On the contrary, Foucault’s notion of power is premised on his nominalism, and has a critical genealogical function. I will close with a discussion of these two last points. 3.3.2.4.1. Contextualism as power Foucault’s classic presentation of the idea that power relations are conditions of possibility of knowledge is found in the extract from La Volonté de savoir that we cited earlier. In this locus classicus, relations of power are described as immanent to relations of knowledge. The second point from Foucault’s conclusion qualifies further this notion of immanence. Here, this qualification can be understood in three main points. First, the relation between truth and power is described in terms of production (“la produisent”). Power relations constitute the conditions of production of knowledge. Second, the immanence of power to knowledge is further qualified in terms of grounding (“la soutiennent”). In that sense, the notion of production becomes underlined: power structures are described not only as productive of truth, but also as the ground of truth. Finally, the relation of production is described in a dynamic way, as Foucault adds a temporal parameter. According to this description, the systems of truth which power produces enhance and extend power itself. Here, Foucault describes a circular movement, or, better, given the time parameter, a spiral movement. It can be described abstractly as a structure with three distinct phases. The first phase constitutes what we have seen just above: a specific constellation of power relations x produces a certain amount of new knowledge y. According to the second phase, the produced amount of new knowledge y is channelled back into, and put in service of, the constellation of power relations x that have initially produced this new knowledge y. The third phase is the outcome of the two. Namely, the constellation of power relations x becomes transformed, qua enhanced and expanded, into x´ that is, in turn, to produce new knowledge y´, and so on. This structure describes a single loop, from power to knowledge to power again, that can continue ad infinitum. This circular structure can be illustrated with a 218 historical example. The power relation between the confessor and the believer can be seen to produce knowledge, as it leads to the formation of an archive on sexuality. This archive contributes to the development of later mechanisms, such as the disciplines of pedagogy, medicine and birth-rate statistics that have the ability to, and in fact do, exercise power over sexuality.63 3.3.2.4.2. Power: nominalism and scepticism Foucault’s nominalist conception of power, and in particular of the relation of power to knowledge, becomes apparent in the third point of Foucault’s conclusion. Foucault’s approach to the notions of power and regime of truth, by invoking and rejecting the distinction of structure and superstructure, elucidates his nominalism well. First, we should be attentive to his exact formulations. He does not say that power is structural and truth non-superstructural. Rather, it is the regime of truth, and not truth, traditionally conceived, that is described as not having the position of the superstructure. Thus, neither power relations nor the regime of truth have the position of superstructure. However, given that Foucault, as we saw, describes power as both the condition and the direct generator of knowledge, is there not a kind of contradiction when a regime of truth is described as non-superstructural? In other words, when Foucault talks about a regime of truth tout court and qualifies it as non- superstructural, does not he mitigate, if not corrupt, the role of power simpliciter as determinedly productive? The response to this question can illuminate Foucault’s stance. Namely, both descriptions can be held. Foucault can both talk in terms of regime of truth and qualify power as conditioning and productive. What defines nominalism on the matter is their combination. This can be understood in terms of three points. First, power relations can be understood as conditioning and producing relations of knowledge to the extent that the latter are understood in exclusively discursive terms. In other words, if knowledge is understood in terms of discourses, the production of discourses 63 Of course, the locus classicus of this is VS. Albeit not included in VS, instances of the long prehistory of these discourses, that is, aspects of a genealogical critique of these discourses, can be found in Foucault’s other works of the same period. We could mention indicatively two kinds of these aspects. On the issue of the construction of the category of the abnormal individual, see Foucault’s 1974–1975 cours Les anormaux. (See also his précis “Les anormaux”, DE I, 1975, 165.) On the chronological milestone of the medieval ‘technologies of sex’ that stem from early Christianity and are crystallised in later penitentiary and confessional practices, see indicatively “Le combat de la chasteté”, DE II, 1982, 312, and “Sexualité et solitude”, DE II, 1981, 295. See also Foucault’s 1979–1980 cours Du gouvernement des vivants. (See also his précis “Du gouvernement des vivants”, DE II, 1980, 289.) 219 is understood in terms of politics. This means that a sharp distinction between politics as non-discursive and epistemology as discursive occurs only when the latter is conceived in its traditional form. Second, as we said sometimes before, Foucault does neither have, nor provide a theory about power, and, a fortiori, about the relation between power and knowledge. What he says here is displaying a structure that emerges from a series of particular historical cases. In other words, the structure he presents is a description, in more or less abstract terms, of what happens at a specific time and place, viewed from a specific perspective. Third, Foucault’s consideration of regime of truth as a unit of analysis and its association with the dipole of structure and superstructure can be understood as nominalist par excellence. Foucault makes a double move. First, he invokes this dipole of structure and superstructure, and says that the regime of truth is not identified with the latter. This does not mean the differentiation between, or the reluctance to collapse, the two schemas, but the rejection of the structure and superstructure schema altogether. He rejects the distinction between a non-discursive, material base-structure, on the one hand, and a discursive, ideo-logical superstructure, on the other, as metaphysical, and in fact as a variation of Hegelian metaphysics. Second, by rejecting a metaphysical stance, he shows that what our first point just above (that power relations are understood as conditioning and producing relations of knowledge) describes is a dialectical move. Distinctions between power and truth, between politics and epistemology, and between non-discursive and discursive are in no circumstances to be understood as metaphysical, and are used only as long as the latter terms of these three distinctions (truth, epistemology, discursive) are used in a traditional way. Thus, power should not be understood as exclusively non-discursive and materialist. In the same way that interpretation, in Foucault’s earlier reading of Nietzsche, and force, in his later reading of Nietzsche’s genealogy as Entstehung, describe a variable that can take the value of any notion or thing that the genealogist will ascribe to it in the context of his or her narrative, power can equally take any form. It ranges from very palpable and specific things, such as the spatial microgeography of the laboratory, or the men–women ratio in the classroom, to non- material ones like the writing style of scientific journal publications, or previously accepted true propositions, or moral and ethical values simpliciter. 220 In that sense, we also understand the sceptical aspect of Foucault’s remarks. First, these notions or things can be found in the historical archive. They are the material of the internalist critique, and thus they delineate the space where the metaphysician and the genealogist can meet. They delineate the space where the metaphysician is confronted with a series of particulars whose existence and identity he accepts, but which he cannot accommodate into his metaphysical narrative without them being distorted. Second, such a sceptical stance involves an equivalent conception of selfhood. As we saw in 3.3.1, the breakdown of a metaphysical conception of truth and knowledge entails the breakdown of the equally metaphysical conception of the knowing subject that grounds it. The nexus of power forces does not only dissolve the ‘relation of representation’ between ‘subject’ and ‘world’, but the ahistorical, transcendental subject that creates it. 221 4. Conclusion: Sceptical Ethics In this thesis I have argued that Foucault’s practice of thinking is the practice of a sceptical stance. I have tried to show that Foucault’s notion of the aesthetics of existence is neither confined only to his late genealogical investigations nor is it simply a conceptualisation of ethics in non-Kantian terms. The notion describes Foucault’s work as an aesthetic work on itself. I have tried to show that is best understood as a sceptical aesthetics of existence. I have further argued that the scepticism that marks Foucault’s aesthetics of existence is best understood in terms of the sceptical stance of Sextus Empiricus. As, according to Foucault himself, aesthetics of existence can be seen to describe his whole work, it also describes his practice of genealogical investigations. As his practice of genealogical investigation aims at the undoing of metaphysical conceptualisations, his aesthetics of existence should be understood as a critique of metaphysics. And given Foucault’s own conceptualisation of metaphysics, his aesthetics of existence is best conceived as a nominalist, contextualist and particularist stance. In the first chapter, I tried to show how the self-referentiality of his ethical conception and its content as nominalist, contextualist and particularist, can be seen to be present in Foucault’s late work. This enabled us to see two main things. First, Foucault’s concern for an aesthetics of existence can be identified, albeit in different terms, at certain earlier instances of his thought. In certain cases, the similarities are particularly striking. For example, his critique of Husserl, in the context of his discussion of Binswanger’s thought (chapter 3.1) is almost identical with the critique of Cartesian subjectivity developed in his later L’Herméneutique du sujet (chapter 1.2). Second, as we saw, a series of notions such as the self, experience, the difference between the mental and the material, and between the discursive and non-discursive, should not be understood as referring to any objective, metaphysically independent reality. Rather, they constitute a series of meta-historical descriptions: they are abstractions from the very concrete particulars of the historical archive. As such, they acquire their meaning only in within the context from which they have been abstracted only tactically. This is important for two reasons. First, these elements constitute the very material of a sceptical critique that is fundamentally internalist. They are the elements 222 that the metaphysician accepts and that define the space where the metaphysician and the genealogist meet. This is the space where the metaphysician becomes vulnerable, exposed and compelled to revise his conceptualisations according to his own standards. Second, this manifests the full critical aspect of Foucault’s conception of aesthetics of existence, the main raison d’être of aesthetics of existence conceived as a sceptical stance. It is this aspect that permits us to defend Foucault’s stance from a number of criticisms, and, thus, to point to the timeliness and efficaciousness of his thought. In the context of our discussion in the Introduction of the advantages of understanding his aesthetics of existence in terms of a sceptical stance, I attempted to show that the failure or absence of recognising and emphasising Foucault’s stance as a critique of metaphysical conceptualisations either makes his stance identical to metaphysics or it makes it equipollent with it, depriving it of its constitutive function of critique and rendering it either as itself metaphysical or else empty. With the help of the tools developed so far, I now wish to show that Foucault’s stance allows us to debunk the critique that is raised against his thought, in the critique’s own terms, and thereby offer a satisfactory answer. Thus, following Foucault’s insight of self-referentiality, the debunking of these critiques can be also seen to justify retrospectively Foucault’s aesthetics of existence as a sceptical stance. In the final sections I show how one may go about defending Foucault from actual and possible criticisms and thereby put his sceptical ethics into practice. 4.1. Critique and Responses 4.1.1. Critique From what we have seen so far, there are at least two kinds of critique of Foucault’s enterprise. According to the first, Foucault’s analyses are contradictory and self- refuting. According to the second, his analyses cannot be adequately justified. In this final part, I will present these two critiques and provide a possible refutation in the form of two responses. The self-refutation critique occurs in two forms. According to the first, Foucault’s conceptualisation of power contradicts his conceptualisation of the self. Foucault argues that power is not only influential or, even, determining, but, rather, 223 constitutive of the self. However, as we have seen, Foucault’s aestheticist asceticism involves one’s work on oneself, that is, one’s exercise of power over oneself. The contradiction does not lie in the fact that there are two kinds of exercise of power, a kind of ‘external’ (i.e. from a subject or an institution to another subject) and ‘internal’ (i.e. from a subject to the same subject) exercise of power. Rather, it is found in the fact that this ‘internal’ exercise of power entails a space, within the self, of conscious and seemingly free intentionality that should be autonomous qua insulated against any type of power influence and power determination, let alone against the idea that the self is constituted by power relations.1 The second form of the self-refutation critique centres upon Foucault’s alleged crypto-normativity; Foucault’s genealogical investigations are contradictory since their standpoint is based on the values, such as freedom, justice, progress, and, most importantly, truth, which constitute their main target of critique. In short, to illustrate this focusing on the latter value, if Foucault claims that power relations are constitutive of truth, how can he hold that his very claim is true? In other words, what is the truth-value of this very claim? I think that Habermas’ following claim encapsulates the general attitude of the critique of Foucault’s thought. Equally instructive is another contradiction in which Foucault becomes enmeshed. He contrasts his critique of power with the ‘analysis of truth’ in such a fashion that the former becomes deprived of the normative yardsticks that it would have to borrow from the latter. Perhaps the force of this contradiction caught up with Foucault in this last of his texts, drawing him again into the circle of philosophical discourse of modernity which he thought he could explode.2 Almost thirty years later, Pascal Engel makes the same point: It always used to astonish me, when I was attending Michel Foucault’s courses at the Collège de France in the 1970s, to hear him explaining to us that the notion of truth was no more than an instrument of power, and that, since all power was bad, truth could only be the expression of a malign intent, and then see him marching in demonstrations under banners bearing the slogan Truth and Justice.3 1 On this matter I have been profited by my discussion with Nicholas Vrousalis. 2 HABERMAS 1986: 108. Taylor asks on the same issue: “‘Power’ without ‘freedom’ or ‘truth’: can there really be an analysis which uses the notion of power, and which leaves no place for freedom or truth?” (1986: 90). This problem along with the ideas “of power without a subject” (ibid.: 83) and the “regime- relativity of truth [that] means that we cannot raise the banner of truth against our own regime” (ibid.: 94) lead Taylor to claim that “Foucault’s position is ultimately incoherent” (ibid.: 83). 3 ENGEL 2007a: 2. See also CASTORIADIS 1978, GEERTZ 1978, HABERMAS 1987 [1985], WALZER, 1986. Cf. also HAN 2002. 224 The second kind of critique can be seen as a variation on the crypto- normativity criticism. Here genealogy is criticised not because it is based on the values (such as truth) that it rejects, but because of the absence of any justificatory values. According to this, genealogy needs to be adequately justified, and this justification cannot be found in the values and norms it attempts to debunk. Nor are there any other justificatory values available. This kind of critique is twofold. It concerns both the diagnostic and the therapeutic aspect of the genealogy. It concerns both genealogy’s epistemological aspect (that is, the correctness in both defining the problem and determining the solution) and genealogy’s ethical aspect (that is, the correctness both of the moral standpoint from where the critique is made, and of the political praxis to follow). Concerning the epistemological aspect, the categories that Foucault employs are criticised for being too open and, thus, having limited explanatory content and force.4 Furthermore, given the impossibility of genealogy to be adequately justified with recourse to any set of values, Foucault’s narratives cannot be considered superior to the foundationalist narratives he criticises. Concerning the ethical aspect, Foucault is criticised of nihilistic scepticism and radical relativism. He gives us no reason why we should oppose what he describes,5 and both the choice of the target of critique (that is, the question of why to choose this metaphysical stance to undo, instead of that) and the way of action to be followed become matters of “aesthetic decisionism”.6 4.1.2. Responses These two kinds of critique, I wish to argue, instantiate the traditional response of philosophy to a sceptical stance. As many of Foucault’s critics combine both kinds, these two can be formulated in terms of a single dilemma: either there is a space in which values and norms are grounded, and which is immune to power determination, and, thus, Foucault contradicts himself, or there is no such ground, and his critique is impossible qua unfounded. The underpinning premise of this dilemma is the following: 4 See KOLAKOWSKI 1999a and WALZER 1986. 5 See FLYNN 1985, RORTY 1991b(iii), SCHURMANN 1985, TAYLOR 1986. Descombes characterises Foucault as a ‘positivist nihilist’ (DESCOMBES 1979). 6 WOLIN 1994. 225 (Pd) values and norms can only be justified when grounded in a metaphysical conception of selfhood or history. Thus, premised on (Pd), either Foucault makes a metaphysical claim, and contradicts himself, or his critique is empty. Foucault’s response would be the undoing of this underpinning premise (Pd), which would then result in negating and undoing both horns of the dilemma. As we have seen, first, Foucault does not make any metaphysical claim and, thus, his investigations are not contradictory; second, the fact that he does not make any metaphysical claim does not entail that his point is empty. As I have argued from the start, there are two possible responses to this critique of Foucault, that is, two possible ways to undo (Pd). The first designates the dogmatism of the metaphysical outlook. The second shows that the sceptical stance actually performs an internalist critique. I will discuss them in turn. 4.1.2.1. First response: exposing metaphysics as unjustified According to the sceptic, (Pd) is unjustified qua dogmatic. The critique of Foucault is premised on the idea that for something to be meaningful it has to correspond to some kind of ahistorical essence. This idea is exactly what we described earlier (section 3.3.0) as the fundamental mistake of Platonism that, according to Nietzsche, is responsible for the contemporary (his and Foucault’s and ours) malaise. I tried to show how this idea has been transplanted into modern thought. In the Cartesian version, the equivalent of ahistorical essences has become the ahistorical structures of the relation of representation between subject and world. In the Hegelian version, the ahistorical essence has become that of the Reason (with a capital letter) of history. Thus, given the above, the metaphysician can be seen to perform the following fourfold move: he puts forward an outlook of how things are, considers this outlook as objectively and ahistorically true, overlooks and assesses everything in its light, and then criticises and dismisses as mistaken and/or/as meaningless everything that lacks the properties that he has himself postulated. The metaphysician’s critique is unjustified qua dogmatic in the following sense: it is premised on a historically specific view that it takes to be solely, that is objectively and ahistorically, true. In that sense, the first response to this critique can be seen as the negation of the metaphysical premise on which the critique is based, that is, exposing the fourfold 226 move that hypostatises and turns a particular historical view into a bedrock. This response not only derives, as we have seen and will be reminded soon, from Foucault’s considerations on self and power. It is also explicitly presented, at a metahistorical level, by Foucault himself. Namely, the manuscript of his first lecture of his 1982–1983 cours at the Collège de France, Le Gouvernement de soi et des autres, contains an argument that both encapsulates Foucault’s own rendering of the critiques of his approach, and outlines his response.7 Foucault’s extract is important. Not only does he present and respond to a series of criticisms that cover most of his work, he also, and mainly, unifies them by showing that they are instances of a basic attitude. I take this to corroborate my view of the unified character of his work. As I hope will become clear, the terms that he uses to presents his argument are highly indicative of his own sceptical stance. According to Foucault, his approach is criticised as negative. This negativism can be traced in three points that correspond, although Foucault does not make this explicit, to the domains of epistemology, ontology and ethics. The first two, négativisme historicisant and négativisme nominaliste, refer to his replacement both of a theory of things and of their corresponding universals with historically determined practices and experiences, respectively. Similarly, Foucault’s nihilisme is traced in the way in which his investigations, instead of assessing practices according to established sets of values, put these values in the context of practices. Foucault’s response exposes (Pd) as the main premise underpinning these criticisms. (Pd) does not only group these criticisms together – it makes them possible: Il faut devant ces objections ou à dire vrai, ces “reproches” avoir une attitude très ferme. Car ce sont des “reproches”, c’est-à-dire des objections qui sont telles qu’à s’en défendre on souscrit à ce qu’elles soutiennent. Sous ces différentes objections/reproches, on suppose ou on impose une sorte de contrat implicite de la décision théorique, contrat au terme duquel historicisme, nominalisme, nihilisme se trouvent disqualifiés d’entrée de jeu : nul n’osant se déclarer tel et le piège consistant à ne pouvoir faire autre chose que de relever un défi[.]8 In short, Foucault responds that, according to his critics, taking things as contingent is wrong; and, according to Foucault, this is wrong because the metaphysician has ad 7 GSA: 7–8, fn. 8 GSA: 7, fn., emphasis added. 227 libitum decided that things are simply not that way – because the metaphysician has ad libitum decided that things are described by an equivalent of (Pd).9 Two important points now become apparent: first, that this response applies to the specific cases of Foucault’s conceptualisation of self and power; and, second, how the specific critique – that he contradicts himself – becomes undone. The critique of contradiction holds if and only if concepts are implicitly premised on something like (Pd), that is, if and only if they are understood in a metaphysical way. This confirms what we have been arguing all along: what defines the sceptical tradition from Sextus to Rorty and Foucault is precisely their indefatigable practice to expose variations of the hidden metaphysical premise. Sextus can be seen to either contradict himself or to argue for an almost unliveable position if and only if he is assumed to adhere to the metaphysical framework of the dogmatists that he uses only tactically. The same applies to Rorty. According to the critic of his ontology and epistemology, the idea that vocabularies are contingent is problematic, as the truth of the descriptions that these vocabularies offer would be undermined. However this critique also holds if and only if truth is metaphysically conceived, and, thus, the notion of contingency is a priori excluded and rejected. Similarly, according to the critique of Rorty’s ethics and politics, the idea that the community is contingent is equally problematic, since a contingent community would be unable to ground any moral concepts. Again, this critique holds if and only if the truth of moral concepts is considered in terms of a metaphysical correspondence to an independent moral reality. Foucault’s case illustrates this nominalist response in an equally robust historicist and contextualist form. He, too, can be considered to contradict himself if and only if both notions of self and power are understood metaphysically. But this is, as we have seen, precisely not the case. The metaphysical conceptualisation of an entity amounts to an arbitrary hypostatisation of a series of historically contingent elements. And even when Foucault talks about self and power in abstract terms, he no 9 This line of argument is also found in scholars that attempted to defend Foucault from his critics well before the publication of his lectures. Rouse (1994: 105, 111–112) counter-criticises Foucault’s critics for considering a point of “epistemic sovereignty”, a point beyond or above the power nexus, where criteria can be articulated and applied in a quasi-objective way. Similarly, Nehamas (AL: 251) argues that one should not ask whether Foucault’s historical account is true or false, but whether it is better than its alternatives. Since this premise is refutable by the argument that even in this case one needs a set of criteria in order to decide for a better or a worse interpretation, Nehamas proceeds in his second line of defence, arguing against the existence of such criteria. 228 longer refers to any theoretical, ahistorical entities. On the contrary, they are at all times descriptions of historically specific uses and seem abstract and theoretical only to the extent that they constitute generalisations, that is, summaries and abstractions, of concrete uses of terms as found in the archive. Recall that Foucault does not have any theory about power, force and domination. He does not make any claim that these notions represent, or correspond, to any ahistorical conceptual reality. On the contrary, when he talks about power he makes an abstraction providing a summary of a series of particular historical cases. He talks about manifestations of specific relations that take place between specific social roles (i.e. the teacher and the pupil, the doctor and the patient, the statistician and the population) within a specific historical period. The same applies to Foucault’s conceptualisation of the self. Even where he gets closest to providing a more positive conception of selfhood, this notion of selfhood applies only to a specific historical context. 4.1.2.2. Second response: the internalist aspect of the sceptical stance In the context of the first response, we saw the following things. First, we saw that the critique of Foucault can be formulated as the dilemma that either his analyses are based on a metaphysical claim, and then are self-refuting, or they are not, and are then unfounded. Second, we saw that this dilemma is based on (Pd), the premise that something is meaningful only when grounded in a metaphysical conceptualisation of selfhood or of history. Third, we saw that Foucault’s response to critiques of this kind is the exposing of this premise as their dogmatic foundation – a specific view of how things are is accepted and hypostatised as unconditionally true. However, it seems that the critique has not been fully dispelled as the premise has only been exposed but not refuted. The idea that a particular view of the way things are is the way they are, could still be the case. In that sense, Foucault’s first response can be seen to relapse again to the two horns of the dilemma. We have argued so far that genealogy, roughly put, constitutes a kind of historical discourse that attempts to undo the metaphysical hypostatisation of things. Thus, either the genealogist presupposes a theory about history and about how things really are that is not different from the metaphysical discourse, or it makes no theoretical claims, and then is unable to provide any adequate justification for why the genealogical account is better than the metaphysical discourse it attacks and seeks to replace. 229 The dilemma can be recast as a single question about the justification of the genealogical discourse. How can the genealogist justify that his discourse is somehow better (in the broadest sense of ‘better’) than the metaphysician’s? Why should the idea that there is no ahistorical way of how things are be more correct (again, in the broadest sense of ‘correct’) than the idea that there is an ahistorical structure of how things are? These questions lead both the metaphysical and the genealogical discourse towards an impasse. Both genealogical critique and metaphysical stance, along with its counter-critique, are transformed into an onus probandi dilemma, to borrow a term from jurisprudence. What is at stake is deciding which one of the two sides has the ‘burden of proof’, which one has to prove the validity of its own discourse. Is it on the metaphysician to argue for the existence of an ahistorical structure? Or is it on the genealogist to argue for its non-existence? Is it on the metaphysician to argue for the existence of an ahistorical standpoint of criticism? Or is it on the genealogist to argue that such a meta-discourse does not exist? I think that this strategy – of turning the well-embedded metaphysical stance, along with its counter-critique, into the state of suspension of the onus probandi dilemma – is necessary, fruitful and effective. However, I also think that the metaphysical discourse has to be fully debunked, and that the genealogical discourse does perform this function. What we referred to earlier as Foucault’s second response describes this function. It combines the exposing of the tacitly assumed metaphysical premise as unjustified with an internalist critique, i.e. its sceptical, internalist undoing. Earlier we saw Foucault’s own rendering of the critiques of his approach as well as his response.10 In the conclusion of his argument we can also find the gist of this second response: Aux objections qui postulent la disqualification du nihilisme/nominalisme/ historicisme, il faudrait essayer de répondre en faisant une analyse historiciste nominaliste nihiliste de ce courant. Et par là je veux dire : non pas édifier dans sa systématicité universelle cette forme de pensée et la justifier en termes de vérité ou de valeur moral, mais chercher à savoir comment a pu se constituer et se développer ce jeu critique, cette forme de pensée.11 What Foucault says here is that the response to the critique of genealogy is to subject this very critique to a genealogical investigation. In short, the response to the critique of genealogy is a genealogy of this critique. However, as we have seen, the critique of 10 GSA: 7–8, fn. 11 GSA: 7–8, fn. 230 genealogy is based on the metaphysical outlook that produces Foucault’s genealogical critique in the first place. So, when Foucault suggests a genealogy of this (metaphysical) critique (of genealogy), is he saying anything different or new here? Is there a difference between a genealogy of a metaphysical critique (which seems to be suggested here) and the genealogy of the metaphysical outlook simpliciter (which we were talking about all along)? Moreover, does he not again cast the dispute between metaphysician and genealogist as an onus probandi dilemma? I think that these questions are valid. Indeed, Foucault does not refer the whole issue to a meta-level. On the contrary, he affirms the genealogical stance in all its nominalist, historicist and nihilistic aspects, and indicates the hermeneutic superiority of this stance over the metaphysical one. This superiority lies in the fact that the very nominalist, historicist, and nihilistic aspects of genealogy provide a better (in the broadest sense of ‘better’) view of how things are compared to the metaphysical stance, along with a solid refutation of the premises in which this metaphysical stance is grounded. Namely, in the light of these three notions (nominalist, historicist, and nihilistic), the genealogical critique is understood as the examination and analysis of entities that are embedded in ontological, epistemic, and ethical claims, in reference to the specific historical contexts of practices in which they are found. This historical contextualism involves the critique of the metaphysical outlook not because it reveals how things really are, but because it reveals the things that the metaphysical stance has accepted before transforming and moulding them into its own outlook. Thus, this historical contextualism exposes metaphysics as a process of misinterpretation and falsification of things according to the very criteria of metaphysics itself. Foucault’s second response describes the internalist aspect of the sceptical stance, that is, the internalist critique that the sceptical stance undertakes. His response is that the premise (Pd) on which the metaphysical stance (and a fortiori the more local metaphysical critique of genealogy) is based is undone because it describes falsely how things are according to the criteria of truth and falsehood that the very metaphysical stance endorses. I think that Foucault’s clearest presentation of the internalist aspect of the sceptical stance can be found in his revisiting of the notion of genealogy in his 1976 231 Collège de France cours « Il faut defendre la société ».12 In the context of his attempt to group and systematise the conclusions of his historical investigations of the time, Foucault produced a series of metahistorical remarks. It is in this context that he specifies and underlines genealogical investigation as a local critique: c’est que cette critique locale s’est effectuée, me semble-t-il, par à travers ce qu’on pourrait appeler des « retours de savoir ». Par « retours de savoir », je veux dire ceci : [...] c’est ce qu’on pourrait appeler l’insurrection de « savoirs assujettis ».13 Et par « savoir assujettis », j’entends deux choses. D’une part, je veux désigner en somme des contenus historiques qui ont été ensevelis, masqués dans des cohérences fonctionnelles ou dans des systématisations formelles. […] Donc, les « savoirs assujettis » ces sont ces blocs de savoirs historiques qui étaient présents et masqués à l’intérieur des ensembles fonctionnels et systématiques, et que la critique a pu faire réapparaître par les moyens, bien entendu, de l’érudition.14 Deuxièmement, par « savoirs assujettis », j’entends également toute une série de savoirs qui se trouvaient disqualifiés comme savoirs non conceptuels, comme savoirs insuffisamment élaborés : savoir naïfs, savoirs hiérarchiquement inférieurs, savoirs en dessous du niveau de la connaissance ou de la scientificité requises. Et c’est par la réapparition de ces savoirs d’en dessous, de ces savoirs non qualifiés, de ces savoirs disqualifiés même, c’est par la réapparition de ces savoirs : celui du psychiatrisé, celui du malade, celui d’infirmier, celui du médecin, mais parallèle et marginal par rapport au savoir médical, le savoir délinquant, etc. – ce savoir que j’appellerais, si vous voulez, les « savoir des gens » (et qui n’est pas du tout un savoir commun, un bon sens, mais au contraire, un savoir particulier, un savoir local, régional, un savoir différentiel, incapable d’unanimité et qui ne doit sa force qu’au tranchant qu’il oppose à tous ceux qui l’entourent) –, c’est par la réapparition de ces savoirs locaux des gens, de ces savoirs disqualifiés que s’est fait la critique.15 We can understand Foucault as saying at least four things. First, a local critique aims at the specific area of the theoretical and metaphysical structure where historical contents have been buried and masked by this structure. Second, this theoretical qua metaphysical process of incorporation, concealment and disguise of local knowledges is identified with their disqualification. Third, their unconcealment by genealogy is the reconstitution of their locality and historicity. Fourth, this reconstitution undoes 12 On the importance and relative autonomy of these parts of IFDS as metahistorical, critical essays, see the relevant footnote in 3.3.2.1. 13 IFDS: 8, emphasis added. 14 IFDS: 8. 15 IFDS: 8–9. 232 the very structure that has engulfed, transformed and rejected them. This point on the mechanism of unconcealment describes genealogy as a sceptical qua internalist critique. The following two points unpack this latter idea. First, as we have seen in Foucault’s earlier discussions of genealogy in “Nietzsche, Freud, Marx” and “Nietzsche, la généalogie, l’histoire”, metaphysics, roughly put, constitutes a fourfold process. It is a process of decontextualisation (and dehistoricisation) of a particular thing or group of things, of its rendering in abstract terms, of its reconsideration in ahistorical terms, and of the concealment of its particularity qua contextual and historical locality. The ‘subjugated knowledges’ can be seen as the historical contents that have undergone such a process. Foucault makes this point forcefully as he refers to the masking of these historical contents as the goal (“ont pour but, justement, de masquer”) of these “aménagements fonctionnels” and “organisations systématiques”.16 Thus, as the metaphysical structure is the product of this process, or as this process of hypostatisation is the condition of possibility of a metaphysical structure, the unconcealment qua restitution of these historical contents entails the undermining of the structure. However, the metaphysician’s question is raised again here: does the genealogist’s claim of unconcealment not presuppose the knowledge of how things really are? Moreover, as the genealogist argues forcefully that there is no space outside interpretation, how can he or she now invoke historical facts and local knowledges as unmediated things? Does not this indicate, once again, that the genealogist not only has, but in fact needs, a theory about both history and the subject that interprets it? Our second, final point is the answer to this question. The savoirs assujettis are the material of the sceptic’s internalist critique. They constitute the material that the metaphysical dogmatist has to assent to, if not accept, according to the premises of his or her own inquiry. This material is the space where the dogmatist and the sceptic meet, the space where the sceptic challenges the metaphysician’s stance on the latter’s own terms. This can be understood as follows. Metaphysics makes universalist claims. This means that metaphysical inquiry involves (if it is not based on), at least in part, the examination of some particulars. In turn, this means that metaphysics performs, at least in part again, an explanatory 16 IFDS: 8, emphasis added. 233 function. The explananda are concrete things of the physical, social or historical reality to the existence of which the metaphysician assents. The ‘subjugated knowledges’ are these concrete historical things. To be sure, as, from a genealogical perspective, there is no interpretation-free layer or part of reality to which one can take recourse, these are not objective things that have been discovered and that one is compelled to accept. Rather, they are parts of a story, of a historical discourse of how things are in a specific spatiotemporal context. However, as it derives from the above, it is a story that the metaphysician has to accept in order to be able to do his job. This story is the discursive space where the metaphysician and the genealogist meet. Thus, the genealogist does not describe or refer to a neutral, objective set of things that the metaphysician has failed to see. Rather, what he does is to remind the metaphysician of the things that he accepted, and to show that he has altered them to make them fit into his own, new story. It is in this way, by showing that it contradicts its own premises, that the genealogist disproves the metaphysical account. More specifically, we can see how this is illustrated in the last of the three extracts above. Here, Foucault does two things. First, he presents the criteria that the metaphysical inquiry employs in order to subjugate these knowledges (like non- conceptuality, insufficient elaboration, naivety, and hierarchical inferiority). These criteria of subjugation manifest the decontextualisation and dehistoricisation of the things to which they apply, and, thus, describe the first part of the fourfold process of hypostatisation presented above. Second, Foucault presents the very content of these knowledges that the theoretical perspective has excluded. These two together show that these knowledges should be understood in terms of the particularity and concreteness we referred to earlier. Foucault’s way of describing the content of these knowledges seems to attempt to elicit rhetorically the feeling of an almost palpable character. He displays things that seem to stand out from the pages of the archive in an almost tactile, quasi- unmediated form. However, when he describes these knowledges as particular, local, regional, differential and oppositional, he does not only seem to attempt to convey the character of a sort of radical disobedience – a disobedience that these parts of the historical archive exhibit towards the inquiry that enforces a metaphysical straightjacket onto them. Rather, as his description itself of “un savoir particulier […] qui ne doit sa force qu’au tranchant qu’il oppose à tous ceux qui l’entourent” manifests, Foucault shows that this tactility and disobedience indicate the intensity of 234 the metaphysician’s inconsistency and ultimately self-refutation. And this self- refutation occurs from the very fact that the archive is precisely not a set of objective truths, but a fragmented pastiche of contingent interpretations. Reality, and perhaps this comes closest to Foucault’s view, is a layering of stories. The metaphysician falsifies reality because the story he wants to tell us contradicts the one in which he himself wants it to be grounded. 4.2. Final Remarks Our argument so far can be summarised in the following points. First, criticisms of Foucault’s genealogical analyses can be rendered in the following dilemma: either they are based on a metaphysical claim, and then are self-refuting, or they are not, and then are unfounded. Second, this dilemma is based on the premise that something is meaningful (qua being a candidate for truth) if and only if it is based on a metaphysical ground. Thus, a genealogical investigation is valid if and only if it constitutes a metaphysical inquiry. Third, Foucault can be interpreted to provide two responses. These two are complementary, and they both attack the premise on which the dilemma is based. The first response exposes this premise as unjustified. Metaphysics is the rendering of a historically specific description of how things are into an ahistorically objective structure of reality. However, this response is itself either self-refuting or unjustified. It could be argued that the genealogist has an ahistorical view of what is historically specific. Thus, it is the second response that completes the first: the metaphysical inquiry is self-refuting because it describes as ahistorically objective that which itself has presupposed as historically specific. The genealogical critique is justified because it is an internalist critique. As an internalist critique, genealogy is neither based on a metaphysical claim nor is unfounded. 4.2.1. Critique of responses However, it seems that it can still be argued that Foucault’s critics have not yet been refuted, as the question concerning the justification of genealogy can still be raised on the meta-level. Namely, the response that genealogy should be understood as an internalist critique can concern only a specific genealogical analysis. The internalist argument is only valid for the historicist critique of the metaphysical conceptualisation of a specific entity, and cannot be held for the genealogical 235 discourse in toto. The genealogist cannot claim that metaphysics simpliciter, conceived as the metaphysical conception of any entity, is identified with the decontextualisation of the respective historical facts. In short, what this argument says is that there are metaphysically realist claims that can be refuted by historicist critique. Which ones these are must be seen on a case-by-case basis. The idea, though, that every metaphysically realist claim is susceptible to historicist critique, is itself a metaphysical claim. Thus, the dilemma that genealogy is either self-refuting or unjustified is posed again. Concerning the first horn of the dilemma, we have seen that Foucault has avoided the Cartesian metaphysical stance, as he does not assent to the existence of an independent world that a transcendental mind represents appropriately. Has he, however, managed to avoid the Hegelian stance, too? Could it not be argued that his critiques are only ostensibly internalist, and that he has replaced the idea of a metaphysically independent world with that of an equally metaphysically independent history? Concerning the second horn, if Foucault does not hold a theory about history and reality, then according to which criterion could the genealogist select the object of his or her critique? Why does the genealogist pick up discourse x, instead of discourse y, to be undone? Since – on pain of self-contradiction – Foucault cannot say a priori that a realist claim is wrong, why does genealogy select to undo scientific discourses that are grounded in metaphysical foundations? And, more specifically, why select discourses on sexuality and on the notion of the abnormal individual, instead of, say, discourses of the natural sciences? In short, either genealogy presupposes a Hegelian metaphysical stance or it is unjustified. 4.2.2. Final responses I shall attempt a final response. As this critique has the same structure as the one I discussed above, the attempted refutation should take again the form of the two responses. As earlier, the first response exposes the premise on which this critique is based, that is, the idea that metahistorical discourse is justified if and only if it is a metaphysical discourse. As he neither assents to nor has any metaphysical view about history, Foucault does not adopt a Hegelian metaphysical stance. His metahistorical remarks do not constitute a transcendental philosophy of history. What was said earlier concerning the notions of self and power applies to his metahistorical remarks salva veritate. In the same way as his talk about self and power is an abstraction, but 236 surely non-metaphysical, of historically specific uses of these notions, his talking about historiography is a commenting on his own genealogical investigations. His making of methodological points is an abstracting from – though this means nothing more than summarising – the specific approaches he followed in the context of specific historicist undoings. Thus, Foucault is again exposing the metaphysical premise behind this critique, and we find ourselves again faced with a structurally- identical onus probandi dilemma. Namely, the metaphysical premise has not been fully refuted, and its truth becomes suspended. Is it on the metaphysician to argue that historiographical discourse needs a metaphysical anchoring in order to be valid, or is it on the genealogist to argue that there is no such a need? This (meta-)dilemma is not too abstract to be irrelevant to what the genealogist suggests. In short, it poses again the problem of how we can know which one of the two stories, that is, the metaphysical or the genealogical, is better. I think that the response of the internalist critique applies here too. However, the content of this kind of second-order internalism would be slightly altered. A strict internalist view would be that a metaphysical realist position is eo ipso contradictory. This view, though, as the very first paragraph of Sextus’ work reminds us, could not be held, on pain of contradiction, as it involves an equally metaphysical position of how things really are. As before, a clear exposition of this response, that is, of what we called second-order internalist critique, is found again in Foucault’s « Il faut defendre la société ». His concluding quasi-definition of what constitutes genealogy provides an apt description of this meta-internalist aspect: [le projet généalogique] s’agit, en fait, de faire jouer des savoirs locaux, discontinus, disqualifiés, non légitimés, contre l’instance théorique unitaire qui prétendrait les filtrer, les hiérarchiser, les ordonner au nom d’une connaissance vraie, au nom des droits d’une science qui serait détenue par quelques-uns. […] Il s’agit de l’insurrection des savoirs. Non pas tellement contre les contenus, les méthodes ou les concepts d’une science, mais d’une insurrection d’abord et avant tout contre les effets de pouvoir centralisateurs qui sont liés à l’institution et au fonctionnement d’un discours scientifique organisé à l’intérieur d’une société comme la nôtre. [...]. C’est bien contre les effets de pouvoir propres à un discours considéré comme scientifique, que la généalogie doit mener le combat.17 What Foucault says here is that the diagnostic criterion that genealogy as therapeutic critique employs is that of power effect. Genealogy is the therapeutic critique of 17 IFDS: 10, emphasis added. 237 unified, theoretical and universalist discourses that are considered valid and true qua scientific. In turn, in the contemporary economy of discourses of knowledge, scientific theories are considered objectively true because they are grounded in metaphysical foundations. This metaphysical grounding produces centralising power effects, and these effects motivate the genealogical critique. Thus, this kind of discourse is not primarily attacked because it claims that it represents how things are objectively. It comes under scrutiny because its claims have centralising power effects. Two interrelated questions arise. The first concerns the way in which the notion of a centralising power effect is to be understood, and, the second, the reasons why it is problematic. Both the meaning of and the problem with this notion can be understood in reference to Foucault’s genealogical conception of power. First, the notion of centralisation can be understood as the phenomenon of swarming, enhancement, expansion and solidification of a series of forces in the context of one or more power relations. Second, elaborating on Foucault’s relevant aphorism, this phenomenon is problematic not because it is eo ipso bad, but because it is dangerous. In other words, it is problematic not because it is in itself somehow abstractly unethical or bad, but because it is actually dangerous qua threatening. I think that this criterion of danger should be understood in terms of Foucault’s distinction between a relation of power and a state of domination. As we saw in section 3.3.2.3, a relation of power is a relation within which one has the freedom to counteract, change and reverse the configuration and balance of forces. A state of domination, however, is a relation of power from which this possibility has been eliminated.18 So, something is dangerous when it displays a tendency towards transforming a relation of power into a state of domination. It should be clear, therefore, that the genealogist’s diagnostic criterion is political qua ethical: genealogy is the historicist critique of discourses that tend to annul the possibility of freedom. 18 The fact that a state of domination can be temporary, and that it can turn (again) into a relation of power does not threaten the validity of the distinction. The point is that even if this change occurs, it would not be due to any counteraction from the dominated part, but due to reasons external to it. For example, we can imagine elements x, y and z to be interrelated in the following way: x and y are found in a state of domination, in which y is dominated by x, and x and z are in a relation of power. If the state of domination between x and y comes to an end and x and y enter into a relation of power, that would not be the outcome of any action from y. Most probably, it would be the outcome of a change in the power balance between x and z. 238 Yet it seems that the metaphysician’s critique can still be raised, and the dilemma be posed again. On the one hand, Foucault’s solution presupposes, at least, an assent to his conception of power, which now looks more to be hypostatised, than to be purely a local tool. On the other, the argument goes, if this is not the case, then his diagnosis becomes unjustified. Even if his diagnostic premises are accepted, there can be disagreements in its application. Namely, we might agree on what it means to tend to make someone unfree, but we may disagree on which discourse instantiates this danger. In short, why is the ‘danger criterion’ not metaphysical, and if it is not, why is it better than the metaphysician’s? As I have argued, not only does this argument fail to invalidate Foucault’s genealogy as a critical enterprise, but his ethical diagnostic criterion can still be considered to manifest the internalist aspect of genealogical critique. The diagnosis is justified not because it is metaphysical, but because it stems from (a reading of) the same intellectual and socio-historical context from which the metaphysical discourse has itself emerged. In that sense, this critique is now internalist not because it exposes and is based on the points that the metaphysical discourse itself makes, but because it exposes and is based on the same concrete situation in which the metaphysical discourse is found. How does this concrete situation manifest itself? And how do we know that the metaphysician and the genealogist share the same understanding of the situation? The manifestation of this concrete situation, of this wider context, chimes with what we have said about selfhood. Namely, this context is manifested in the genealogist’s practice itself. The genealogist’s choices, the story he tells, and his metahistorical remarks, that is, in short, the textual fabric he creates, is itself the justification of his choices, his story, and his remarks. In that sense, there is no further, ultimate proof and guarantee that the metaphysician and the genealogist have the same ‘reading’ of the situation. Having a contextualist ethical justification, genealogy should be understood as a work of love and hope. It is about love, as the genealogist’s stance can be seen as grounded in his love for the other, manifested in the attempt to encounter the other in his or her concreteness, and to make both encounter themselves and each other in their concreteness. It is about love when both metaphysician and genealogist, writer and reader, enter into an open conversation. And, based on this love, it is about the hope that this conversation will persuade the reader of a genealogical story of the collapse of a metaphysics of selfhood and a metaphysics of history, and that it makes 239 both writer and reader actively encounter what I would like to call the (near) immediacy of the particular. I believe that Foucault’s sceptical aesthetics of existence, which I described as the contextualist coherence of the self in its genealogical practice, instantiates a poetics of the self and the particular. Foucault’s sceptical askēsis is exhibited in the bios of a thinker who combines his fascination with suicide with an analysis of dreaming as an experience of nothingness, who attempts to reveal the concealed voice of madness, using the tools of literary avant-garde, who empathises with the incarcerated and the marginalised in his genealogical histories, and who provides, at the end of his life, a retrospective justification of this trajectory by elaborating on the idea of the aesthetics of existence. What is the ethical claim or demand in all this, one may ask? The ethical claim or demand is nothing else than what has just been described: it is nothing else than the suggestion of the bios of a thinker who combines his fascination with suicide with an analysis of dreaming as an experience of nothingness, who attempts to reveal the concealed voice of madness using the tools of literary avant-garde, who empathises with the incarcerated and the marginalised in his genealogical histories, and who provides, at the end of his life, a retrospective justification of this trajectory by elaborating on the idea of the aesthetics of existence.19 I do not know whether Foucault’s philosophical life can be considered a successful instance of Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence; it enables us, though, to construct our own imaginary castles and even live in them without paying the rent to anybody. 19 I am following here closely Nehamas’ ingenious description of the Nietzschean eternal recurrence in terms of the narrativist reconstruction of the narrator’s life in Proust’s Á la recherche du temps perdu. (See NEHAMAS 1985: 168). 240 Bibliography of Michel Foucault Books 1954. Maladie mentale et psychologie. Paris: Quadrige édition, P.U.F. 1961. Folie et déraison. Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique. Gallimard. 1963. Raymond Roussel. Gallimard. 1966. Les mots et les choses. Gallimard. 1969. L’archéologie du savoir. Gallimard. 1975. Surveiller et punir. Naissance de la prison. Gallimard. 1976. Histoire de la sexualité I. La volonté de savoir. Gallimard. 1984. Histoire de la sexualité II. L’usage des plaisirs. Gallimard. 1984. Histoire de la sexualité III. Le souci de soi. Gallimard. 1997. « Il faut défendre la société ». Cours au Collège de France, 1976. “Hautes Études” collection, Gallimard and Le Seuil. 1999. L’herméneutique du sujet. Cours au Collège de France, 1981–1982. “Hautes Études” collection, Gallimard and Le Seuil. 2001. Les anormaux. Cours au Collège de France, 1974–1975. “Hautes Études” collection, Gallimard and Le Seuil. 2008. Le gouvernement de soi et des autres. Cours au Collège de France, 1982–1983. “Hautes Études” collection, Gallimard and Le Seuil. 2009. Le courage de la vérité. Le gouvernement de soi et des autres II. Cours au Collège de France, 1984. “Hautes Études” collection, Gallimard and Le Seuil. 2012. Du gouvernement des vivants. Cours au Collège de France, 1979–1980. “Hautes Études” collection, Gallimard and Le Seuil. 2014. Subjectivité et vérité. Cours au Collège de France, 1980–1981. “Hautes Études” collection, Gallimard and Le Seuil. Dits et écrits DEFERT, Daniel, EWALD, François and LAGRANGE, Jacques (eds.) 2001a [1994]. Michel Foucault. Dits et écrits I, 1954–1975. Quarto edition, Gallimard. DEFERT, Daniel, EWALD, François and LAGRANGE, Jacques (eds.) 2001b [1994]. Michel Foucault. Dits et écrits II, 1976–1988. Quarto edition, Gallimard. 241 LAGRANGE, Jacques 2001, “Complément Bibliographique”. In DEFERT, EWALD and LAGRANGE (eds.) 2001b [1994]. Dits et écrits I, 1954–1975 1954, 1: “Introduction” 1961, 4: “Préface” 1961, 5: “La folie n’existe que dans une société” 1962, 8: “Le « non » du père” 1962, 10: “Dire et voir chez Raymond Roussel” 1962, 11: “Un si cruel savoir” 1963, 13: “Préface à la transgression” 1963, 14: “Le langage à l’infini” 1963, 15: “Guetter le jour qui vient” 1964, 21: “La prose d’Actéon” 1964, 22: “Débat sur le roman” 1964, 23: “Débat sur la poésie” 1964, 24: “Le langage de l’espace” 1964, 29: “L’obligation d’écrire” 1966, 38: “La pensée du dehors” 1966, 39: “L’homme est-il mort?” 1966, 43: ‘“C’était un nageur entre deux mots” 1967, 46: “Nietzsche, Freud, Marx” 1967, 47: “La philosophie structuraliste permet de diagnostiquer ce qu’est « aujourd’hui »” 1967, 50: “« Qui êtes-vous, professeur Foucault? »” 1968, 59: “Sur l’archéologie des sciences. Réponse au Cercle d’épistémologie” 1969, 64: “Ariane s’est pendue” 1969, 66: “Michel Foucault explique son dernier livre” 1969, 69: “Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?” 1970, 80: “Theatrum Philosophicum” 1970, 82: “Folie, littérature, société” 1971, 84 : “Nietzsche, la généalogie, l’histoire” 1971, 85: “Entretien avec Michel Foucault” 242 1971, 95: “Un problème m’intéresse depuis longtemps, c’est celui du système pénal” 1972, 102: “Mon corps, ce papier, ce feu” 1973, 119: “De l’archéologie à la dynastique” 1973, 124: “Foucault, le philosophe est en train de parler. Pensez” 1974, 136: “Prisons et asiles dans le mécanisme du pouvoir” 1974, 139: “La vérité et les formes juridiques” 1975, 152: “Sur la sellette” 1975, 159: “À propos de Marguerite Duras” 1975, 161: “Radioscopie de Michel Foucault” 1975, 165: “Les anormaux” Dits et écrits II, 1976–1988 1976, 174: “Le savoir comme crime” 1976, 184: “La fonction politique de l’intellectuel” 1977, 192: “Entretien avec Michel Foucault” (“Intervista a Michel Foucault”) 1977, 193: “Cours du 7 janvier 1976” 1977, 194: “Cours du 14 janvier 1976” 1977, 218: “Pouvoirs et stratégies” 1978, 234: “La scène de la philosophie” 1978, 238: “Précisions sur le pouvoir. Réponses à certaines critiques” 1978, 255: “Sécurité, territoire, population” 1979, 274: “Naissance de la biopolitique” 1980, 281: “Entretien avec Michel Foucault” (“Conversazione con Michel Foucault”) 1980, 289: “Du gouvernement des vivants” 1981, 295: “Sexualité et solitude” 1982, 305: “Pierre Boulez, l’écran traversé” 1982, 306: “Le sujet et le pouvoir” 1982, 312: “Le combat de la chasteté” 1982, 323: “L’herméneutique du sujet” 1983, 326: “À propos de la généalogie de l’éthique : un aperçu du travail en cours” 1983, 329 : “L’écriture de soi” 1983, 330: “Structuralisme et poststructuralisme” 1983, 336: “Une interview de Michel Foucault par Stephen Riggins”. 1984, 339: “Qu’est-ce que les Lumières?” 243 1984, 341: “Politique et éthique : une interview” 1984, 342: “Polémique, politique et problématisations” 1984, 343: “Archéologie d’une passion” 1984, 344: “À propos de la généalogie de l’éthique : un aperçu du travail en cours” 1984, 345: “Foucault” 1984, 347: “Le souci de la vérité” 1984, 354: “Le retour de la morale” 1984, 356: “L’éthique du souci de soi comme pratique de la liberté” 1984, 357: “Une esthétique de l’existence” 1984, 360: “Des espaces autres” 1988, 362: “Vérité, pouvoir et soi” 1988, 363: “Technologies of the self” Other editions 1977. Michel Foucault. Microfisica del potere. Interventi politici. Ed. Alessandro Fontana and Pasquale Pasquino. Turin: Einaudi. 1980. Michel Foucault. Power/Knowledge. Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977. Ed. Colin Gordon. The Harvester Press Limited. 1984. Raymond Roussel, Death and the Labyrinth. Trans. Charles Ruas. New York: Doubleday. HUTTON , P. H., GUTMAN, H., and MARTIN L. H. (eds.) 1988. Technologies of the self. A seminar with Michel Foucault. Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press. PEARSON, Joseph (ed.) 2001. Fearless Speech. Semiotext(e) 244 General Bibliography ALGRA, Keimpe, BARNES, Jonathan, MANSFELD, Jaap and SCHOFIELD, Malcolm (eds.) 1999. The Cambridge History of Hellenistic Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ALLEN, Barry 1993. Truth in Philosophy. Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press. ANNAS, Julia and BARNES, Jonathan (eds.) 2005 [2000]. Sextus Empiricus. Outlines of Scepticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ARABATZIS, Theodore 2006. Representing Electrons. A Biographical Approach to Theoretical Entities. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. ARONOWITZ, S. 1994. “History as disruption: on Benjamin and Foucault”. In SMART (ed.) 1994–1995. ARRINGTON, Robert L. and GLOCK, Hans-Johan (eds.) 2005 [1996]. Wittgenstein and Quine. London and New York: Routledge. ARRINGTON, Robert L. and GLOCK, Hans-Johan 2005a. “Editors’ introduction”. In ARRINGTON and GLOCK (eds.) 2005 [1996]. ASHENDEN, Samantha and OWEN, David (eds.) 1999. Foucault contra Habermas. Sage. BADIOU, Alain 2006. “Préface”. In MEILLASSOUX 2006. BAKHTIN, Mikhail M. 1982. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin and London: University of Texas Press. BAKHTIN, Mikhail M. 1984. Rabelais and His World. Trans. Hélène Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. BALDWIN, Thomas (ed.) 2003. The Cambridge History of Philosophy 1870–1945. Cambridge University Press. BALL, Stephen J. 2012. Foucault, Power, and Education. London: Routledge. BARNES, Jonathan 1997 [1982]. “The Beliefs of a Pyrrhonist”. In BURNEYEAT and FREDE (eds.) 1997. BARNES, Jonathan 2005. “Introduction”. In ANNAS and BARNES (eds.) 2005 [2000]. BAUGH, Bruce 2003. French Hegel. From Surrealism to Postmodernism. Abington and New York: Routledge. 245 BELLON, Guillaume 2012. L’inquiétude du discours. Barthes et Foucault au Collège de France. Ellug. BÉNATOUÏL, Thomas 1999. “Les usages de Socrate”. Critique 627–628, August 1999: 639–648. BERNAUER, James and CARRETTE, Jeremy (eds.) 2004. Michel Foucault and Theology: The Politics of Religious Experience. Hampshire and Burlington: Ashgate BERNAUER, James and RASMUSSEN, David (eds.) 1991. The Final Foucault. MIT Press. BERNAUER, James W. and MAHON, Michael 2005. “Michel Foucault’s Ethical Imagination”. In GUTTING (ed.) 2005. BERSANI, Leo 1989. “Death and Literary Authority”. In HOLLIER (ed.) 1989. BETT, Richard (ed.) 2005. Sextus Empiricus. Against the Logicians. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. BETT, Richard 2005a. “Introduction”. In BETT (ed.) 2005. BINSWANGER, Ludwig 1930a. “Traum und Existenz” (first part). Neue Schweizer Rundschau, vol. XXIII, nº 9, September 1930: 673–685. BINSWANGER, Ludwig 1930b. “Traum und Existenz” (second part). Neue Schweizer Rundschau, vol. XXIII, nº 10, October 1930: 766–779. BINSWANGER, Ludwig 1942. Grundformen und Erkenntnis menschlichen Daseins. Zürich: Max Niehans. BINSWANGER, Ludwig 1947. “Traum und Existenz”. In Ausgewählte Vorträge und Aufsätze, Band I: Zur phänomenologischen Anthropologie. Bern: A. Francke AG Verlag. BINSWANGER, Ludwig 1954. Le Rêve et l’Existence. Trad. Jean Verdeaux. Paris: Desclée de Brower. BINSWANGER, Ludwig 1993. Ausgewählte Werke Band 2: Grundformen und Erkenntnis menschlichen Daseins. Eds. M. Herzog and Hans-Jürgen Braun. Heidelberg: Roland Asanger Verlag. BINSWANGER, Ludwig 1994. Ausgewälte Werke Band 4: Der Mensch in der Psychiatrie. Herausgegeben und bearbeit von Alice Holzhey-Kunz. Heidelberg: Roland Asanger Verlag. BLACKBURN, Simon 1998. Ruling Passions. Oxford: Oxford University Press. BLANCHOT, Maurice 1938. “L’ebauche d’un roman”. Aux Ecoutes, 30 July 1938: 31. 246 BLANCHOT, Maurice 1942. Comment la littérature est-elle possible?. Paris: José Corti. BLANCHOT, Maurice 1943 [1941]. “Le Journal de Kierkegaard”. In BLANCHOT 1943. BLANCHOT, Maurice 1943. Faux pas. Paris: Gallimard. BLANCHOT, Maurice 1949. La part de feu. Paris: Gallimard. BLANCHOT, Maurice 1951. “La folie par excellence”. Critique 45, February 1951: 99– 118 . BLANCHOT, Maurice 1955. L’espace littéraire. Paris: Gallimard. BLANCHOT, Maurice 1955a. “Broch”. Nouvelle Revue Française 32, August 1955: 295–303. BLANCHOT, Maurice 1955b. “La mort de Virgile”. Nouvelle Revue Française 34, October 1955: 747–759. BLANCHOT, Maurice 1959. Le livre à venir. Paris: Gallimard. BLATTNER, William 2006. “Laying the ground for metaphysics: Heidegger’s appropriation of Kant”. In GUIGNON 2006. BOEDEKER JR., Edgar C. 2005. “Phenomenology”. In DREYFUS and WRATHALL (eds.) 2005. BOUVERESSE, Jacques 1983. “Why I am so very UnFrench”. In MONTEFIORE (ed.) 1983. BOUVERESSE, Jacques 1984. La philosophie chez les autophages. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit. BOUVERESSE, Jacques 1996. La demande philosophique. Éditions de l’éclat. BOUVERESSE, Jacques 2016. Nietzsche contre Foucault. Sur la vérité, la connaissance et le pouvoir. Agone. BOYNE, Roy 1990 [2001]. Foucault and Derrida: The Other Side of Reason. London and New York: Routledge. BOYNE, Roy 2002. “Foucault and Art”. In SMITH and WILDE (eds.) 2002. BRANDOM, Robert 2005 [1983]. “Heidegger’s Categories in Being and Time”. In DREYFUS and WRATHALL (eds.) 2005. BRUNSCHWIG, Jacques 1999. “Introduction: the beginnings of Hellenistic epistemology”. In ALGRA et al. (eds.) 1999. BRUNSCHWIG, Jacques and SEDLEY, David 2003. “Hellenistic Philosophy”. In SEDLEY (ed.) 2003. 247 BURNEYEAT, Myles and FREDE, Michael (eds.) 1997. The Original Sceptics. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company. BURNYEAT, Myles 1984. “The sceptic in his place and time”. In RORTY, SCHNEEWIND and SKINNER (eds.) 1984. BURNYEAT, Myles 1997 [1980]. “Can the Sceptic Live His Scepticism?”. In BURNYEAT and FREDE (eds.) 1997. BURY, R. G. (ed.) 2000 [1933]. Sextus Empiricus. Outlines of Pyrrhonism. Harvard University Press. BUTLER, Judith 1999 [1987]. Subjects of Desire. Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth- Century France. New York: Columbia University Press. CAMBIANO, Guiseppe 1999. “Philosophy, Science and Medicine”. In ALGRA et al. (eds.) 1999. CANFIELD, John V. 2005. “The Passage into Language: Wittgenstein versus Quine”. In ARRINGTON and GLOCK (eds.) 2005 [1996]. CAPUTO, John D. 1993. “Heidegger and theology”. In GUIGNON 1993. CAPUTO, John D. and YOUNT, Mark 1993. Foucault and the Critique of Institutions. Penn State University Press. CARRETTE, Jeremy R. 2000. Foucault and Religion: Spiritual Corporality and Political Spirituality. London and New York: Routledge. CARROLL, David 1989. Paraesthetics: Foucault, Lyotard, Derrida. New York and London: Routledge. CASTORIADIS, Cornelius 1978. Les carrefours du labyrinthe I. Paris : Seuil. CHALMERS, David 1992. What is this thing called Science? An assessment of the nature and status of science and its methods. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press. CHAUVIRE, Christiane (ed.) 1994. Jacques Bouveresse : Parcours d’un combatant. Critique 567–568, August–September 1994. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit. CHRISTIAS, Dionysis 2016. “Sellars, Meillassoux and the Myth of the Categorial Given: A Sellarsian Critique of “Correlationism” and Meillassoux’s “Speculative Materialism””. Journal of Philosophical Research, June 30, 2016. CRAMPTON, Jeremy W. and ELDEN, Stuart (eds.) 2007. Space, Knowledge and Power: Foucault and Geography. Hampshire and Burlington: Ashgate. CRITCHLEY, Simon 1996. “Deconstruction and Pragmatism – Is Derrida a Private Ironist or a Pubic Liberal?”. In MOUFFE (ed.) 1996. 248 CRITCHLEY, Simon 1997. Very Little … Almost Nothing. Death, Philosophy, Literature. Routledge. CROSSLEY, Nick 1994. The Politics of Subjectivity: Between Foucault and Merleau- Ponty. Avebury. CROWELL, Steven Galt 2005. “Heidegger and Husserl: The Matter and Method of Philosophy”. In DREYFUS and WRATHALL (eds.) 2005. CROWLEY, Martin 2000. “Possible suicide: Blanchot and the ownership of death”. Paragraph 23(2): 191–206. DADOUN, Roger 1993. La violence. Essai sur l’ « homo violens ». Paris: Hatier. DASTUR, Françoise 1994. La mort. Essai sur la finitude. Paris: Hatier. DAVIDSON, Arnold I. “Ethics as Ascetics: Foucault, the History of Ethics, and Ancient Thought”. In GUTTING (ed.) 2005. DAVIDSON, Arnold I. (ed.) 1997. Foucault and His Interlocutors. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. DE BEISTEGUI, Miguel 2004. Truth and Genesis. Philosophy as Differential Ontology. Indiana University Press. DE CARO, Mario and MACARTHUR, David (eds.) 2004. Naturalism in Question. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. DE ROSA, Raffaella and LEPORE, Ernest 2004. “Quine’s Meaning Holisms”. In GIBSON, Roger F. Jr. (ed.) 2004. DELEUZE, Gilles 1993. Critique et Clinique. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit. DELEUZE, Gilles 1998 [1993]. Trans. Smith, D. W. and Greco, M. A.. Essays Critical and Clinical. Verso. DERRIDA, Jacques 1996. “Remarks on Deconstruction and Pragmatism”. In MOUFFE (ed.) 1996. DESCOMBES, Vincent 1979. Le même et l’autre. Quarante-cinq ans de philosophie française (1933–1978). Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit. DETIENNE, Marcel 1967. Les Maîtres de vérité dans la Grèce archaïque. Paris: Maspero. DOSTAL, Robert J. 2006. “Time and Phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger”. In GUIGNON 2006. DREYFUS and WRATHALL (eds.) 2005. A Companion to Heidegger. Malden, Mass., Oxford and Victoria, Aus.: Blackwell. 249 DREYFUS Hubert L. and RABINOW Paul 1982. Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Harvester Press: The University of Chicago. DREYFUS, Hubert L. 1991. Being-in-the-Word: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division I. Cambridge, Mass. and London: The MIT Press. DREYFUS, Hubert L. 1993. “Heidegger’s Critique of Husserl’s (and Searle’s) Account of Intentionality”. Social Research 60 (1), Spring 1993: 17–38. DREYFUS, Hubert L. 2003. ““Being and Power” Revisited”. In MILCHMAN and ROSENBERG (eds.) 2003 DREYFUS, Hubert L. and KELLY, Sean Dorrance 2011. All Things Shining. Free Press. DREYFUS, Hubert L. and RUBIN, Jane 1991. “Appendix: Kierkegaard, Division II and Later Heidegger”. In DREYFUS 1991. DUMMETT, Michael 1978. Truth and Other Enigmas. London: Duckworth. DURING, Simon 1992. Foucault and Literature: Towards a Genealogy of Writing. London and New York: Routledge. ECO, Umberto 1980. “Two Problems in Textual Interpretation”. Poetics Today 2 (1a), Autumn 1980: 145–161. ENGEL, Pascal 1987. “Contemporary French Analytic Philosophy”. In GRIFFITHS (ed.) 1987. ENGEL, Pascal 1998. La vérité. Réflexions sur quelques truismes. Paris: Hâtier. ENGEL, Pascal 2000. Truth. Reflections on Some Evident Truths. Greek translation of ENGEL 1998. Athens: Scripta. ENGEL, Pascal 2000a. “Writer’s preface to the Greek edition”. In ENGEL, Pascal 2000, [1998]. ENGEL, Pascal 2002. Truth. Acumen. ENGEL, Pascal 2007a. “Main Statement by Pascal Engel”. In RORTY and ENGEL 2007. ERIBON, David 1991. Michel Foucault. Flammarion. FALZON, Christopher, O’LEARY, Timothy and SAWICKI, Jana (eds.) 2013. A Companion to Foucault. Wiley-Blackwell. FEHÉR, István M. 1994. “Phenomenology, Hermeneutics, Lebensphilosophie: Heidegger’s Confrontation with Husserl, Dilthey and Jaspers”. In KISIEL and VAN BUREN (eds.) 1994. FESTENSTEIN, M. and THOMPSON, S. (eds.) 2001. Richard Rorty: Critical Dialogues. Polity Press. 250 FEYERABEND, P. K. 1975. Against Method: Outline of an Anarchist Theory of Knowledge. London: New Left Books. FEYERABEND, P. K. 1995. Killing Time: The Autobiography of Paul Feyerabend. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. FISH, Stanley 1980. Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretative Communities. Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press. FLYNN, Thomas D. 1985. “Truth and Subjectivation in the Later Foucault”. Journal of Philosophy 82 (10), 1985: 531–539. FLYNN, Thomas D. 1989. “Foucault and the Politics of Postmodernity”, Noûs 23, 187–98. FLYNN, Thomas D. 1991. “Foucault a Parrhesiast: His Last Course at the Collège de France”. In BERNAUER and RASMUSSEN (ed.) 1991. FLYNN, Thomas D. 1997. Sartre, Foucault and Historical Reason. Vol. 1. Toward an Existentialist Theory of History. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. FLYNN, Thomas D. 2005. Sartre, Foucault and Historical Reason. Vol. 2. A Poststructralist Mapping of History. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. FØLLESDAL, Dagfinn 1969. “Husserl’s Notion of Noema”. Journal of Philosophy 66 (20), October 1969: 680–687. FOWLER, Harold North (ed.) 1921. Plato. Theaetetus. Sophist. London, William Heinemann and New York, G. P. Putnam’s Sons: Loeb Classical Library. FREDE, Michael 1987 [1979]. “The Skeptic’s Beliefs”. In FREDE 1987. FREDE, Michael 1987 [1984]. “The Skeptic’s Two Kinds of Assent and the Question of the Possibility of Knowledge”. In FREDE 1987. FREDE, Michael 1987. Essays in Ancient Philosophy. Oxford: Clarendon Press. FREGE, Gottlob 1952. Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege. P. Geach and M. Black (eds). Oxford: Blackwell. FREGE, Gottlob 1952a. “On ‘Sense and Reference’”. In FREGE 1952. FRIE, Roger 1997. Subjectivity and Intersubjectivity in Modern Philosophy and Psychoanalysis. A Study of Sartre, Binswanger, Lacan, and Habermas. Lanham, Maryland, and London: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers. FRIEDMAN, 2000. Michael 2000. A Parting of the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger. Open Court. 251 GAIGER, Jason 1998. “Lebensphilosophie”. Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/lebensphilosophie/v-1/ GEERTZ, Clifford 1978. “Stir Crazy”. The New York Review of Books, 26 January 1978: 6. GEUSS, Raymond 1999. Morality, Culture, and History. Cambridge University Press. GEUSS, Raymond 1999a. “Nietzsche and Genealogy”. In GEUSS 1999. GEUSS, Raymond 2001. Public Goods, Private Goods. Princeton, New Jersey and Woodstock, Oxfordshire: Princeton University Press. GEUSS, Raymond 2003. “Heidegger”. In BALDWIN (ed.) 2003. GEUSS, Raymond 2005. Outside Ethics. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. GEUSS, Raymond 2005a. “Liberalism and its discontents”. In GEUSS 2005. GEUSS, Raymond 2005b. “Outside Ethics”. In GEUSS 2005. GEUSS, Raymond 2005c. “Plato, Romanticism, and Thereafter”. In GEUSS 2005. GEUSS, Raymond 2005d. “Adorno’s Gaps”. In GEUSS 2005. GEUSS, Raymond 2010. “A World Without Why”. The Point Magazine, Issue 2, Winter 2010. http://thepointmag.com/2010/examined-life/a-world-without-why. GIBSON, Roger F. Jr. (ed.) 2004. The Cambridge Companion to Quine. New York: Cambridge University Press. GIBSON, Roger F. Jr. 2005. “Quine, Wittgenstein and Holism”. In ARRINGTON and GLOCK (eds.) 2005 [1996]. GILLIES, Donald 2013. Educational Leadership and Michel Foucault. London: Routledge. GOLDER, Ben and FITZPATRICK, Peter 2009. Foucault’s Law. Abington and New York: Routledge. GONZALEZ, F. 2000. “Is There an Art of Living?”. Salmagundi 126–127, Spring– Summer 2000: 253–275. GONZALEZ, F. 2001. “Living Well is Hard Indeed: A Reply to Alexander Nehamas”. Salmagundi 128–129, Fall-–Winter 2001: 310–326. GREIMAS, A. J. 1987 [1970]. On Meaning. Trans. Frank Collins and Paul Perron. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. GRIFFITHS, A. Phillips (ed.) 1987. Contemporary French Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 252 GROS, Frédéric (ed.) 2002. Foucault. Le courage de la vérité. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. GROS, Frédéric 1997. Foucault et la folie. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. GUIGNON, Charles (ed.) 1993. Cambridge Companion to Heidegger. Cambridge University Press. GUIGNON, Charles (ed.) 2006. Cambridge Companion to Heidegger. Second Edition. Cambridge University Press. GUIGNON, Charles 1993a. “Introduction”. In GUIGNON (ed.) 1993. GUIGNON, Charles 1993b. “Authenticity, Moral Values and Psychotherapy”. In GUIGNON (ed.) 1993. GUIGNON, Charles 2004. On Being Authentic. Routledge. GUNN, G. 1990. “Rorty’s Novum Organum”. Raritan x:1, Summer 1990: 80–103. GUTTING, Garry 2001. French Philosophy in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge University Press. GUTTING, Garry 2011. Thinking the Impossible. French Philosophy Since 1960. Oxford: Oxford University Press. GUTTING, Gary (ed.) 1994. The Cambridge Companion to Foucault. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. GUTTING, Gary (ed.) 2005. The Cambridge Companion to Foucault. Second edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. GUTTING, Gary 1989. Michel Foucault’s Archaeology of Scientific Reason. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. GUTTING, Gary 1994a. “Introduction”. In GUTTING (ed.) 1994. GUTTING, Gary 2002. “Foucault’s Philosophy of Experience. In boundary 2, 29 (2): 69–85. GUTTING, Gary 2003. “Review of Beatrice Han, Foucault’s Critical Project”. In Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews (5). GUTTING, Gary 2005a. “Introduction”. In GUTTING (ed.) 2005. GUTTING, Gary 2009. What Philosophers Know: Case Studies in Recent Analytic Philosophy. Cambridge University Press. HABERMAS, Jürgen 1986. “Taking Aim at the Heart of the Present”. In HOY 1986. HABERMAS, Jürgen 1987 [1985]. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. 253 HACKER, P. M. S. 2005. “Wittgenstein and Quine: Proximity at a Great Distance”. In ARRINGTON and GLOCK (eds.) 2005 [1996]. HACKING, Ian 1975. Why Does Language Matter to Philosophy?. Cambridge University Press. HACKING, Ian 1986. “The Archaeology of Foucault”. In HOY (ed.) 1986. HACKING, Ian 1999. The Social Construction of What?. Harvard University Press. HACKING, Ian 2002. Historical Ontology. Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press. HACKING, Ian 2002a. “Two Kinds of “New Historicism” for Philosophers”. In HACKING 2002. HACKING, Ian 2002b. “Making Up People”. In HACKING 2002. HALL, Harrison 1993. “Intentionality and world: Division I of Being and Time”. In GUIGNON 1993. HAN-PILE, Béatrice 2005. “Early Heidegger’s Appropriation of Kant”. In DREYFUS and WRATHALL (eds.) 2005. HAN, Béatrice 2002. Foucault’s Critical Project: Between the Transcendental and the Historical. Stanford, CA.: Stanford University Press. HAN, Béatrice 2003a. “Foucault and Heidegger on Kant and Finitude”. In MILCHMAN and ROSENBERG (eds.) 2003 HAN, Béatrice 2003b. “Reply to Gary Gutting’s review of Foucault's Critical Project: Between the Transcendental and the Historical”. (http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/ ~beatrice/Gutting%20_answer_%202003-05.pdf). HAN, Béatrice 2005. “The Analytic of Finitude and the History of Subjectivity”. In GUTTING (ed.) 2005. HART, Kevin 2004. The Dark Gaze. Maurice Blanchot and the Sacred. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. HEIDEGGER 1949 [1936]. “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry”. In HEIDEGGER 1949. HEIDEGGER 1949. Existence and Being. Ed. Werner Brock, London: Vision. HEIDEGGER 1962 [1927]. Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. Oxford: Blackwell. HEIDEGGER 1969 [1929]. The Essence of Reasons. Trans. Terence Malick. Evanston, Il.: Northwestern University Press. HEIDEGGER 1982 [1959]. On The Way to Language. Trans. Peter D. Hertz. New York: Harper and Row. 254 HEIDEGGER 1984. The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic. Tr. Michael Heim. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. HEIDEGGER 1990 [1929]. Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. Trans. Richard Taft. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. HEIDEGGER 1998 [1929]. “What is Metaphysics?”. In HEIDEGGER 1998. HEIDEGGER 1998 [1943]. “Postscript to “What is Metaphysics?””. In HEIDEGGER 1998. HEIDEGGER 1998 [1949]. “Introduction to “What is Metaphysics?””. In HEIDEGGER 1998. HEIDEGGER 1998 [1955]. “On the Question of Being”. In HEIDEGGER 1998. HEIDEGGER 1998. Pathmarks. Ed. William McNeil. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. HEIDEGGER 2002 [1935/1936]. “The Origin of the Work of Art”. In HEIDEGGER 2002. HEIDEGGER 2002 [1946]. “Why Poets?”. In HEIDEGGER 2002. HEIDEGGER 2002. Off the Beaten Track. Ed. and trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes. Cambrdige: Cambridge University Press. HEIDEGGER, Martin 1991a [1996/1961]. Nietzsche. Volumes One and Two. San Francisco: Harper Collins. HEIDEGGER, Martin 1991b [1997/1961]. Nietzsche. Volumes Three and Four. San Francisco: Harper Collins. HEIDEGGER, Martin 1996 [1961]. Nietzsche I (1936–1939). Gesamtausgabe. Band 6.1. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermanm. HEIDEGGER, Martin 1997 [1961]. Nietzsche II (1939–1946). Gesamtausgabe. Band 6.2. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermanm. HEIDEGGER, Martin 2003. The End of Philosophy. Trans. Joan Stambaugh. The University of Chicago Press. HEIDEGGER, Martin 2003a [2000/1954]. “Overcoming Metaphysics”. In HEIDEGGER 2003. HEIDEGGER, Martin 2003b [1997/1961]. “Metaphysics as History of Being”. In HEIDEGGER 2003. HEIDEGGER, Martin 2003c [1997/1961]. “Sketches for a History of Being as Metaphysics”. In HEIDEGGER 2003. HICKS, Steven V. 2003. “Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Foucault: Nihilism and Beyond”. In MILCHMAN and ROSENBERG (eds.) 2003. 255 HILL, Leslie 1997. Blanchot. Extreme Contemporary. London and New York: Routledge HINTIKKA, Jaakko 1962. Knowledge and Belief. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. HINTIKKA, Jaakko 1969. Models for Modalities. Dordrecht: D. Reidel. HINTIKKA, Jaakko 1969a. “Semantics of Propositional Attitudes”. In HINTIKKA 1969. HINTIKKA, Jaakko 1975. The Intentions of Intentionality and Other New Models for Modalities. Dordrecht: D. Reidel. HINTIKKA, Jaakko 1975a. “The Intentions of Intentionality”. In HINTIKKA 1975. HINTIKKA, Jaakko 1989. “The Cartesian cogito, epistemic logic and neuroscience: some surprising interrelations”. In HINTIKKA and HINTIKKA 1989. HINTIKKA, Jaakko 1995. “The phenomenological dimension”. In SMITH and SMITH (eds.) 1995. HINTIKKA, Jaakko and HINTIKKA, Merrill B. (eds.) 1989. The Logic of Epistemology and the Epistemology of Logic. Dordrecht: D. Reidel. HOELLER, Keith (ed.) 1993. Dream and Existence. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press International. HOLLIER, Denys (ed.) 1989. A New History of French Literature. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. HOOKWAY, Christopher 2005. “Perspicuous Representations”. In ARRINGTON and GLOCK (eds.) 2005 [1996]. HORTON, J. 2001. “Irony and Commitment: An Irreducible Dualism of Modernity”. In FESTENSTEIN and THOMPSON (eds.) 2001. HOY, David Couzens (ed.) 1986. Foucault: A Critical Reader. Oxford: Blackwell. HOY, David Couzens 1986. “Introduction”. In HOY (ed.) 1986. HUNSON, N. R. 1958. Patterns of Discovery. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. INWOOD, Michael 1999. A Heidegger Dictionary. Oxford and Malden, Mass.: Blackwell. JAMES, Ian 2000a. Pierre Klossowski: The Persistence of a Name. Oxford: Legenda. JAMES, Ian 2000b. “Simulacrum and the Play of Parody in the Writing of Pierre Klossowski”. French Studies 54 (3): 299–311. JAMES, Ian 2001. “Klossowski, Nietzsche, and the Fortuitous Body”. Romance Studies 19 (1): 59–70. JAMES, Ian 2006. The Fragmentary Demand. An Introduction to the Philosopphy of Jean-Luc Nancy. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 256 KELLY, Michael 1994. Critique and Power: Recasting the Foucault/Habermas Debate. The MIT Press. KISIEL, Theodore 1994. “Heidegger (1920–1921) on Becoming a Christian: A Conceptual Picture Show”. In KISIEL and VAN BUREN (eds.) 1994. KISIEL, Theodore and VAN BUREN, John (eds.) 1994. Reading Heidegger from the Start. State University of New York Press. KNELLWOLF, Christa and NORRIS, Christopher (eds.) 2001. The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism. Volume 9. Twentieth-Century Historical, Philosophical Perspective. Cambridge University Press. KOJÈVE, Alexandre 1947. Introduction à la lecture de Hegel. (ed.) Raymond Queneau. Paris: Gallimard. KOLAKOWSKI, L. 1999. Freedom, Fame Lying and Betrayal. London: Penguin. KOLAKOWSKI, L. 1999a. “On Power”. In KOLAKOWSKI, L. 1999. KRELL, David Farrell 1994. “The “Factical Life” of Dasein: From the Early Freiburg Courses to Being and Time”. In KISIEL and VAN BUREN (eds.) 1994. KUHN, Thomas S. 1970 [1962]. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: Chicago University Press. KUSCH, Martin 1995. Psychologism: A Case Study in the Sociology of Philosophical Knowledge. London: Routledge. LACLAU, Ernesto. 1996. “Deconstruction, Pragmatism, Hegemony”. In MOUFFE (ed.) 1996. LATIMER, Dan 2001. “American neopragmatism and its background” in KNELLWOLF, Christa and NORRIS, Christopher (eds.) 2001. LONG, A. A. 1974. Hellenistic Philosophy. London: Duckworth. MACEY, David. 1993. The Lives of Michel Foucault. Vinatge. MAGNUS, Bernd and HIGGINS, Kathleen M. (eds.) 1996. The Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche. Cambridge University Press. MAY, Rollo, ANGEL, Ernest, and ELLENBERGER, Henry F. (eds.) 1958. Existence. A New Dimension in Psychiatry and Psychology. New York: Basic Books. MCDONALD, Ch. 1997. “The Proustian Revolution”. In UNWIN (ed.) 1997. MCNEIL, D. N. 1999. “Review”. European Journal of Philosophy 8(1), April 2000: 118–122. MCWHORTER, Ladelle 2003. “Subjecting Dasein”. In MILCHMAN and ROSENBERG (eds.) 2003 257 MEGILL, Allan 1985. Prophets of Extremity: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida. Berkley and Los Angeles, and London: The University of California Press. MEILLASSOUX, Quentin 2006. Après la finitude. Essai sur la nécessité de la contingence. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. MILCHMAN, Alan and ROSENBERG, Alan (eds.) 2003. Foucault and Heidegger: Critical Encounters. University of Minnesota Press. MILLER, James 1993. The Passion of Michel Foucault. New York: Simon and Schuster. MISRAHI, Roger 1981. Traité du bonheur I : Construction d’un château. Paris: Seuil. MISRAHI, Roger 1983. Traité du bonheur II : Éthique, politique et bonheur. Paris: Seuil. MISRAHI, Roger 1987. Les Actes de la joie. P.U.F. MISRAHI, Roger 1994. Le Bonheur. Essai sur la joie. Paris: Hatier. MITCHEL, W. J. T. (ed.) 1985. Against Theory, Literary Studies and the New Pragmatism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. MOHANTY, Jitendranath N. 1974. “Husserl and Frege: A New Look at Their Relationship”. Research in Phenomenology 4 (1): 51–62. MONTEFIORE, Alan (ed.) 1983. Philosophy in France Today. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. MORAR, Nicolae, NAIL, Thomas and SMITH, Daniel W. 2016. Between Deleuze and Foucault. Edinburgh University Press. MOUFFE, Chantal (ed.) 1996. Deconstruction and Pragmatism. London and New York: Routledge. MOUFFE, Chantal 1996a. “Deconstruction, Pragmatism and the Politics of Democracy”. In MOUFFE (ed.) 1996. NEEDLEMAN, Jacob (ed.) 1975. Being in the World: The Selected Papers of Ludwig Binswanger. London: Souvenir. NEHAMAS, Alexander 1985. Nietzsche: Life as Literature. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. NEHAMAS, Alexander 1990. “A Touch of the Poet”. Raritan x:1, Summer 1990: 104– 125. NEHAMAS, Alexander 1998. The Art of Living. Socratic Reflections from Plato to Foucault. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 258 NEHAMAS, Alexander 2001a. “A Reply to Francisco Gonzalez: Living Well is Hard to Do”. Salmagundi 128–129, Fall–Winter 2001: 286–309. NEHAMAS, Alexander 2001b. The Art of Living. Socratic Reflections from Plato to Foucault. (Greek ed.). Trans. Varvara Spyropoulou. Athens: Nefeli. NEHAMAS, Alexander 2001c. “Introduction to the Greek edition”. In NEHAMAS, Alexander 2001b. NIETZSCHE, Friedrich 1968. The Will to Power. Ed. Walter Kaufman, trans. Walter Kaufman and R. J. Hollingdale. Vintage. NIETZSCHE, Friedrich 1988. Kritische Studien-Ausgabe. Eds. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, 15 vols. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag and Walter de Gruyter. NIETZSCHE, Friedrich 1990a. Beyond Good and Evil. Trans. R. J. Hollingdale. Penguin. NIETZSCHE, Friedrich 1990b. Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ. Ed. Michael Tanner, trans. R. J. Hollingdale. Penguin. NIETZSCHE, Friedrich 1997a. Untimely Meditations. Ed. Daniel Breazeale. Cambridge University Press. NIETZSCHE, Friedrich 1997b. On the Genealogy of Morality. Ed. Keith Ansell- Pearson, trans. Carol Diethe. Cambridge University Press. NIETZSCHE, Friedrich 1999. The Birth of the Tragedy. Eds. Raymond Geuss and Ronald Speirs, trans. Ronald Speirs. Cambridge University Press. NIETZSCHE, Friedrich 2001. The Gay Science. Ed. Bernard Williams, trans. Josefine Nauckhoff and Adrian Del Caro. Cambridge University Press. NUSSBAUM, M. C. 1994. “Pity and Mercy: Nietzsche’s Stoicism”. In SCHACHT 1994. NUSSBAUM, M. C. 1999. “The Cult of the Personality”. The New Republic, January 4&11: 32–37. O’LEARY, Timothy 2002. Foucault and the Art of Ethics. London: Continuum. OGIEN, Ruwen (dir.) 1999. Le réalisme moral. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. OKRENT, Mark 1988. Heidegger’s Pragmatism: Understanding, Being and the Critique of Metaphysics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. OKSALA, Johanna 2005. Foucault on Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. PEIRCE, C. S. 1955. Philosophical Writings of Peirce. Ed. Justus Buchler. New York: Dover. 259 PÖGGLER, Otto 1987. Martin Heidegger’s Path of Thinking. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press International. POLANYI, M. 1973. Personal Knowledge. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. POST, John F. 2005. “Post-Quinean Philosophical Investigations”. In ARRINGTON and GLOCK (eds.) 2005 [1996]. PRICE, Huw 2004. “Naturalism without Representationalism”. In DE CARO and MACARTHUR (eds.) 2004. PUTNAM, Hilary 1975. Philosophical Papers vol. 2. Mind, Language and Reality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. PUTNAM, Hilary 1990. Realism with a Human Face. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. QUINE, W. V. O. 1960. Word and Object. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. QUINE, W. V. O. 1969. Ontological Relativity and Other Essays. New York: Columbia University Press. QUINE, W. V. O. 1969a. “On the Reasons for Indeterminacy of Translation” In QUINE, W. V. O. 1969. QUINE, W. V. O. 1980 [19612]. From a Logical Point of View. Cambridge, MA and London, England: Harvard University Press. QUINE, W. V. O. 1980a. “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”. In QUINE, W. V. O. 1980, [19612]. RORTY, Richard 1979. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. RORTY, Richard 1984. “The historiography of philosophy: four genres”. In RORTY, SCHNEEWIND, and SKINNER (eds.) 1984. RORTY, Richard 1986. “Foucault and Epistemology”. In HOY (ed.) 1986. RORTY, Richard 1989. Contingency, Irony and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. RORTY, Richard 1991a. Objectivity, Relativism and Truth. Philosophical Papers, Volume 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. RORTY, Richard 1991a(i). “Texts and lumps”. In RORTY 1991a. RORTY, Richard 1991a(ii). “Non-reductive physicalism”. In RORTY 1991a. RORTY, Richard 1991a(iii). “Pragmatism, Davidson and truth”. In RORTY 1991a. RORTY, Richard 1991a(iv). “The priority of philosophy to democracy”. In RORTY 1991a. 260 RORTY, Richard 1991b. Essays on Heidegger and Others. Philosophical Papers, Volume 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. RORTY, Richard 1991b(i). “Heidegger, contingency, and pragmatism”. In RORTY 1991b. RORTY, Richard 1991b(ii). “Unger, Castoriadis, and the romance of a national future”. In RORTY 1991b. RORTY, Richard 1991b(iii). “Moral identity and private autonomy: The case of Foucault”. In RORTY 1991b. RORTY, Richard 1998a. Truth and Progress. Philosophical Papers, Volume 3. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. RORTY, Richard 1998a(i). “Is Truth a Goal of Inquiry? Donald Davidson versus Crispin Wright”. In RORTY 1998a. RORTY, Richard 1998a(ii). “Hilary Putnam and the Relativist Menace”. In RORTY 1998. RORTY, Richard 1998a(iii). “Human Rights, Rationality, and Sentimentality”. In Rorty 1998a. RORTY, Richard 1998b. Achieving Our Country. Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. RORTY, Richard 1999. Philosophy and Social Hope. Penguin. RORTY, Richard 1999a. “Ethics Without Principles”. In RORTY 1999. RORTY, Richard 1999b. “The Banality of Pragmatism and the Poetry of Justice”. In RORTY 1999. RORTY, Richard 1999c. “Pragmatism and Law: A Response to David Luban”. In RORTY 1999. RORTY, Richard 1999d. “Education as Socialization and as Individualization”. In RORTY 1999. RORTY, Richard 1999e. “ The Humanist Intellectual: Eleven Theses”. In RORTY 1999. RORTY, Richard 2001. “Response to Richard Shusterman”. In FESTENSTEIN and THOMPSON (eds.) 2001. RORTY, Richard 2007a. Philosophy as Cultural Politics. Philosophical Papers, Volume 4. New York: Cambridge University Press. RORTY, Richard 2007a(i). “Justice as a larger loyalty”. In RORTY 2007a. RORTY, Richard 2007a(ii). “Honest Mistakes”. In RORTY 2007a. RORTY, Richard 2007a(iii). “Grandeur, profundity, and finitude”. In RORTY 2007a. 261 RORTY, Richard 2007a(iv). “Naturalism and quietism”. In RORTY 2007a. RORTY, Richard 2007a(v). “Kant vs. Dewey: the current situation of moral philosophy”. In RORTY 2007a. RORTY, Richard 2007b. “Main Statement by Richard Rorty”. In Rorty and Engel 2007. RORTY, Richard and ENGEL, Pascal 2005. A quoi bon la verité?. Grasset et Fasquelle. RORTY, Richard and ENGEL, Pascal 2007. Ed. Patrick Savidan. What’s the Use of Truth. Trans. William McCuaig. New York: Columbia University Press. RORTY, Richard, SCHNEEWIND, J.B. and SKINNER, Quentin (eds.) 1984. Philosophy in History. Cambridge University Press. ROTH, Michael S. 1988. Knowing and History. Appropriations of Hegel in Twentieth- Century France. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. ROUSE, Joseph 1994. “Power/Knowledge”. In GUTTING (ed.) 1994. RUSH, Fred L. Jr. 1999. “Review”. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 57 (4), Autumn 1999: 473–475. SAWICKI, Jana 2003. “Heidegger and Foucault: Escaping Technological Nihilism”. In MILCHMAN and ROSENBERG (eds.) 2003 SCHACHT, Richard (ed.) 1994. Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality. California: University of California Press. SCHNÄDELBACH, H. 1984. Philosophy in Germany 1831–1933. Cambridge University Press. SCHOFIELD, Malcolm 1999. “Academic Epistemology”. In ALGRA et al. (eds.) 1999: 323-351. SCHRIFT, Alan D. 1996. “Nietzsche’s French Legacy”. In MAGNUS and HIGGINS (eds.) 1996. SCHURMANN, Reiner 1985. “‘What can I do?’ in an Archaeological-Genealogical History”. Journal of Philosophy 82, October 1985: 540–547. SEARLE, John 2011 [1969]. Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge University Press. SEDLEY, David (ed.) 2003. The Cambridge Companion to Greek and Roman Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. SEGALL, M. H., CAMPBELL, D. T., and HERSKOVITS, M. J. 1963. “Cultural Differences in the Perception of Geometric Illusions”. Science 193: 769–771. 262 SEGALL, M. H., CAMPBELL, D. T., and HERSKOVITS, M. J. 1966. The Influence of Culture on Visual Perception. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill. SHUSTERMAN, Richard 2001. “Reason and Aesthetics between Modernity and Postmodernity: Habermas and Rorty”. In FESTENSTEIN and THOMPSON (eds.) 2001. SIMONS, Peter 1995. “Meaning and Language”. In SMITH and SMITH (eds.) 1995. SMART, Barry (ed.) 1994–1995. Michel Foucault: Critical Assessments. Vols. 1–7. Routledge. SMITH, Barry and SMITH, David Woodruff (eds.) 1995. The Cambridge Companion to Husserl. Cambridge University Press. SMITH, Barry and SMITH, David Woodruff 1995a. “Introduction”. In SMITH and SMITH (eds.) 1995. SMITH, David Woodruff and MCINTYRE, Ronald 1982. Husserl and Intentionality. Dortrecht: D. Reidel. SMITH, Paul and WILDE, Carolyn (eds.) 2002. A Companion to Art Theory. Blackwell. SMOLIN, Lee 2013. Time Reborn. From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of Universe. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. TAYLOR, Charles 1986. “Foucault on Freedom and Truth”. In HOY (ed.) 1986. THIELE, Leslie Paul 2003. “The Ethics and Politics of Narrative: Heidegger + Foucault”. In MILCHMAN and ROSENBERG (eds.) 2003. TIERCELIN, Claudine 1994. “Un pragmatisme conséquent?”. In CHAUVIRE (ed.) 1994: 642–660. TOULMIN, Stephen 1992. Cosmopolis. The Hidden Agenda of Modernity. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. TREMAIN, Shelley (ed.) 2005. Foucault and the Government of Disability. University of Michigan Press. TUGENDHAT, Ernst 1993 [1984]. “Heidegger’s Idea of Truth”. In WOLIN (ed.) 1993. UNGER, Roberto Mangabeira and SMOLIN, Lee 2015. The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time: A Proposal in Natural Philosophy. Cambridge University Press. UNWIN, Terence (ed.) 1997. The Cambridge Companion to the French Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. VAN BUREN, John 1994a. The Young Heidegger: The Rumour of the Hidden King. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. VAN BUREN, John 1994b. “Martin Heidegger, Martin Luther”. In KISIEL and VAN BUREN (eds.) 1994. 263 VEYNE, Paul 1997 [1993]. “The Final Foucault and His Ethics”. In DAVIDSON, Arnold I. (ed.) 1997. VIRVIDAKIS, Stélios 1996. La Robustesse du bien. Nîmes: Éditions Jacqueline Chambon. VIRVIDAKIS, Stelios 1999. “Stratégies de modération du réalisme moral”. In OGIEN (dir.) 1999. VIRVIDAKIS, Stelios 2003. “On the Relations Between Philosophy and Literature”. Philosophical Inquiry 25: 161–169. VIRVIDAKIS, Stelios 2008. “Varieties of Quietism”. Philosophical Inquiry 30: 157– 175. VIRVIDAKIS, Stelios 2014a. “The Search of the Beautiful as Art of Living: How Many and Which Promises of Happiness?”. (In Greek). In ZIKA (ed.) 2014. VIRVIDAKIS, Stelios 2014b. “Living Well and Having a Good Life: Interpreting the Distinction”. Philosophical Inquiry 38/3–4: 69–90. WALZER, Michael 1986. “The Politics of Michel Foucualt”. In HOY (ed.) 1986. WATERFIELD, Robin (ed.) 2004 [1987]. Plato. Theaetetus. Penguin. WILKES, Kathryn V. 1988. Real People. Oxford: Oxford University Press. WILLIAMS, Bernard 1972. Morality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. WILLIAMS, Bernard 1976. “Moral Luck”. In Proceeding of the Aristotelian Society, supplementary volume I, 1976: 115–135. WILLIAMS, Bernard 1985. Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. Penguin. WIMSATT, William K. Jr. and BEARDSLEY, Monroe C. 1946. “The Intentional Fallacy”. The Sewanee Review 54 (3), July–September 1946: 468–488. WINNUBST, Shannon 2013. “The Missing Link: Homo Economicus (Reading Foucault and Bataille Together)”. In FALZON, O’LEARY, and SAWICKI (eds.) 2013. WITTGENSTEIN, Ludwig 1961. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. WITTGENSTEIN, Ludwig 1967, [1953]. Philosophical Investigations. Trans. G. E. M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell. WITTGENSTEIN, Ludwig 1979. Tagebücher 1914–1916 (Notebooks 1914–1916) [bilingual]. Eds. G. H. von Wright and G. E. M. Anscombe. Trans. G. E. M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell. WOLIN, Richard (ed.) 1993. The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. 264 WOLIN, Richard 1986. “Foucault’s Aesthetic Decisionism”. Telos 67, March 20, 1986: 71–86. WOOD, David 2002. Thinking after Heidegger. Polity Press. WRIGHT, Crispin 1992. Truth and Objectivity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. YOUNG, Julian 2001. Heidegger’s Philosophy of Art. Cambridge University Press. YOUNG, Julian 2002. Heidegger’s Later Philosophy. Cambridge University Press. ZAMORA, Daniel and BEHRENT, Michael C. (eds.) 2016. Foucault and Neoliberalism. Cambridge, UK and Malden, MA, USA: Polity Press. ZIKA, Fay (ed.) 2014. Art, Thought, Life. The Aesthetic Philosophy of Alexander Nehamas. (In Greek). Athens: Editions Okto. ZUSNE, Leonard 1984. Biographical Dictionary of Psychology. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press.