Magazine: Political Theory, August, 1993
BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL
--------------------
The Ethical Sensibility of Michel Foucault
To be ashamed of one's immorality--that is a step on the staircase at
whose end one is also ashamed of one's morality.
Friedrich Nietzsche[1]
THE EVIL OF GOODNESS
Is Foucault, who continues to live among us, a creative carrier of a
generous sensibility? Or a dangerous thinker who threatens political
restraint by scrambling fundamental parameters of morality? He is both.
He challenges established morality in pursuit of a higher ethical
sensibility, but danger is inscribed in the effort to shift the terms
and bases of these doctrines. For to challenge fixed conceptions of will,
identity, responsibility, normality, and punishment is to be cruel to
people (and aspects of oneself) attached to established moral codes; it
is to open up new uncertainties within established terms of judgment;
and, sometimes it is to incite punitive reactions among those whose
sense of moral self-assurance has been jeopardized. The Foucauldian
sensibility shares these characteristics with every experiment in
morality, including those enacted today in courts, families, schools,
churches, hospitals, armies, welfare offices, prisons, and workplaces.
Foucault's ethical sensibility of "care" amidst social conflict and
coordination operates, then, within a series of paradoxes that threaten
to derail it. But, as I receive his political spirituality, the most
promising route is to struggle to overcome resentment against the
paradoxical circumstances in which we are set (for no god guarantees
life without paradox; indeed, most of the ones I have encountered embody
it), and to negotiate this slippery terrain with intellectual care and
political daring. (Or vice versa? I'm not sure.)
Let me consider a recent essay by James Miller to introduce the
Foucauldian sensibility I admire. Miller seeks to protect a liberal
politics of limits against Foucauldian assaults on the morality of good
and evil. He thinks that liberalism, with its commitment to rule of law,
rights, and individual responsibility provides the conditions for a
politics of limits. Foucault blurs these limits and threatens those
moral stabilizations. In Foucault's 1971 interview with Actuel, "the
most freewheeling magazine of the French counter-culture," Miller finds
Foucault running roughshod over the limits that freedom and order
require.[2] Miller informs us that the interview is entitled "Beyond
Good and Evil," that Foucault attacks humanism because it "restricts the
drive for power," (a fragment from Foucault), and that Foucault wages
"total war against society" (Miller's phrase). This sounds like a
refusal of self-limitation, alert--one, as Miller puts it, that Foucault
reconsidered in his later work when he moved closer to liberalism.
But I find this same 1971 interview to embody an admirable ethical
sensibility, one in which ingredients crucial to a future perspective
are outlined with insufficient introduction of reservations and cautions
that become installed later. Foucault finds a covert problem of evil to
be lodged within the conventional politics of good and evil. Evil not
as actions by immoral agents who freely transgress the moral law but
evil as arbitrary cruelty installed in regular institutional
arrangements taken to embody the Law, the Good, or the Normal. Foucault
contends, along with Nietzsche, Arendt, and Todorov, that systemic
cruelty flows regularly from the thoughtlessness of aggressive
conventionality, the transcendentalization of contingent identities, and
the treatment of good/evil as a duality wired into the intrinsic order
of things. A modern problem of evil resides, paradoxically, within the
good/evil duality and numerous dualities linked to it. Evil, again, not
as gratuitous action by free agents operating in an innocent
institutional matrix but as undeserved suffering imposed by practices
protecting the reassurance (the goodness, purity, autonomy, normality)
of hegemonic identities. To reach "beyond" the politics of good and
evil is not to liquidate ethics but to become ashamed of the
transcendentalization of conventional morality. It is to subject
morality to strip searches.
There is cruelty involved in such strip searches. But they also take a
precarious step toward a social ethic of generosity in relations among
alternative, problematic, and (often) rival identities. They promote a
politics of limits through genealogies of ambiguity and arbitrariness in
cultural norms that have become naturalized. This agenda can be heard
in lines from the essay in question:
The campaign against drugs is a pretext for the reinforcement of
social repression; not only through police raids, but also through
the indirect exaltation of the normal, rational, conscientious,
and well-adjusted individual.[3]
We emphasize the fear of criminals; we brandish the threat of the
monstrous so as to reinforce the ideology of good and evil, of the
things that are permitted and prohibited--precisely those notions
which teachers are now somewhat embarrassed to communicate.[4]
And then, in response to a suggestion that the distinction between the
normal and the pathological is today more fundamental than that between
good and evil, Foucault says,
They reinforce each other. When a judgment cannot be framed in
terms of good and evil, it is stated in terms of normal and
abnormal. And when it is necessary to justify this last
distinction, it is done in terms of what is good or bad for the
individual. These are expressions that signal the fundamental
duality of Western consciousness.[5]
What, then, is the ethical point of genealogies of good/evil and normal/
abnormal? Foucault, at a later stage, suggests it:
We have to dig deeply to show how things have been historically
contingent, for such and such a reason intelligible but not
necessary. We must make the intelligible appear against a
background of emptiness, and deny its necessity. We must think
that what exists is far from filling all possible spaces.[6]
Several elements in the Foucauldian ethical sensibility are discernible
here:
1. Genealogical analyses that disturb the sense of ontological necessity,
historical inevitability, and purity of discrimination in established
dualities of identity/difference, normality/abnormality, innocence/guilt,
crime/accident, and responsible agency/delinquent offender.
2. Active cultivation of the capacity to subdue resentment against the
absence of necessity in what you are and to affirm the ambiguity of life
without transcendental guarantees.
3. Development of a generous sensibility that informs interpretations of
what you are and are not and infuses the relations you establish with
those differences through which your identity is defined.
4. Explorations of new possibilities in social relations opened up by
genealogy, particularly those that enable a larger variety of identities
to coexist in relations of "studied" indifference on some occasions,
alliance on others, and agonistic respect during periods of rivalry and
contestation.
Together these elements suggest the "political spirituality" of
Foucauldianism, or if you think I project too much into these texts, Fou-
connoism. Indeed, in what follows I use Nietzsche to fill out Foucault
and Foucault to fill out Nietzsche until we reach a perspective I am
willing to endorse.
FROM MORALITY TO ETHICS
If you think that a stubborn source of evil resides in the paradoxical
relation of identity to the differences through which it is constituted,
you might deploy genealogy to expose the constructed, contingent, and
relational character of established identities. Doing so to contest the
conversion of difference into otherness by individuals and
collectivities striving to erase evidence of dependency on the
differences they contest. Doing so to open up other relational
possibilities between interdependent, contending identities by
subtracting the sense of necessity from every identity.
But many moralists find such a strategy to be self-defeating. Every neo-
Kantian and teleocommunitarian in North America, for instance, has
issued this charge against Foucault (and those lumped with him as
"postmodernists") at some point during the decade of the 1980s. Those
who pursue genealogy for ethical reasons, it seems, are caught in a
pragmatic contradiction or trapped in a (unique) pit of incoherencies;
as a result, they emerge either as nihilists who refuse ethical
restraint or as parasites who are killing the moral host they suck
sustenance from. How can you have a morality without grounding it in
the Law or the Good, or, at the very least, in the Contract, the
Rational Consensus, the Normal, or the Useful?
>From my (Foucauldian) perspective, these responses too often reflect a
transcendental egoism that requires contestation. Lach is egoistic
because it silently takes its own fundamental identity to be the source
that must guide moral life in general; it is transcendental because it
insists that its identity is anchored in an intrinsic Purpose or Law or
potential consensus that can be known to be true. In Nietzsche's
language, such transcendental egoists insist "I am morality itself and
nothing besides is morality." They veil egoism in the demand to
universalize what they are by presenting it as what they are commanded
to be by the Law or elevated to by experience of the Good. They present
themselves as disinterested servants of the Law or the Good, and they
respond to each challenge to their ego-idealism through a ritual of
reiteration, restating the external, necessary, intrinsic character of
the fundament they serve.[7]
But so what? How does this rejoinder speak to the fundamental question
posed to the genealogist? That is, "How can a genealogist cultivate an
ethical sensibility? And what makes such a sensibility ethical?" A
Foucauldian line of reply might be to challenge theories of intrinsic
moral order with a competing ethical sensibility: to create a little
space between morality and ethics--with appropriate apologies to Hegel.
A moralist often (but not always) thinks that a moral code can be
separated from other elements in social and political practice and
presented more or less systematically, whereas a post-Metzschean thinks
that, at best, an ethical sensiblity can be cultivated that informs the
quality of future interpretations, actions, and relationships. More
definitively, a moralist explicitly or implicitly gives priority to the
idea of a fundamental order of identity, gender, sexuality, and so on
governing cultural formations. One type accentuates the verb form "to
order," construing morality to be obedience to a god or nature or the
dictates of reason or a transcendental argument or a categorical
imperative. Another accentuates the noun form "order," construing
"moral order" now as an inherent, harmonious design of being. Both
types often anchor moral order in a god, either as a commander of last
resort, a postulate required to give virtue its just reward in the last
instance, or an ultimate source of the harmonious design discernible in
being. Those who eschew a theological story present narratives in which
the fundamental nature of things is supposed to be highly compatible
with strong conceptions of identity, agency, rationality, autonomy,
responsibility, and punishment. The moralist, to put it briefly, finds
some way or other to smooth out Nietzschean conceptions of "life," "will
to power," "differance," and so on in the name of a smooth moral economy
of equivalences, by projecting an intrinsic purpose, a law, or the
plasticity of nature/bodies into the order of things.[8]
Moral order as inherent command or harmonious purpose or as (inter)
subjective imposition by humans whose subjectivity acts upon plastic
bodies and nature--often these are united in some unstable combination.
Sometimes, such perspectives are explicitly articulated, but more often
today they are implicitly installed in narratives of nature, identity,
gender, sexuality, agency, normality, responsibility, freedom, and
goodness.
A post-Nietzschean ethical sensibility might, first, claim that most
contemporary moralists are implicated in one or several of these moral
economies, and, second, contest the sense that they exhaust the range of
admirable alternatives. As the contestation proceeds, instructive
points of convergence unfold between one traditional type of moral order
delineated above--the design/teleological conception--and a post-
Nietzschean sensibility.
Consider a few intersections between a teleological morality and an
antiteleological ethic. First, both challenge authoritarian temptations
residing within the command tradition. Second, both construe the self
to be a complex microsocial structure, replete with foreign relations,
rather than a "disengaged" unit solid or universal enough to anchor
morality in itself. Third, both oppose, though differently, plastic
conceptions of nature and bodies often presupposed by command theories,
paying attention to how human powers of agency and mastery are inflated
by these presumptions of plasticity and "disembodiment." Fourth, both
pursue a morality/ethics of cultivation in place of one of command or
rational demonstration: neither attempts to isolate a systematic "moral
theory"; each cultivates a sensibility that enters into the
interpretations and actions it endorses.[9]
It is this last intersection I will pursue. Both the genealogist and
the teleologist, then, advance an ethics of cultivation. What is
cultivated? Not a Law or a categorical imperative but possibilities of
being imperfectly installed in established institutional practices.
Where are these possibilities located? How are they cultivated? These
are the difficult questions for both perspectives.[10]
Charles Taylor, to my mind the most thoughtful and flexible among
contemporary defenders of a teleocommunitarian morality, speaks of
"moral sources" ambiguously lodged between established practices and a
higher, fugitive experience of intrinsic purpose floating above them.
Taylor's "moral sources" are neither simple objects to be represented
nor transcendental laws to be deduced. A "source" changes as it is drawn
into discursive practice, but it also provides indispensable sustenance
from which moral articulation draws:
Moral sources empower. To come closer to them, to have a clearer
view of them, to come to grasp what they involve, is for those who
recognize them to be moved to love or respect them, and through
this love/respect to be better enabled to live up to them. And
articulation can bring them closer. That is why words can
empower; why words can at times have tremendous moral force.[11]
If you substitute genealogy for articulation, affirm for recognize,
ethical sensibility for moral force, and (reading between the lines)
"the abundance of life" for "a purposive god," you have at once marked
momentary points of convergence and fundamental lines of divergence
between a teleocommunitarian morality and an agonopluralistic ethic.
These two orientations produce each other as competitors; they
manufacture a competition in which neither is in a good position to
write its adversary off as inconceivable, incoherent, or unthinkable
because the elements of strength and weakness in each are too close for
comfort to those in the other. These two sensibilities are well-suited--
to use terms to be redeemed later--to enter into competitive relations
of agonistic respect.
Taylor almost recognizes this moment of affinity within difference with
respect to Metzsche, but he fails to do so with respect to Foucault and
Derrida. Nonetheless, the line of demarcation he draws between a viable
moral sensibility and the amoralism of "postmodernism" cannot be
sustained once Nietzsche has been admitted into the charmed circle of
ethics. Taylor anchors his highest morality in an ambiguous relation
between two dimensions: an identity deepening itself through progressive
attunement to a higher purpose in being. A post-Nietzschean might draw
corollary sustenance from a contingent identity affirming the rich
abundance of "life" exceeding every particular organization of it. In
the Nietzschean tradition, such fugitive sources as "life," "bodies,"
"earth," "will to power," "the oblivion of difference," "differance,"
"resistances," an "untamed exteriority," and "untruth" play a structural
role remarkably close to the roles that "a god," "intrinsic purpose," "a
higher direction," and "the essentially embodied self" play in the
teleological tradition that Taylor invokes. Several of the anarchistic
sources on the first list serve, in Nietzsche's texts, as contestable
"conjectures" or projections informing the ethical sensibility he
cultivates. Genealogy takes you to the edge of the abyss of difference,
even though it cannot bring this surplus within and around the
organization of things to presence.[12]
Taylor's sources also embody this ambiguous, fugitive character because
the higher direction cultivated is never fully articulable by finite
beings and because human articulation always changes the inchoate source
it draws into the (revised) linguistic web. Nietzsche, Foucault, and
Taylor (almost) converge in grasping the productive role of excess in
ethico-political interpretation, separating themselves from a host of
realists and rationalists who either have yet to plumb this dimension of
their own practices or (as Taylor may do) are driven to treat the
experience of excess as a "lack" or "fault" in a divided self always yet
to be remedied.
In Nietzsche's work, as I read it, "life," and other terms of its type,
functions as an indispensable, nonfixable marker, challenging every
attempt to treat a concept, settlement, or principle as complete,
without surplus or resistance. This projection challenges alternatives
that project acommanding god, a designing god, an intrinsic identity, or
the sufficiency of reason. The case for it is closely linked to
recurrent demonstrations of the operational failure of the other
contenders to achieve the presence their representatives (sometimes)
promise.[13] The excess of life over identity provides the fugitive
source from which one comes to appreciate, end perhaps to love, the an-
archy of being amidst the organ-ization of identity\difference.
Genealogy by itself can lead either to repression of the experience of
contingency it enables or to passive nihilism. Unless genealogy is
combined with tactics applied by the self to itself it may well fuel the
very resentment against the an-archy of being its advocates are trying
to curtail. That is why Nietzsche and Foucault alike are involved
serially with the genealogy of fixed experience and the application of
tactics by the self to itself. Both are crucial to the generous or
"noble" sensibility endorsed by each. Neither alone nor both in
conjunction can guarantee the effects sought. This latter
acknowledgment is a defining mark of a post-Nietzschean sensibility
because the demand for guarantees in this area is precisely what fosters
the most authoritarian versions of the moralities of Law and Purpose.
Apost-Nietzschean ethical sensibility, then, strives, first, to expose
artifice in hegemonic identities and the definitions of otherness (evil)
through which they propel their self-certainty; second, to destabilize
codes of moral order within which prevailing identities are set, when
doing so crystallizes the element of resentment in these constructions
of difference; third, to cultivate generosity--that is, a "pathos of
distance"--in those indispensable rivalries between alternative
moral/ethical perspectives by emphasizing the contestable character of
each perspective, including one's own, and the inevitability of these
contestations in life; and fourth--as Foucault eventually endorsed--to
contest moral visions that suppress the constructed, contingent,
relational character of identity with a positive alternative that goes
some distance in specifying the ideal of political life inspiring
it.[14] I draw these themes from Foucault and Nietzsche, respectively:
the ethical importance of the struggle against existential resentment is
emphasized by Nietzsche, and the politicization of an ethical
sensibility is emphasized by Foucault. Before pursuing Foucault on the
second register, let me quote from the madman himself concerning the
basis of an admirable ethical sensibility:
Thus I deny morality as I deny alchemy, that is, I deny their
premises: but I do not deny that there have been alchemists who
believed in these premises and acted in accordance with them.--I
also deny immorality: not that countless people feel themselves to
be immoral, but that there is any true reason so to feel. It goes
without saying that I do not deny--unless I am a fool--that many
actions called immoral ought to be avoided and resisted, or that
many called moral ought to be done and encouraged--but I think
that one should be encouraged and the other avoided for other
reasons than hitherto. We have to learn to think differently--in
order at last, perhaps very late on, to attain even more: to feel
differently.[15]
The "we" is a solicitation rather than a command. A new sensibility is
rendered possible through genealogies. Then a set of experiments is
enacted by the self upon its self to revise vengeful sensibilities that
have become fixed. Nietzsche, like Foucault after him, commends a set
of artful techniques to modify these contingent installations, these
"feelings." The sensibility that these techniques install functions as
a corollary to the cultivation of "virtues" in teleological theories.
Thus, to cite one example of such a practice, Nietzsche in Daybreak
marks the importance of "little deviant acts" in a life where
accumulated conventions are always becoming naturalized and moralized.
"For nothing matters more," Nietzsche asserts, " than that an already
mighty, anciently established and irrationally recognized custom should
be once more confirmed by a person recognized as rational.... All
respect to your opinions! But little deviant acts are worth more."[16]
Ethical generosity becomes effective when it is installed in the
feelings, and this involves a series of tactics patiently applied by a
self to itself: "All the virtues and efficiency of body and soul are
acquired laboriously and little by little, through much industry, self-
constraint, limitation, through much obstinate, faithful repetition of
the same labors, the same renunciations."[17] Echoes from the Christian
tradition can be heard here as elsewhere in Nietzsche, but these
techniques of the self are designed to foster affirmation of a
contingent, incomplete, relational identity interdependent with
differences it contests rather than to discover a transcendental
identity waiting to be released or to acknowledge obedience to a
commanding/designing god.
When Nietzsche, and later Foucault, commend the self as a work of art
acting modestly and artfully upon its own entrenched contingencies, the
aim is not self-narcissism, as neo-Kantians love to insist. The point
is to ward off the violence of transcendental narcissism: to modify
sensibilities of the self through delicate techniques, to do so to reach
"beyond good and evil," so that you no longer require the constitution
of difference as evil to protect a precarious faith in an intrinsic
identity or order. The goal is to modify an already contingent self--
working within the narrow terms of craftsmanship available to an adult--
so that you are better able to ward off the demand to confirm
transcendentally what you are contingently.[18] In Foucault's terms,
"care of the self" is the operative practice. In Nietzsche's terms,
one thing is needful: that a human being should attain
satisfaction with himself, whether it be by means of this or that
poetry and art; only then is a human being at all tolerable to
behold. Whoever is dissatisfied with himself is continually ready
for revenge; and we others will be his victims, if only by having
to endure his ugly sight.[19]
The "ugliness" that Nietzsche opposes, then, reflects the demand to
ratify a contingent identity by transcendental means. Look around at
the next faculty meeting if you need empirical verification of this
ratification process.
But so far I have merely outlined some of the aspirations within this
ethical sensibility. We have so far only glimpsed the dangers.
paradoxes, and limits within which it operates.
THE ONTALOGICAL PROBLEMATIC
Foucault resists the language of "life" that Nietzsche invokes.[20] He
does so, I think, to fend off the suggestion such a term conveys to some
(though not to the mature Nietzsche) either of an elemental energy
directly accessible to experience by nonlinguistic means or of a vital,
purposive force that must be allowed expression regardless of the
implications it carries for anyone or anything else. But if Foucault
denies a law or purpose in being while also resisting the language of
life (and "will to power"), does this mean that the ethical sensibility
he endorses is free of ontological (or "essentialist") dimensions?[21]
Does this sensibility liquidate every semblance of "the universal"?
In a recent essay on Foucault's "cultivation of the self" Pierre Hadot
asserts that Foucault misreads the Stoics and the Epicureans in a way
that vitiates his own ethic. To these Greeks, "the point was not to
forge a spiritual identity by writing but to free oneself from one's
individuality, to raise oneself to universality."[22] Foucault's
reduction of the universal back into the individual, Hadot fears,
results in a solipsistic self: "by defining his ethical model as an
ethic of existence, Foucault might have been advancing a cultivation of
the self which was too purely aesthetic--that is to say, I fear a new
form of dandyism, a late-twentieth century version."[23] I fear that
Hadot, in the company of others, collapses the space in which the
distinctive Foucauldian sensibility is formed, doing so by the way he
deploys "the universal" in relation to "the self," the "aesthetic," and
"dandyism."
Foucault, I want to say, affirms a hypothetical universal that does not
conform to any possibility that Hadot recognizes. He affirms a
hypothetical, ontalogical universal, one designed to disturb the closure
and narcissism of dogmatic identities, one affirmed to be a contestable
projection, and one treated as an alternative to ontologies of Law and
Purpose. Foucault struggles, against the grain of the language he uses
and is used by, not to project a "logic" or order into the fundamental
character of being. He invokes what might be called an ontalogy, a
"reading" of the fundamental character of being that resists imputing a
logic to it and affirms its a logical character. It is this fugitive,
deniable, and contestable experience, always resistant to articulation,
that is approached through the arts of genealogy and affirmed through
techniques of the self. And it is this critical task that must be
renewed perpetually because of pressures installed in language and other
elements of communal life to reinstate the fundamental "logic" of good
and evil into the experience of being.
Consider again a quotation presented earlier. Foucault says "we have to
dig deeply to show how things have been historically contingent, . . .
intelligible but not necessary". . ., making "the intelligible appear
against a background of emptiness." A deep contingency, a lack of
necessity in things, a background of emptiness--these themes, inserted
into the agenda of genealogy, gesture toward the ont-alogical universal
Foucault would endorse. The "emptiness" of things suggests the absence
of a Law or Purpose governing existence. In a similar way, numerous
expressions of "plentitude," "doubles," and an "untamed exterior"
gesture toward an abundance that exceeds any particular set of
conventions without assuming the form of a Law, Identity, or Purpose
governing things--an emptiness with respect to an intrinsic order, an
abundance with respect to any fixed organ-ization of actuality. These
are fugitive experiences to cultivate through genealogy, doing so to
enhance generosity in rivalries between identity and alter-identity that
provide each with its ambiguous conditions of existence.[24]
In one essay, Foucault strives to express this ontalogical problematic
most actively. Here he makes it clear that the ont-alogy installed in
his researches is not one that is or is likely to become known to be
true. It takes the form of a "happy posit-ivisim" (dash added) or
"critical principle" through which questions are posed and critical
comparisons with other positions are explored. It shares this
paradoxical character with all other fundaments presumed or posited to
date in ethico-political interpretation, even though many of the latter
strive so hard to conceal this status of their own faith. Allow me to
condense a few pages in "The Order of Discourse" into a few lines, doing
so to underline how Foucault both elaborates his stance and exposes
tactics by which alternative stances of its type conceal their posit-
ivistic and comparative character.
"It seems to me," Foucault says, "that beneath this apparent veneration
of discourse, under this apparent logophilia, a certain fear is hidden.
It is just as if prohibitions, thresholds and limits have been set up in
order to master, at least partly, the great proliferation of discourse
in order to remove from its richness its most dangerous part." Next,
marching orders are presented to those who endorse such semblances: "And
if we want to" . . . analyze the terms of this fear, then "we must call
into question our will to truth" . . .; "we must not imagine there is a
great unsaid or a great unthought . . . which we would have to
articulate or think at last" . . .; "we must not imagine that the world
turns towards us a legible face which we would have only to decipher."
This stack of negative imperatives, stretched in front of a small "if,"
finally culminates in an affirmative whose standing at the end of a long
chain of hypotheticals has (almost) been forgotten: "We must conceive
discourse as a violence which we do things, or in any case' as a
practice which we impose on them; and it is in this practice that the
events of discourse find the principle of their regularity."[25]
Two things. First, Foucault's conception of discourse, containing its
own uncertainties and proliferations, is initially presented as a
critical principle "we" pursue in our researches. But as the imperatives
that operationalize this practice pile up, it shortly begins to be heard
as an imperative of being as such. The posit-ivism on which it is
founded is all too easy to forget. This contrived forgetfulness,
condensed into the space of a couple of pages, mimics and exposes the
ontological forgetfulness of moralist-political discourse. The
hypothetical character of the fundamental presumptions becomes buried
beneath the weight of discursive practice, and because it is impossible
to proceed without implicidy invoking some set of fundaments, this set,
too, all too readily becomes received as a set of absolute imperatives
installed in the order of things. Genealogy breaks up this inertia of
presumption that constantly reinstates itself as Nature, God, Law, or
Purpose; it scrambles the sense of ontological necessity implicit in
contingent consolidations.[26]
Second, Foucault contests implicit and explicit ontologies of intrinsic
order and plasticity not simply by showing how each conceals the
hypothetical character and multiple sites of undecidability in its own
imperatives but also by projecting in competition with them an (always
underdeveloped) ontalogy of that which is "violent, pugnacious,
disorderly . . ., perilous, incessant. . ., and buzzing" within
discursive practice.
If this antilogical logos is hypothetical, comparative, and
problematical, why struggle to operationalize it through critical
comparison to other familiar alternatives? There is unlikely to be a
final answer to this question, just as there is none forthcoming with
respect to the alternatives against which it contends. But one response
resides in the fact that every interpretation presupposes or invokes
some such problematical stance with respect to the fundamental character
of being; to try to eliminate such a stance altogether from
interpretation is either to repress crucial dimensions of one's own
perspective or to lapse into a passive nihilism of resolute silence.
Passive nihilism cedes the activity of interpretation to dogmatic
perspectives; it secretly concedes too much to fundamentalists by
treating the problematical standing of its own projections as a
sufficient reason to withdraw from the field of interpretation. It still
presumes that this condition of discourse is a "fault" or "lack" that
"ought not to be" rather than a productive source of creativity that
makes life possible and keeps things moving.
The Foucauldian problematic elicits fugitive, subterranean elements in
contemporary experience, where old verities have fallen onto hard times
and where the sense of violence in them may be more palpable to more
people. Foucault's ontalogical projection speaks to a problematical
experience increasingly available, while contending against insistencies
and resentments that press us to deny, evade, avoid, or defer its
fugitive power. Its thematization alters the terms of contestation in
political discourse. Familiar debates between the advocates of Law,
Purpose, and Normality no longer seem to exhaust the available terms of
debate. The sense of necessity governing the old debate is broken, and
a set of complementary assumptions not subjected to debate by these
debating partners now become open to interrogation. Each alternative,
including the one Foucault advances, is now more likely to be received
as a "problematic" than as a "position" or "theory": it is construed as
a particular, tension-ridden gathering of impulses, insistences,
presumptions, and questions through which interpretation proceeds rather
than as a coherent setof imperatives on which it "rests."[27] Such a
modification in the terms of self-presentation can have salutary effects
on the characterof ethical discourse.
Foucault identifies, though more lightly and obliquely than the mentor
who inspires him, ressentiment as a source from which the problematics
of moral order are constructed. Some of us now begin to hear each of
these orientations as point and counterpoint in the same melody of
deniable revenge; more of us refuse to treat them as The Set that
exhaust the possible terms of ethical debate. Foucault says,
Nothing is fundamental. That is what is interesting in the
analysis of society. That is why nothing irritates me as much as
these inquiries--which are by definition metaphysicalon the
foundations of power in a society or the self-institution of a
society, etc. These are not fundamental phenomena. There are
only reciprocal relations, and the perpetual gaps between
intentions in relation to one another.[28]
It will assist my reading if you read the first sentence along two
registers: "Nothing is fundamental" in the sense that no fundamental Law
or Purpose or Contract governs things; "Nothing is fundamental" in the
sense that energies and forces exceeding the social construction of
subjects and things circulate through "gaps" in these
institutionalizations.
So there is a politics of forgetfulness built into the character of
language, the imperatives of social coordination, the drives to revenge
against the contingency of things, and the insecurities of identity.
Genealogy disturbs this forgetfulness, in the interests of drawing us
closer to the experience that nothing is fundamental. The results of
genealogy are then to be translated into noble effects, as you reach
toward a sensibility beyond good and evil. But how can this combination
of genealogical disturbance and noble sensibility ever establish itself
securely in a self or a culture at any particular time? It cannot. The
Nietzsche/Foucault sensibility (taking various forms such as passing by,
generosity, agonistic respect, a pathos of distance, the
spiritualization of enmity) consists of a set of elements that cannot be
combined together perfectly at any single time. They lack
"compossibility" not because of "weakness of will" or "the crooked
timber of humanity," where the primordial 'Yault" resides within the
self, but because the accentuation of one element in this combination at
any moment necessarily impedes the other at that time. The (post)
Nietzschean ideals of nobility, a pathos of distance, agonistic care,
and passing by never arrive; they are at best always coming to be. One
element is always incompletely articulated with the other to which it
must be united. Here we encounter a "rift" or dissonance not within but
between human capacity and the temporality in which it is set:
More and more it seems to me that the philosopher, being of
necessity a man of tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, has always
found himself, and had to find himself in contradiction to his
today.[29]
This means, I take it, not only that the cultivator of such a
sensibility regularly encounters conflict with a culture inscribed by
the logic of good and evil, but that the pursuer, given the continuing
power of forgetfulness amidst the quest to incorporate generosity into
one's corporeal sensibilities, always has more to do to arrive beyond
the logic of good and evil. To celebrate such a philosophy is always to
offer "A Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future," and that paradoxical
condition too must be affirmed by those who struggle against
ressentzment. Foucault places this Nietzschean theme on a political
register when he says, perhaps in response to a question posed by
Charles Taylor during a collective interview, "the farthest I would go
is to say that perhaps one must not be for consensuality, but one must
be against nonconsensuality."[30] In a Nietzschean-Foucauldian world,
something is always out of joint ethically because it is impossible to
combine all the elements of nobility perfectly in one site at one time.
The struggle to reach beyond good and evil is salutary, but the claim to
have arrived there is always a falsification that reiterates the
dogmatism of the duality you oppose. That is why, I think, Foucault
celebrates the ambiguity of politics and finds politics, in one of its
registers or another, always to be appropriate.
AN ETHICO-POLITICAL SPIRITUALITY
An ethical sensibility, anchored in an ontalogical problematic, rendered
through genealogies of the possible, cultivated through tactics applied
by the self to itself, embodied as care for an enlarged diversity of
life in which plural constituencies coexist in more creative ways than
sustained by a communitarian idea of harmony or a liberal idea of
tolerance, politicized through a series of critical engagements with
established social apparati of good/evil, normal abnormal,
guiltfinnocence, rationality/irrationality, autonomy/dependence,
securityfinsecurity. Several of these dimensions can be heard in the
following celebration of "curiosity":
I like the word [curiosity]. It evokes "care"; it evokes the care
of what exists and might exist; a sharpened sense of reality, but
one that is never immobilized before it; a readiness to find what
surrounds us strange and odd; a certain determination to throw off
familiar ways of thought and to look at the same things in a
different way . . .; a lack of respect for the traditional
hierarchies of what is important and fundamental.[31]
Let me locate this sensibility more actively on a political register. I
do so, first, by modifying the received democratic imaginary correspond
more closely to a timely politics of care for the strife and
interdependence of contingent identity\difference relations; second, by
considering what relationships such a sensibility might strive to
establish with the fundamentalisms circulating through contemporary
life; and, third, by engaging tensions that persist between an ethic of
cultivation and persistent circumstances of political engagement.
Foucault does not articulate a vision of democracy. His early
objections against political ideals as prisons militates against it; and
his later, cautious affirmation of a positive political imagination
never takes this form. But numerous comments in the context of his
participation in public protests and demonstrations are suggestive on
this score. It seems to me that a series of correspondences can be
delineated between the ethical sensibility cultivated by Foucault and an
ethos of democracy they invoke. Consider three dimensions of democratic
practice in this light.[32]
1. Democracy within the territorial state. A viable democratic ethos
embodies a productive ambiguity at its very core. Its role as an
instrument of rule and governance is balanced and countered by its logic
as a medium for the periodic disturbance and denaturalization of settled
identities and sedimented conventions. Both dimensions are crucial.
But the second functions politically to extend the cultural effects of
genealogy, to open up the play of possibility by subtracting the sense
of necessity, completeness, and smugness from established organizations
of life. If the democratic task of governance ever buries the
democratic ethos of disturbance and politicization undor the weight of
national consensus, historical necessity, and state security, state
mechanisms of electoral accountability will be reduced to conduits for
the production of internal/external others against whom to wage moral
wars of all too familiar sorts.
2. The limits of the state. We live during a time when an asymmetry
between the globalization of relations and the confinement of electoral
institutions to the territorial state functions too often to intensify
state chauvinism and violence. The nostalgia in political theory (and
many other sites, too) for a "politics of place," in which
territoriality, sovereignty, electoral accountability, nationality, and
public belonging must all map the same space, depoliticizes global
issues and fosters democratic state chauvinism. During the late-modern
time, productive possibilities of thought and practice might be opened
up by a creative disaggregation of elements in the modern democratic
imagination, paying attention, for instance, to how a democratic ethos
might exceed the boundaries of the state, even when electoral
institutions of democratic accountability are confined to the state.
During a time when corporate structures, financial institutions,
intelligence networks, communication media, and criminal rings are
increasingly global in character, democratic energies, active below and
through the state, might also reach beyond these parameters to cross-
national, extrastatist social movements. A new and timely pluralization
of attachments, identifications, and spaces of political action, already
unfolding before us in the late-modern era, might eventually compromise
the state's ability to colonize the terms of collective identity at key
historical moments. Foucault's 1981 declaration at a press conference
on behalf of the boat people is suggestive on this score in its protest
against treatment of the stateless by states, in its insistence on
extending political identifications beyond the state, and in its
identification of that which diverse constituencies within states share
that might serve as a contingent basis for extrastatist, cross-national
mobilization:
There exists an intemational citizenry that has its rights, that
has its duties, and that is committed to rise up against every
abuse of power, no matter who the author, no matter who the
victims. After all, we are all ruled, and as such, we are in
solidarity.... The will of individuals must be inscribed in a
reality that the govemments wanted to monopolize. This monopoly
must be wrested from them bit by bit, each and every day.[33]
3. The politicization of nonstatist global movements. Boundary-crossing
political movements, with respect to, say, gay/lesbian rights,
disturbance of international patterns of state secrecy and surveillance,
contestation of the state's monopoly over potent symbols of danger and
practices of security, and the renegotiation of first world patterns of
consumption that impinge on the future of the earth can both contribute
to the democratic drive to participate in the events that define our
lives and ventilate dead pockets of air within contemporary states. As
a variety of cross-national, extrastatist movements already in motion
accelerate, they might extend the democratic ethos beyond the state
through a pluralization of democratic spaces of action. They might
compromise the state as the ultimate source of collective identity
whenever a crisis arises and contest its monopoly over the rules of
boundary crossing.
These, then, are some of the elements in the ethico-political
sensibility of Michel Foucault: genealogies that dissolve apparent
necessities into contingent formations; cultivation of care for
possibilities of life that challenge claims to an intrinsic moral order;
democratic disturbances of sedimented identities that conceal violence
in their terms of closure; practices that enable multifarious styles of
life to coexist on the same territory; and a plurality of political
identifications extending beyond the state to break up the monopolies of
state-centered politics.
But surely, politicization of the Foucauldian sensibility will continue
to meet with opposition and outrage from the various fundamentalisms
circulating through contemporary life. Nietzsche and Foucault both
teach us how the more optimistic hopes of the Enlightenment on this
score are unlikely to succeed. Theistic and secular priests persist as
voices in and around us: the inertia of shared practices, forces of
resentment, the pressures of guilt arising from ambivalent
identifications, the effects of social coordination on the reification
of selves and institutions--all these forces press upon the effective
generalization of generous sensibilities. They make genealogies and
politicizations of dogmatic identities into perpetual tasks. They render
the move "beyond good and evil" always a movement and never a secure
achievement. What, then, can be the terms of engagement between an
ethical sensibility affirming care for the contingency of things and
those moral fundamentalisms that oppose it as nihilistic, relativistic,
or parasitic? (As if everyone, everything, and every institution were
not parasitical in some way!)
One salutary possibility Foucault cultivates, I think, is to convert
some relations of antagonism between fundamentalists and genealogists
into those (as I call them) of agonistic respect. The effective
possibilities here are limited, but they are nonetheless real.
Agonistic respect constitutes an element in an impossible utopia, worth
pursuit even amidst the impossibility of its final realization.
Agonistic respect, as I construe it, is a social relation of respect for
the opponent against whom you define yourself even while you resist its
imperatives and strive to delimit its spaces of hegemony. Care for the
strife and interdependence of contingent identities, in which each
identity depends upon a set of differences to be, means that "we" (the
"we" is an invitation) cannot pursue the ethic that inspires us without
contesting claims to the universality and sufficiency of the moral
fundamentalismawe disturbance genealogy and deconstruction. But this
antagonism can be translated into something closer to agonistic respect
in some cases, as each party comes to appreciate the extent to which its
self-definition is bound up with the other and the degree to which the
comparative projections of both are contestable. We opponents can
become bonded together, partially and contingently, through an enhanced
experience of the contestability of the problematic each pursues most
fervently. This is what Nietzsche meant by the "spiritualization of
enmity,"[34] although he thought the capacity to operationalize such a
relationship was limited.
Agonistic respect differs from its sibling, liberal tolerance, in
affirming a more ambiguous relation of interdependence and strife
between identities over a passive letting the other be. The latter may
be desirable on occasion, but it is less available in late-modern life
than some liberals presume. It is not sufficient to shed "prejudice"
because our identities are bound up with each other in a world where
pressures to enact general policies are always active. It "cuts" deeper
than tolerance because it folds contestation into the foundations of the
putative identity from which liberal tolerance is often derived and
delimited. But, still, it remains close enough to liberal tolerance to
invite comparison and critical negotiation, pressing its debating
partner to fold the spirit of genealogy more actively into its
characterization of "the individual" and arguing against the spirit of
complacency so often lodged in bifurcations between the private and the
public.
There is considerable irony and foolishness in a call to agonistic
reciprocity because it invites the fundamentalist to incorporate an
element we endorse into its own identity. The invitation may be
refused. But the call is made in the context of showing him through
genealogy some of the ways in which his fundaments too are questionable
and contestable. And we do not demand that the fundamentalist
incorporate the entire sensibility of the opponent as a condition of
respect; we merely call on the fundamentalist to acknowledge the
contestability of its claim to intrinsic moral order and to affirm self-
restrictions in the way it advances its agenda in the light of this
admission. In this way, space for politics can be opened through a
degree of reciprocity amid contestation; new possibilities for the
negotiation of difference are created by identifying traces in the other
of the sensibility one identifies in oneself and locating in the self
elements of the sensibility attributed to the other. An element of care
is built into contestation and of contestation into care. But, as I
have already said once, such invitations are often rejected.
So the difficulties continue. There are, additionally, numerous times
and places where the terms of opposition are likely to remain implacable
even after the initial positions have been softened by reciprocal
acknowledgment of the contestability of each stance. Debates over the
di(per)vesity of sexuality, over abortion, and, perhaps, over the right
to take one's own life when one decides the time is right might have
this character to varying degrees. Some fundamentalists who treat
homosexuality as perverse, for instance, might be moved to cultivate
either a studied indifference or agonistic respect in relation to those
who celebrate sexual diversity. But they will be less likely to do so
with respect to the issue of gay parents. Those who celebrate diversity
here will have to try to disrupt their operational presumptions
concerning what is "natural," maintaining confidence in the possible
efficacy of genealogy and struggle in exposing the social constitution
of the perversity they fear.[35] So, introduction of a Foucauldian
sensibility more actively into the terms of political contestation,
first, is likely to be refused by many constituencies and, second, to
encounter obdurate instances of nonnegotiability even between
constituencies willing to engage it.
The Foucauldian faith, if I may put it this way, is that more extensive
cultivation of a political ethos of agonistic care makes a real
difference in private and public life, even if it remains a minority
stance within that life, for it is a political problematic of
interrogation, engagement, and negotiation, not a political doctrine of
intrinsic identity, consensus, and resolution. Its impossible utopia is
agonistic respect among differences irreducible to a rational consensus
in settings where it is often necessary to establish general policies.
It locates freedom in the gaps and spaces fostered by these collisions
and negotiations rather than in a pattern of harmonious unity or private
sanctuary it hopes to realize. It counsels recurrent disturbance and
negotiation of the numerous paradoxes of political life over attempts to
conceal, resolve, or repress them.
These last reflections, linking an ethical sensibility to an ethos of
politics, reveal another tension between these two registers amidst the
durable connection between them. An ethic of cultivation requires
attention to the nuances of life; it applies tactics patiently and
experimentally to the self; it affirms ambiguity and uncertainty in the
categories through which ethical judgment is made. But a politics of
engagemert and insurgency often generalizes conflicts so that one set of
concerns becomes overwhelmed by others; it opens up the probability of
more totalistic definitions of one side by its opponents; it sometimes
foments rapid transformations exceeding the temporal and spatial rhythms
of ethical cultivation. Cultivation of care for the contingency of
things and engagement in political contestation, then, are locked into a
relation of strife amidst their mutual implication.[36]
There is no way to eliminate these tensions, unless you endorse some
fictive model of political agency that has never been instantiated
anywhere.
The tension already identified between genealogy and sensibility now
catapults into the medium of politics. The struggle against resentment
of a world in which "nothing is fundamental" involves a willingness to
act in such ambiguous circumstances,[37] because although these two
registers are in tension with each other, they are also interdependent:
the ethical sensibility requires the ethos as one of its conditions of
existence and vice versa. The aspiration is to draw agonistic respect
from the effects of politics and to fold agonistic respect into the art
of politics. The danger flows from suppression of such tensions and
ambiguities in the name of private tranquility, rational harmony, or
consummate political agency.
Perhaps I can allow Foucault to have the last word (for the moment):
There's an optimism that consists in saying that things couldn't
be better. My optimism would consist rather in saying that so
many things can be changed, fragile as they are, bound up more
with circumstances than necessities, more arbitrary than self-
evident, more a matter of complex, but temporary, historical
circumstances than of inevitable anthropological constants.... You
know, to say that we are much more recent than we think, is to
place at the disposal of the work that we do on ourselves the
greatest possible share of what is presented to us as
inaccessible.[38]
NOTES
[1] Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Cood and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy
of the Future, translated by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1966),
83.
[2] James Miller, "The Politics of Limits" (paper delivered at the 1991
convention of the American Political Science Association, September 1-4,
Washington, DC), pare. 13.
[3] Michel Foucault, "Revolutionary Action: `Until Now,' " in Donald
Bouchard, ea., Michel Foucault: Language, Counter-Memory, Practice
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1977), 226.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid, 230. I bypass here Miller's crude charge that, in calling in
the same essay for an attack on the "whole of society," Foucault
legitimizes attempts to eradicate all social institutions. It becomes
clear what Foucault has in mind when he says, "I believe, on the
contrary, that this particular idea of the 'whole of society' [single
quotes in original] derives from a utopian context." Foucault attacks
"the dream" of "the whole of society" because the dream of wholeness and
harmony it pursues requires the destruction, elimination, or repression
of everytbing that does not fit in with it.
[6] Michel Foucault, "Friendship as a Way of Life," in Foucault Live,
edited by Sylvere Lotringer and translated by John Johnston (New York:
Semiotexte, 1989), 208
[7] I hope it becomes clear as we proceed that not all those who anchor
their morality in the Law or the Good are locked into transcendental
egoism. Only those who insist that the "other" cannot devise a morality
unless he or she accepts these fundaments are so locked in. Thinkers
like Foucault, Derrida, and Nietzsche are excellent at bringing out the
subterranean fundamentalism of many who otherwise deny it.
[8] A world with no commanding or designing god is likely to be marked
by discordances, accidents, and chance. This is exactly the world in
which Nietzsche and Foucault cultivate an ethical sensibility. Such a
world, in turn, is not a likely source of a teleological ethic. A world
with an omnipotent god, as the nominalists tried to show the Thomists,
is unlikely to be one limited by any prior design of the world, for an
omnipotent god flourishes in a highly contingent world it can vary in
any way at any time; its omnipotence is threatened by any design that
restricts it. A teleological morality without a god is problematic,
then, but it is also difficult to construct one with an omnipotent god.
It is not that a god filling the bill is impossible to construct, but
such a delicate construction raises the question as to whether it is
discovered or invented to fill the exact purpose it is supposed to
reveal. On the other hand, an omnipotent god seems most compatible with
a morality grounded in a transcendental imperative, and neo-Kanfians
have had a hell of a time demonstrating this imperative without recourse
to such a deeply contestable faith. Hans Blumenberg pursues these
issues, in his history of onto-theological aporias and debates that have
marked the West since the inception of Augusfianism. Blumenberg, The
Legifirnacy of the Modern Age (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983). A last
"theological" point: Although there are powerful pressures binding the
command and design traditions to the authority of a god, a "post-
Nietzschean" ethic need not resist every conception of divinity. A god
as "absence," for instance, might be compatible with a post-Nietzschean
sensibility. So might some versions of polytheism. I prefer
"nontheistic reverence for the ambiguity of being."
[9] In these comparisons I take Charles Taylor to represent the
"teleological" model. His version of it, I think, brings out
effectively assumptions implicit in the other formulations. He might
resist the title I have bestowed on him, but the language through which
his morality is couched is very teleological by comparison to the
Nietzschean/Foucauldian sensibility defended here. Those are the only
terms of comparison that interest me at the moment. See Charles Taylor,
Philosophical Papers, vols. 1-2 (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1985).
[10] Notice how the favorite critique that neo-Kantians pose against
teleocommunitarians loses its bite against post-Nietzscheans. They
contend that it is impossible to reach universal agreement on the nature
of the good, commending instead the same quest with respect to rights or
the procedures of justice. I concur that a grounded consensus on the
good is unlikely, even though I emphasize much more than neo-Kantians do
how much established conventions are treated implicitly by neo-Kantians
and teleocommunitarians as if they were so grounded, for both parties
tend to eschew genealogy, limiting their ability to identify limits to
pluralism in established regimes.
[11] Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 96. A powerful argument in
Taylor's study is that advocates of "disengaged" morality are unable to
account for the sources of their own moral inspirations. Bernard
Williams, in an insightful review of this study, points to the strength
of this argument, while claiming that Taylor's framework of analysis is
not well suited to come to terms with Nietzschean thought: "I think that
Taylor, in his search for the sources of value, seems not to have taken
seriously enough Nietzsche's thought that if there is, not only no God,
but no metaphysical order of any kind, then this imposes quite new
demands on our self-understanding." New York Review of Books, November
4 ( 1990): 48. 1 concur with this judgment.
[12] In Identity and Difference, translated by Joan Stambaugh (New
York: Harper & Row, 1969), Martin Heidegger speaks of "tbe oblivion of
difference." "We speak of the difference between Being and beings....
That is the oblivion of difference. The oblivion here to oe thought is
the veiling of the difference as such" (p. 50). The thought is similar
to Nietzsche's elusive presentations of life. You never lift the veil
of difference as such, for difference is that which differs from the
organized, conceptualized, fixed, and determinate. But you might
encounter the oblivion of difference through artful techniques; you
might experience the way in which the organization of experience draws
on that which is itself not yet organized.
[13] Hence the indispensability of deconstruction and genealogy to the
sensibility in question.
[14] "But, in the end, I've become rather irritated by an attitude,
which for a long time was mine, too, and which I no longer subscribe to,
which consists in saying: our problem is to denounce and to criticize;
let them get on with their legislation and their reforms. That doesn't
seem to me the right attitude." Lawrence D. Kritzman, ed., Michel
Foucault: Politics, Philosophy, Culture, translated by Alan Sheridan
(New York: Routledge, 1988), 209.
[15] Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak, translated by R. J. Hollingdale
(Cambridge: Cambridge Univesity Press, 1982), #103, p.104. Alan White
gives an excellent reading of this formulation in Within Metzsche's
Labyrinth (New York: Routledge, 1990).
[16] Nietzsche, Daybreak, #149,97. In Will to Power, translated by
Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Random House, 1967),
#1019, Nietzsche lists six practices that have been wrecked by the
church's monopoly and misuses of them. They are asceticism, fasting,
the monastery, feasts, the courage to endure one's nature, and death.
In each ofthese cases, Nietzsche would refigure the practice in question
into one that fends off existential resentment and fosters a "nobility"
that reaches beyond the ugly narcissism of good and evil. The notes in
Will to Power that focus on the body also focus on the priority of
techniques of the self over rational argumentation or direct reform of
"the will" in fostering a generous ethical sensibility.
[17] Metzsche, Will to Power, translated by Walter Kaufmann (New York:
Vmtage,1968),#995.
[18] Narcissus loved not himself but his image in the pond. The
transcendental narcissist loves the image of itself that it projects
into a transcendental command or direction.
[19] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, translated by Walter
Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974), #290, p. 233.
[20] Nietzsche himself invokes the vocabulary of life in one way in his
early work and in a modified way in his later work. I will not pursue
that issue here, but it is the later uses that I am drawn to.
[21] I generally try to avoid the language of "essentialism." It means,
variously, a philosophy that pretends that a highest law, nature, or
principle can be brought into full presence; the confidence that there
is a fundamental law or purpose governing existence that can be more
closely approximated in life through hermeneutic piety, and the claim
that every actor and every interpreter invokes a set of fundamental
assumptions about the character of being in every act and
interpretation. Thus anyone can successfully accuse anyone else of
"being an essentialist" in some way or another. Foucault, as I read him,
is not an "essentialist" on the first two scores but is one on the
third. He comes close to what one might call the "vague essentialism"
advanced by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1970). "So how are we to
define this matter-movement, this matter-energy, this matter flow, this
matter in variation that enters assemblages and leaves them? It is a
destratified, deterritorialized matter. It seems to us that Husserl
brought thought a decisive step forward when he discovered a region of
vague and material essences (in other words, essences that are vagabond,
inexact and yet rigorous), distinguishing them from fixed, metric and
formal essences" (p. 407). Husserl did not pursue this insight far
enough. Deleuze and Guattari do in Plateau 6, "How Do You Make Yourself
a Body Without Organs?" The strategies they endorse there are initially
more extreme and dangerous dhan Foucault or Nietzsche would endorse.
For American conceptions that cultivate a lawless essentialism more
cautiously, see Jane Bennett, Unthinking Faith and [Enlightenment (New
York: New York University Press, 1986) and Donna Haraway, Primate
Visions (New York: Roudedge, 1989).
[22] Pierre Hadot, "Reflections on the notion of `the cultivation of
the self,' " in Timathy J. Armstrong, ed. and trans., Michel Foucault:
Philosopher (New York: Roudedge, 1992),229.
[23] Ibid., 230. Hadot goes on to say, "For my part, l believe finely
. . . in the opportunity for modern man ... to become aware of our
situation as belonging to the universe.... This exercise in wisdom will
therefore be an attempt to open ourselves up to the universal."
[24] This ontalogical level is the one that Habermasians, to date, have
been hesitant to engage in Foucualt. While they do not postulate a Law
or Design in being, the terms through which "communicative ethics" is
delineated seems to presuppose a plasticity of bodies and things that is
challenged by Foucault. These two competing "communicative ethics" will
enter into more reflective engagement with one another when both parties
actively consider how differences in their most fundamental projections
into nature and bodies enter into their divergent readings of
"discourse." Habermas evinces awareness of this dimension when he
engages communitarians. In one note, he indicates how Sandel would have
to explicate the normative content of "community, embodied and shared
self-understanding" more carefully to sustain his theory "If he did, he
would realize just how onerous the burden of proof is that neo-
Aristotelian approaches must bear, as in the case of A. MacIntyre in
After Virtue.... They must demonstrate how an objective moral order can
be grounded without recourse to metaphysical premises." Moral
Consciousness and Communicative Action (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990).
Habermas, in turn, would have to show how the conception of nature he
presupposes in his discourse ethics is superior to the projection that
Foucault endorses in "The Order of Discourse" and elsewhere. It only
defers the engagement to reduce Foucault's options to a choice between a
morally obnoxious "vitalism" or the model of communication Habermas
himself invokes. I pursue this issue between Habermas, Foucault, and
Taylor in "The Irony of Interpretation," in Daniel Conway and 30hn Seery,
eds., Politics and Irony (New York: St. Martin's, forthcoming).
[25] Foucault, "The Order of Discourse," in Michael Shapiro, ed.,
Language and Politics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), 125-27, emphases added.
l find the second half of the last sentence to be more credible than the
first. The first might suggest that the level of violence is the same
in all instances and hence that it is always impossible to curtail
violence.
[26] The forgetfulness pursued here runs deeper than I have so far
intimated. It is built into the very character of shared vocabularies,
where the conditions of existence of a common language require an
imposition of equivalences within the concepts deployed that "forget"
those excesses that do not fit into these configurations. Nietzsche
discusses this level of forgetting in On the Genealogy of Morals,
translated by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random Books, 1967). In the
texts in which this logic of equivalences is discussed, he also develops
linguistic strategies that cut against it.
[27] See "Polemics, Politics, and Problematizations: An Interview with
Michel Foucault," in The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow (New
York: Pantheon, 1984), 381-89.
[28] Foucault, "An Ethics of Pleasure," in Foucault Live edited by
Sylvere Lotringer and translated by John Johnston (New York: Semiotext(e)
, 1989) 267.
[29] Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, #212, p. 137.
[30] Foucault, "Politics and Ethics: An Interview," in Paul Rabinow,
ea., The Foucault Reader (New York: Pantheon,1984),379. Foucault refuses
the language of "regulative ideal" in pointing out ms own double
relation to consensus.
[31] Foucault, "The Masked Philosopher," in Lawrence D. Kritzman, ea.,
Michel Foucault: Politics, Philosophy, Culture (New York: Routledge,
1984), 328.
[32] These dimensions are developed more fully in Connolly,
Identity\Difference, especially the last two chapters, and "Democracy
and Territoriality, Millenium," December(1991): 463-84.
[33] Quoted in Didier Eribon, Michel Foucault, translated by Betsy Wing
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), 279. Thomas Keenan, in "The
'Paradox" of Knowledge and Power," Political Theory (February, 1987),
discusses this statement thoughtfully and extensively
[34] "The Church has at all times desired the destruction of its
enemies: we, we imoralists and anti-Christians, see that is to our
advantage that the church exists.... In politics, too, enmity has
become much more spiritual-much more prudent, much more thoughtful, much
more forbearing.... We adopt the same attitude toward the 'enemy
within': there too we have spiritualized enmity, there too we have
grasped its value." Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, translated by R.
J. Hollingdale (New York: Penguin, 1968), under "Morality as Anti-Nature,
" 43-44.
[35] When presenting these thoughts, I have found that about the
juncture someone will interrupt, charging: "Murder is perverse! Torture
is perverse! Your ethics of 'generosity' sanctions these perversities.
Certainly it lacks the ability to oppose them." But, of course, it does
not carry such implications. Its governing sensibility of care for the
interdependence and strife of identity\difference obviously opposes such
acts. Indeed, very often, murder and torture express the very dogmatism
of identity and abstract revenge against life that this sensibility
seeks to curtail. So why is the charge so predictable at this juncture?
I suspect that some who wrap themselves in a fictive law they cannot
demonstrate would like to punish those who keep pounding away, first, at
the paradox of identity and, second, at the cruelties installed in
transcendental narcissism. The next time this charge is issued, examine
the demeanor of the one who issues it. Does he look like he could kill
you? Fortunately, there are still laws to restrain dogmatists from
acting on these impulses.
[36] These comments on tensions between an ethic of cultivation and a
politics of critical engagement are inspired from one side by a critique
delivered to me every other day by Dick Flathman and from another by a
critique offered by Stephen White of a paper of mine at the 1991 meeting
of the Southern Political Science Association, Tampa, Florida entitled
"Territoriality and Democracy." Flathman is tempted by an antipolitics
that expects little of politics because of its ugly character. This
sensibility is brought out effectively in Toward a Liberalism (Ithaca,
NY: Comell University Press, 1990) and in a study of Hobbes soon to be
published by Sage in its "Dialogue with Modemity" series. White finds
my "ethic of cultivation" to be in conflict with a "politics of radical
hope." I find the terms in which he recognizes the tension to be too
stark for my position. I do not have "radical hopes" for a political
transformation; rather, I support radical critiques that might open up
new spaces for life to be while supporting new possibilities of
democratic change. Together these two put considerable pressure on the
position I ,seek to inhabit. It is only after I compare the tensions in
my stance with those in their's, respectively, that my confidence begins
to reassert itself.
[37] How can resentment find expression against a world lacking the
kind of agency capable of receiving this animus? It cannot. That is
what makes existential resentment so dangerous, for it preserves itself
by manufacturing viable substitutes on which to displace itself. It (re)
invents the logic of good and evil to locate evil agents to hold
responsible for an apparent contingency of things that should not be
this way. But where, asks Nietzsche, comes this last "should not"?
>From the same pool of existential resentment that keeps refilling
itself. The logic of good and evil keeps returning-hence the continuing
need for genealogy. Not even an "overman" can simply surpass this
logic. It is timely to laugh at the overman, too.
[38] Foucault, "Practicing Criticisms," in Michel Foucault: Politics,
Philosophy, Culture, 256. Does Foucault underplay the tendency of "God,
" "the Law," "Nature," and "Intrinsic Purpose" to reinstate themselves
offstage even as the contingencies within them are addressed on stage?
Probably. But I prefer to say that he acts as if these enactments can
be challenged through counter enactments. Girard, Freud, Lacan, and
others show how final markers reinstate themselves even though they lack
the transcendental basis that their most eamest supporters yearn for. In
Freud, guilt flows from the ambivalent identification with a model that
one has just (perhaps in the imagination) killed; it precedes the God
and the Law invented retroactively to explain it. Freud and others
challenge moralisms that translate the experience of guilt into a
transcendental source. But the next step is to develop strategies
through which to politicize violences accompanying the conversion
process. This is where the genius of Foucault shines.
AUTHOR'S NOTE: I would like to express my appreciation to Jane
Bennett, David Campbell, Tom Dumm, Dick Flathman, Bonnie Honig,
and Tracy Strong for criticisms of the first draft of this essay
~~~~~~~~
By WILLIAM E. CONNOLLY Johns Hopkins University
William E Connolly teaches political theory at Johns Hopkins University,
where he is a professor of political science. He is the Series Editor
of Contestations: Cornell Studies in Political Theory. His books
include Political Theory and Modernity, Identity\Difference: Democratic
Negotiations of Political Paradox, and The Augustinian Imperative: A
Reflection on the Politics of Morality.
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Source: Political Theory, Aug93, Vol. 21 Issue 3, p365, 25p.
Item Number: 9402091472
