Magazine: POLITICAL THEORY, August 1990

                         CARNIVALS OF ATROCITY
                         ---------------------

                      Foucault, Nietzsche, Cruelty

It might be said that all knowledge is linked to the essential forms of
cruelty.

                                                --Michel Foucault (1962)

MICHEL FOUCAULT'S GREATEST WORK, Surveiller et punir, ostensibly a
history of penal practices, starts like this: "Damiens had been
condemned, on March 2, 1757, `to make honorable amends before the main
door of the Church of Paris,' where he was to be `brought on a cart,
naked but for a shirt, holding a torch burning wax weighing two pounds;'
then, `in said cart taken to the Place de Greve, where, on a scaffold
that will be erected there, the flesh will be torn from his breasts,
arms, thighs, and calves with red-hot pincers, his right hand, holding
the knife with which he committed the said [regicide], burned with
sulphur, and, on those places where the flesh will be torn away, poured
molten lead, boiling oil, burning resin, wax and sulphur melted together
and then his body drawn and quartered by four horses and his limbs and
body consumed by fire, reduced to ashes and his ashes thrown to the
wind.'"(n1)

In the event--and the text spares nothing in the document it cites--the
condemned man suffered horribly. Four horses tethered to each limb
proved unable to dismember Damiens. Next, six horses tried--and failed.
" 'After two or three attempts,"' the executioner drew a knife "`and cut
the body at the thighs instead of severing the legs at the joints; the .
. . horses gave a tug and carried off the two thighs after them, namely,
that of the right side first, the other following; then the same was
done to the arms, the shoulders, the arm-pits and the four limbs; the
flesh had to be cut almost to the bone.'"(n2)

Reading, we recoil: The scene provokes nausea, disgust, revulsion--but
also a perverse fascination with the details. These are rehearsed in a
language of great economy and precision. Slow, meticulous, ceremonial,
it is a kind of pornography--a pornography of murderous pleasures, and,
on the printed page, mute pain: "It is probably this that can be called
the horror: to an unsuspecting glance, the encounter with dead things
which are laid open, a certain tortuousness of being, where open mouths
do not cry out."(n3)

Damiens' death introduces a miscellany of documents, a starkly drawn
chronology, a kaleidescope of striking images, a meticulously
multilayered network of surprising anecdotes, unexpected hypotheses, and
patches of plain narrative. Threading through the different layers and
tying them together is one central story: as the book's subtitle puts it,
a story about "the birth of the prison." In this context, Damiens' death
by torture illustrates what kind of cruel and unusual punishment the
modern prison was designed to replace. In the hands of another
storyteller, the main plot line might even offer a kind of consolation.
It is common, after all, to attribute the disappearance of torture as a
public spectacle to a process of "humanization" that has softened the
often savage violence of premodern societies.

But Foucault in Surveiller et punir famously does nothing of the sort.
Instead, the central narrative is, in the words of his admiring
expositors Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, a "somber recounting," an
austere, sometimes antiseptic description of how "a disciplinary
technology and a normative social science," displacing the old public
rituals of violent expiation, came to exercise an ubiquitous, deadening
power not only over convicted criminals but over the entire surface of
modern society.(n4) The book's pivotal image, Jeremy Bentham's
panopticon, Foucault treats as a sinister symbol of unlimited
surveillance, a utopian fantasy of a painlessly coercive kind of social
machine geared to produce "docile bodies" and obedient souls.

The scene that opens the book therefore turns out to be doubly
disturbing. For if the text that follows is designed to arouse the most
profound skepticism about the virtues of the modern penal system, it
simultaneously invites the reader to contemplate with unwonted sympathy
what Foucault calls l'eclat des supplices--the splendor and explosive
glory of death by torture.(n5)

This strange double transvaluation--which provokes skepticism about
reforms intended to lessen pain and simultaneously arouses sympathy for
institutions that promote visible displays of cruelty--goes a long way,
I believe, toward explaining the disquiet a reader may feel on finishing
Foucault's remarkable book. Thinking through the issues raised in
Surveiller et punir is like walking into a fiendishly clever kind of
philosophical fun house: It is a very creepy experience. To express
bland admiration for the book's imposing edifice of erudition and
methodological sophistication is to diminish the disturbing impact of
this shadowy interior; ultimately, it is to treat the work as a trivial
display of intellectual fireworks.

Fireworks, of course, there certainly are: Among other things,
Surveiller et punir offers readers a provocative new approach to the
history of penal institutions; a seductive new jargon that promises to
define, as never before, an insidious "micro-physics of power"; and,
last but not least, an avowed "genealogy of the modern `soul'," showing
how an institution like the modern prison, through its "micro-physics,"
"dissociates power from the body," creating a set of aptitudes that
explain, "no doubt," how "the man of modern humanism was born"--and how
the modem soul became a "prison" of the body.(n6)

At the same time, Surveiller et punir is a singularly difficult text.
While negotiating its labyrinthine twists and sums, trying to avoid dead
ends and patiently exploring detours in pursuit of answers to the many
riddles it poses--about chronology, about method, about genealogy--it is
easy to let slip from view the troubling substantive issues to which the
book nevertheless keeps circling back.

What, for example, are we to make of Foucault's apparent fascination
with death by torture? Or, to pose the question more bluntly, in the
kind of simple form that is fundamentally foreign to Foucault's way of
thinking: What, if any, role ought cruelty to play in society?

On the face of it, this may seem a bizarre, even grotesque, topic to
pursue. Political theorists have tended to skirt the issue of cruelty,
despite the large amount of merciless violence connected with the
exercise of political power--a connection that persists to this day, as
witness the annual reports issued by Amnesty International. It is
symptomatic of how matters stand in modem psychology that the word
"cruelty" appears only once in the new Oxford Companion to the Mind, and
then--tellingly enough--only in the brief entry on "sadism."
Philosophers have also generally avoided the topic, as Judith Shklar has
recently pointed out in one of the few good essays 1 know of on cruelty.
Why this silence surrounding the phenomenon? Perhaps, as Shklar
speculates, cruelty "is too deep a threat to reason for most
philosophers to contemplate it at all."(n7)

This circumstance makes Foucault's views on the subject all the-more
interesting. But illuminating these views is tricky. The first challenge
is to sketch an interpretation that renders explicit what Foucault has
left largely implicit.

I will begin with what, at first, must seem like a long digression.

Midway through Surveiller et punir occurs one of the blind references
that Foucault sometimes uses to mark the spot where a less circuitous
philosopher might produce a straightforward argument. In the book's
central chapter, on what Foucault calls "panopticism," in a brief
disgression on Napoleon as a transitional figure, we read the following:
"As a monarch who is at one and the same time a usurper of the ancient
throne and the organizer of the new state, he combined into a single
symbolic, ultimate figure the whole of the long process by which
sovereignty, the necessarily spectacular manifestations of power"-of
which public death-by-torture was one aspect-"were extinguished one by
one in the daily exercise of surveillance, in a panopticism in which the
vigilance of intersecting gazes was soon to render useless both the
eagle and the sun."(n8)

Eagle? Sun?

What at first glance may seem a non sequitur is not. Different
possibilities spring to mind: The eagle was Napoleon's imperial herald;
and the sun, of course, was the cognizance of King Louis XIV. But there
is more: The same symbols figure prominently in Nietzsche's prologue to
Thus Spoke Zarathustra. At the outset of this prologue, Zarathustra
rises with the dawn, steps before the sun, and delivers a speech: "You
great star," declares Nietzsche's prophet, "what would your happiness be
had you not those for whom you shine? For ten years you have c,limbed to
my cave: you would have tired of your light and of the journey had it
not been for me and my eagle and my serpent." At the close of this
prologue, the sun stands high at noon and Zarathustra hears the sharp
call of a bird: "An eagle soared through the sky in wide circles, and on
him there hung a serpent, not like prey but like a friend."(n9)

The eagle--bird of prey, classical image of sovereign power--Zarathustra
declares "the proudest animal under the sun." His "friend," the serpent,
is, among other things, a biblical symbol of evil, sin, diabolical
temptation, conventionally associated with the Fall--not flight.
Spiraling upward, entertwined, the two animals, as Heidegger comments in
his lectures on Nietzsche, form "a magnificent emblem that scintillates
for all who have the eyes to see," even though, as Heidegger adds, these
animals augur "the most hair-raising and hazardous things." These
intertwined animal-omens of evil and power--and the eternal recurrence
of the same--are Zarathustra's companions and guides, as is that "great
star," the sun. Traditionally a Platonic image of the True and the Good,
the sun also suggests the immateriality and otherworldliness of God.
Elsewhere in his-work, Nietzsche subverts the monotheistic and
supernatural implications of the image by speaking of an "eclipse of the
sun," "a starry sky," a constellation of "different moralities" that
presage a new dawn. Similarly, in the heart of the prologue to Thus
Spoke Zarathustra, warning of a world where "everybody wants the same,
every body is the same" and "whoever feels different goes into a
madhouse," Nietzsche's fictive alter ego declares: "I say unto you, one
must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing
star. I say unto you: you still have chaos in yourselves. Alas, the time
is coming when man will no longer give birth to a star. Alas, the time
of the most despicable man is coming, he that is no longer able to
despise himself. Behold, I show you the last man."(n10)

As we have seen, Foucault, at the outset of Surveiller et punir,
declares his ambition to write, as Nietzsche did, a "genealogy"-a
"genealogy of the modern `soul.'" Interpreting the eagle and sun as
Nietzschean symbols suggests, more narrowly, that we read Surveiller et
punir as a genealogy of a specific type of modem soul, namely "the last
man"-docile, oblivious, a stranger to creative energy, unable to take
flight, unwilling to be different, serenely unaware of those "hair-
raising and hazardous things" that have driven other men "into a
madhouse." In effect, Surveiller et punir would then become a sequel not
only to Foucault's own exploration of the madhouse in Folie et deraison
but to Nietzsche's original Genealogy of Morals--a sequel in which the
French genealogist shows how the modern human sciences have taken over
the role of Christianity in disciplining the body and constituting the
soul, substituting for the Christian soul, "born in sin and subject to
punishment," a modern soul, born under surveillance and subject to an
indefinite discipline, "an interrogation without limits." "If I wanted
to be pretentious," Foucault remarked in an interview shortly after the
publication of Surveiller et punir, "I would use `the genealogy of
morals' as the general title of what I am doing."(n11)

Now, Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals expresses the same disquieting
transvaluation that I have already noted in Surveiller et punir.
Nietzsche, too, expresses skepticism about the value of eliminating
pain; he also expresses an unwonted, disturbing sympathy for
institutions that promote public displays of cruelty.

Nietzsche, furthermore, explicitly places the phenomenon of cruelty at
the heart of his genealogy. By cruelty, I mean (to modify slightly the
definition in the Oxford English Dictionary) "a disposition to inflict
suffering"; indifference to or delight in pain or misery; mercilessness,
hard-heartedness, especially as exhibited in action. "Man is the
cruelest animal," writes Nietzsche in Thus Spoke Zarathustra: "Whatever
is most evil is his best power and the hardest stone for the highest
creator."(n12)

This conviction takes shape gradually in Nietzsche's work. It grows, on
one hand, from his observation that the purity and beauty of ancient
Greek culture emerged only after a "long comfortless period" of "dark
crudity and cruelty"-an observation that leads Nietzsche to comment that
"one can speak of spring as long as one has a winter to precede it."(n13)


More fateful, because more fundamental, though, is Nietzsche's
proposition--at first advanced hesitantly--that the infliction of pain,
to the extent it excites pleasure, ought not to be regarded as evil.
When suffering is "accompanied by pleasure (feeling of one's own power,
of one's own strong excitation)," writes Nietzsche in Human, All Too
Human, "it occurs for the wellbeing of the individual.... Without
pleasure no life; the struggle for pleasure is the struggle for life.
Whether an individual pursues this struggle in such a way that people
call him good, or in such a way that they call him evil, is determined
by the degree and quality of his intellect."(n14)

This formulation, which yokes pleasure and pain together in a kind of
Dionysian folie a deux, grows increasingly central to Nietzsche's
thought. To exercise actively the will to power, he regards as the
essence of life. To exercise this power with abandon is not only to
court being cruel but, when cruelty occurs, to enjoy the pain the
suffering, the agony that cruelty causes. "To practice cruelty is to
enjoy the highest"-note the adjective: the highest -"gratification of
the feeling of power." To enjoy the exercise of power is, in effect, to
be cruel: This is Nietzsche's hard teaching.(n15)

At first, contends Nietzsche, such pleasure was public. Cruelty is "one
of the oldest festive joys of mankind." "It is not long since princely
weddings and public festivals of the more magnificent kind were
unthinkable without executions, torturing, or perhaps an auto-da-fe, and
no noble household was without creatures upon whom one could heedlessly
vent one's malice and cruel jokes." For thousands of years, societies
have been organized hierarchically, enabling the man with prestige to
enjoy the cruel pleasure of exciting envy and permitting the man of
power "the pleasure of being allowed to vent his power freely upon one
who is powerless, the voluptuous pleasure `defaire le mal pour le
plaisir de le faire,' the enjoyment of violation."(n16)

It was by public displays of cruelty, Nietzsche speculates, that memory
and, with it, the spheres of legal obligation and morality were first
brought into existence. "Blood, torture and sacrifices" were the way in
which man created "a memory for himself"-"only that which never ceases
to hurt stays in the memory." Joining a group, a man pledged himself to
obey shared rules-- on pain of cruel punishment if he did not. Such
punishment produces "an in&ease of fear, a heightening of prudence,
mastery of the desires: thus punishment tames men, but it does not make
them `better.'"(n17)

Taming for Nietzsche, entails what he calls "internalization"-an idea
that, in our own post-Freudian age, seems deceptively self-evident. "All
instincts that do not discharge themselves outwardly turn inward,"
writes Nietzsche: "[T]hus it was that man first developed what was later
called his `soul'." The invention of the soul divides the human animal.
"Its instinct for freedom pushed back and repressed, incarcerated within,
and finally able to discharge and vent itself only on itself," the
organism declares war on itself.(n18)

Suing for peace, the human being, in time, comes to swear allegiance to
a kind of psychological "oligarchy," with "regulation, foresight, and
premeditiation" keeping at bay "our underworld of utility organs working
with and against one another." With the "aid of the morality of mores
and the social straitjacket," as Nietzsche puts it, the organism's
oligarchy is kept in power; man learns "to be ashamed of all his
instincts." Stifling his cruel and murderous impulses, he becomes
"calculable, regular, necessary"-a subject of civilized reason and
morality.(n19)

But the organism's cruel impulses do not disappear altogether. What
otherwise might be inexplicable--namely, the pleasure many men have
clearly learned to feel in taking pains to rule themselves--Nietzche
explains through the survival of internalized cruelty and the
paradoxical convergence of pleasure and pain that characterizes it. The
idea of "self-chosen torture"--prima facie, a monstrous oxymoron--
becomes the key in the Genealogy of Morals to interpreting a host of
intertwined phenomena: guilt; the bad conscience; and, above all, the
triumph of asceticism in Christianity.(n20)

The internalization of cruel impulses represented by the triumph of
asceticism ramifies in unpredictable ways. Guilt hobbles man's animal
energies; shared taboos make exercising the will difficult and sometimes
unpleasant. Yet in some rare souls, the masochistic pleasures of self-
rule paradoxically strengthen the will to power in all of its cruel
splendor; the old animal impulses, cultivated with foresight and
transmogrified through the use of memory, imagination, and reason erupt
in new forms of mastery. "This secret self-ravishment, this artist's
cruelty, this delight in imposing a form upon oneself as a hard,
recalcitrant, suffering material and in burning a will, a critique, a
contradiction, a contempt, a No into it, this uncanny, dreadfully joyous
labor of a soul voluntarily at odds with itself that makes itself suffer
out of joy in making suffer--eventually this entire active bad
conscience--you will have guessed it--as the womb of all ideal and
imaginative phenomena, also brought to life an abundance of strange new
beauty and affirmation, and perhaps beauty irself."(n21)

In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche summarizes the history we have just
surveyed by using the metaphor of a ladder. The "great ladder of
religious cruelty," as he calls it, has three rungs. The first step
leads to the sacrifice of human beings for the sake of one's god. Next,
"one sacrificed to one's god one's own strongest instincts, one's
`nature': this festive joy lights up the cruel eyes of the ascetic."
Finally comes the "paradoxical mystery of the final cruelty," the
sacrifice of God himself. This is the specific form of cruelty proper to
the philosopher. Governed by the will to truth--a will nurtured and
preserved by the practice of asceticism--the philosopher finally appears,
who, recognizing that the idea of truth is itself a kind of fiction,
spares nothing in telling us that everything we hold as solid and
certain about the world is, on closer examination, demonstrably
accidental, contingent, or false--laws, ideas, philosophies, religions,
moralities, everything. Such honesty risks ending in nihilism--the
catastrophic conviction that nothing is true and anything is permitted.
Destroying, as it does, assumptions and essential convictions that
enable societies to function and most people to feel at home in the
world, the philosopher's will to truth is "a kind of sublime
wickedness." But this final cruelty, unlike its Christian antecedent,
does not incarcerate the will to power; rather, it promises to liberate
this will from the shackles of groundless guilt, thereby restoring "its
goal to the earth" by translating "man back into nature"-an animal
`nature' characterized, among other things, by cruelty: the primordial
pleasure to be found in causing pain.(n22)

In trying to imagine what kind of institutions might, in the future,
reinforce rather than weaken the will to power, it is useful to recall
that different historical cultures have differed widely in the degree of
internalization that they have required and also in the externalized
displays of power that they have permitted. For long centuries, as we
have seen, the state, according to Nietzsche, employed the most "fearful
means" for molding its human material. "Consider the old German
punishments: for example, stoning . . .. breaking on the wheel . . .,
piercing with stakes, tearing apart or trampling by horses . . .,
boiling of the criminal in oil or wine . . ., the popular flaying alive
. . ., cutting flesh from the chest, and also the practice of smearing
the wrongdoer with honey and leaving him in the blazing sun for the
flies." Nietzsche remarks that the popular belief that punishment
awakens conscience is quite mistaken: One reason, he speculates, that
"belief in punishment" is "tottering" among nineteenth-century
Europeans. "Generally speaking," he observes, "punishment makes men hard
and cold; it concentrates; it sharpens the feeling of alienation; it
strengthens the power of resistance." Harsh penal practices
paradoxically honor and preserve man's murderous impelses: for the
criminal and spectators sense that "the type" of the criminal's actions
"as surf`" cannot be reprehensible since one sees "exactly the same kind
of actions practiced in the service of justice and approved of and
practiced with a good conscience: . . . violence, defamation,
imprisonment, torture, murder, practiced as a matter of principle and
without even emotion to excuse them."(n23)

The modern state, by contrast, tends, as a matter of humanitarian and
egalitarian principle, to outlaw harsh forms of punishment and cruel
practices generally, abolishing slavery, for example, eliminating titles
and status symbols, softening hierarchical distinctions. In the wake of
the French Revolution, there had appeared a new kind of "legal order,
thought of as sovereign and universal." The democratic state is
organized "not as a means in the struggle between-power-complexes, but
as a means of preventing all struggle in general." Heralded both by
Kant's philosophy and by the liberal and socialist movements of the
nineteenth century, this legal order Nietzsche despised; it introduced
"a principle hostile to life, an agent of the dissolution and
destruction of man, an attempt to assassinate the future of man."
Mankind was becoming enmeshed in a "tremendous clockwork, composed of
ever smaller, ever more subtly `adapted' gears," in which there is "an
ever-growing superfluity of all dominating and commanding elements," in
which individuals represent "minimal forces, minimal values." Such
individuals, deprived of the spectacle of punishment and tired of the
war within, crave peace, tranquillity, an end to suffering. With
"nothing any more to be afraid of," man is "no longer able to despise
himself," no longer able even to enjoy the pleasure of inflicting pain
on himself. At the end of this path lies the "last man"-docile denizen
of a world that, to return to our starting point in Foucault's text, has
rendered useless "both the eagle and the sun."(n24)

It is scarcely news to remark that Foucault felt a profound affinity for
Nietzsche. In Folie et deraison, Foucault's first major work, Nietzsche
is repeatedly invoked as one figure in a pantheon of "tragic heroes"
that also includes de Sade, Nerval and Artaud--figures united by their
being classified as "mad"; but also authors, in the case of de Sade and
Artaud, notorious for their own transvaluations of cruelty. In the
conclusion to Foucault's unpublished these complementaire on Kant's
anthropology, completed at roughly the same time, Nietzsche looms even
larger: "The path of the question: What is Man? in the field of
philosophy, ends with the challenging and disarming response: the
Overman." "To awaken us from the confused sleep of dialectics and of
anthropology," writes Foucault in 1962, "we required the Nietzschean
figures of tragedy, of Dionysius, of the death of God, of the
philosopher's hammer, of the Overman approaching with steps of a dove,
of the Return." "Nietzsche," Foucault declares in another passage, from
Les mots et les choses in 1966, "marks the threshold beyond which
contemporary philosophy can begin again to think; and he will no doubt
continue for a long while to loom over its advances."(n25)

Nietzsche marks a similar threshold for Foucault's conception of
history. In appearance, "or rather, according to the mask it bears,"
historiography in the wake of Nietzsche may seem "neutral, devoid of
passions, and committed solely to truth." A closer look at such
historiography, however, reveals at play all the elements that Nietzsche
associated with the will to truth: "instinct, passion, the inquisitor's
devotion, cruel subtlety, and malice." In the work of such a historian,
"knowledge," concludes Foucault--and this comment climaxes perhaps his
most important extended essay on Nietzsche-"is not tied to the
constitution and affirmation of a free subject; rather, it creates a
progressive enslavement to its instinctive violence."(n26)

These are harsh words--harsher, in some ways, than anything we have seen
in Nietzsche. What can Foucault here mean by "progressive enslavement"
to "instinctive violence"? How could "knowledge," through the production
of a certain kind of "history," bring about such an enslavement? Is it
at all plausible to see in Surveiller et punir a veiled expression of
some such aim?

Let us start by looking more closely at the discussion of supplies--
death by torture--in this book's second chapter, entitled "L'eclat des
supplices." The word eclat evokes a paradox underlined throughout the
text: Torture, far from being a disgusting act of blind savagery, was,
as Foucault describes it, a carefully regulated practice with its own
splendors and glory. An art of "maintaining life in pain," a "theatre of
hell," "the poetry of Dante put into laws," supplice was, emphatically,
a festive pleasure: Crowds avidly Bocked to the scene of torture: "If
the crowd gathered round the scaffold, it was not simply to witness the
sufferings of a condemned man or to excite the anger of the executioner:
it was also to hear someone who had nothing left to lose curse the
judges, laws, power, religion. Death-by-torture allowed the condemned
man this momentary saturnalia, where nothing was prohibited or
punishable." Climaxing in the ceremony of dismemberment, supplice also,
adds Foucault, allowed the "the crime to explode [eclater] into its
truth."(n27)

But in what does this "truth" consist? That crime has "beauty and
greatness," Foucault insists: "The most intense point of lives, that
which concentrates their energy, is precisely where they collide with
power, struggle with it, attempt to use its forces or escape its traps."
Through "sacrificial and glorious murders," the criminal becomes a
"lightning-existence," harshly illuminating the "ambiguity of the
justifiable and the outlawed"; his fate, as it is recorded in popular
memory, reveals "the relation between power and the people, stripped
down to essentials: the order to kill, the prohibition against killing;
to make oneself kill, to be executed; voluntary sacrifice, ordained
punishment; memory, oblivion." Crime looms as a "privilege"-the
"exclusive privilege of those who are really great." Far from being a
symptom of pathology, murder in Foucault's eyes evinces an admirable
sort of power: "At bottom, the existence of crime happily manifests `an
irrepressibility of human nature;' it is necessary to see in it, not a
weakness or a disease, but rather an energy that is straightening itself
out, a `striking protestation of human individuality,' which no doubt
gives it, in the eyes of all, its strange power of fascination."(n28)

Whereas in modern society the fascination with crime becomes a kind of
pleasure largely enjoyed vicariously, in private, for example, through
the reading of literature--one thinks of authors like Jean Genet and
Norman Mailer, on one hand, and the proliferation of popular nonfiction
accounts of hideous crimes and spectacular murder trials, on the other--
the ancient regime's practice of surplice allows the fascination with
crime to exert "its strange power"-its "truth," if you will--directly,
in public. Facing both executioner and outlaw, the crowd can appreciate
"how men have been able to rise against power, traverse the law, and
expose themselves to death through death."(n29)

It is small wonder, then, that supplice in practice was an "uncertain
festival in which violence was instantaneously reversible." Beholding
the exquisitely calibrated excesses of torture and "`the cruel pleasure
taken in punishing'," the crowd at any moment might feel emboldened to
vent its own subversively "bestial virility" on the sovereign's official
representatives. "In these executions, which ought to have shown only
the terrifying power of the prince, there was a whole aspect of carnival,
in which the roles were inverted, the powerful mocked and criminals
transformed into heroes." Invigorated by the shared pleasure of
witnessing spectacular acts of cruelty, the crowd had its own latent
power as an "army of disorder" silently reinforced. It was this cruel
power that erupted on the great journees of the French Revolution, in a
"sort of constantly recommenced liturgy" of "combat and sacrifice."(n30)


The effect of penal reform Foucault therefore considers highly
ambiguous. Death by torture belonged to a specific "mechanism of power"-
a social mechanism where power, among other defining features, was
visibly "exalted and strengthened by its physical manifestations"; a
mechanism where the power of the sovereign, along with the latent
counterpower of the people, "was recharged in the ritual display of its
reality as `surpouvoir'"--literally, a "super-power," a power above
power, a transcendent form of transcending power.(n31)

By contrast, contemporary societies, which seek to institute "less
cruelty, less suffering, more gentleness, more respect, more `humanity,
'" aim at a "perfection of power" that would "render its actual exercise
useless." With the abolition of death by torture, "the people was robbed
of its old pride in its crimes." No longer was traversing the law
permitted to be a source of shared pleasure. The criminal was no longer
cast as an outlaw, a hero, a fitting adversary of sovereign power, but
rather as a "deviant," an anomaly, an aberration from the norms of a
universal humanity, and therefore a "case," to be analyzed,
rehabilitated, and, if possible, cured. Deprived of a shared public
forum for savoring displays of cruel omnipotence, subject to
disciplinary regimens that painlessly "dissociate power from the body,"
dissipating savage impulses by acting in depth "on the heart, the
thought, the will, inclinations," mankind finds its potential for
greatness--its ability to exercise its "super-power"-squandered. The
eagle--Nietzche's proud symbol of sovereign power--becomes useless, as
does the "dancing star" born of chaos: "Incipit tragoedia."(n32)

But the last man is not the last word, either in Foucault or in
Nietzsche. The "tragic heroes" which Foucault invokes in Folie et
deraison bear witness to another possibility, another perspective,
another way of thinking, "outside," above and beyond the limits set by
the "insidious leniencies" of modern humanism. Driven inward, cut off
from its old links to the punishing Christian conscience that
externalized itself in the great atrocities of the Inquisition, cruelty,
to borrow one of Foucault's phrases, turns from "jousts to
phantasms."(n33)

The reference to phantasms is worth pursuing a little further, for
phantasy, the dream, and imagination together play a central role in
Foucault's way of thinking about cruelty. "Phantasms," he contends,
"topologize the materiality of the body"-they map out the otherwise mute
animal instincts and drives. The capacity to phantasize gives the human
organism "disturbing and nocturnal powers." No matter what civilization
may dictate, the dreamworld remains beyond good and evil, outside of
discipline, alien to reason, akin to madness, a secret frenzy with all
the "ambiguity" of "chaos and apocalypse." Given any "healthy, normal
and law-abiding adult," it is always possible to bring out the chaos
within--the "nakedness of desire as the lawless law of the world"--by
asking a man, as Foucault puts it in Surveiller et punir, "how much of
the child he still has in him, what secret madness dwells within him,
what fundamental crime he has wished to commit." "Happiness and
unhappiness" may be "inscribed in the register of the imagination,"
Foucault writes in one of his first essays in 1954--but certainly "not
duty and virtue." Perhaps that is why Foucault, seventeen years later,
in a rare flight of prescriptive rhetoric, urged that phantasms "should"-
note the word should-"be freed from the restrictions we impose upon them,
freed from the dilemmas of truth and falsehood and of being and non-
being. . .; they must be allowed to conduct their dance"-even though the
dance of phantasy may produce results that are, in Foucault's words,
"simultaneously topological"-that is, mapped back onto the materiality
of the body as carnal desires-"and cruel."(n34)

There is more. Insofar as the dreamworld becomes the last, secret,
irrepressible redoubt of the primordial pleasure to be felt in
inflicting pain, the imagination itself, as Foucault suggests in Folie
et deraison, undergoes an epochal transformation: "Sadism is not a name
finally given to a practice as old as Eros; it is a massive cultural
fact which appeared precisely at the end of the eighteenth century' and
which constitutes one of the greatest conversions of Western
imagination: unreason transformed into delirium of the heart, madness of
desire, the insane dialogue of love and death in the limitless
presumption of appetite." After de Sade, continues Foucault in his next
major book, Les mots et les choses, "violence, life and death, desire,
and sexuality will extend, below the level of representation, an immense
expanse of shade, which we are now attempting to recover, as far as we
can, in our discourse, in our freedom, in our thought."(n35)

Outwardly, in modern society, bodies may--seem to be docile. But
inwardly, as Foucault explains in the first volume of his History of
Sexuality, bodies and souls boil and seethe, their secret dreams of a
mastery without mercy "isolated, intensified, incorporated," and finally
reconstituted in an explosive proliferation of perversions. Cruelty,
abolished as public spectacle, reappears as a shadowy sexual obsession
fueled by phantasies of butchery, death, and violent domination, finding
expression in a kind of delirious, murmuring, increasingly garrulous
language that discovers in the most--murderous impulses both an
unlimited source of erotic fascination and an "infinite void that opens
beneath the feet of the person it attracts."(n36)

There thus appears what Foucault regards as a distinctly modern
tradition of thought that exalts cruelty and death. Through monotonous
inventories of every conceivable atrocity, dramatically physical
evocations of violence and frenzied flights of philosophical phantasy,
artists and writers like de Sade, Artaud, Nietzsche, and Bataille not
only rescue from a silent oblivion our "primitive savagery" but labor to
transform it into a "total contestation" of Western culture: "Everything
that morality and religion, everything that a botched society has
stifled in man, springs back to life in the castle of murders."(n37)

Surveiller et punir is the hidden masterpiece of this tradition.
Masquerading as a work of normal, law-abiding history, "neutral, devoid
of passions and committed solely to truth," it lures the unwitting
reader into a castle of murders. Orienting ourselves in the shadowy
bowels of this dungeon of ideas, we "feel an infinite void opening
beneath our feet"-we experience what Foucault calls "the thought from
outside." Thinking through this thought--which leads us, literally,
"outside" of the text--we are brought face-to-face with the specter of
an "untamed ontology," as Foucault once put it. The dark secret of this
ontology is that the human organism in its savage, wild state takes
pleasure in inflicting pain--a "lawless law of the world," if ever there
was one. In Surveiller et punir has not the historian working in the
wake of Nietzsche cunningly deployed his "knowledge" in order to
authorize--just as Foucault promised--"a progressive enslavement" to
"instinctive violence?"(n38)

During the French student uprising in May 1968, graffiti appeared on the
walls of the Sorbonne. One slogan admonished: SOYONS GRUELS! [BE
CRUEL!](n39)

Perhaps the student who composed this graffiti had read Nietzsche and
Foucault, more likely not: Sentiments like this, popularized by born-
again enrages and the Situationists, were in the air. In its enigmatic
economy, this slogan, in any case, sharply poses the question that I
would now like briefly to explore. BE CRUEL! What can such an injunction
possible mean?

There is a temptation, worth resisting, to shrug the question off as
insane. Still, there is something to be said for a healthy dose of naive
common sense and skepticism when approaching the question of cruelty.

Reading Foucault at his most histrionic, raving on about the castle of
murders, I am reminded of a splendidly superheated, youthful essay by
Georges Bataille; "The Use Value of D. A. F. de Sade." After slashing
away at Andre Breton and the surrealists for expressing their admiration
for the Marquis de Sade without showing the slightest inclination to put
sadism into practice, Bataille declares that "it is time to choose
between the conduct of cowards afraid of their own joyful excesses," and
brave, truly serious sadists like Bataille himself, who calls for the
creation, after a "fiery and bloody Revolution," of "organizations that
have ecstasy and frenzy as their goal (the spectacular deaths of animals,
partial tortures, orgiastic dances, etc.)."(n40)

This is absurd. And twenty-five years later, in the great magnum opus of
his maturity, Erotism: Death and Sensuality, Bataille admitted as much:
"Such a strange doctrine" as de Sade's, Bataille writes in 1955, "could
obviously not be generally accepted, nor even generally propounded,
unless it were glossed over, deprived of significance, and reduced to a
trivial piece of pyrotechnics. Obviously, if it were taken seriously, no
society could accept it for a single instant."(n41)

So what could a society accept? What can the injunction to BE CRUEL!
mean?

Here are some possibilities suggested by my reading of Nietzsche and
Foucault:

BE CRUEL in your quest for the truth, ruthless in your honesty, savage
in your irreverence. This we may call the cruelty proper to Nietzsche's
philosopher, a cruelty certainly practiced by Foucault, one of whose
great and not-so-secret crimes was to butcher gleefully the concept of
"man," as this had been understood by modern humanists from Kant to
Sartre.

BE CRUEL in your resoluteness, welcome the harsh renunciations and
sometimes brutal costs of relentlessly pursuing any vaulting ideal, be
it wisdom, Godliness, or revolutionary purity. This we may call the
cruelty proper to the ascetic, an eagerness to suffer the pains entailed
by unswerving commitment to any burning faith or transcendent ambition,
a cruelty accepted by both Foucault and Nietzsche and recently
illuminated in fascinating detail by Foucault's friend Peter Brown in
The Body and Society, his study of sexual renunciation in early
Christianity.

BE CRUEL in the works of imagination that you create: spare us nothing
in painting the demons in the desert who tempt St. Anthony: a horseman
with a head made of thistle-flower, a mermaid riding on a rat, a
tonsured devil with a pig's snout; etch two beatifically radiant whores,
holding captive a dignified libertine with the body of a chicken and
jabbing the quill of a plucked feather up his ass; give us the death of
Damiens in unbearable detail, make us queasy, tell us exactly how red-
hot pincers singed his flesh, how his thighs were carved up and pulled
apart. This we may call the cruelty proper to the artist, a cruelty to
be found in both Nietzsche and Foucault, and also in the canvases of
Bosch, the Caprichos and Disparates of Goya, the theatre of Artaud, and
pornography of Bataille.(n42)

BE CRUEL in your erotic play: snap on handcuffs, neck-collars and chains,
lock pins and clips on nipples, administer meticulous floggings; or, be
a slave for a night and, with your master's help, mimic the ancient "art
of maintaining life in pain," tremble with "the most exquisite agonies,"
savor the disintegration and humiliation of the self in the jouissance
of exploded limits. This we may call the cruelty proper to de Sade and
Sacher-Masoch, a cruelty never directly mentioned in Nietzsche but
explicitly endorsed by Foucault, who praised sado-masochistic sexual
practices for "inventing new possibilities of pleasure" through the
"eroticization of power."(n43)

BE CRUEL in the license you give to institutions and political practices
that foster brutality and public displays of suffering: praise regimes
and popular insurrections that do not flinch from execution, torture,
terror, unleashing the lust for revenge. This is akin to the cruelty of
Machiavelli's prince; a kind of cruelty certainly not ruled out by
Nietzsche, and often commended by him, though his own political goals
remain elusive; a kind of cruelty also entertained sympathetically by
Foucault, whose conception of what he called "popular justice" he
explained in one astonishing interview by commending at length the
September Massacres that occurred during the French Revolution. In the
spirit of Foucault, let us not mince words about what, exactly, he was
endorsing: Inflamed by rumors of a counterrevolutionary plot, crowds of
Parisian militants in 1792 stormed the prisons, where they established
impromptu popular courts; those found guilty were forced to run a
gauntlet of clubs, pikes, axes, knives, sabers, even, in one instance, a
carpenter's saw; after the victims had been bludgeoned to death and
hacked to pieces, the lucky ones were thrown onto a bloody heap; the
others had their body parts--decapitated heads, mutilated genitalia--
mounted on pikes and triumphantly paraded through the streets of Paris;
before the orgy of killing was over, more than one thousand men and
women had died.(n44)

Let me propose a crude summary of what Nietzsche and Foucault together
seem to tee saying: Better externalized than internalized cruelty: It is
healthier, more "active," rather than weak and "reactive."(n45) Better
internalized cruelty than no cruelty at all: Both the ruthless
resoluteness of the ascetic and the brutal phantasies of the artist and
solitary onanist at least bear witness to the continuing chaos of
instinctive violence--the kind of chaos needed to give birth to "a
dancing star."

Foucault's political views in this regard are, of course, far more
complex, even contradictory, than I can indicate here. In the last years
of his life, he became increasingly interested in discriminating between
power, which he regarded as ineliminable and a source of potential
pleasure, and domination, which he criticized for reifying power in an
asymmetrical relationship; he also defended such classically liberal
devices as the assertion of human rights against autocratic and
totalitarian regimes. Apart from a few exceptional cases--including
revolutionary Iran, which Foucault admired--the resistance to domination,
he conceded, could no longer come from crowds weaned on public rituals
of "combat and sacrifice."(n46)

In countries like France and the United States, at the same time
Foucault looked elsewhere: implicitly, to madmen and delinquents; to the
readers of de Sade and Nietzsche and Artaud, one supposes; and, perhaps
above all, to the countless silent daydreamers who, in the aftermath of
1968, have felt free to act out their wildest phantasies, giving rise,
among other things, to "a visible explosion of heretical sexualities,"
where the painless coercions of modern society can be overturned
voluptuously--for example, in an exuberant carnival of make-believe
atrocities. Writing about such heretical sexualities, Foucault almost
sounds optimistic: "Never have there existed more centers of power;
never more manifest and prolix thoughtfulness; never more circular
contacts and linkages; never more hotbeds for kindling, in order to
disseminate still further, the strength of pleasures and the stubborn
waywardness of powers."(n47)

There is more to be said about these themes in both Nietzsche and
Foucault. The issue of cruelty in Foucault could be further illuminated
by systematically tracking his references to de Sade, to Artaud, and to
Freud's concept of thanatos.

There is more to be said as well about the enigmatic admonition to BE
CRUEL! It is worth noting, for example, how little we really know about
the differences and the similarities between philosophical, ascetic,
artistic, erotic, and political forms of cruelty: The interminibility of
the current debate over pornography and violence is only one symptom of
our ignorance in this area. Is externalizing cruelty, if only in art and
erotic play, better than internalizing it? Does it offer, as some
research suggests, a useful outlet for aggressive impulses, exhausting
energies that might otherwise break society apart? Or, on the contrary,
does making public cruel phantasies stimulate an appetite for them,
increasing the likelihood chat some people will act out such phantasies?
So far as I can see, no one really knows.(n48)

One thing at least does seem clear after reading Nietzsche and Foucault
on this subject. Whether cogent or not, the transvaluation of cruelty
proposed by both Nietzsche and Foucault is radically incompatible with
the avowed principles of most modern (and, for that matter' many
historical) societies-- though, of course, the fascist and Nazi cases
are striking, and not particularly reassuring, exceptions. Judith Shklar,
I think plausibly, suggests that liberalism has to rest on "putting
cruelty first," and regarding cruelty as the worst of vices. Furthermore,
it is probably no accident that most contemporary advocates of outlawing
the continuing practice of torture ultimately refer back to something
very much like the humanistic anthropology that Nietzsche and Foucault
both have so savagely criticized. "It may be possible to make torture
disappear by making it effectively illegal," remarks Edward Peters at
the close of his sober little history of Torture, "but it seems
necessary also to preserve the reason for making it illegal and
dangerous--to preserve a notion of human dignity that, although not
always meticulously observed, is generally assumed in the public
language, if not the unpublic actions, of most modern societies, and
assumed, moreover, in a generally universal and democratic sense."(n49)

This, of course, is not to say that Nietzsche and Foucault are mistaken:
It is simply to point out that their views on power and cruelty raise a
number of very complex theoretical and practical questions.

It would be inappropriate to conclude without noting two final, and
profoundly paradoxical, features of Foucault's lifework, taken as a
whole.

The first is that Foucault, insofar as he upholds a radically
historicist view of the body and soul, a view perhaps even more
radically historicist than that found in Nietzsche, must, if he is to be
consistent, concede that "the lawless law" of cruelty is, in fact, no
law at all. This Foucault himself explicitly stressed in the works he
published after Surveiller et punir. In La volonte' de savoir, he calls
the human organism "un dispositif historique"--a deployment of forces
that shifts over time. In a culture constructed differently, the
pleasures of pain, ceasing to haunt our phantasies, might well disappear
altogether.(n50)

What would it be like to be free of cruel impulses? That, I imagine, is
one of the questions Foucault had in mind as he worked on the second and
third volumes of his History of Sexuality. In these two final works--on
the classical arts of self-control--he was, as he wrote near the end of
his life, struggling "to learn to what extent the effort to think one's
own history can free thought from what it silently thinks, and so enable
it to think differently." In these searing words, which come as close as
any to revealing the genuinely tragic character of Foucault's own life,
we must, if we take seriously Nietzsche's views on internalization and
Foucault's final sentence in Surveiller et purnir, "hear the distant
roar of battle."(n51)

But that is a topic for another time.

                                 NOTES

(n1.) Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir [hereafter SP] (Paris, 1975),
9 (English translation: Discipline and Punish [hereafter DP], trans.
Alan Sheridan [New York, 1977], 3). In several passages here and
elsewhere, my own translation differs, in a few cases substantially,
from the published English versions of Foucault's works. My essay's
epigraph is from Michel Foucault, Mental Illness and Pyschology, trans.
Alan Sheridan (New York, 1976), 73.

(n2.) SP, 11 (DP, 5).

(n3.) Michel Foucault, Death and the Labyrinth: The World of Raymond
Roussel, trans. Charles Ruas (Berkeley, 1986),84, evoking the "cruelty
without claws" of Roussel's phantastic world--and "a darkness within the
thing itself which is quietly contained there." Cf. Michel Foucault
"Language to Infinity," in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice [hereafter
LCP], trans. Donald F. Bouchard, 60-61, on the language of de Sade.

(n4.) Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond
Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago, 1982), 143. This bock,
explicitly endorsed by Foucault himself as a sound guide, is arguably
the best single work in English on Foucault's thought. It is only fair
to warn the reader that the basic sense of the interpretation offered by
Dreyfus and Rabinow is in sharp contradiction to my own understanding.
This naturally raises a question about the plausibility of my own, quite
different reading of Foucault. Accounting for these radical
discrepancies, however, requires a much longer discussion of Foucault's
polymorphous texts and persona, which would help make intelligible the
various interpretations of his thought--and the uses to which it has
been put--by different audiences, not all of them academic.

(n5.) Edward Peters, in his exemplary short history of Torture (Oxford,
1985), 89, is the only commentator I know of to point this out. "L'eclat
des supplices" is the title of chapter 2 of SP; Alan Sheridan translates
it as "The Spectacle of the Scaffold"--which drains the French of its
paradoxical sting.

(n6.) SP, 34, 140, 143, (DP, 29-30, 138, 141).

(n7.) Judith Shklar, Ordinary Vices (Cambridge, 1984), 8. See also
Richard L. Gregory, ea., The Oxford Companion to the Mind (Oxford, 1987),
693. In Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge, 1989), Richard
Rorty discusses Foucault, Nietzsche, and also cruelty, citing Shklar as
one inspiration. The book, alas, is a profound disappointment, largely
because of Rorty's naive (and, in the context of his own philosopby,
arbitrary) conviction that, as be puts it, "J. S. Mill's suggestion that
governments devote themselves to optimizing the balance between leaving
people's private lives alone and preventing suffering seems to me pretty
much the last word" (p. 63).

(n8.) SP, 219 (DP, 217).

(n9.) Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra [hereafter Z],
prologue, nos. 1, 10. Here and throughout, I am using the translations
of Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale.

(n10.) Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, trans. David Farrell Krell (New York,
1984), vol.2, 45-48; cf. Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche (Paris, 1965), 43.
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science [hereafter GS], no. 343; Beyond
Good and Evil [hereafter BGE], no. 25; and Z, no. 5.

(n11.) SP, 34, 228 (DP, 29, 227). Michel Foucault, "Prison Talk," in
Power/Rnowledge [hereafter PK], ed. Colin Gordon (New York, 1980), 53.
Foucault's reference to "being pretentious" is, in fact, disingenuous:
Elsewhere (and on more than one occasion), he refers to SP as
"reactivating the project of a `genealogy of morals,' "without
mentioning Nietzsche by name. See, for example, Michel Foucault,
"Questions of Method," in Kenneth Baynes, James Bohman and Thomas
McCarthy, eds., After Philosophy: End or Transformation (Cambridge, MA.,
1987), 102. Cf. Foucault's own back-cover blurb to the original French
edition of SP: "Can one produce a genealogy of modern morals through a
political history of bodies?"

(n12.) Z, Ill, 2. Cf. Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, on the crux of the
second essay in the Genealogy of Morals: "Cruelty is here exposed for
the first time as one of the most ancient and basic substrata of culture
that simply cannot be imagined away."

(n13.) Friedrich Nietzsche to Erwin Rohde, 16 July 1872, in Selected
Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Christopher Middleton
(Chicago, 1969), 97.

(n14.) Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, An Too Human, no. 104.

(n15.0 Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak [hereafter D], no. 18. See also
Friedrich Nietzche, The Birth of Tragedy, no. 2, on the intertwining of
agony and ecstasy among Dionysian revellers; and the Genealogy of Morals
[hereafter GM], II, 12, on the will to power as the "aggressive,
expansive, form-giving," etc., "essence of life."

(n16.) D, no. 18; GM, II, 6; D, no. 30; GM, II,5.

(n17.) GM, II, 3, 15.

(n18.) GM, II, 16, 17.

(n19.) GM, II, 1; D, no. 18; GM, II, 2.

(n20.) D, no. 18; see also GM, III, II

(n21.) GM, II, no. 18.

(n22.) BGE, no.55, no. 230; GM, II, 24; cf. GM, III, 28.

(n23.) GM, II, 3, 14.

(n24.) GM, II, 11; Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, no. 866; BGE,
no. 201.

(n25.) Michel Foucault, Introduction d l'anthropologie de Rant, ler tome
(these complementaire; typescript available in the Bibliotheque de la
Sorbonne), 128. Foucault, "Preface to Transgression," in LCP, 38. Michel
Foucault, Les mots et les choses [hereafter MC] (Paris, 1966), 353
(English translation: The Order of Things [hereafter OT] [New York,
1970], 342).

(n26.) Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," in LCP, 163,162. For a
provocative discussion of Foucault's literary techniques as an historian,
see Michel de Certeau, Heterologies, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis,
1986), 185-192.

(n27.) SP, 38, 49, 228 (DP, 33-34, 46, 227).

(n28.) SP, 72, 295-296 (DP, 68-69, 289). Michel Foucault, "Les vies des
hommes infames," Les Cahiers du Chemin 29 (15 January 1977),17,14;
Michel Foucault, ea., Moi, Pierre Riviere, ayant egorge ma mere, ma
soeur et mon frere . . ." (hereafter MPR) (Paris, 1973), 271-272
(English translation: I, Pierre Riviere, Having Slaughtered My Mother,
My Sister and My Brother . . . [hereafter IPR], trans. Frank Jellinek
[New York, 1975], 206-207).

(n29.) MPR, 271 (IPR, 206). See also SP, 72 (DP, 69).

(n30.) SP, 66-67, 75, 64, 267 (DP, 63, 73, 61, 262). Michel Foucault,
"Un si cruel savior," Critique 182 (July 1962), 606; "Iran: The Spirit
of a World Without Spirit," in Politics, Philosophy, Culture, ed.
Lawrence D. Kritzman (New York, 1988), 214 (Foucault's reference to the
French Revolution comes in the context of explaining his fascination
with the Iranian revolution).

(n31.) SP, 60-61 (DP, 57).

(n32.) SP, 21-22, 202, 72,140, 307, (DP, 16, 201, 69, 138, 299); GS,
342.

(n33.) SP, 195 (DP, 193).

(n34.) Foucault, "Theatrum Philosophicum," ID LCP, 170. MC, 290 (OT, 278)
. Michel Foucault, Histoire de la folie d l'age classique [originally
published in 1961 as Folie et deraison--hereafter FD] (Paris 1972), 551
(partial English translation: Madness and Civilization [hereafter MA],
trans. Richard Howard [New York, 1965], 281). SP, 195 (DP, 193). Michel
Foucault, "The Thought from Outside" [hereafter "TO"], in
Foucault/Blanchot, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman and Brian Massumi (Cambridge,
MA., 1987), 17. Michel Foucault, "Dream, Imagination, and Existence,"
trans. Forrest Williams, in Review of Existential Psychology and
Psychiatry 19 no. I (198485), 69.

(n35.) FD, 381 (MA, 210); MC, 224 (OT, 211).

(n36.) Michel Foucault, La volonte de savoir [hereafter VS] (Pads, 1976),
65 (English translation: The History of Sexuality [hereafter HS], trans.
Robert Hurley [New York,1978],48; "TO," 28.

(n37.) FD, 551 (MA, 281).

(n38.) MC, 291 (OT, 278): The French phrase, une ontologie sauvage,
nicely evokes Heidegger, Levi-Strauss, and de Sade, all at once.

(n39.0 See Rene Vienet, Enrages et Situationnistes a la mouvement des
occupations (Paris, 1968), 99.1 owe this reference to Greil Marcus.

(n40.) Georges Bataille, "The Use Value of D. A. F. de Sade," in Visions
of Excess, bans Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis, MN, 1985), 102.

(n41.) Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality, trans. Mary
Dalwood (New York, 1962), 180.

(n42.) The description of the works by Bosch ("The Temptation of St.
Anthony") and Goya ("Todos Caeran [All Will Fall]," Caprichos, plate 19)
was inspired by Foucault's reference to both artists in FD, 550 (MA, 280-
281). Cf. the definition of cruelty in Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and
Its Double, trans. Mary Caroline Richards (New York, 1958), 101.
Foucault's friend Leo Bersani has interesting things to say about sado-
masochistic impulses in art in The Freudian Body Psychoanalysis and Art
(New York, 1986).

(n43.) SP, 38 (DP, 34). Michel Foucault, "An Interview: Sex, Power and
the Politics of Identity," Advocate, 7 August 1984, 27, 29. My
description of s/m play is in part, a paraphrase of that in Leo Bersani,
the Rectum a Grave?" in Douglas Crimp, ed., AIDS: Cultural Analysis,
Cultural Criticism (Cambridge, MA, 1988), 217.

(n44.) See PK 1-2. The description of the September Massacres is drawn
from Simon Schama, Citizens (New York, 1989), 630-639. Brian C. J.
Singer of York University in Toronto has written an interesting (and so
far unpublished) essay on the sociology of violence as it relates to the
Massacres, "Violence in the French Revolution: Forms of Ingestion/Forms
of Expulsion." For a sensible, if rather cautious, brief appraisal of
Nietzsche's elusive views on cruelty and politics, see the superb study
by Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Cambridge, MA, 1985)
, 215-217.

(n45.) These categories are elaborately worked out in Gilles Deleuze,
Nietzsche as Philosopher, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York, 1983), esp.
129-130.

(n46.) For Foucault's growing interest in liberalism, see the surprising
course of 1978-79 in the College de France, "Naissance de la
biopolitique," summarized in Michel Foucault, Resume des cours, 1970-
1982(Paris, 1989),109-119. Cf. Michel Foucault, "Face aux gouvernments,
les droits de l'homme," a statement issued in 1981, first published in
Liberation, 1 July 1984, 22. Perhaps the clearest statement of the
difference between power and domination appears in Michel Foucault, "The
Ethic of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom," in James Bernauer
and David Rasmussen, eds., The Final Foucault (Cambridge, 1988), 18-19.

(n47.) VS, 67 (HS, 49). See also SP, 195 (DP, 193): "In a system of
discipline, the child is more individualized than the adult, the patient
more than the healthy man, the madman and the delinquent more than the
normal and the non-delinquent."

(n48.) A particularly impressive effort to grapple with these issues is
Robert J. Stoller, Perversion. The Erotic Form of Hatred York, 1975).
Apart from Stoller's current work on s/m and Bersani's essay, cited in
nt. 43, perhaps the most interesting essay in English that I know of on
the theoretical issues raised by sado-masochistic sexual practices is by
Foucault's friend Gayle Rubin, "The Leather Menace: Comments on Politics
and S/M," in SAMOIS, eds., Coming to Power (Boston, 1981), 194-229.

(n49.) Peters, Torture, 186.

(n50.) VS, 139 (HS, 105). Cf. Michel Foucault, "Power and Sex" (a 1977
interview), in Foucault, Politics, Philosophy, Culture, ed. Lawrence D.
Kritzman (New York, 1988), 119-120.

(n51.) Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley (New
York, 1985), 9; SP, 315 (DP, 308).

~~~~~~~~
By JAMES MILLER, Brown University


James Miller is Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science at
Brown University Author of History and Human Existence: From Marx to
Merleau-Ponty (1979), Rousseau: Dreamer of Democracy (1984) and
"Democracy Is in the Streets:" From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago
(1987), he is currently working on a biographical study of Michel
Foucault.

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Source: Political Theory, Aug90, Vol. 18 Issue 3, p470, 21p.
Item Number: 9703116694