Magazine: Research in Phenomenology, September 1997
Section: REVIEW ARTICLES
GRAY MORNING
------------
Todd May. Between Genealogy and Epistemology: Psychology, Politics, and
Knowledge in the Thought of Michel Foucault. University Park, PA: Penn
State University Press, 1993. 136 pp., including index.
Todd May has done a remarkable thing; he has written and published three
books within three years: Between Genealogy and Epistemology--the
explicit focus of this essay--(in 1993), The Political Philosophy of
Poststructuralist Anarchism (in 1994), and The Moral Theory of
Poststructuralism (in 1995).(n1) The three books are connected, each
unfolding from an issue left unresolved in the preceding one. The first
book, Between Genealogy and Epistemology, takes up the issue of whether
Foucaultian genealogy falls into a self-refuting epistemological
relativism (cf. PPPA, 93 n. 17). After resolving this issue, it ends by
discussing the micropolitics implied by genealogy. In turn, the second
book takes up genealogical micropolitics in terms of the anarchism it
implies; micropolitics implies anarchism because Foucault and Deleuze
and Lyotard--who define poststructuralism for May--deny a universal
principle which particular cases would or should represent, what May
calls their "anti-representationalism." The second book ends with a
chapter entitled "Questions of Ethics" in which May engages in a
"defense" of the ethics that seems necessary to support postructuralist
anarchism. This final chapter, however, is only a sketch, and a "full
defense," as May says, "will have to await another book" (PPPA, 155).
This "other book" turns out to be his own The Moral Theory of Post-
structuralism. In this last book, in order to provide a "full defense,"
May appropriates contemporary analytic moral theory; his appropriation
of analytic philosophy is so massive that it leads him not only to
compromise Foucault's anti-representationalism (cf. PPPA, 132; MTP, 65,
89), but also to ask the following question:
At the outset, I said that a central goal of this book is the
construction and defense of a moral perspective that can found much of
the political philosophy associated with poststructuralist thought.
Readers who have followed me so far may be struck by how `unradical'
this moral perspective is. It relies on a scaffolding already erected by
much recent Anglo-American moral theory; and where it adds something new,
it does so by building a little new scaffolding on the old and working
from there. This may be fine as moral theory, but what can it have to do
with poststructuralism? (MTP, 135)
I have to admit that I found myself asking the same, exact question
throughout my reading of The Moral Theory of Poststructuralism.
Reflecting on this question led me to realize--and this is what I find
most disturbing about May's body of work--that as May formulates what he
wants to say with greater precision, in other words as his level of self-
awareness increases from one book to the next, the level of radicality
in what he wants to say decreases, decreases to the point where I see in
the third book nothing but an apology for tolerance (cf. PPPA, 151). How
is it possible for someone to start out writing a book sympathetic to
Foucault's thought and end up writing a book entitled The Moral Theory
of Poststructuralism? This progression seems especially strange when one
is aware that Foucault says in Les Mots et les choses that "For modern
thought, no morality is possible."(n2)
Such a decrease in radicality at the end is possible only if the
beginning already implies a sort of conservatism. I think we can locate
this implicit conservatism on the very first page of Between Genealogy
and Epistemology. Here, May defines the type of reflection in which
Foucault engages as one "obsessed with a single question . . .: what is
our present?" (BGE, 1). May warns us, however, that this question is not
as abstract as it may appear; he says, "For what Foucault is after in
holding this question to be the organizing principle of his life's work
is neither an ontology nor a metaphysics. It is not a matter of delving
into the Being of the present, but rather a more pedestrian and yet more
urgent question: What are things like for us today?" (BGE, 1). May bases
his interpretation of the question "What is our present?" on Foucault's
frequent discussions of Kant's essay, "What is Enlightenment?" One of
the places where Foucault talks about this essay is in his first 1983
lecture at the College de France.(n3) Here, however, in direct contrast
to May's interpretation, Foucault himself says that the question "What
is our present?" aims at "an ontology of the present, an ontology of
ourselves."(n4) According to Foucault himself then, the question is
precisely "a matter of the Being of the present." Therefore, I believe--
and this belief is the primary concern of my essay--that the
conservativism implicit in May's starting point, that is, his
unawareness of the ontological nature of Foucault's thinking, results in
the unradicality of his third book. Indeed, May's misunderstanding of
Foucault's thinking forces him to agree with certain thinkers influenced
by the Frankfurt School (Peter Dews and Nancy Fraser, for instance) who
have charged Foucault's genealogy with relativism. Only, however, if we
come to understand the nature of genealogical discourse--I would say its
"grayness"--will we be able to understand the radicality of Foucault's
thought and thereby avoid the charge of relativism.
1
Twice in Between Genealogy and Epistemology (BGE, 74 and 125), May
quotes the very first line from Foucault's famous essay, "Nietzsche,
Genealogy, History." Here Foucault says that "genealogy is gray,
meticulous, and patiently documentary."(n5) Like most commentators on
Foucault, May stresses genealogy's meticulousness, its patience in
reading documents, and ignores Foucault's characterization of genealogy
as gray.(n6) We cannot, however, ignore this characterization. Here,
Foucault is alluding to paragraph seven of The Genealogy of Morals,
where Nietzsche says that gray is a "color a hundred times more
important for a genealogist of morals than blue"; gray, for Nietzsche,
means "what is documented, what can actually be confirmed and has
actually existed, in short, the entire long hieroglyphic record, so hard
to decipher, of the moral past of mankind."(n7) For Nietzsche, blue
refers to those places on earth where sunlight shines brightly, while
gray refers to those times on earth when the sun does not shine so
brightly. The two colors, therefore, refer to the methods respectively
of Dr. Paul Ree, one of the "the English psychologists," and of
Nietzsche himself; in other words, they respectively refer to positivism
and to genealogy. This interpretation of blue and gray in Nietzsche is
perhaps obvious. But Foucault's appropriation of Nietzsche's color gray
is not. In order to begin to understand it, we must pay attention to the
occasion for which Foucault wrote "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History."
"Nietzsche, Genealogy, History" was originally published in 1971 in a
volume entitled Hommage a Jean Hyppolite.(n8) Foucault writes "Nietzsche,
Genealogy, History" for a volume devoted to the memory of a man famous
for his French translation and interpretation of Hegel's The
Phenomenology of Spirit because, as Foucault says in his inaugural
address to the College de France, L'Ordre du discours, Hyppolite
explored the ways by which one can escape Hegelianism.(n9) To escape
from Hegel's thought implies a transformation of the nature of
philosophy, and, in L'Ordre du discours, Foucault attributes such a
transformation to Hyppolite. According to Foucault, Hyppolite
transformed philosophy from a totality which thinks and grasps itself in
the movement of the concept to a task without finale taking place
against the background of an infinite horizon; this transformation means
that philosophy is supposed to march not towards an endpoint but back to
what precedes it, to what has not yet awakened to philosophy's
restlessness, back to "the singularity of history, the regional
rationalities of science, the depths of memory in consciousness," in
short, to what is not philosophy."(n10) Philosophy, therefore, is
supposed to be mobile all along its line of contact with non-philosophy,
thinking non-philosophy, repeating it, and revealing what sense this non-
philosophy has for us."(n11) But if thought moves all along its line of
contact with the unthought, philosophy exists neither in the pure
whiteness of abstraction--it is not a "white mythology"--nor in the
bright colors of concreteness. Instead, philosophy must see itself as a
discourse concerned with the middle; if one can characterize it with a
color, it is gray. And this is why Foucault concludes his 1969 eulogy
for Hyppolite by saying that "if theory is gray, then the golden tree of
life is green."(n12)
When Foucault concludes his eulogy in this way, he is in fact quoting
Hyppolite quoting Goethe's Faust. In his 1952 Logique et existence--a
book that Foucault says sets up all the problems on which we work(n13)--
Hyppolite brings together Hegel's diverse comments on language in order
to have something like a Hegelian philosophy of language.(n14) One of
these comments comes from the chapter on Reason in The Phenomenology of
Spirit (in particular, paragraphs 360-363). There Hegel uses the episode
of Gretchen and Faust in order to exemplify the type of consciousness
that "turns back" from the mediation of knowledge to the immediacy of
pleasure, the type of consciousness that despises "the understanding and
science, the supreme gifts of man."(n15) In other words, Gretchen and
Faust exemplify, for Hegel, the consciousness that knows that "all
theory is gray and green the golden tree of life." So, by rejecting
discourse, as Mephisto recommends, this type of consciousness thinks it
is rushing headfirst from dead theory into life itself, but, as Hegel
shows, it is rushing straight into mute experience, into the ineffable,
into indeterminateness. In short, this consciousness goes into the
ground: zu Grunde gehen. Instead of plunging into concrete particularity,
this consciousness ends up in abstract universality; instead of ending
up in life, it ends up in death. This reversal means therefore that, for
Hegel, discourse brings determinateness into that which is
indeterminate; it is that by which concrete particularity and abstract
universality are mixed; its mode of being is double; although gray,
discourse is life, even life's enhancement.
Not only can we trace the grayness of Foucault's genealogical discourse
back to Hyppolite's Logique et existence, we can also find the source of
his Nietzscheanism there. Hyppolite begins the second part of Logique et
existence by comparing the opening of Hegel's Science of Logic to the
opening of Nietzsche's Zarathustra; both announce that God is dead.(n16)
For Hyppolite, this means that immanence is complete.(n17) But immanence
being complete does not mean that we have reduced all being down to
factuality, particularity, empiricity, or, in a word, history. While,
like Nietzsche, Hegel overcomes Platonism, destroys the second,
transcendent, true world, he does not eliminate difference in favor of
identity, heterogeneity in favor of homogeneity.(n18) There are still
different modes of being; and that there still are such modes is why
Hyppolite calls Hegel's philosophy an onto-logic, a logos of the
differences of being. According to Hyppolite, however, Hegel is
conceiving this difference in modes of being, this "between," this
"living relation," in terms of mediation. For Foucault, as for Deleuze
and Derrida, mediation will not be radical enough to conceive this
relation; it can never account for the production of sense as an
event.(n19) Hegelian mediation does not take discontinuity in genesis
seriously; mediation always refers back to an origin or ** and ahead to
an end or **. In short, mediation does away with chance and rationalizes
everything. But, Hyppolite himself suggests this sort of criticism. At
the end of Logique et existence, Hyppolite asks the following question:
"What relation is there between absolute knowledge, the Logos, and [a]
philosophy of history?"(n20) Commenting on this question, Hyppolite says,
"This passage from history to absolute knowledge, the passage from the
temporal to the eternal, is the most obscure dialectical synthesis of
Hegelianism."(n21) This claim by Hyppolite is, I think, the origin of
Foucault's thinking. Foucault is concerned to conceive this "most
obscure dialectical synthesis" between absolute knowledge and history;
and this is why one can call Foucault's thought "a philosophy of the
relation."(n22)
2
If there is anything primary in Foucault's thought, it is the relation.
Does this characterization, however, imply that Foucault's thought falls
into a relativism? May believes that Foucault's thought is open to the
charge of relativism because, for him, Foucault's project essentially
includes the elimination of the transcendental level, an elimination
taking place in Foucault's so-called archeological writings such as Les
Mots et les choses (BGE, 57). May recognizes that Foucaultian archeology
reveals conditions that generate certain forms of knowledge; he even
recognizes that these conditions are not conditions of possibility but
conditions of reality (BGE, 27). But May concludes that "These
conditions are not transcendental but historical." He interprets this
claim to mean that what makes these conditions valid or true is
irrelevant for archeological research; May says, "The conditions that
determine whether a discourse can emerge have nothing to do with the
progress of truth, but with factors that, if epistemic, are so only in a
historically relative sense" (BGE, 28). Thus May sees in this
Foucaultian shift from conditions of possibility to conditions of
reality a shift making all knowledge relative (BGE, 30-31). This
relativism, however, I believe, is not to be found anywhere in Foucault.
Three comments are in order in relation to the charge of relativism.
First, Foucault (like Merleau-Ponty, for example) tries to separate what
he does from Kantian criticism, but such a separation does not imply
that Foucault has entirely abandoned the transcendental project. Instead,
what the shift from conditions of possibility to conditions of reality
signals is Foucault's anti-Platonism. Even Kant's method of arguing back
to conditions of possibility for experience which are not given in
experience looks to Foucault (but also to Merleau-Ponty) as a vestige of
the two world theory. Conditions of reality (like the notion of
virtuality in Deleuze(n23)) amounts to a new way of talking about
latency, potentiality, or the unthought, a way which does not posit what
is latent, potential, or unthought as a separate being. Second, while
anti-Platonism is a sort of reduction, even a sort of phenomenological
reduction, it is not a reduction to the positively given. That
Foucault's thinking is not reductionistic is why, as May says, the
transcendental keeps returning (BGE, 31). "The radical historicization
of principles that are normally considered to be atemporal foundations
of thought" (BGE, 31) does not imply that Foucault reduces all modes of
being down to the mode of empiricity or to the mode of history in a
banal sense. As for Deleuze, being in Foucault has only one sense--what
Foucault calls following Heidegger the Same(n24) or what he calls in
L'Ordre du discours "incorporeal materialism"(n25)--but despite being
univocal, there are still many modes of being. Evidence of this
plurality can be seen in the chapter entitled "Man and his Doubles,"
which concerns itself entirely with duplicity within the Same (MC,
326/315).(n26) The transcendental does not go away in Les Mots et les
choses, because "the transcendental question" has only been "displaced"
(MC, 334/323; cf. BGE, 32); indeed, the transcendental level returns,
for Foucault, as the originary (MC, 341-342/330-331).(n27)
My third comment concerning relativism is based on what Paul Veyne has
convincingly shown in his excellent 1978 essay "Foucault revolutionne
l'histoire." In this essay, Veyne points out immediately that the title,
Les Mots et les choses, is ironic (FRH, 347). It is ironic because, as
Foucault says in The Archeology of Knowledge, "on the basis of the kind
of analysis that I have undertaken, words are as deliberately absent as
things themselves; any description of a vocabulary is as lacking as any
recourse to the living plentitude of experience."(n28) This comment is
significant because it implies that, for Foucault, there are no things
(FRH, 363); but, rejecting things, we are not simply turning to the
analysis of the meaning of words. For Foucault, there are only practices
(FRH, 370). As is well-known, practices are relations, non-human power
relations, which at once are based on material conditions and form
objects. In order to speak of these objects as well as to speak of these
material conditions, we must abstract them from the relations
themselves; neither the material conditions nor the objects exist
independently of the relations. More importantly, although they seem to
be natural (or ideal), objects such as madness or a certain religion are
not continuous across time. For Foucault, there are no natural objects.
Veyne says, "Such is the meaning of the negation of natural objects:
there is no evolution or modification, across time, of one selfsame
object which would always shoot up at the same place. [The image of
history for Foucault] is a kaleidoscope, not a nursery" (FRH, 374). That
there are no natural objects is why Deleuze can say in his book on
Foucault that the historical conditions revealed by archeology (or for
that matter, genealogy) "do not vary historically, but they do vary with
history."(n29) History does not modify conditions which are permanent
and universal; rather as the practices change so do the conditions and
the objects produced so that the conditions and objects are only as
general as the practices. If this is a correct characterization of
Foucault's thought, then nothing could be more un-Foucaultian than the
charge of relativism. What relativism presupposes is an object existing
separate from my or our temporal experience of it--it presupposes a
natural or ideal object--so that all knowledge that I or we have of it
is relative to that limited experience. Relativism accepts the epistemic
measure of another world; it accepts the belief that I should be able to
transcend finite experience and acquire a view from nowhere, acquire
what Merleau-Ponty would call "une pensee de survol."(n30) Yet, this
type of thinking is precisely what Foucault denies.
Moreover, the negation of natural objects does not do away with the
question of truth understood as adequation. Once the relations of
practice have constructed the object, then other discursive practices
which refer to this object can be measured as adequate to it. For
instance, there are practices that make use of material conditions in
order to create the object to which the common name "soul" refers;
similarly there are practices that make use of material conditions in
order to create the object to which the common name "man" refers. Then
sentences made in the discipline of psychology can be measured against
the object designated by the common name "soul"; similarly, sentences
made in the discipline of anthropology can be measured against the
object designated by the common name "man." That the question of truth
as adequation is merely displaced and not eliminated as such is why Paul
Veyne can say: "[Foucault's] negation of the natural object does not
lead to skepticism" (FRH, 379; cf. BGE, 59).
3
We have just tried to show then that, for Foucault, knowledge is not
relative to practices but the possibility of knowledge, that is, the
object to which a set of epistemological sentences refers, is based in
relations known as practices or power. The plane of power precedes the
distinction of truth and falseness, objective and subjective. In
contrast, May believes that Foucault's thinking is a relativism and
leads to skepticism. For May, knowledge in Foucault is relative to
practices, even human practices, which means that epistemological claims
are not true, that is, not objective. Moreover, for May, if all
knowledge is relative to practices, then the scope of this claim must
include Foucault's own genealogical sentences, including the one that
claims that all knowledge is relative to practices. May calls this
dilemma a self-refuting epistemological relativism (cf. BGE, 31). If
epistemic claims are not objective, if they are merely the result of a
sort of social construction, then, according to May, there is apparently
nothing to justify our believing them; in fact, there is nothing to
justify our believing Foucault's own genealogical sentences. It seems to
me that there are two ways to respond to the dilemma that May raises.
On the one hand, we can say that Foucault himself has enacted a powerful
work of interpretation of the science of history. He has transformed
certain material conditions, certain already existing objects and
certain already existing sentences. In short, Foucault has reinscribed
the common name "history"; he has constructed a new object: historical a
priori or practices or power. Therefore, once this new object has been
constructed we can measure the adequacy of Foucault's other discursive
practices in regard to the new object. For instance, we can measure his
history of sexuality against the fact that such a history must not posit
any continuous objects. In this case we can actually claim that
Foucault's discursive practices are adequate or inadequate; we can claim
that they are true or false. Foucault's genealogy does not fall prey to
a self-refuting epistemological relativism, because the very question of
truth as adequation has only been displaced not eliminated. But there is
another way to deal with what May calls self-refuting epistemological
relativism. On the other hand, we can accept May's argumentation that
Foucault's discursive practices are false or that, at least, we cannot
determine their truth or falseness. We can then seek another way of
justifying our belief in them. This second solution--the search for
justification--is the one that May himself chooses.
In order to arrive at a way of justifying Foucault's genealogical claims,
May starts with an analysis of Foucault's 1971 essay, "Nietzsche,
Genealogy, History." May draws two lessons from his reading of this
essay. On the one hand, due to Foucault's criticism of the notion of
origin, which is based on his interpretation of Nietzsche's thought,
"genealogy," as May says, "traces the play of dispersed forces as they
form shifting and dissolving unities which have no purpose or intention
informing them. And knowledge, too, rather than lying behind this
movement, is part of it" (BGE, 75). The relativistic conclusion is
already on the horizon, but then to drive the point home, May says, and
this is the second lesson, "For the genealogist, the epistemological
lesson of history is `its affirmation of knowledge as perspective.'
There is no outside from which to view history, since all history is a
struggle" (BGE, 76). For May, what perspectivism in Foucault as well as
in Nietzsche implies is that "the blade of history [carves] the moniker
of relativity into all things absolute" (BGE, 77). May rejects
Nietzschean perspectivism, because perspectivism looks to be a claim
about the world and therefore not about the way we have access to the
world; it looks to be metaphysics and not epistemology. Perspectivism,
therefore, for May, confuses epistemic and non-epistemic accounts of
knowledge (BGE, 81). May argues that one must account for knowledge
strictly epistemically. To give such an account of knowledge means that
one remains within the domain of linguistic claims and one does not make
any metaphysical claims. One simply asks for the justification of an
epistemic claim and not for its ultimate truth. To provide for the
justification of a claim, according to May--and here he relies on recent
developments in analytic epistemology--one must view knowledge as a
network of claims that make up what May calls one's "inherited
background" (BGE, 96). Then one supports one claim by appealing to other
claims in the network that are still held constant; or one criticizes
one claim on the basis of other claims that, again, are still held
constant (BGE, 100101). The claims held constant, according to May, "are
matters of social acceptance rather than transcendental guarantees" (BGE,
101), and social acceptance is enough to justify a genealogical
critique. Social acceptance of certain claims is enough to justify the
genealogical critique of certain other claims found, for example, in
psychological discourse. Such a view of epistemic justification, a view
that makes no appeal to anything transcendental (or more precisely,
anything transcendent), allows May to characterize genealogy as a
"radical empirics" (BGE, 100).
Foucaultian genealogy, however, is not an empirics--at least not in the
positivistic sense of empiricism(n31)--and May's attempt to revise it in
terms of epistemic justification is not radical. First, Foucault's
genealogy is not an empirics because, as May correctly realizes, the
transcendental always returns. But one must be careful to distinguish
the transcendental from the transcendent. The transcendent is a separate
type of being. The transcendental as well as the empirical (or the
mundane) are modes of the univocal being. To claim that Foucault forces
absolutism, as May says, "to lead a more shadowy existence" (BGE, 32) is
hardly a criticism. Instead such a claim precisely captures what defines
Foucault's thought. Thus, in "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," Foucault
says, "emergence designates a place of confrontation but not as a closed
field offering the spectacle of a struggle among equals. Rather, as
Nietzsche demonstrates in his analysis of good and evil, it is a `non-
place,' a pure distance, which indicates that the adversaries do not
belong to a common space. Consequently, no one is responsible for an
emergence; no one can glory in it, since it always occurs in the
interstice" (NGH, 156/150; cf. MC, 12/xxi). If there is an absolute in
Foucault, it is this "non-place," this "between";(n32) or, to quote
another philosopher contemporaneous with Foucault: "the absolute is
passage."(n33) Second, May's attempt to revise Foucaultian genealogy in
terms of epistemic justification is not radical, because May provides no
reflection on the notion of justification itself. The term
"justification" must be conceived in its connection to the word
"justice." The traditional notion of justice is defined by balance,
equality, and equilibrium. Epistemic justification therefore implies
that one criticizes one claim on the basis of others held constant,
because there is an imbalance at this very moment in the discourse under
consideration. One claim or one type of claim has been given too much
weight at the expense of others. So, to criticize a discourse for May
amounts to a rectification of the imbalance. The rectification then
implies that a teleology of equilibrium directs May's entire epistemic
revision of Foucault. Evidence of this teleology can be seen in his
second book, The Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism,
when May attaches ceteris parlous clauses (the caveat "all. things being
equal") to his so-called poststructuralist moral principles (PPPA, 152)
.(n34) Even more explicit evidence can be found in his third book, The
Moral Theory of Poststructuralism, where May argues for equilibrium in
reflecting on conflicts between rights and duties (MTP, 47, 87, 104).
But, if anything, as Deleuze has shown in his 1962 study of
Nietzsche(n35)--one can't help wondering, by the way, why in Between
Genealogy and Epistemology May relies on Nehemas and not on Deleuze in
order to understand Foucault's appropriation of Nietzsche--as Deleuze
has shown, Nietzsche's thought criticizes any terminal or equilibrium
state; such a criticism is the very purpose of the doctrine of the
eternal recurrence.(n36) Failing to go beyond the fifth paragraph in
"Nietzsche, Genealogy, History"--in Between Genealogy and Epistemology,
May cites no passage in "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History" after paragraph
five--May does not see that Foucault links Nietzschean perspectivism
with injustice. Foucault says at the end of the fifth paragraph that
"Nietzsche's version of historical sense is explicit in its perspective
and acknowledges its system of injustice" (NGH, 163/157). Moreover, in
paragraph seven, Foucault says, "The historical analysis of this
rancorous will to knowledge reveals that it rests upon injustice (that
there is no right, not even in the act of knowing, to truth or a
foundation for truth)" (NGH, 170/171). Thus, Foucaultian genealogy is
not "modest," as May claims it is (BGE, 23); it is not "restrained," as
May claims it is (BGE, 100); most importantly, it is not "pedestrian,"
again, as May claims it is (BGE, 1). If anything, Foucaultian genealogy
is immodest, unrestrained, and breaks through the socially acceptable
opinions, the inherited background. That its purpose is to open the
future, reveal virtualities left hidden, and therefore provide new ways
of thinking is why Deleuze (appropriating the title of Foucault's essay
on Blanchot) characterizes Foucault's thinking as "the thought of the
outside"; it is a thought directed to the outside of what has been
thought. Genealogy's only justification, therefore--and this is
precisely its injustice--is that it intensifies life.(n37)
Finally, what most makes May's revision of Foucaultian genealogy
conservative is that he fails to take into account the destructive use
that Foucault ascribes to it in paragraph seven. This destructive use is
analogous to the third use of history found in Nietzsche's The Uses and
Disadvantages of History for Life. For Foucault, the will to knowledge
that animates the historian's consciousness is a will to cruelty and
malice; it encourages the dangers of research and delights in disturbing
discoveries. Such a will creates, as Foucault says, "a progressive
enslavement to its instinctive violence" (NGH, 171/163). The will to
knowledge, intensified to the nth power, calls for the sacrifice of the
subject of knowledge by means of self-experimentation. The sacrifice of
the subject of knowledge, however, returns us to Goethe's Gretchen and
Faust. The "turning back" from discourse to "the golden tree of life,"
as Gretchen and Faust exemplify for Hegel, brings about the destruction
of determination or, in other words, the destruction of individuation.
At the very end of "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," Foucault stresses
that the loss of individuation is necessary, in Hegel, to the
development of absolute knowledge; he then quotes Nietzsche's Beyond
Good and Evil (paragraph 39): "to perish through absolute knowledge may
well form a part of the basis of being." "To perish" translates
Foucault's French "perir," but "perir" translates Nietzsche's German,
"zu Grunde gehen." Literally, like Gretchen and Faust, man, animated by
the unjust will to knowledge, must go into the ground and die; he must
lose himself in the anonymity of life so that life may be intensified
once again. That man must be destroyed is why Deleuze also characterizes
Foucault's thinking--and this is the most accurate characterization of
all--as a "profound Nietzscheanism."(n38) Only when man has sacrificed
himself will there be another beginning, dawn, "gray morning. The first
yawn of reason."(n39)
NOTES
(n1.) Todd May, Between Genealogy and Epistemology: Psychology, Politics,
and Knowledge in the Thought of Michel Foucault (University Park: Penn
State University Press, 1993), hereafter BGE; Todd May, The Political
Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism (University Park: Penn State
University Press, 1994), hereafter PPPA; Todd May, The Moral Theory of
Poststructuralism (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1995),
hereafter MTP. Other texts by Todd May that I have consulted are:
"Difference and Unity in Gilles Deleuze," in Gilles Deleuze and the
Theater of Philosophy, eds., Constantin V. Boundas and Dorothea Olkowski
(New York: Routledge, 1994), 33-50; "Kant the Liberal, Kant the
Anarchist: Rawls and Lyotard on Kantian Justice," in The Southern
Journal of Philosophy 28, no. 4: (1990) 525-38.
(n2.) Michel Foucault, Les Mots et les choses (Paris: Gallimard, 1966),
337; Translation edited by R. D. Laing under the title The Order of
Things (New York: Random House, 1970), 328. Hereafter as MC with
reference first to the original French edition, then to the English
translation.
(n3.) Michel Foucault, "The Art of Telling the Truth," in Politics,
Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings 1977-1984, ed.
Lawrence D. Kritzman (New York: Routledge, 1988), 86-95.
(n4.) Foucault, "The Art of Telling the Truth," in Politics, Philosophy,
Culture, 95.
(n5.) Michel Foucault, "Nietzsche, la genealogie, l'histoire," in
Hommage a Jean Hyppolite (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1971)
; Translated by Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon under the title
"Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977); hereafter as NGH with
reference first to the original French edition, then to the English
translation.
(n6.) Commentators such as May have often claimed that there is a break
in Foucault from the archeological to the genealogical period. But by
examining Foucault's use of the word "gray" one can question whether
this break ever took place. In "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," we have
the famous opening line, "La genealogie est grise; elle est meticuleuse
et patiemment documentaire" (NGH, 145/139); one should compare this
comment to what Foucault says in "Les suivantes" in Les Mots et les
choses, "C'est peut-etre par l'intermediaire de ce langage gris, anonyme
, toujour meticuleux et repetif parce que trop large, que la peinture,
petit a petit, allumera ses clartes" (MC, 25/10).
(n7.) Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, in Basic Writings
of Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House,
1968), 457.
(n8.) Michel Foucault (editor), Hommage a Jean Hyppolite (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 1971).
(n9.) Michel Foucault, L'Ordre du discours (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), 75;
Translated by A. M. Sheridan Smith under the title "The Discourse on
Language," in The Archeology of Knowledge (New York: Random House, 1972),
235. Anti-Hegelianism, of course, defines French philosophy as it
emerges from the shadows of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty in the Sixties; in
short, it defines the project of structuralism and poststructuralism;
cf. Vincent Descombes, Modern French Philosophy, trans. L. Scott-Fox and
J. M. Harding (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980).
(n10.) Foucault, L'Ordre du discours, 78/236.
(n11.) Foucault, L'Ordre du discours, 78/236.
(n12.) Michel Foucault, Jean Hyppolite (1907-1968), --in Revue de
metaphysique et de morale 2, 1969: 136.
(n13.) Foucault, "Jean Hyppolite (1907-1968)": 136.
(n14.) Cf. Jacques Derrida, "Le Puits et la pyramide," in Marges de la
philosophic (Paris: Minuit, 1972), 81; Translated by Alan Bass under the
title "The Pit and the Pyramid," in Margins of Philosophy (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1982), 71.
(n15.) Hyppolite, Logique et existence, 20; Hyppolite is quoting
Goethe's Faust, lines 203839, 1850-51.
(n16.) Hyppolite, Logique et existence, 70.
(n17.) Hyppolite, Logique et existence, 230.
(n18.) Hyppolite, Logique et existence, 78.
(n19.) Foucault, L'Ordre du discours, 50-51/228; see also "Theatrum
Philosophicum," in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, 175-76.
(n20.) Hyppolite, Logique et existence, 243.
(n21.) Hyppolite, Logique et existence, 246.
(n22.) Paul Veyne, "Foucault revolutionne l'histoire," in Comment on
ecrit l'histoire, augmentee (Paris: Seuil, 1978), 380; hereafter FRH;
all translations are my own.
(n23.) Gilles Deleuze, Difference et repetition (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 1968), 269-76; Translated by Paul Patton under
the title Difference and Repetition (New York: Columbia University Press,
1994), 208-14.
(n24.) Martin Heidegger, Identity and Difference, trans. Joan Stambaugh
(New York: Harper and Row, 1969), 47; cf. also Deleuze, Difference et
repetition, 52/35.
(n25.) Foucault, L'Ordre du discours, 60/231.
(n26.) Cf. Gilles Deleuze, Foucault (Paris: Minuit, 1986), 105;
Translated by Sean Hand under the title Foucault (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 97-98.
(n27.) The word "l'originaire" is mistranslated in the English as "the
original."
(n28.) Michel Foucault, L'archeologie du savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1969),
66; Translated by A. M. Sheridan Smith under the title The Archeology of
Knowledge (New York: Random House, 1972), 48.
(n29.) Deleuze, Foucault, 122/114.
(n30.) Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans.
Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 13.
(n31.) Any utilization of the word "empiricism" in Foucault's thought
must take account, of its redefinition in Sixties French thought, a
redefinition which begins with Deleuze's Empirisme et subjectivite
(Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1953); Translated by
Constantin V. Boundas under the title Empiricism and Subjectivity (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1991). See also my "The End of
Phenomenology: Expressionism in Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty," forthcoming
in Man and World.
(n32.) Deleuze, Foucault, 91/85.
(n33.) Edmund Husserl, L'ongine de la geometric, traduction et
introduction par Jacques Derrida (Paris: Presses Universitaires de
France, 1974 [1962]), 165; Translated by John P. Leavey under the title
Edmund Husserl's Origin of Geometry: An Introduction (Lincoln, NE:
University of Nebraska Press, 1989 [1978]), 149.
(n34.) May's teleology of equilibrium makes it particularly difficult to
understand what the word "anarchy" means for him. Such a teleology
implies that an (Greek text cannot be converted in ASCII text) a
governor--the principle of equilibrium--commands the distribution of
beings. But anarchy, like pluralism, is defined by self-distribution. If
we can characterize Foucault's thought as genuinely anarchical, then we
must even say that Foucault's archeology is an-archeological. On
distribution, pluralism, and anarchy, see Deleuze, Difference et
repetition, 53-55/36-37.
(n35.) Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche et la philosophic (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 1962); Translated by Hugh Tomlinson under the
title Nietzsche and Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press,
1983).
(n36.) Deleuze, Nietzsche et la philosophic, 53/47.
(n37.) Cf. Gilles Deleuze, What is Philosophy?,?trans. Hugh Tomlinson
and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 74.
(n38.) Deleuze, Foucault, 78/71.
(n39.) Friedrich Nietzsche, "How the True World Finally Became a Fable,"
in The Twilight of the Idols, in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. Walter
Kaufmann (New York: Viking, 1954), 485.
~~~~~~~~
By Leonard Lawlor, University of Memphis
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Source: Research in Phenomenology, 1997, Vol. 27, p234, 14p.
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