Magazine: Political Theory, May, 1991

       THE PHILOSOPHER'S PRISM: FOUCAULT, FEMINISM, AND CRITIQUE
       ---------------------------------------------------------

SOMETHING CHANGES WHEN THE WORK OF A LIFETIME is viewed posthumously.
There is an almost desperate attempt to grasp the oeuvre, and the mortal
person of the author becomes the measure of the whole to which hindsight
lends a special unity. It is ironic, however, when that honor is
bestowed on one whose every expression questioned the unity and
coherence of modern subjectivity, including that of his own
authorship.[1] So it may seem unjust that in death, Michel Foucault, or
who he was as a politically motivated individual, has become the measure
of what he wrote. Understandably one wants to find what made him tick,
to dissect the corpus and find the magic and make it work for the many
worthy causes that he might have championed. We might wish to have
Foucault the ghostly critic take us back to the "vantage point" and the
"method" that made his analysis compelling--but this, of course, is
precisely the sort of thing that he was unwilling to do.

Indeed, it was that tremendous uneasiness about going back and assuming
the transcendent perspective of modern reason that characterized
Foucault's approach to history. Like the spirit guide who brings us near
but will not let us touch the world of the dead, Foucault would only
address the past in the most elliptical ways. A curious refusal to lead,
to judge, or to tell the "truth" about that history made him unlike
other critics. Always consistent with his own understanding of the
pervasiveness of power, he would deny that he had escaped the effects of
power or that the critical detachment of authorship should give him any
special claim on its "truth." A profound humility before the complex
enclosures of the historical past and the variety of human existence
moves on every page of his writings, and it is from this that we may
learn the most from him.

At first, that humility must seem frustrating to the critic who has
struggled with oppression and won some special insight. It might seem
disturbingly neutral, if not objective, and it is hard to see how it
could be useful to criticism. The feminist might regard it as an affront
or a dismissal of precisely what she has gained in resisting subjugation,
and she would be right, at least, that it does not duplicate her
particular awareness of the effects of power. But if Foucault is not a
guide or simple ally, there may be other ways in which he complements
her enterprise. If we are tempted to ask whether Foucault was a feminist,
or whether his work shares the same ends, we may miss the more subtle
instruction that his analysis affords.

I want to suggest that there is a certain congruence between Foucault's
analysis of power and that of many feminists: that the two often
articulate different aspects of the same critical space. At least, the
feminist critique of the hierarchical divisions of Western reason finds
a complement in Foucault's refusal to engage that reason--a seemingly
passive posture that becomes a most powerful analytical device. I want
to take that humility seriously and to regard Foucault's work not as a
completed system that issues forth in guidelines for our own political
practice but as a series of questions and a brace of cautions that may
be useful to a feminist analysis of power and to critical concerns about
liberalism and modernity.

Among others, Susan Hekman and Eloise Buker have pointed out the
similarities between Foucault's unwillingness to adopt the categories of
Enlightenment thinking and feminist challenges to the same divisive
knowledge.[2] Feminist analysis tends to regard the Western antinomies
of subject and object, mind and body, reason and emotion, culture and
nature, sanity and hysteria, and of public and private all in their
gendered meaning and suspicious correspondence with the hierarchical
division of Male and Female. That these are instrumentalities of power
or that there is a "male ethic" running through them is axiomatic for
Foucault as well,[3] but he does not allow himself the distance to
comment and condemn, and he is unwilling to turn the tables by giving
favor to the subordinate pole. To do so, for him, would be to indulge
power from another direction, to attempt to raise what power has stunted
as a principle of opposition to power. Instead, he represents those
couplings as such, without taking sides. Here, what seems like
positivist objectivity amounts to a refusal to indulge these divisions
of knowledge from any angle, and it is this intransigence that gives
Foucault his critical edge. If not objectivity, an odd neutrality allows
the work to act as a refracting stone on the very same emanations of
knowledge and power, an obstinate prism that reveals something new and
perishable about them.

Of course, that resistance to the categories of Enlightenment reason
poses an extraordinary dilemma for all postmodern criticism. Not only
were such "foundationalist" categories as "truth," "essence," "human
nature," "rationality," or "consciousness" the instruments of modern
power, they have also been the tools of criticism that hold the promise
of "liberation."[4] Hence there is reason to suspect that the liberation
from modernity that is grounded in the assumptions of modernity may
repeat the same mistakes. Says Foucault,

I've always been a little distrustful of the general theme of liberation,
to the extent, that, if one does not treat it with a certain number of
safeguards and within certain limits, there is a danger that it will
refer back to the idea that there does exist a nature or human
foundation which as a result of a certain number of historical, social,
or economic processes, found itself concealed, alienated or imprisoned
in and by some repressive mechanism. In that hypothesis it would suffice
to unloosen these repressive locks so that man can be reconciled with
himself.[5]

There is a warning here that the totalizing vision which accepts such a
"human foundation" is always in danger of leading back to a totalizing
practice--and even the critical dichotomy of "appearance and reality"
falls on a similar fate.[6] So it is, for example, that even the
rigorous awareness of the antinomies of Western thought offered by
Lukacs did not prevent him from deploying his own divisive scheme of
true and false consciousness, which in turn may have led to
revolutionary excess and elitism.[7] Yet Foucault has avoided that
legacy of Enlightenment even as it has been extended through Marx, and
he does not permit himself to ascend the privileged perch of reason or
true consciousness like the modern critic. He cannot step "outside" of
power, because there is no outside of power, and no one, oppressed or
otherwise, can have such unencumbered access to its truth.

So it is in making the suggestion that there is no outside of power that
Foucault poses his most poignant warning to critical analysis. If
criticism, that of feminism included, sets out to right the scales of
power merely by taking sides in a world of those who "have" power and
those who do not, of dominators and dominated, it may preserve the old
dichotomies of power in spite of itself. Even a metaphysics of gender
runs that risk, not because it has focused on gender but because it is a
metapysics of that Western variety that mirrors its own origins in
domination. For feminism, then, as Judith Butler's work suggests,
Foucault sharpens the warning that the analysis which privileges "gender,
" or woman as "other," may still speak from within the paradigm that
made them both what they are; it may confirm that "diadic gender system"
by making a metaphysical standard out of it.[8] At the least, this would
seem to be a worthy, almost Marx-like caution for the critic who might
stray from the historical context or make utopian leaps beyond it.

But it is here, too, that Foucault's resistance--even to the modestly
transcendent categories of a critical humanism--seems to leave us in an
utterly hopeless situation. He seems to foreclose every appeal beyond
the radically distinct contexts that he displays. If there is no
"outside" of power, no privileged perspective of the oppressed that
reveals the whole truth, and not even a gendered "core of identity"
outside of what power has defined it to be, then it seems that we can
only capitulate to power--unless it is possible that from within the
context that conceals no hidden message and admits of no one truth, a
proliferation of different voices may be heard, each questioning power
in different ways.[9]

It is possible, in other words, that by denying that his analysis can
produce a unitary vision of truth outside of power and suggesting that
power is itself a " 'regime' of truth," he creates an opening for a
different sort of politics.[10] If arriving at "truth" is not possible,
and the contentious construction of truth is what defines politics in
the first place, then challenging " 'truth games'"[11] from a variety of
angles within power is a worthy political enterprise. Now, he says, "the
political question is not error, illusion, alienated consciousness or
ideology; it is truth itself."[12] This is not politics as a means to
truth but as the activity of contesting truths; it is a struggle with
and within power rather than a struggle for power.

To question the political nature of truth is something that feminists
and other critics have done for a long time. But with Foucault, the
questioning itself is a political art and the refractory historical
method emerges as political strategy. As John Rajchman and others have
suggested, his is largely a labor of questions and not the sort of
inquiry that yields answers.[13] The analysis of the "surfaces" of power,
like his interrogation of the ways in which sexuality has been
"problematized," always invites a further questioning and renewed
interrogations of history. It does not play on timely sympathies, it
does not wring timeless lessons out of history, and it does not settle
things once and for all. The endless inquiry has no need of final
answers to enduring moral questions; it has the humility to entertain
all questions and questioners and to be satisfied with the open-ended
debate. One might wonder whether the way of the question might
ultimately offer a more useful opening for those who are relatively
powerless than that of the answer.

With this in mind, we may make sense of the truly disturbing fact that
in Foucault's last volume on the history of sexuality, there appears to
be no "woman"--none, anyway, who speaks against the classical male ethic
of the "care of the self" or who seems to comment on the Christian
tradition of marriage.[14] Here, there does seem to be a danger of
losing "her" comment on the impenetrable power in which she is
supposedly enmeshed. Yet perhaps she really is there in Foucault's work
posing a sort of question. In refusing to assert his own perspective he
is unwilling to posit hers, and yet she stands in the same relation to
the texts of his history of Sexuality as the mad individual, the deviant,
the prisoner, or "mankind" in general stands in relation to the texts of
his earlier work. Perhaps she is speaking by virtue of her absence, and
by not attributing a voice to her that resonates with modern
subjectivity, an expression of who she really was might be heard from
within the vortex of the power that defines her. Foucault's attentive
silence may make women less reified and not more and much like the
broader phenomenon of the "shrinking woman" that Christine Di Stefano
has identified in postmodern thought, it may enjoin us to return and
listen again for her distinctive expressions. Indeed, says Di Stefano,

the figure of the shrinking woman may perhaps be best appreciated and
utilized as an aporia within contemporary theory: a recurring paradox,
question, dead end or blind spot to which we must repeatedly return.[15]


By posing this absence of woman as an unarticulated question, Foucault
the interrogative critic may have goaded us once again into a renewed
inquiry: to return to what is very much her story. Now she does not
appear as a transcendent gender or persistent consciousness, or as a
vicarious expression of modern individualism, but as something defined
in her particularity. Again, the absence of the subject--female or
otherwise--categorically determined once and for all, invites the
question: How has her subjectivity variously been constituted? What have
been the spectra of her existence?

All of this may seem too wishful or apologetic. I do seem to have
credited Foucault for what he has left out, just as I appear to have
credited him for relinquishing certain responsibilities of authorship.
After all, by the extraordinary omission of a "female perspective,"
Foucault has very nearly assumed the "androcentric" attitude with which
Eloise Buker associates him.[16] But somehow he remains a critic--
subversive and not proud of anything in that attitude. From the
perspective that moves within the games of male power displaying its
different guises, he has decentered and disrupted the very same
"androcentrism." He has stepped within the context of power without
adopting the point of view of the prevailing power, and with the
relativistic eye of the visitor, he surveys everything evenly so that it
is all oddly diminished. If he seems to dissolve the category of woman
within power-which is dangerous-he has also begun to dissolve the very
power that defines her as such.

Yet in the broader sense, it appears that this dissolving criticism has
proceeded at the expense of those concepts of "domination" and
"patriarchy" which were indispensable to criticism--unless Foucault has
also shattered these into a specificity that refines the analysis of
power and unless he has restored the examination of particulars which
had been lost to the "universalizing" gaze of criticism. If the absence
of the "subject" poses the questing of how subjects are constituted,
this suspension of critical categories directs attention back to the
radically distinct contexts in which they were. Just as the
idiosyncratic individual surfaces from time to time in Foucault's work,
so does the unique historical situation, and like a strangely inverted
Marxism, contextually formed practices are the beginning and the end of
the discussion, if not the universal categories that had once shed light
on them. Now it is in meeting Foucault's recalcitrant eye that the
elements of those contexts appear to be transformed.

Specifically, then, we may see how Foucault and feminism might
complement one another in the analysis of marriage. Buker reminds us
that it is the critical "perspective of the wife, and only this, that
teaches us that the 'velvet chairs' of modern marriage are still
chains."[17] In this feminist analysis, the chains of marriage stretch
across historical contexts like a timeless undifferentiated oppression,
and the oppositional "perspective" that is bound by them would seem to
persist intact, hidden, and waiting as well. But this transcendent
critical perspective is a modern one. There have been many wives in many
ages who may not have perceived the chains as chains and have not
participated in the institution of matrimony in the same way. In
Foucault's examination of marriage, that perspective has dissolved
within the many contexts of marriage. It does not instruct us by finding
common cause among all the forms of marriage, but our attention is drawn
to the distinctive bonds of "marriages" instead. With Foucault, the
"velvet chains" of modern marriage appear to be very different from the
constraints of marriage in the past century and still more different
from the classical male ethic of self-mastery that extended its
particular dominion over the household, the wife, and the slave.[18]

Really, the more subtle aspect of Buker's point as well, is not the
sameness or immutability of marital chains but the discriminating
comparison that makes the modern ones seem "soft." The feminist
inclination to find transhistorical solidarity with all women is
qualified and refined by the equally powerful draw of historical
distinction which, in turn, resists the distortions of comparison and
assimilation. Accordingly, in the shattered image of power that Foucault
represents to us, we are inclined to ask what the "chain" is and where
the "velvet" is and precisely how they coalesce in a distinctive power.
As feminists, we might also be inclined to wonder about the specific
ways in which women are subjugated or constitute themselves in power or,
like the prisoners of Panopticon, how they might be "caught up in a
power situation of which they themselves are the bearers."[19]
Paradoxically, a suspension of empathy with the oppressed may sometimes
invite more subtle revelations about power, and we are reminded that the
respect for the integrity of distinctive experiences is the only genuine
basis for such communion, historically or in contemporary political
struggle. It seems that Foucault's hard, unsympathetic analytic displays
components of power much as the prism reveals something more elemental
than the mirror about the same light.

Once again, in refusing to define the subject--of any type or gender--
and in rejecting transcendent categories and perspectives, Foucault has
refused leadership of the more (masculine) pedantic variety. He cannot
tell feminists or anyone else what to do if he is to be consistent with
his own analysis of power, and the more we look to him posthumously for
guidance, the more he eludes us. But just as he returns us inexorably to
the historical context and resists the impulse to transcend it, he seems
to advocate an oddly restrained variety of "local" political resistance,
a kind of practice that boasts of no more privileged consciousness than
he allows himself in analysis. Susan Hekman has emphasized the
theoretical importance of this idea, but practically, as she suggests,
it will have to be filled out.[20] Practically, this would not seem to
be the resistance of local community leaders anxious to restore a sense
of normalcy and virtue but that which arises at sites where the
normalizing constraints of power are felt. If power relations assume
"multiple forms," resistance must at least be "multiple,"[21] and as
feminists would likely agree, it must be localized and concentrated in
regions once thought too intimate for political struggle.

Yet in detailing these challenges to power, Foucault remains deficient
or deliberately incomplete, and there is much more that may now be said
of the one context and the struggle from "within." Within power, it
would seem that there must be smaller "regimes" that are not seamlessly
woven in with the rest, and if these do not offer a vantage point that
should be valorized in critical practice, indeed because they do not,
they must still be the locus of such "multiple" resistances. There are
those who stand in different relations to the power that moves within
and defines them, those who think the unthinkable, and those whose
"bodies and pleasures"[22] are more tensely restricted than others.
Being differently formed in power, as idiosyncratic beings or members of
a group, they deserve the same distinction and integrity that Foucault
has accorded to historical epochs. Foucault's "missing persons" (to use
Buker's phrase)--prisoners, the insane, the wealthy, the impoverished,
or the colonized, women, and especially children with needs and bodies
not yet wholly formed in power[23]--must each bear the marks of power
differently within themselves. Although Foucault will not say how, there
are those whose self-knowledge strains the greater "power/knowledge"
that defines them, who form discourses that are not identical with the
greater discourse, and for all of its normalizing effects, power does
not fall evenly over all.

If Foucault's hardened refusal to amplify those voices of resistance
within power reveals something more of its complexity, feminism reminds
us that there are expressions of resistance nonetheless, and our
understanding of power might benefit from both kinds of insight.
Together they might reveal ways in which power constitutes identity and
is occasionally transgressed by those who seek to generalize their own
discontentment, even if they are not the vanguard or the embodiment of
some transcendent idea of freedom. Here we might think of the "local"
struggle of Las Madres, the Argentine mothers of "disappeared" persons,
whose efforts have been richly detailed in this country by Jean
Elshtain. In resistance to political oppression, their self-constitutive
discourse combines what Elshtain calls "the language of a mother's loss,
" with a rather more global "language of human rights."[24] Each of the
two different kinds of expression has been self-consciously altered in
the heroic effort by which these women have politicized their own
particular locus in power--as mothers and something more.

It would seem that this complex movement combines resistance to the ways
in which these women have bee, constituted in power together with a
redefinition of themselves and their motherhood that challenges the
powers that be. What it means to be a mother in that Argentine context
has now been posited differently, and the constituting power that
Foucault might have depicted is confronted by self-constitutive
practices. In the process, these women have made something more of a
politicized motherhood that "transports them and made something less--or
rather, more parochial and manifest--out of the language of universal
human rights as well. In this, it would seem that their special efforts
do correspond with Foucault's general suggestion that "the critique of
what we are is at one and the same time the historical analysis of the
limits that are imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of
going beyond them."[25]

Still, it must seem that Foucault is deficient in explaining such
things. How would that local action, a feminist or any other struggle
against oppression, become possible for him? How can it be grounded if
not in the universalizing discourse of rights and freedom that emerged
with the Enlightenment? It can be grounded, one might reply, because
that discourse did not arise only in an intellectual enlightenment but
from particular, local experiences with power--not in a dialectical
sweep of historical change or an awakening of a latent consciousness or
freedom but in particular "transgressions."[26] It arose in "practices
of liberty" and "practices of freedom" of the sort that Foucault
identifies in the aftermath of "liberation" from a colonial
situation.[27] Such transgressive practices might make liberty manifest
without making grandiose claims for liberty, and in them, it is not just
a principal of freedom that is at stake but continuous self-formative
acts of freedom. In such practices, people might generate "rights" and
articulate them as such, but that is different from relying on a
catalogue of rights that makes them "individuals." They might fashion
communities of people who are at one and the same time resistant to the
dictates of community--be they habitual and traditional or abstract and
liberal--and this, at least, is one direction in which Foucault's
contextual understanding might lead political practice.

It appears that this much of Foucault ought to strike a sympathetic
chord with the growing number of critics of liberal "rights based"
thinking.[28] Many feminists, postmodernists, and communitarians
proclaim the impoverishment of that tradition, its lack of specificity,
equity, or moral suasion. Yet Foucault does not set out to attack the
liberal tradition so much as to reveal the ways in which its own
constellation of freedom is also a construction of power. For him, such
freedoms are suffused with disciplines and at once pose limits for the
very thematic interests they would advance. If the individual obtains
rights in that tradition, this would be another way in which identity
has been "problematized" and certain liberties set up within
constraints. Thus, and for all of his reluctance to discuss "the
subject" or to canonize that "individual" who was the vital theoretical
entity of liberalism, it should not really be surprising that Foucault's
final work concerns the care and constitution of the "self."

Here, the later Foucault reveals himself as an ethicist of sorts,
declaring that he would fight the "fascism in us all."[29] The almost
flat, relativistic descriptions of power, knowledge, and discursive
norms in different contexts reveals how individuals are constituted as
normative beings and how they constitute themselves within, if not
against, the normative currents of power. If there is no particular
faith in human essences or in freedom's own mysterious struggle against
authority here, it is not capitulation to authority either, and
something like a Nietzschean will may occasionally assert itself within
a moral domain. At least, the march through many forms of ethical self-
mastery suggests a profusion of possibilities. Because each is
positively constructed for Foucault--and never simply negated,
prohibited, or repressed--others might be generated in varying degrees
of self-consciousness. And if such ethical schemes are constructed in
recognition of the very human variety that they would suppress, that
leaves open the possibility--although Foucault did not develop it--of an
ethics of multiplicity that not only tolerates but values human
differences.

Accordingly, when he is asked of his last work: "Should we actualize
this notion of the care of the self in the classical sense against
modern thought?", Foucault says, "Absolutely."[30] But does he want to
reinstate the classical male ethic? Not at all. Rather, he wants to
generalize its capacity for self-formation in an utterly new way; to
allow a freer range of choices among the elements that Western thought
had once already defined and restricted. Now the interrogative criticism
that Rajchman identified in the work becomes an "endless questioning of
constituted experiences,"[31] a certain "choosing" or "inventing" of
oneself amid the constitutive elements of power and not just in spite of
them or by an imagined negation that risks duplicating them.

In a way, this ethical turn of Foucault's takes the feminist notion that
the "personal is political" to a limit without disregarding the
problematic of the "situated self." Once again, it acknowledges
particular constructs of freedom within the context of power and
recognizes their critical import without proclaiming them as universals.
Yet in all of this there are recognizable tensions of freedom and
constraint, and it might seem, as Nancy Fraser has suggested, that
Foucault has "smuggled back in" certain priorities of a liberal humanism,
relying on a reader's "familiarity with and commitment to modem ideals
of autonomy, reciprocity, dignity, and human rights."[32] But to
characterize him in this way may miss the subtle mechanism by which he
tests the same ideals. Indeed, Foucault enjoins us to return to
reexamine the conditions of confinement and discipline that shaped our
conception of freedom in the first place, and by the repeated return to
the periods which prefigure modernity, he has shaken the complacency
with which we accept it now. Far from relying on such modem ideals, he
is reviving the contexts of their origination in a way that tests them,
which has the dual effect of challenging their abstraction and revealing
their inspiration. Here, if there is not a secret liberalism, there is a
certain fascination with a thematics of liberalism.

So it is that the language of "practices" and "uses" of freedoms and
pleasures in Foucault's later work seems to promise a certain "liberty,"
not because it affirms a principle of liberty but because it displays
the thematic elements of constraint and self-constitution in a strangely
refracted light. He returns us to scenes of an earlier discipline, to
constructions of power that precede the Enlightenment as if to say that
ours are quite different, but without forgetting that the rhetoric of
freedom poses new constraints which delimit our "freedom." Like a prism,
the work breaks up and reveals the emanations of power and knowledge as
they were arranged before and during the Enlightenment, as if to demand
that we see a more complete spectrum of "uses" in each.

Displayed in their historical variety in this way, the elements of
liberalism are stretched to the point of dissipation. We are invited to
view them in the spectral form that recalls their origins, where the
promise of unfolding liberties is still affixed to the most devilish
confinements. Now the very definitions of illness, criminality, or
sexuality are each regarded as categories of enlightened knowledge which
contain knowledge and which represent limiting conditions for freedom.
What once appeared as the mysterious contradictions of a liberal freedom
that promised equality and relied on inequality can now be seen as the
restrictive norms that inevitably attend and enable those "freedoms." It
follows that where Marxists and many feminists would realize the
promises of liberalism by reversing the social order of domination,
Foucault's work invites a different set of trespasses on the
constitutive elements of the diffuse power that is the fabric of that
"freedom" itself. In this, he confronts us abruptly with the
problematics of constraint and self-formation as they have found one
peculiar expression in liberalism.

With Foucault, then, the receptive reader will find that the themes of
liberalism have been shaken loose from a narrow, complacent meaning in a
way that may inspire feminism and other criticism to construe them
differently. There is freedom, not a universal juridical principal of
freedom of the sort that liberalism had articulated but freedoms posed
in the shadows of constraint or imprisonment, and occasionally, the
transgressive, self-generative acts which test those limits. There is
individuality in the acts that might rearrange the elements of an
inescapable power, or in the idiosyncracy that defies its ability to
define. A certain equality is advanced in the analysis as the same
steady eye surveys everyone and no one principle or voice is privileged.
This is not an abstract equality accompanied by the usual methodological
objectivity, but an expression of the very sort of humility that
"practices" of equality require, one that recognizes the integrity of
human differences without leveling them. In this there is something like
the liberal toleration in which people reluctantly endure the presence
of "others," only now the even-handed relativism of the analysis of
power positively values their "differences" and what they reveal about
power. Finally, there is truth, no longer the one "truth" or facticity
that has been the aim of so much Enlightenment reason--the qualification
or secret hope for its tolerance--but the "truth telling" that was the
subject of Foucault's last seminar.[33] To value that telling of truth
would strain the Millian reverence for the unpopular opinion as a means
to some greater truth, as it might ultimately encourage a discursive
community of "discordant concordance" in which many different voices are
valued for themselves and a more honest pluralism might emerge.[34]

There may not be the sort of politics that builds new systems here, but
the humble interrogation of liberal themes anticipates a reconstituted
ethics with profound political implications. It is an ethics that has
learned something from the classical virtues and from the liberal ethos
without quite adopting either--one which might involve the "care of the
female self," as Buker would call for it,[35] within a broader care of
the self and others. Paradoxically, Foucault's humility before many
realities and his obstinate refusal to judge them do serve that end.
That resilience has the extraordinary effect of expanding meanings and
exposing the limitations by which they are constituted, and almost
unwittingly, it introduces the possibility of a nonrestrictive, positive
ethic that is political, at least, as the ethical care of the self once
was. It foreshadows a politics that does not depend on ultimate truth to
pursue freedom, which remains diverse, interrogative, localized, and
transgressive.

In this, Foucault is a useful companion to the feminist critic of
liberalism and modernity. Yet his oddly contextual thought is useful
because it is irreducible, and we would do well not to enlist him or
expect things from him in regions where he was reluctant to tread. In
the end, if Foucault does not lead, his vision reveals the complexity of
the practices of the past in a way that may help us to construct
practices of freedom with a similar regard for the richness and
diversity of the present.

                                 NOTES

[1.] See a related discussion in Michael Shapiro, Language and Politics
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), 132.

[2.] Such views are developed by Susan Hekman, "From Monism to Pluralism,
The Feminization of Epistemology," Women & Politics (Fall 1987); and
"Foucault and Political Action: A Feminist View," manuscript; and by
Eloise A. Buker, "A Feminist Deconstruction of Foucault: Hidden Desires
and Missing Persons," manuscript.

[3.] Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 11: The Use of
Pleasure (New York: Vantage, 1988), 22.

[4.] Susan Hekman, "From Monism to Pluralism," makes a similar point
concerning Foucault's antifoundationalism.

[5.] Michel Foucault, "The Ethic of Care for the Self as a Practice of
Freedom: An Interview with Michel Foucault on January 20, 1984,"
conducted by Raul Fornet-Betancourt, Helmut Becker, and Alfredo Gomez-
Muller and translated by J. D. Gauthier, S J, Philosophy and Social
Criticism, 12 (Summer 1987): 113.

[6.] See the discussion in William E. Connolly, Appearance and Reality
in Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

[7.] Georg Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist
Dialectics, translated by Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1972)
, 156. In this vein, Isaac Balbus warns against equating an
"epistemology of totality" and a "politics of totalitarianism."
Nevertheless, the presumptions of truth, of omniscient consciousness and
"correct thinking" may have a certain unfortunate correspondence. See
Isaac D. Balbus, "Disciplining Women: Michel Foucault and the Power of
Feminist Discourse," in Feminism as Critique, edited by Seyla Benhabib
and Drucilla Cornell (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987),
114.

[8.] Judith Butler, "Variations on Sex and Gender: Bouvoir, Wittig and
Foucault," in Feminism as Critique, edited by Seyla Benhabib and
Drucilla Cornell (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 136-
40. See related comments in Nancy Hartsock, "Rethinking Modernism:
Minority vs. Majority Theories," Cultural Critique, No. 7 (Fall 1987):
202-6.

[9.] Thomas Flynn, "Foucault as Parrhesiast: His Last Course at the
College de France, 1984," Philosophy and Social Criticism 12(Summer 1987)
: 223, aptly identifies Foucault's strategy of employing a "plurality of
counterpositions, of points of resistance, of styles of life--of
`truths.' " Similarly, Judith Butler suggests that Foucault's strategy
of "proliferation" diffuses the binary opposition of gender, in
"Variations on Sex and Gender," 138.

[10.] Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other
Writings, 19721977, edited by Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980),
133.

[11.] Michel Foucault, Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel
Foucault, edited by Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton
(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 15, 18.

[12.] Foucault, Power/Knowledge, 133. Foucault goes on to suggest here,
"detaching the power of truth from the forms of hegemony," not because
truth deserves autonomy but because there is always a suspicious link
between the privilege of power and the epistemological privilege of
truth.

[13.] John Rajchman, Michel Foucault: The Freedom of Philosophy (New
York: Colombia University Press, 1985); and "Ethics After Foucault,"
Social Text, No. 13/14 (Winter/Spring 1986): 179. See Susan Hekman,
"Foucault and Political Action," 11.

[14.] Eloise Buker, "A Feminist Deconstruction," 4,8, characterizes this
"absence" of women as "actors" in Foucault's work as a silence: "This
silence displays the role of women as bodies for reproduction rather
than as humans able to enter into community," and again,"his silence
articulates women as objects, victims of domination, not as actors,
subjects of domination." Yet Foucault's "silence" does not "display" or
"articulate" an objectification of women as if to confirm it so much as
it raises questions about how anyone becomes a subject or actor. The
point here is that he initiates a different interrogation of the matter
by not rushing to fill that silence.

[15.] Christine Di Stefano, "Dilemmas of Difference: Feminism, Modernity,
and Postmodernism," Women & Politics 8(3/4, 1988): 20.

[16.] Eloise Buker, "A Feminist Deconstruction," 4, 8.

[17.] Commenting on modern marriage as Foucault has characterized it in
The Care of the Self (New York: Pantheon, 1986), 172, Buker suggests
that "hoary the perspective of the 'wife,' it only adds a bit of velvet
to the chains, because it does not create a space for the wife to emerge
as a 'self' or a `citizen' even within the narrow context of marriage"
("A Feminist Deconstruction," 14). But perhaps the word "perspective"
belongs in quotation here along with the rest precisely because it is a
historical eventuality which that "narrow context" had made so difficult
to obtain.

[18.] Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure (New York: Vintage, 1986),
see, for example, 63-77, 143-51

[19.] Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison
(New York: Vintage, 1979), 201.

[20.] Susan Hekman, "Foucault and Political Action," 17.

[21.] Foucault, Power/Knowledge, 142.

[22.] Nancy Fraser offers an insightful discussion of Foucault's
preference for the use of this phrase in comments on the eighteenth
century. He reserves the analytical conjunction "sex-desire" for more
contemporary discussions. See Nancy Fraser, "Foucault s Body-Language: A
Post-Humanist Political Rhetoric?" Salmagundi, No. 61 (Fall 1983): 61-
63.

[23.] Cad Horowitz, "The Foucautian Impasse: No Sex, No Self, No
Revolution," Political Theory 15 (1987): 64-73, makes much of the
missing child and childhood in Foucault's work and suggests, critically,
that this corresponds to his resistance to a Freudian notion of
psychological repression and to his radical reading of the latter. l
have raised a related question about the critical, contextual challenge
posed by memories of childhood in "Memory, Culture and Critical
Reflection," Ph.D. dies., 1986.

[24.] Jean Bethke Elshtain, "Antigone's Daughters Reconsidered:
Continuing Reflections on Women, Politics and Power," manuscript, 15.

[25.] Susan Hekman, "Foucault and Political Action," 17, comments on the
import of this passage from The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow
(New York: Pantheon, 1984), 50.

[26.] Here, I am suggesting that Foucault's notion of "transgressive"
rather than dialectical change may have a special implication for
situated political acts. See, for example, The Archaeology of Knowledge
(New York: Harper & Row, 1976), 4; Language, Counter-Memory and Practice
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980), 29-52.

[27.] Michel Foucault, "The Ethic of Care," 113-14.

[28.] Benhabib and Cornell quote Michael I. Sandel, Liberalism and Its
Critics (New York: New York University Press, 1984),5-6, in expressing
the same conjunction of views. See their Feminism as Critique, 12.

[29.] Foucault, Preface to Anti-Oedipus (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1983). See the discussion in Alexander E. Hooke, "The
Order of Others: Is Foucault's Antihumanism Against Human Action?"
Political Theory 15 (1987): 54.

[30.] Foucault, "The Ethic of Care," 125.

[31.] Rajchman, Michel Foucault: The Freedom of Philosophy, 7; "Ethics
After Foucault," 167. See the discussion in Hekman, "Foucault and
Political Action," 11-12.

[32.] See Fraser, "Foucault's Body-Language," 59. Hartsock, "Rethinking
Modernism," 203, cites this passage in support of her critique of
Foucault, while Hekman, "Foucault and Political Action," 10, suggests
that Fraser's is a rather "backward looking" reading of the same.

[33.] Flynn, "Foucault as Parrhesiast," 223.

[34.] See William E. Connolly, Political Theory and Modernity (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1988), 170. Although less "hostile" toward democracy than
Nietzsche and less "ambivalent" about it than Foucault, Connolly
applauds the appreciation for "discordance" in both and suggests that it
may coexist democratically with "concordance" without subjecting human
differences to normalizing disciplines or a "politics of insidious
assimilation." See William E. Connolly, Politics and Ambiguity (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 13-14.

[35.] Buker, "A Feminist Deconstruction," 3-6.

AUTHOR'S NOTE: This essay develops my remarks at the Spring 1988 meeting
of the Western Political Science Association in response to papers by
Eloise Buker, Nancy Hartsock and Susan Hehman and comments by Christine
Di Stefano and Michael Shapiro. I am grateful to the panelists, and to
Tedros Kiros, Tracy Strong, and an anonymous reviewer for their helpful
comments.

~~~~~~~~
TERRY K ALADJEM: Harvard University


Terry K. Aladjem is a Lecturer on Social Studies at Harvard University.
He is presently working on a manuscript titled Vengeance and Democratic
Justice.

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Source: Political Theory, May91, Vol. 19 Issue 2, p277, 15p.
Item Number: 9604084907