By Gordon Hull
The current issue of Foucault Studies contains the first English translation of a lecture Foucault gave in Japan in 1978. This “Analytic Philosophy of Politics” is essential reading if you have an interest in the transition between Foucault’s “power” and “ethics” work and/or his later understanding of power and resistance. The Tokyo lecture underscores a profound continuity in his thought along a number of lines. Here are a few things that emerged for me on a first reading (there are also references to Confucianism that I am totally unqualified to address, so I will simply note that they are present):
(1) Foucault proposes that the question of power emerges in the wake of fascism and Stalinism, which he treats as both singular but as tied to “a whole series of mechanisms that already existed within social and political systems” (189). That is, movements now challenge “this overproduction of power that Stalinism and fascism clearly manifested in its stark and monstrous state” (189). The emphasis on Stalinism and fascism corresponds to the lectures that bookend Society must be Defended a few years prior, where Foucault begins by critiquing “totalitarian” discourses in the form of orthodox Marxism and closes with an analysis of state racism (exemplified by the Nazis) as a form of biopower. So too, at the beginning of SMD, he refers to some of the same movements – anti-psychiatry, the recovery of “subjugated knowledges” that are the examples in the Tokyo lecture.
(2) Second, Foucault is interested in the role of the philosopher and philosophy. This is not a surprise given his other interviews and essays on the topic, but it’s worth mentioning that he explicitly poses as a problem that philosophies of liberation presented during the 19c have become tools of oppression in the 20th. As he puts it, “each and every time these philosophies of freedom gave birth to forms of power that, whether in the guise of terror, bureaucracy, or even bureaucratic terror, were the very opposite of the regime of freedom, the very opposite of freedom as history” (191). As with the critique of Marxism and Freudianism at the start of SMD, the text here underscores why Foucault is skeptical of revolutionary discourses and thinks they may be a part of the problem, not the solution. Thus, “one should no longer imagine that one can escape relations of power all at once, globally, massively, through a sort of radical rupture or a flight without return” (193).
In this, Foucault is on a page very similar to Deleuze, at least on this point. A moment in an interview of Deleuze by Antonio Negri is instructive. In it, Negri asks about a “tragic note” he detects in Thousand Plateaus. Deleuze responds with a gesture to Primo Levi and a “shame at being human,” of being tainted with what people have done. “This,” he adds, “is one of the most powerful incentives toward philosophy, and it’s what makes all philosophy political…. What’s so shameful is that we’ve no sure way of maintaining becomings, or still more of arousing them, even within ourselves” (Negotiations, 171-3).
Instead of wanting to know if power is good or bad, etc., “one should simply try to relieve the question of power of all the moral and juridical overloads that one has placed on it, and ask the following naïve question, which has not been posed so often … what do power relations fundamentally consist in?” In so doing, the job of the philosopher is to “make visible what precisely is visible, which is to say to make appear what is so close, so immediate, so intimately connected with ourselves that we cannot perceive it” (192). The remark certainly recalls the early Heidegger on the question of Being, but it’s here put in service of understanding power as a form of subjectification: the later part of the Tokyo lecture is precisely interested in pastoral power as a technique of individuation.
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