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.
(3) Foucault foreshadows his final lectures on parrhēsia here, and in a couple of very explicit ways. On the one hand, he characterizes the historical roles of the philosopher in ways that he will directly analyze in the later parrhēsia lectures: there is the philosopher as lawgiver (Solon), the philosopher as advisor to princes (Plato going to see Dionysius), the philosopher as someone who will “laugh at power” (Cynics). Yes, the topology gets nuanced before the later lectures, but the continuity is there.
On the other hand, there is the same rejection of philosophy as (mere) logos (and emphasis on it as work/ergon) that we see in Courage of Truth. In the Tokyo lecture, Foucault suggests various tasks for philosophy. One could investigate how philosophy and power have become linked in the West. One could also declare that the “essential vocation of philosophy is to address the truth, or to question being; and that by digressing into these empirical domains like the issue of politics and power, philosophy cannot but get compromised” (192). This is clearly a rejection of Heidegger (recall here and here), of course, but in Courage of Truth it’s also a rejection of Derrida.
(4) Foucault makes an extended analogy to contemporary Anglo-American philosophy of language (by this he is clearly referring to the late Wittgenstein and his disciples). Rather than trying to say universally what language “is,” the emphasis is on what language does, and on “language games.” By analogy, we need to y “a philosophy that would address the relations of power rather than the games of language” (192). There is a connection to genealogy here that goes unemphasized. Consider the following remark from Wittgenstein:
“Our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses” (Philosophical Investigations sec. 18).
Genealogy is partly about seeing the contingency of the architecture of our power, and we need to be very wary of cities and philosophies that are imagined whole cloth from the top down. There is always a power expressed by architectural schemes.
(5) This then leads to a different understanding of resistance: one strategy is not to engage in a confrontation “within the games;” rather, one can “refuse the game itself” (194). He then cites a number of contemporary resistances, such as the anti-prison movement, or the right-to-die movement (196). What this resistance is not about is “revolution:” “these processes, these unrests, these obscure, limited, and often modest struggles are different from the forms of struggle that have been so strongly valorized in the Western world under the mark of revolution.” (196). The struggles cited in the Tokyo lecture are against biopower in its Christian pastoral variation (thus there is an implied link to his later lectures on confession). Hence, “this power has a religious origin. It is a power that aims to conduct and guide men during their entire life and in each circumstance of their life, a power that consists in taking charge of the life of men in their detail and their progress from their birth up to their death” (197).
Foucault’s effort to think through a kind of resistance that is neither revolution nor reform is central to his thought at this time. For example, he is simultaneously attempting to understand the Iranian revolution. His writings about that share some of the same anxieties. For example, in an interview early in the Iranian revolution, he draws the same parallel between emancipatory philosophies and tyranny, in this case with regards to capitalism: out of “the [Enlightenment] vision of a non-alienated, clear, lucid, and balanced society – industrial capitalism emerged, that is, the harshest, most savage, most selfish, most dishonest, oppressive society one could possibly imagine” (185). Thus, “we have to abandon every dogmatic principle and question one by one the validity of all the principles that have been the source of oppression” (in Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, 185).
I obviously can’t adjudicate or even adequately start a debate about Foucault’s Iran writings here, but it’s noteworthy that he doesn’t want to think of events there as a “revolution” at all:
“It is not a revolution, not in the literal sense of the term, not a way of standing up and straightening things out. It is the insurrection of men with bare hands who want to lift the fearful weight, the weight of the entire world order that bears down on each of us, but more specifically on them, these oil workers and peasants at the frontiers of empires. It is perhaps the first great insurrection against global systems, the form of revolt that is the most modern and the most insane” (222).
Power, subjectification, resistance: it’s all here; there is no radical break in Foucault’s thought from “power” to “ethics.”
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