By Gordon Hull
In a previous post, I made the case for reading Foucault’s 1978 comments on Marxism (especially in the Yoshimoto interview) in the context of theory/practice questions raised by the re-evaluation of Marx’s 11th “Thesis on Feuerbach.” Here I want to flesh out that position a little more, starting with reference to another 1978 piece. Shortly after the Japan interviews, Foucault writes a response to the Italian communist Massimo Cacciari’s “Rationality and Irrationality of Politics in Delezue and Foucault” (the piece appeared in Italian; as far as I can tell, there is no translation of it). Much of Foucault’s response is dedicated to accusing Cacciari of using the tactics of Stalinism: “always having a unique adversary” (created in this case by amalgamating Foucault, Deleuze and the New Philosophers), of engaging in a trial-like procedure, of assimilating ‘the enemy’ and danger, of reducing thought immediately to a system, and so forth.
He then defends the argument of Discipline and Punish, in particular with reference to the understanding of power; Foucault says he “would like precisely to show this heterogeneity of power, that is to say how it is always born of something other than itself” (D&E #238, II, 651 (2 vol. ed, 2001]). He underscores that there is no metaphysics of power here, no “power with a capital P.” Rather, “it is necessary to put the relations of power back into the interior of struggles and not suppose that there is, on the one hand, power, and on the other, that on which it is exercised, and that the struggle unfolds between power and non-power” (632). In other words, Foucault’s entire effort is to resist the sort of abstraction that the Theses on Feuerbach warn against reifying. The goal is rather to write a text that does something, that constitutes an intervention or a tool. In language similar to that of the Japan interviews, and against the accusation that he is merely telling a story, Foucault proposes:
“In reality, what I am trying to do, and therein lies the difficulty of the attempt, is to work out an interpretation, a reading of a certain reality, which is such that, on the one hand, this interpretation is able to produce effects of truth and that, on the other hand, these effects of truth can become instruments at the heart of possible struggles. To speak the truth so that it can be attacked [dire la vérité pour qu’elle soit attaquable]. It is a reality of possible struggles that I seek to make appear.” (633)
A few sentences later, he argues that “the effect of the truth that I seek to produce resides in this manner of showing that the real is polemical” (633). However, “I do not speak of the current situation. I effect an interpretation of history, and the problem – but I do not resolve it – is to know what the possible utilization of these analyses in the current situation is” (633-4).
This then leads to a very clear statement of the role of the intellectual. “It is absolutely true that, when I write a book, I refuse to take a prophetic position which consists in saying to people: here is what you ought to do, or again, this is good, that is not.” Instead, the goal is to show in a general way “it seems to me that these things have happened, but I describe them in such a manner that views of possible lines of attack are traced. But in this I do not force or constrain anyone to attack” (634). What to actually do – and he refers to his own decisions about throwing himself into certain political actions - “is a problem of groups, of physical and personal engagement,” and not of books. Indeed, bossy Marxists are not radical: “one is not radical because one has pronounced some formulas; no, radicality is physical, radicality concerns existence” (634).
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