By Gordon Hull
Last time, I noted that mid-late 1960s Foucault aligned himself in favor of Althusser’s work on Marx, and against what he called “Chardino-Marxism,” which turns out to be a shorthand for humanist Marxism, in particular any efforts to synthesize Marx and Teilhard de Chardin, as well as (or rather, as exemplified by) the work of PCF intellectual Roger Garaudy. Foucault’s opposition to “humanism” is well-known, but his differentiation of Marxism into less-desirable humanist varieties and more-desirable Althusserian less so, and so I want to pursue the Chardino-Marxism critique further, because it helps us understand the context in which the humanist critique appears, as well as Foucault’s subsequent efforts to position himself relative to Marxism in the 1970s (obligatory self-promotion: my foray into that is here)
In the 1966 interview, “L’homme est-il mort? [Is man dead?]”, Foucault gives as clear a position statement as I’ve seen on all of this. The interview is roughly contemporaneous with Order of Things, and certainly the more detailed exposition of humanism and Marxism’s place in it there needs to be taken into account in any full discussion. The interviewer had asked if Foucault differentiated among different kinds of humanism, naming Sartre. Foucault responds that “if you set aside the facile humanism that Teilhard and Camus represent, the problem of Sartre appears completely different.” Foucault then stops talking about Sartre and offers a general characterization: “humanism, anthropology and dialectical thought are related. What ignores man, is contemporary analytic reason which we saw born with Russell, [and] which appears in Levi-Strauss and the linguists.” On the other hand, dialectics, Foucault says, promotes the idea that the human being “will become an authentic and true man.” That is, it “promotes man to man and, to this extent, it is indissociable from humanist morality. In this sense, the great officials of contemporary humanism are evidently Hegel and Marx” (D&E I, 569). So we are back to the Lindung interview, where Foucault accuses Garaudy of having indiscriminately “picked up everything from Hegel to Teilhard de Chardin” (discussed last time), though with perhaps an emerging sense of what that lineage looks like.
Foucault then says that it is Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason that puts the close to this lineage – Sartre “has closed again [refermé] the parenthesis on this entire episode of our culture which starts with Hegel.” Sartre attempts the same scavenging operation we see in Garaudy:
“He has done everything he can to integrate contemporary culture, that is the acquisitions of psychoanalysis, of political economy, of history, of sociology, of dialectics. But it is characteristic that he is not able to let go of everything which analytic reason lifts up [relève] and which profoundly takes part in contemporary culture: logic, information theory, linguistics, formalism” (569).
Foucault then famously adds that the Critique of Dialectal Reason is “the magnificent and pathetic effort of a man of the 19th Century to think the 20th Century. In this sense, Sartre is the last Hegelian, and I would even say the last Marxist” (570).
All of this has a sense of repetition to it, and one gets the feeling that Foucault thinks that dealing with humanism is a game of whack-a-mole: Sartre has (re)closed the parentheses. The ideological currents of the world are found again (retrouveraient) to be reconciled. But of course this game starts with Hegel (or at least one reading of Hegel) and his effort to articulate the end of history and the close of dialectics into a totality. Garaudy is explicit about the Marxian version: under communism, “everyone will be able to live the life of all the others and, for the first time, one human world will form a ‘totality’” (Marxism, 27).
Garaudy is certainly not the only person who reads Marx along these lines; the emphasis on a Marxian humanism and the early writings (in particular the 1844 Manuscripts, which had not been translated into English until 1959) became prominent after Stalin’s death and with the awareness of just how bad Stalin’s USSR had been.
Eric Fromm, for example, says in the introduction to his 1961 Marx’s Concept of Man that:
“[The] popular picture of Marx's ‘materialism’ – his anti-spiritual tendency, his wish for uniformity and subordination – is utterly false. Marx's aim was that of the spiritual emancipation of man, of his liberation from the chains of economic determination, of restituting him in his human wholeness, of enabling him to find unity and harmony with his fellow man and with nature. Marx's philosophy was, in secular, nontheistic language, a new and radical step forward in the tradition of prophetic Messianism; it was aimed at the full realization of individualism, the very aim which has guided Western thinking from the Renaissance and the Reformation far into the nineteenth century.”
A couple of paragraphs later, he underscores that “Marx's philosophy constitutes a spiritual existentialism in secular language and because of this spiritual quality is opposed to the materialistic practice and thinly disguised materialistic philosophy of our age. Marx’s aim, socialism, based on his theory of man, is essentially prophetic Messianism in the language of the nineteenth century.”
From these sorts of comments, a few things should be apparent. First, the move to a humanist Marx is not unique to France. Foucault makes no reference to Fromm (at least, not in the Dits et Écrits), but writers like Fromm and Garaudy are committed to similar arguments and expressions. Second, they are committed to a developmental concept of “man,” one that relies on a concept of human nature. This is very clear in the opening paragraph in Fromm’s chapter on “The Nature of Man:”
“Marx did not believe, as do many contemporary sociologists and psychologists, that there is no such thing as the nature of man; that man at birth is like a blank sheet of paper, on which the culture writes its text. Quite in contrast to this sociological relativism, Marx started out with the idea that man qua man is a recognizable and ascertainable entity; that man can be defined as man not only biologically, anatomically and physiologically, but also psychologically.”
This line of reasoning is one of the central problems with humanism, as Foucault sees it.
Third, the language of prophecy and messianism is recurrent. I’ll add examples as we go here, but I want to flag now that Foucault will, in later writings, be especially opposed to prophetic language in Marxism. In 1978, for example, he notes 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.” (Foucault Live, 262; D&E II, 634). In another interview from 1978, he had this to say:
“Marxism, insofar as it is a science—in the measure where it is a matter of a science of history, of a history of humanity—is a dynamic of coercive effects about a certain truth. Its discourse is a prophetic science which diffuses a coercive force onto a certain truth, not only in the direction of the past, but towards the future of humanity. In other terms, what is important is that the historicity and the prophetic character function as coercive forces concerning the truth." (D&E #235, II, 600 (2 vol. ed., 2001).
The Foucault of Order of Things picks up on the language of prophetic discourse as inherently humanist, and groups positivism, Marxism and phenomenology into one package. He begins by arguing that the “threshold of our modernity is situated … by the constitution of an empirico-transcendental doublet which was called man.” (Order, 319). This inaugurated two kinds of analysis: one that led to the “discovery that knowledge has anatomo-physiological conditions,” and one that showed that “knowledge had historical, social, or economic conditions” (319). That Foucault blames Kant for this state of affairs is apparent in that he calls the former a “sort of transcendental aesthetic” and the latter a “sort of transcendental dialectic.”
The dialectic component proceeds according to “clearly elucidated … though … arbitrary” divisions, as between illusion and truth, or ideology from science. Beneath this, “there is a more obscure and more fundamental division ... a truth that is of the order of discourse – a truth that makes it possible to employ, when dealing with the nature or history of knowledge, a language that will be true” (320). Foucault says that this ambiguity can resolve in one of two ways:
“These two things lead to one conclusion: either this true discourse finds its foundation and model in the empirical truth whose genesis in nature and history it retraces, so that one has an analysis of the positivist type … or the true discourse anticipates the truth whose nature and history it defines; it sketches out in advance and foments it from a distance, so that one has a discourse of the eschatological type” (320).
He then takes Comte and Marx as “bear[ing] out the fact that eschatology … and positivism … are archaeologically indissociable” (320).
What emerges is then an effort to find “a discourse that would be neither of the order of reduction nor of the order of promise” (320) and serve as an analytic that would give the quasi-aesthetics and quasi-dialectics a “foundation in a theory of the subject.” In “modern reflection,” it is the “analysis of actual experience [vécu] that has “established itself … as a radical contestation of positivism and eschatology” because it offers a “means of communication between the space of the body and the time of culture.” It thus “attempt[s] to exorcise the naïve discourse of a truth reduced wholly to the empirical, and the prophetic discourse which with similar naivete promises at last the eventual attainment by man of experience” (321).
Phenomenology just repeats the initial ambiguity between the aesthetic and dialectic, and so the rapproachment between existentialist phenomenology and Marxism is no surprise:
“This analysis [phenomenology and its progeny] seeks to articulate the possible objectivity of a knowledge of nature upon the original experience of which the body provides an outline; and to articulate the possible history of a culture upon the semantic density which is both hidden and revealed in actual experience. It is doing no more, then, than fulfilling with greater care the hasty demands laid down when the attempt was made to make the empirical, in man, stand for the transcendental. Despite appearances to the contrary, it is evident how closely knit is the network that links thoughts of the positivist or eschatological type (Marxism being in the first rank of these) and reflections inspired by phenomenology. Their recent rapprochement is not of the order of a tardy reconciliation: at the level of archaeological configurations they were both necessary – and necessary to one another – from the moment the anthropological postulate was constituted, that is, from the moment when man appeared as an empirico-transcendental doublet.” (321-2).
For Foucault, of course, the right way to think through this is to ask an entirely different question: “does man really exist?” (322).
All of this is to say that, if Foucault is eager to contest Marxist humanism, he also has a theory for what holds it together. But his formulation in Order is abstract, and Marxism develops substantially over the 20th Century, as Foucault’s affirmation of the work of Althusser suggests. What is going on with Chardino-Marxism, then? As far as I know, the above are the only references to Teilhard in Foucault. I can’t say this with certainty about the lecture courses, but at least there are no other references in Dits et Écrits, and none in Order of Things, Archaeology of Knowledge, Birth of a Clinic or History of Madness.
Next time, I’ll come back to Teilhard and Garaudy, and look at Teilhard’s appeal to Marxism.
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