Philosophers From France

"Foucault, always focused on the exercise of power and repression, tells his students to read Hayek and crew “with special care.” He found much to commend in their work. First and foremost, true liberalism is “imbued with the principle: ‘One always governs too much.’” As important, it asks (and answers) the question, “Why, after all, is it necessary to govern?”"

"I have been thinking a lot about this question. Foucault always subscribed to a number of social projects. And in his texts he was talking to readers in an ongoing transformative process. Over the past year I edited his 1971–1972 lectures at the Collège de France, together with Bernard Harcourt, and it became clear to me that his thinking revolved around the idea of change, of transformation, of individuals and collectives. In the stale climate of the 1960s we thought the transformation could occur only through literature and art. And in the early 1970s, when things were opening up, Foucault thought that social change was possible merely by changing a small number of very important relations of power — for example, the prison system. But already in 1976 he realized that this project of social change was a failure, and that people are much more easily mobilized by religious motives or nationalistic ones. The great movements weren't social. He didn't give up on his project of social change. But it had gotten more complicated."

"From a conservative perspective, the great thing about Foucault's writing is that it is more plastic than Marx, and far less economically subversive. Academics rooted in Foucauldian thought are far more compatible with neoliberalism than the old Marxist academics."

"I openly avow myself the pupil of that mighty thinker Michel Foucault, and even here and there coquette with the modes of expression peculiar to him. But at least for my purposes his useful ideas suffer a certain mystification in his hands: he presents them upside-down, as it were. They must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell."

"The history of the very institution of the prison is a history of reform. Foucault points this out."

"Following Kant, Foucault criticized the practices that impede maturity, issuing a powerful warning against blind submission to the will of authorities. With Kant, he also insisted that the subject has a “right to question truth concerning its power effects and to question power about its discourses of truth”. Indeed, Foucault notes that his view of critique resembles Kant's idea of enlightenment: both involve “the art of voluntary inservitude, of reflective indocility”. For Foucault, moreover, philosophy as a whole exemplifies this art. The history of philosophy is a history of parrěsia, of the courageous practice of speaking truth to power. By the end of his regrettably short life, then, Foucault recognized that he belonged to the tradition of critical philosophy that runs from Kant and Hegel “to the Frankfurt School, passing through Nietzsche, Max Weber and so on”. As a critical thinker, he promoted maturity by encouraging his readers to engage in sustained – critical and self-critical – reflection on the historical conditions that have made them what they are. For by understanding how they are entangled in these conditions, readers might be able to rise above them and resist them. And, for Foucault, whatever freedom we can meaningfully be said to possess consists in resistance to prevailing forms of power."

"Foucault is an interesting case because I'm sure he honestly wants to undermine power but I think with his writings he reinforced it."

"I continue to be very strongly influenced by Foucault's History of Sexuality, in which he warns us against imagining a complete liberation from power. There can never be a total liberation from power, especially in relation to the politics of sexuality."

"I wanted to read Mark Twain and Emerson and Thoreau, and I remember moments in class where I thought my head was going to explode, going, What the fuck are these people talking about? I don't understand what this deconstructive semiotic bullshit is. Who the fuck is Michel Foucault?"

"And now his own history has been written. What does one learn from these books? Chiefly that Foucault's relativistic outlook can be applied to Foucault himself. He used to say that the 19th century was to Marxism what water is to a fish. Increasingly his own work makes sense only when seen as a product of the Sixties. Not that Foucault would have denied this. He never suggested that he wasn't an interested being too. But one should ask of a body of philosophical work that it has a longer shelf life than a couple of decades. Nine years after his death his achievements, such as they are, are so much historical jetsam, their final worth little more than sweet Foucault."

"A profound shaking had happened in the seemingly smooth greensward of the classical philosophical tradition... faultlines in the ancient world that one had barely dreamed of ... A manuscript that moved me deeply."

"At a crucial moment in my own work, I was fortunate to have had the opportunity to take heart from the humbling serenity and unaffected craftsmanship of Michel Foucault, in what I was not to know were his last years."

"The hope may be entertained that some practitioner of the "sociology of knowledge" will one day have an interesting story to tell about -why the work of Michel Foucault generated such wide enthusiasm among certain intellectual elites for several decades in the latter half of the twentieth century. One or two hypotheses of my own may be hazarded. What is interesting about Foucault's unique rhetoric is that he steadfastly resists pronouncing explicit moral-political judgments, yet of course he is judging all the time. Foucault refuses to come clean on his normative commitments, but rather "insinuates" them throughout his work. This constitutes a kind of radical-left positivism that is somehow potently attractive to what I will call the hyper-liberal ethos of late modernity. The idea here is that one must avoid at all costs spelling out a normative vision, since it would ineluctably become the ground for a repressive regime of "normalization." This is clearly connected to the negativism one associates with postmodern writers."

"Foucault has a very good discussion of what the theory of crime—modern economic theory of crime and punishment—has to say. I didn't have much to disagree with him. I think he was accurate on what it has to say. He goes also into a theory of formation of laws, which I had a lot of sympathy with as well."

"The aim of this Socratic parrhesiastic activity... is to lead the interlocutor to the choice of that kind of life (bios) that will be in Dorian-harmonic accord with, logos, virtue, courage, and truth."

"The harmony between word and deed in Socrates' life is Dorian... manifested in the courage he showed at Delium. This harmonic accord... distinguishes Socrates from a sophist... [who] can give... fine and beautiful discourses on courage, but is not courageous... [U]nlike the sophist, he can use parrhesia and speak freely because what he says accords... with what he thinks... [which] accords... with what he does."

"In Plato... or Xenophon... we never see Socrates requiring... examination of conscience or... confession of sins. [A]n account of your life, your bios, is... not to give... the historical events... but... to demonstrate whether you are able to show... a relation between the rational discourse, the ', you... use, and the way... you live. Socrates is inquiring into the way that logos gives form to a person's style of life... whether there is a harmonic relation between the two... the degree of accord between a person's life and its principle of intelligibility or logos... [and] the true nature of the relation between the logos and bios"

"[F]rom Plato's Republic... [t]he primary danger of liberty and free speech in a democracy is what results when everyone has his own... style of life... For then there can be no common logos, no possible unity, for the city."

"[In] "On the Peace"... in 355 B.C., Isocrates... [argues that] depraved orators ["flatterers"]... only say what the people desire to hear. ... The honest orator... is courageous enough, to oppose the demos. He has a critical and pedagogical role... to transform the will of the citizens so that they will serve the best interests of the city. ...[O]pposition between the people's will and the city's best interests is fundamental to Isocrates' criticism of the democratic institutions of Athens. ...[H]e concludes ...it is not ...possible to be heard in Athens if one does not parrot the demos' will ...the only ...speakers left who have an audience are "reckless orators" and "comic poets" ..."

"Sequestered in the usual sectarianism of the academic world, no stimulating reading had existed that took into consideration the arguments of Friedrich Hayek, Gary Becker, or Milton Friedman. On this point, one can only agree with Lagasnerie: Foucault allowed us to read and understand these authors, to discover in them a complex and stimulating body of thought. On that point I totally agree with him. It's undeniable that Foucault always took pains to inquire into theoretical corpuses of widely differing horizons and to constantly question his own ideas."

"In making these various critical points, I am not proposing that Foucault should lose his place in the social and political theory hall of fame. He undoubtedly deserves his berth (as well as deserving what all the other inductees have won as a right: the right to be constructively criticised). I am not even suggesting that Foucault's writings on power are totally tainted by the problems I have highlighted. Certainly, many of his pronouncements about surveillance, for instance, along with the examples offered above look overblown now. The fact that the panopticon was never actually built should have alerted more readers (including me) to this at the time his main power pieces were being published, as should have the fact that the ‘eye of power’ arrangements of hospitals, schools, factories, and so forth (see esp. Foucault 1980: 146–65) were more a matter of architectural fashion, among other things, than they were an attempt to enhance the surveillance of subjects. But making claims that now look overblown is not much of a charge; it was the 1970s after all. I think that in this context I should dismiss that charge as trivial and concentrate instead on the fact that the second and third volumes of the History of Sexuality project (both published posthumously: Foucault 1986a, 1986b) – books in which the problem of ‘theorising’ stressed above is totally absent – were inspirational to Peter Brown in producing some of the most exciting and convincing work on power produced in the last thirty years (see esp. Brown 1988). This is both Foucault on power and Foucault at his very best: ‘the author of descriptive genealogies – “grey, meticulous and patiently documentary”’ (Saunders, quoting Foucault, 1997: 105–6)"

"Foucault's achievement in so quickly building such an enthralling account of the operation of power in society is all the more remarkable when one remembers the dominant hold that Marxist and neo-Marxist accounts had in the Anglophone academy in the 1970s and even into the 1980s. The key to his success probably lies in the fact that he did not initially present his insights in abstract terms but instead allowed them to emerge from his painstaking histories of various knowledge endeavours, or sciences, particularly psychiatry, psychology, penology, and sexology. Without bludgeoning his readers, Foucault allowed them to see mostly power where others would see mostly science."

"The name ‘Foucault’ was first spoken to me in dark, conspiratorial tones, as if he were a threat to the then-alluring project of combining Althusser's ideology-centred thinking and the British culture-and-hegemony thinking. Foucault, along with Weber, Popper, Berlin, and many others (the list was a tiresomely long one) had to be rejected, or so I was told. My mind was soon changed on that score. The exciting work of Barry Hindess and Paul Hirst (see esp. Hindess and Hirst 1975, 1977), who had worked through the Althusser and British Cultural Marxist possibilities more thoroughly than anyone else I had then read (or have read since), indirectly opened up the idea that Foucault was not only not a threat to the best-alternative project I shared with hundreds of others, but was the key to that project's success. At last, here was a thinker who could treat power seriously yet undogmatically, someone who could relate power to society without making it read like the script of a prison movie. I was hooked. I tried my best to understand (or to sound like I understood) all the methodological innovations that came with the Foucault package – ‘archaeology’, ‘genealogy’, ‘discourse’, ‘episteme’, and so on. My excitement reached its peak when, using these tools, Foucault appeared to have succeeded in crafting an entirely new approach to the study of government, under a term of his own invention, ‘governmentality’. But, as so often happens in life, the peak of excitement turned out to be the moment when doubts emerged. These doubts became stronger, eventually leading me to think that Foucault's works from this period too often pronounce and too rarely argue from the historical evidence."

"Foucault was often lumped with Derrida. That's very unfair to Foucault. He was a different caliber of thinker altogether."

"Michel Foucault once characterized Derrida's prose style to me as "obscurantisme terroriste." The text is written so obscurely that you can't figure out exactly what the thesis is (hence "obscurantisme") and then when one criticizes it, the author says, "Vous m'avez mal compris; vous êtes idiot" ["You did not understand; you are an idiot"] (hence "terroriste")."

"The impression created by these later works is of a Foucault who has been ‘normalized’. His command of the French language, his fascination with ancient texts and the by-ways of history, his flamboyant imagination and beautiful style – all have been put, at last, to a proper use, in order to describe the human condition respectfully, and to cease to look for the secret ‘structures’ beneath its smile. It helps that his subject-matter is the ancient world, and the works of authors who cannot be dismissed or debunked as merely ‘bourgeois’. But it helps too that Foucault had, by this time, been ‘mugged by reality’, and was being cared for in the institution which he had once scoffed at for its habit of confronting its inmates with the ‘truth’ of their condition. It was when confronted with the truth of his condition that Foucault at last grew up. He had gone down with Sartre into the hell where the Other resides. But he had recognized his own otherness too, and returned to the real world in a posture of acceptance. And, reading these later works, I was constantly drawn to the thought that Foucault's belligerent leftism was not a criticism of reality, but a defence against it, a refusal to recognize that, for all its defects, normality is all that we have."

"There are certainly many insights in Foucault's early writings. But the relativist method – which identifies reality with a way of apprehending it – must lead us to doubt that they are hard-won. For this method allows him to jump across to the finishing line of historical enquiry, without running the hard track of empirical enquiry. Consider what would really have to be proved by someone who believed man to be an artefact, and a recent one at that – more recent even than the medieval and renaissance humanists who extolled man's virtues. A proper assessment of Foucault's thought must therefore try to separate its two components: the relativist sleight of hand (which would lead us too simply to dismiss him), and the ‘diagnostic’ analysis of the secret ways of power. It is the second that is interesting, and which is expressed in Foucault's claim that each successive form of ‘knowledge’ is devoted to the creation of a discourse favourable to, and symbolic of, the prevailing forms of domination."

"It is, for instance, pretty suicidal for embattled minorities to embrace Michel Foucault, let alone Jacques Derrida. The mi­nority view was always that power could be undermined by truth [...] Once you read Foucault as saying that truth is sim­ply an effect of power, you've had it. [...] But American de­partments of literature, history and sociology contain large numbers of self-described leftists who have confused radical doubts about objectivity with political radicalism, and are in a mess."

"Foucault revealed the universal truths hidden in societal extremes."

"Foucault's response to attempts such as those of Habermas, Dewey, and Berlin - attempts to build a philosophy around the needs of a democratic society - is to point out the drawbacks of this society, the ways in which it does not allow room for self-creation, for private projects. Like Habermas and Sellars, he accepts Mead's view that the self is a creation of society. Unlike them, he is not prepared to admit that the selves shaped by modern liberal societies are better than the selves earlier societies created. A large part of Foucault's work - the most valuable part, in my view - consists in showing how the patterns of acculturation characteristic of liberal societies have imposed on their members kinds of constraints of which older, premodern societies had not dreamed. He is not, however, willing to see these constraints as compensated for by a decrease in pain, any more than Nietzsche was willing to see the resentfulness of "slave-morality" as compensated for by such a decrease."

"A proper encounter with Foucault's work permanently changes one's understanding of how people are governed in modern society."

"The most serious flaw of Foucault's system is in the area of sex. I view his hurried, compulsive writing as a massive rationalist defense-formation to avoid thinking about (a) woman, (b) nature, (c) emotion, and (d) the sexual body. His attempt to make the body passive property of male society is an evasion of the universal fact so intolerable to him: that we are all born of human mothers. By turning women into ciphers, he miniaturizes and contains them."

"As a philosopher sympathetic to Foucault recently remarked to me, Foucault failed in each of his major inquiries and, in desperation, went further afield from his areas of expertise. The History of Sexuality is a disaster. Page after page is sheer fantasy, unsupported by the ancient or modern historical record. [...] Foucault, like David Letterman, made smirking glibness an art form."

"The truth is that Foucault knew very little about anything before the seventeenth century and, in the modern world, outside France. His familiarity with the literature and art of any period was negligible. His hostility to psychology made him incompetent to deal with sexuality, his own or anybody else's. The elevation of Foucault to guru status by American and British academics is a tale that belongs to the history of cults. [...] The more you know, the less you are impressed by Foucault."

"Try teaching Foucault at a contemporary law school, as I have, and you will quickly find that subversion takes many forms, not all of them congenial to [Judith] Butler and her allies. As a perceptive libertarian student said to me, Why can't I use these ideas to resist the tax structure, or the antidiscrimination laws, or perhaps even to join the militias? Others, less fond of liberty, might engage in the subversive performances of making fun of feminist remarks in class, or ripping down the posters of the lesbian and gay law students' association. These things happen. They are parodic and subversive. Why, then, aren't they daring and good? [...] Well, there are good answers to those questions, but you won't find them in Foucault"

"A utopia of judicial reticence: take away life, but prevent the patient from feeling it; deprive the prisoner of all rights, but do not inflict pain; impose penalties free of all pain. Recourse to psycho-pharmacology and to various physiological ‘disconnectors’, even if it is temporary, is a logical consequence of this ‘non-corporal’ penalty."

"The disappearance of public executions marks therefore the decline of the spectacle; but it also marks a slackening of the hold on the body."

"Instead of insanity eliminating the crime according to the original meaning of article 64,every crime and even every offense now carries within it, as a legitimate suspicion, but also as a right that may be claimed, the hypothesis of insanity, in any case of anomaly. And the sentence that condemns or acquits is not simply a judgement of guily, a legal decision that lays down punishment; it bears within it an assessment of normality and a technical prescription for a possible normalization Today the judge- magistrate or juror0 certainly does more than 'judge'"

"It was an important moment. The old partners of the spectacle of punishment, the body and the blood, gave way. A new character came of the scene, masked. It was the end of a certain kind of tragedy; comedy began, with shadow play, faceless voices, impalpable entities. The apparatus of punitive justice must now bite into this bodiless reality."

"The guillotine takes life almost without touching the body, just as prison deprives of liberty or a fine reduces wealth. It is intended to apply the law not so to a real body capable of feeling pain as to a juridical subject, the possessor, among other rights, of the right to exist it had to have the abstraction of the law itself."

"It is ugly to be punishable, but there is no glory in punishing. Hence the double system of protection that justice has set up between itself and the punishment it imposes."

"Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?"

"[L]'âme, prison du corps."

"We are observing ourselves being observed by the painter, and made visible to his eyes by the same light that enables us to see him. And just as we are about to apprehend ourselves, transcribed by his hand as though in a mirror, we find that we can in fact apprehend nothing of that mirror but its lusterless back. The other side of a psyche."

"The painter is turning his eyes towards us only in so far as we happen to occupy the same position as his subject. We, the spectators, are an additional factor. Though greeted by that gaze, we are also dismissed by it, replaced by that which was always there before we were: the model itself. But, inversely, the painter's gaze, addressed to the void confronting him outside the picture, accepts as many models as there are spectators; in this precise but neutral place, the observer and the observed take part in a ceaseless exchange."

"Between the fine point of the brush and the steely gaze, the scene is about to yield up its volume."

"Absurdity destroys the and of the enumeration by making impossible the in where the things enumerated would be divided up."

"In France at least, the history of science and thought gives pride of place sciences, sciences of the necessary, all close to philosophy: one can observe in their history the almost uninterrupted emergence of truth and pure reason. The other disciplines, however - those, for example, that concern living beings, languages, or economic facts - are considered too tinged with empirical thought, too exposed to the vagaries of chance or imagery to age old traditions and external events, for it to be supposed that their history could be anything other irregular. At most, they are expected to provide evidence of a state of mind, an intellectual fashion, a mixture of archaism and bold conjecture, of intuition and blindness. But what if empirical knowledge, at a given time and in a given culture, did possess a well defined regularity."

"Nietzsche was the first to release the desire to know from the sovereignty of knowledge itself: to re-establish the distance and exteriority that Aristotle cancelled."

"There is hardly a philosophy which has not invoked something like the will or desire to know, the love of truth, etcetera. But, in truth, very few philosophers—apart, perhaps, from Spinoza and Schopenhauer—have accorded it more than a marginal status; as if there was no need for philosophy to say first of all what the name that it bears actually refers to. As if placing at the head of its discourse the desire to know, which it repeats in its name, was enough to justify its own existence and show—at a stroke—that it is necessary and natural: All men desire to know. Who, then, is not a philosopher, and how could philosophy not be the most necessary thing in the world?"