A critical ontology of the present:

Foucault and the task of our times

Arianna Bove

Table of Contents

A Critical Ontology of the Present: “You have no right to despise the

present”
Note to the online reader

Introduction

I. The Anthropological Horizon in Foucault’s Thought

a) Influences on the early Foucault

Thinking Language: Formalism

Writing Histories: the Annales School

Humanism and Anthropology

b) Kant and Foucault.

Part I. Kant’s Critique of the Dogmatic Slumber
Part II. Foucault’s Critique of the Anthropological Slumber

Part III. What is it to Reason? From Sapere Aude to Mutare Aude

II. From Self-affection to Technologies of the Self

a) Practices of Freedom VS. Processes of Liberation

L'hermeneutique du sujet

b) The Political Economy of the Production of Subjectivity

III. Technologies of the Common

Reflections on Postfordism

Concluding Remarks

Appendix:

Thèse complémentaire pour le doctorat ès lettres

Introduction à l'Anthropologie de Kant (Michel Foucault, 1961)

English translation of Michel Foucault’s Thèse complémentaire

Bibliography

Introduction

What is modern philosophy? Perhaps we could respond with an echo:

modern philosophy is the philosophy that is attempting to answer the
question raised so imprudently two centuries ago: Was ist
Aufklärung?[1]

In outlining the contours of his project Michel Foucault refers us to Immanuel

Kant’s answer to the question ‘What is the Enlightenment?’ This text is crucial for
Foucault because it combines transcendental critique with an ethico-political
perspective of cosmopolitan man.

Drawing on Kant’s answer, Foucault tries to capture the particular attitude of the
Enlightenment and posit it as the task of philosophical exercise. This is that
‘critical’ attitude to actualité consisting in a philosophy that interrogates history
with a focus neither on its origin nor its telos, but rather on the question of its
belonging to the present.[2] This situatedness of philosophical thinking is
premised on a view of man as both element and agent of the object of critical
analysis[3] and shifts the task of critique from one of analytics of truth to that of
an ontology of ourselves as diagnosis.[4] The enquiry on the present is an enquiry
of the present day and a search for the difference introduced by the present with
respect to the past.

In classical age the question of the modern was often posed on an axis
with two poles: the ancient and the modern. (…) It was formulated through
the concepts of an authority that one could accept or reject (…) the new
question of modernity has no longitudinal reference to the ancient, but
rather a sagittal relation to its own actuality.[5]

For both Kant and Foucault philosophical exercise entails preliminary thinking for
oneself, sapere aude (Wahlspruch) as an invitation and task of one’s time.
Foucault stresses that any attempt at thinking limits implies the opening to
autonomy as self constitution. As Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari observe:

when Foucault admires Kant for posing the problem of philosophy in

relation not to the eternal but to the Now, he means that the object of
philosophy is not to contemplate the eternal or to reflect History but to
diagnose our actual becomings: a becoming-revolutionary that, according
to Kant himself, is not the same thing as the past, present, or future
revolutions.[6]

The condition of immaturity Kant outlines in his text on the Enlightenment, and
the definition of Enlightenment as the process of exiting such condition are
directly linked to a set of power relations that denote both an excess of authority
and a lack of courage. Foucault notes: ‘From the very first paragraph, Kant notes
that man himself is responsible for his immature status. Thus, it has to be
supposed that he will be able to escape from it only by a change that he himself
will bring about in himself’:[7] a practice of the self on the self, a matter of self
conduct, a technology of the self. Hence, an ontology of the present cannot avoid
questioning how not to be governed like this and at this price (l’art de n’être pas
tellement gouverné). For Foucault, to resurrect the contents of the Enlightenment
would actually be a betrayal to this ethical project, because the latter can only be
enacted in the form of a critical attitude to the present.[8] ‘The point is not to
preserve the remains of the Aufklärung, we must keep in mind and safeguard the
very problem of this event and its meaning (the problem of the historicity of
thinking the universal) as that which is to be thought.’[9]

In Kant’s original answer, the Revolution is primarily what produces an effect

through the change of the collective attitude, social imaginary and conceivable
realm of possibility.[10] The Revolution has an impact as spectacle, as the trigger
of that courage to think of limitation as something to liberate oneself from, rather
than as the framework within which action and thought must be confined and
deemed legitimate: this attitude requires the courage of ‘facing the task of
producing oneself’. For Foucault, a critical and historical ontology of the present
entails a genealogy of what constituted us and made us recognisable as subjects
of what we say, do and think.

It must be considered not as a theory, a doctrine, nor even as a permanent

body of knowledge that is accumulating; it must be conceived as an
attitude, an ethos, a philosophical life in which the critique of what we are
is at one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits imposed on
us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them. The
overcoming of the foundational character of the transcendental
perspective consists in not deducing from the form of what we are what we
can do and know, but in catching from the contingency, that makes us be
what we are, the possibility of not being, not doing and not thinking what
we are, do and think. [11]

Critique must become an épreuve d’évenemèntialisation, a production of events,

the questioning of the actual field of possible experiences and practices, rather
than an analytics of the formal conditions of truth and search for the legitimacy of
their discursive status.

It is in the framework of a critical ontology of the present and

ourselves that we will look at Foucault’s oeuvre. As his work is embedded in the
present and engaged with it in a constant questioning of practices of existence,
we are interested in how Foucault’s notion of biopower, technologies of the self
and aesthetics of existence contribute to our understanding and production of
current practices and technologies of being. In the Lectures delivered at the
Collège de France between 1970 and 1984, Foucault presented his work-in-
progress in a mode of constant engagement with the present, relating it to issues
of actualité. Most of this research did not feature in his publications, but we
believe it essential to understand how the project of a critical and historical
ontology of the present was carried out. For this reason, we will analyse much of
the research presented at the lectures, which will hopefully soon be published in
its entirety in French and English.

In the first chapter of the thesis, we will focus on the notion of a critical
ontology of the present in relation to historiography, linguistic analysis and
anthropology. A brief outline of the theoretical import of Formalism and the
Annales School will help us introduce Foucault’s work on epistemology in relation
to language and history. When asked about his relation to Structuralism, Foucault
replied that Formalism had a greater influence on his thought. We have chosen to
explore this claim in more depth for two main reasons: one is to investigate the
elements at play in Foucault’s conceptualisation in The Archaeology of Knowledge
of a historical ontology of language. The other is that the relation between
Formalism and Structuralism in linguistic analysis is a fertile ground for
developing an analysis of language in its relation to subjectivity today. In this
context we will introduce the interventions on the debate on linguistics of the
Italian philosopher Paolo Virno, who recently interrogated the role of language in
relation to Kant’s philosophy with a particular emphasis on the state of
subjectivity in the present.

Foucault’s critical ontology of the present is also a historical one. The

importance of the theoretical and methodological innovations of the Annales
School for Foucault’s practice of writing histories is often underestimated. We will
briefly discuss these innovations in order to introduce the way in which Foucault
developed his genealogical method in terms of eventalisation, which is a central
element in our analysis of his idea of an ontology of the present.

We will then move onto Foucault’s engagement with anthropology. Firstly,

through his critique of humanism expounded in Maladie mentale et personnalité
and the Introduction to Ludwig Binswanger’s Traum und Existenz, we will analyse
the conceptual development of Foucault’s notion of technologies of the self as
emerging out of a reflection on the role of an anthropology of concrete existence
in relation to a philosophy of being. Secondly, through his critique of finitude, we
will explore Foucault’s engagement with the epistemological and ontological
status of the object of anthropological analysis. In the framework of an
anthropology that takes man as citizen of the world as its point of departure, we
will then dwell on Foucault’s Commentaire to Kant’s Anthropology from a
Pragmatic point of view.

By looking at Foucault’s relation to Kant at length we aim to establish the

theoretical correspondences between the epistemological role of self affection in
Kant’s Critique and Anthropology and Foucault’s political conceptualisation of
technologies of the self. The role of an ontology of the present emerges out of a
reflection on epistemology and ontology in philosophy, and in Foucault’s reading
of the attitude of the Enlightenment we will find the important difference between
aesthetics of existence and analytics of truth. Foucault’s relation to the notion of
rationality and modernity will be analysed against the background of Kant’s
writings on the question.
 In the second chapter of the thesis, we will begin to look into the way in
which a historical ontology of the present was practiced in Foucault’s later work
on the genealogy of technologies of the self, in the context of his differentiation
between philosophy and spirituality and processes of liberation against practices
of freedom, as expounded in the 1982 course L’Herméneutique du sujet. This
course is important because it bridges the changes in technologies of the self –
from care of the self to knowing yourself- from the Hellenistic period to Early
Christianity and sheds light on the notion of aesthetics of existence and
alternative ethics as a positive ontological project. The more explicit theorisation
of technologies of the self will then be related to Foucault’s work on power, the
latter seen in the framework of a study of practices and discourses of power and
resistance. To this aim, we have chosen to look into the 1976 lecture course on “Il
faut défendre la société”, as it brings together a reflection on the historical
political analysis of the war of races with the outline of the emergence of
biopower. This will take us to the work of Giorgio Agamben on biopolitics and the
state of exception, which will aid our assessment of the ontological import of
Foucault’s positive conceptualisation of aesthetics of existence as a technology of
the self, whilst questioning it in the context of our current political framework.

In the third and final chapter, we will turn to our present and the
development of an ontology of ourselves in the framework of biopower, with the
aid of the recent debate on biopolitical production initiated by the thinkers of
Postfordism. First we will discuss the use of Foucault’s writings on disciplinary
power and the welfare state in postfordist analyses of the changing paradigms of
control. The claim that there has been a shift from disciplinary to control society
and the respective changing nature of subjectivity will be analysed through the
writings of Jacques Donzelot, Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt. In outlining the
elements at work in biopolitical production we will look into theories of immaterial
labour in the contributions of Maurizio Lazzarato and Christian Marazzi.

Foucault’s work has been received in very different ways. We have chosen
what we regard as the most constructive interpretations and adoptions of his
contribution for the purpose of our thesis, which draws on many resources in
Italian and French. As we believe that our debates would greatly benefit from
them, our effort has also been one of translation.

Acknowledgements

First of all, I should thank my supervisors, William Outhwaite and Darrow

Schecter, for reading and commenting on the thesis. The thesis has greatly
benefited from consulting the Archive Foucault at the Institut de mémoires de
l’édition contemporaine (IMEC) in Paris . The Biblioteca Nazionale in Rome was also
an important source of material. I could research in France and Italy thanks to an
ERASMUS grant and the ESRC scholarship. I am grateful to those who participated to
the Generation-Online reading and discussion group and made it possible to
experiment in cooperative production, exchange and dissemination of theory.
Special thanks to Alessandro Pandolfi for introducing me to the literature that was to
change the course of my research. I am also grateful to Paul Joey Clark and Thanos
Kastritis for their encouragement. But I am most indebted to Erik Empson, for his
invaluable support and continuous inspiration.

[1] Michel Foucault, ‘What is Enlightenment?’ in The Foucault Reader. London : Penguin, 1984, p. 32, also online at
http://courses.essex.ac.uk/cs/cs101/foucault.htm. Foucault engages with Kant’s answer to this question mainly in four texts, one dated 1978- called
Qu’est-ce que la critique? (translated in Italian as Illuminismo e Critica, Roma: Donzelli Editore, 1997) - the other two are both dated 1984 and
called ‘What is Englightenment?’, one published in The Foucault Reader, the other in Magazine Littéraire, n. 207, the latter is an extract from the
course at Collège de France on 5 January 1983, translated in Italian in Archivio Foucault 3, Milano: Feltrinelli, 1998. Other explicit references to
Kant’s reply to the question appear in Foucault’s introduction to Canguilhem’s The Normal and the Pathological [1978], published as ‘Life:
Experience and Science’ in Essential Works: Aesthetics, London : Penguin, 2000, p. 465.

[2] See Paul Veyne’s ‘Foucault revolutionises History’, in A. I. Davidson (ed.) Foucault and his Interlocutors, Chicago : The University of Chicago
Press, 1997, for an analysis of the philosophy which operates outside the domain of both eternity and historicity. Dreyfus and Rabinow also
interestingly see Foucault’s project as avoiding the problems of both presentism and finalism in their Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics,
Hertfordshire: Harvester Press, 1982, p. 118.

[3] M. Foucault, Dits et écrits IV. Paris : Gallimard, 1994, p. 564-565 (my translation)

[4] ‘History today still designates only the set of conditions, however recent they may be, from which one turns away in order to become, that is to
say, in order to create something new’. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What is Philosophy? London : Verso, 1984, p. 96

[5] M. Foucault, Dits et écrits IV, 1994, p. 681, (my translation)

[6] Deleuze and Guattari. What is Philosophy? 1994, p. 112-113

[7] M. Foucault, ‘What is Enlightenment?’ in Essential Works: Ethics, 2000, p.306

[8] To which we also add Deleuze’s and Guattari’s call for thinking for oneself in their What is Philosophy?, 1994: ‘What is the best way to follow
the great philosophers? Is it to repeat what they say or to do what they did, that is, create concepts for problems that necessarily change?’ p. 28

[9] M. Foucault, Archivio Foucault. Vol. 3, 1998, p. 206 (my translation of: ‘Laissons a leur piété ceux qui veulent qu’on garde vivant et intact
l’héritage de l’ Aufklärung. Cette piété est bien sûr la plus touchante des trahisons. Ce ne sont pas les restes de l’Aufklärung qu’il s’agit de
préserver; c’est la question même de cet événement et de son sens (la question de l’historicité de la pensée de l’universel) qu’il faut maintenir
présent et garder à l’esprit comme ce qui doit être pensé’. M. Foucault, Dits et écrits IV, 1994, p. 687.)

[10] See Kant, ‘The Contest of the Faculties’ in Political Writings, Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1991. Deleuze also recognises in this
passage in Kant the importance of seeing the Revolution in its force as an event. ‘As Kant showed, the concept of revolution exists not in the way
in which revolution is undertaken in a necessarily relative social field but in the “enthusiasm” with which it is thought on an absolute plane of
immanence, like a presentation of the infinite in the here and now, which includes nothing rational or even reasonable. The concept frees
immanence from all the limits still imposed on it by capital (or that it imposed on itself in the form of capital appearing as something transcendent).
However, it is not so much a case of a separation of the spectator from the actor in this enthusiasm as of a distinction within the social action itself
between historical factors and “unhistorical vapour”, between a state of affairs and the event. As concept and as event, revolution is self-referential
or enjoys a self-positing that enables it to be apprehended in an immanent enthusiasm without anything in states of affairs or lived experience being
able to tone it down, not even the disappointments of reason. Revolution is absolute deterritorialization even to the point where this calls for a new
earth, a new people.’ (Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, 1994, p.101)

[11] M. Foucault, ‘What is Enlightenment?’ in The Foucault Reader, 1984, p.319

Humanism and Anthropology.

 It may be part of the destiny of Western philosophy that, since the 19 th
century, something like an anthropology became possible; when I say
‘anthropology’ I am not referring to the particular science called
anthropology, which is the study of cultures exterior to our own; by
‘anthropology’ I mean the strictly philosophical structure responsible for
the fact that the problems of philosophy are now all lodged within the
domain that can be called that of human finitude. If one can no longer
philosophise about anything but man in so far as he is a Homo natura, or
insofar as he is a finite being, to that extent isn’t every philosophy at
bottom an anthropology?[1]

Foucault begins by questioning the role of anthropology in philosophical thinking

and its status with respect to psychology. In his Commentaire of Kant’s
Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, Foucault already sets out a highly
philosophical analysis of Kant’s own difficulties in positioning anthropological
study within an epistemologically coherent system of understanding. His
preoccupation with anthropology and the possibility of such science as well as its
relations to philosophy and psychology are clear from the outset. We are more
familiar with the declaration of the death of man in The Order of Things. However,
in the previous and largely unpublished works one can see the extent to which the
development of a preoccupation with the possibility of alternatives to humanist
man-centred epistemic structures already points towards an attempt at
constituting a positive ontology of concrete existence, in the form of a rendering
of Kant’s anthropological question: ‘What does man make of himself?’.

In 1954 Foucault published Maladie mentale et personnalité and L’Introduction to

the French edition of Ludwig Binswanger’s Traum und Existenz. Maladie mentale
et personnalité aims to show that ‘the root of mental pathology should not be
searched in a speculation on some metapathology, but only in a reflection on man
himself’.[2] In this work, the reflection on man’s being is taken to be the
methodological premise of the definition of mental illness. The attempt at
founding a rigorous science of mental illness is developed through references to
historical materialism. Foucault’s intervention in the debate on alienation and
humanism in this work takes the form of a critique of positivism and determinism,
as well as Freudianism. In the fifth chapter, initially entitled ‘The historical
meaning of alienation’, Foucault sustains that alienation arises out of and is the
product of the interaction of man with his environment, particularly in the context
of the conflictual nature of existing in social relations and the specificity of the
individual’s response to such situation of conflict.[3] More specifically, in the
analysis of alienation, Foucault criticises Freud’s recourse to a past that
reactivates itself in the individual by positing mental illness as a response to a
conflict in the present. As he puts it: ‘Pathology is a diffused defence reaction’[4],
that occurs when the ‘individual cannot master (maîtriser), at the level of his
reactions, the contradictions of his environment, when the psychological dialectic
of the individual cannot recognise itself in the dialectics of the conditions of his
existence’[5]. We can see a reiteration, in his critical interpretation of
psychoanalysis, of the Kantian anthropological preoccupation with what man
makes of himself. Foucault interestingly adopts a sort of ‘transformative method’
familiar to Feuerbachian Marxism, and with all its rhetorical force he applies it
onto Freud and psychoanalysis.[6] He claims that in his reflection on the neurosis
of the war, Freud developed the notion of an opposition between a life instinct,
reminiscent of the old bourgeois optimism of the 19th century, and a death
instinct. Foucault then proceeds to deconstruct this notion by regarding the
opposition as evidence of the contradictions that characterised European society
at the beginning of the century, rather than as an original psychological scenario
to ascribe to man, thereby defining Freudianism as the supreme stage of
subconscious theorisation of capitalism: ‘Freud wanted to explain war, they say;
but it is war that explains this turn in Freudian thought’.[7]

According to Foucault, materialism ought to avoid two potential errors: on the one
hand, the identification of psychological conflict with the existing contradictions of
the environment, which would equate mental with social alienation; on the other
hand, the reduction of each pathology to a malfunctioning of the nervous system,
whose mechanism should in principle be analysed purely from the physiological
point of view[8]. According to Foucault, a materialist standpoint is capable of
recognising the reality and specific dimensions of illness. Therapy ought to aim at
establishing ‘new relations with the environment’ and, like all human sciences,
psychology ought to strive towards the end of human alienation.[9]

In the same period, Foucault also writes the introduction to the work of an
Austrian existentialist psychoanalyst, Ludwig Binswanger.[10] This introduction is
emblematic of a deeper reflection on the status of psychoanalysis with respect to
philosophy, not so much on the status of scientificity of the former, which will be
the core concern of his later Madness and Civilisation, but more particularly on
the relation of the study of man and the ontology of existence. For this reason it is
an important contribution to our understanding of Foucault’s reading of Kant in
the context of his preoccupation with anthropological thought. In his words:

These introductory pages do not intend, as it is paradoxically customary in

prefaces, to follow the path traced by Binswanger in Traum und Existenz.
Perhaps the difficulty of the text might lead one to do so, but it is so
essential to the reflection developed here that it cannot be watered down
 by the zealous advise ad usum delphini, even though the 'psychologist' is
always a non specialist in the field of reflection. The original forms of
thought introduce themselves: their history is the only exegesis they
tolerate, their destiny their only critical form.
However, this is not a history we will attempt to decipher. A later work will
seek to locate existentialist analysis within the development of the
contemporary reflection on man. Today, these introductory remarks have
one objective: to present a form of analysis that is not projected as a
philosophy and does not have the effect of being a psychology; a form of
analysis that reveals itself as being fundamental in relation to concrete,
experimental and objective knowledge; finally, its principle and method are
determined from the outset only by the absolute privilege of the object of
their inquiry: man, or rather, being-man, Menschsein. In this way one can
circumscribe the whole basis of anthropology.[11]

In this work it is already evident that the relationship established between

anthropology and psychology is of crucial importance for Foucault. As we shall see
in the analysis of his Commentaire of Kant’s Anthropology, Foucault takes up and
reiterates Kant’s questioning of the (im-)possibility of rational psychology as a
science. Implicit in this philosophical exegesis is on the one hand the attempt to
question, with Kant, the status of the I as substance, which will be later referred to
as the Cartesian subject, whilst on the other hand to show the fallacies of a
treatment of man’s being as a purely physiological question. As Rudi Visker
comments, ‘psychology can only legitimate its own scientificity by reducing
history to the overcoming of an inertia, which keeps an already original present,
but misrecognized object under the sway of a pre-scientific knowledge’.[12]
Foucault sees Binswanger’s project and its positing of Menschsein as the object of
enquiry as setting itself up against psychological positivism ‘that claims to
exhaust the signifying content of man in the reductive concept of homo natura.’
According to Foucault, Binswanger’s merit is that of reintroducing man’s being in
an ontological reflection on existence.

Clearly such an anthropology can only assert its rights by showing how an
analysis of being-man can be articulated on an analytics of existence: a
problem of foundation that must define, in the latter, the conditions of
possibility of the former; a problem of justification that must bring to light
the proper dimensions and the autochthon meaning of anthropology. One
can provisionally say, whilst open to possible revisions, that being-man
(Menschsein) is the effective and concrete content of what ontology
analyzes as the transcendental structure of Dasein, of being-there.[13]

Foucault here needs to introduce an ontology of man that can account for
concrete existence beyond the physiological, whilst keeping with a method that is
capable of inducing and deriving an ontology from the reality of man’s being in
the world. As we shall later analyse, this is also the core of Kant’s conception in
the anthropological analysis of man as citizen of the world which Foucault will
extensively draw on in reconfiguring the project of philosophical critique within
the worldliness of language exchange.

Referring to anthropology, Foucault writes that ‘its original opposition to a science

of human facts that proceeds following the methods of positive knowledge,
experimental analysis and naturalistic reflection, does not lead to an a priori form
of philosophical speculation. Its research theme is that of the human “fact”, if by
“fact” we do not mean a definite objective part of a natural universe, but the real
content of an existence that lives, experiments itself, recognises itself or loses
itself in a world that is at once the whole of its project and the “element” in which
its reality is given.’[14]

Foucault aims to underline the dynamic element introduced into any ontological
reflection by the anthropological analysis of concrete forms of existence. This is
also what sustains his critical rendering of Kant’s anthropological reflections in
relation to the first Critique. In our view, the question posed by Foucault and Kant
alike is the following: what constitutes the object of an anthropology that avoids
the positivist fallacy of a physiological study of man as well as the rendering of
man as the centripetal force at the centre of all possible knowledge of the world?

Anthropology can therefore be defined as a ‘science of facts’ in so far as it

rigorously develops the existential content of being there. To immediately
reject it because it is neither philosophy nor psychology, nor can it be
defined as science, or speculation, because it does not proceed as a
positive knowledge, nor is it the content of a priori knowledge, means to
ignore the original meaning of its project. It seemed to us worth following,
for an instant, the path of this reflection in order to ascertain whether the
reality of man can only be accessible beyond a distinction between
psychology and philosophy; whether man in its forms of existence
represents the only way to get to man.[15]

In this introduction, Foucault is very explicit on the role of anthropology for an

ontology of man. He sees anthropology, the study of man and its modes of being
in the world, as propedeutic to any reflection on the nature of being and existence
as such. By criticising the a priori separation of anthropology and ontology he is
asserting the primacy of a movement of reflection on the concrete.[16]

Within the contemporary anthropological paradigm, Binswanger’s

procedure seemed to follow the most important lead. It indirectly goes
through the problem of ontology and anthropology, pointing directly
towards concrete existence, its development and historical content.
Starting from there and through the analysis of structures of existence-
individuated existence, which has a proper name and lives a precise
 history- there is a continuous going back and forth from anthropological
forms to ontological conditions of existence and vice versa. For
Binswanger, the borderline that seems too difficult to trace between
anthropological forms and ontological conditions of existence is
continuously overcome by concrete existence, in which the real limit of
Menschsein and of Dasein is evident.[17]

Foucault’s notion of practices of the self will later delineate more clearly the
concern with concrete existence and its role in relation to philosophical reflection.
It is from a historical study of concrete existence and the archival research carried
out on the epistemic configuring role of practices of power relations that
characterises Foucault’s work Les Anormaux.[18] Les Anormaux opens with a
literary overview of ‘dangerous individuals’ in criminal records of the 18 th century.
An impressive accumulation of resources and research material, this work is close
for its irony and exposition to what Foucault worked on with a team of researcher,
Parallel Lives.[19] He often remarks the sub-literary character of the records
whilst underlying their actualité. The records are interesting in themselves: they
are reports of trial processes for charges of murder and minor illegalities
committed by ‘dangerous individuals’: a glimpse at the formation of discursive
practices on ‘perverse adults’, ‘hysterical women’ and ‘masturbating children’.
One of the focuses of the analysis is the way in which state power establishes a
relation of continuity in the application of the law with the medical establishment.
In the reported records judges call upon doctors to certify that the whole
behaviour of a person who committed a crime is to be regarded as dangerous,
thereby justifying the process of confinement from society. The crucial
‘improvement’ in the coordinated operation of the legal and medical apparatus is
that what comes to be under judgement is the whole subjectivity of the person
committing a crime, where by subjectivity we mean an individuated set of
practices of concrete existence.

The idea of dangerousness meant that the individual must be considered

by society at the level of his potentialities, and not at the level of his actions;
not at the level of the actual violations of an actual law, but at the level of
the behavioural potentialities they represented.[20]
Therefore, it is no longer the criminal action to be under the scrutiny of the law,
but a whole set of known social practices and behaviours ascribed to the
‘criminal’ that come to be judged as dangerous and potentially detrimental to
social peace. Under this category of course are listed numerous actions that are
more indicative of the moral, medical and legal discourse of the period than
anything else; such as the role of religion and blasphemy in the social imaginary,
the sexual attitudes promoted and silenced as well as the general standards of
sociability and involvement in the community. In other words, the concrete
practices of man in the world become the object of regulation and government.
 This new knowledge was no longer organised around the question: ‘Was
this done? Who did it?’ It was no longer organised in terms of presence and
absence, of existence and non existence; it was organised around the norm,
in terms of what was normal or not, correct or not, in terms of what one must
do or not do. This examination was the basis of the power, the form of
knowledge-power, that was to give rise not, as in the case of the inquiry, to
the great sciences of observation, but to what we call the ‘human sciences’ –
psychiatry, psychology, sociology.[21]
As we have seen, the earlier preoccupation with the role of concrete existence
here takes as its main focus the genealogical mapping of relations of power that
arise out of the intertwining of medical practices with the legal apparatus. As
Foucault often highlights, the relation of medical and legal practices is crucial to
our understanding of power relations. His studies and genealogies of criminal and
medical knowledge converge on a strong critical stance against received habits
of designating and seek to unravel at the level of the ‘unconscious of knowledge’
the framing of the self-evident, in other words, the workings of morality both at
the level of interiorised practices and the habitual re-enactment of domination
intrinsic to the ontological repetition of being. With reference to the identification
of hysteria and hypochondria as mental diseases, which at a certain point
sanctions the mode in which madness arises in the moment when ‘the mind
becomes blind through the very excess of sensibility’,[22] Foucault points out
how madness acquires ‘a new content of guilt, a moral sanction of just
punishment’.[23]

Instead of making blindness the condition of possibility for all the

manifestations of madness, it describes blindness, the blindness of madness,
as the psychological effect of a moral fault. And thereby compromises what
had been essential in the experience of unreason. What had been blindness
would become unconsciousness, what had been error would become fault,
and everything in madness that designated the paradoxical manifestation of
non-being would become the natural punishment of a moral evil. In short,
the whole vertical hierarchy which constituted the structure of classical
madness, from the cycle of material causes to the transcendence of delirium,
would now collapse and spread over the surface of a domain which
psychology and morality would soon occupy together and contest with each
other. The ‘scientific psychiatry’ of the 19th century became possible. It was
in these ‘diseases of the nerves’ and in these ‘hysterias’, which would soon
provoke its irony, that this psychiatry took its origin.[24]

Foucault’s task goes beyond proving the unscientificity of any given science.[25]
In Genealogy as Critique, Rudi Visker makes a point of showing Foucault’s
genealogy to be incomplete from the point of view of radical critique, ‘If we were
able to explain what was the decisive motive for psychology to develop -on more
than merely random grounds- precisely this particular self-understanding as a
science, then he might possess the means to shield a potential critique of that
self-understanding from the charge of arbitrariness.’
 For Visker, the idea that the emergence of the historical reality of madness
represents a degeneration or alienation provides a counterpoint to a basically
genealogical analysis of an éclairage en retour.[26] As he puts it: ‘Historically, the
object which psychology claims to discover not only arose conjointly with this
discovery but this discovery also functions as a concealment of the real object, la
folie; it is based on a de facto alienation which is avoidable de jure: mental illness
is alienated madness.’

We do not think this reading fully captures Foucault’s opposition to essentializing

trends in anthropology. The accent posed on the effects of truth is more geared to
point towards a critique of the philosophy of origins or consciousness, as well as the
formalising tendencies of the human sciences, which, as we shall later see, is fully
explicated in his treatment of modern anthropology in the Commentaire. We read
Foucault’s genealogies as the realisation of an ambition expressed in the
Introduction to Binswanger’s Traum und Existenz, namely one that aims to rethink
anthropology and ontology through a reflection on concrete forms of life, and their
articulation, possibilities and limits in different historical moments, yet with an
objective that is that of striking at the heart of the present and questioning the
existing frontiers of possible knowledge and transformation. To read Foucault’s work
outside of the demands of an ontology of the present, in search for an analytics of
truth, would no doubt diminish its import and freeze it in a-temporal theoretical
constraints that might leave us with a whole body of historical data and theoretical
opinions of little internal autonomous coherence.

[1] M. Foucault, ‘Philosophy and psychology’, interview by A. Badiou, [1965] in Essential Works: Aesthetics. 2000, p. 250

[2] M. Foucault, Maladie mentale et personnalité, Paris: PUF, coll. «Initiation philosophique», 1954, p. 2

[3] Ibid., p. 75, p. 82-83. Karl Jasper’s and Ludwig Binswanger’s existentialist psychoanalyses are an important influence on Foucault’s work at
this stage.

[4] Ibid., p. 102

[5] Ibidem

[6] ‘Psychology can never tell the truth about madness because it is madness that holds the truth of psychology’. ‘Madness, in the unfolding of its
historical reality, makes possible, at a particular moment, a knowledge of alienation in a style of positivity which defines it as mental illness’. M.
Foucault, Madness and Civilisation. [1961] London : Routledge Classics, 2001

[7] M. Foucault, Maladie mentale et personnalité, 1954, p. 87. See also Madness and Civilisation, 2001, p.209: ‘In the second half of the 18 th
century, madness was no longer recognised in what brings man closer to an immemorial fall or an indefinitely present animality; it was, on the
contrary, situated in those distances man takes in regard to himself, to his world, to all that is offered by the immediacy of nature; madness became
possible in that milieu where man’s relations with his feelings, with time, with others, are altered; madness was possible because of everything
which, in man’s life and development, is a break with the immediate. Madness was no longer of the order of Nature or of the Fall, but of a new
order, in which men began to have a presentiment of history, and where there formed, in an obscure originating relationship, the ‘alienation’ of the
physicians and the ‘alienation’ of the philosophers – two configurations in which man in any case corrupts his truth, but between which the
nineteenth century, after Hegel, soon lost all trace of resemblance’.

[8] M. Foucault, Maladie mentale et personnalité, 1954, p.106

[9] ‘S’il est vrai que, comme toute science de l’homme, elle doit avoir pour but de le désaliéner’, ibid., p. 110

[10] Ludwig Binswanger’s Le rêve et l’existence, introduced by Foucault, was published in 1954. The French version of the Introduction is now in
M. Foucault, Dits et écrits, Volume I, Paris : Gallimard, 1994, p. 65-119. As this work has not been translated into English, the quotes are taken
from the Italian edition published as Il Sogno, Roma: Raffaello Cortina Editore, 2003. All citations are taken from my translation of Part I of the
Introduction.

[11] M. Foucault, Il Sogno, 2003, p. 1

[12] Rudi Visker, Genealogy as Critique, London: Verso, 1995, p. 120

[13] M. Foucault, Il Sogno, 2003, p. 2

[14] Ibidem

[15] Ibid., p. 3

[16] Ibid., p. 75

[17] Ibid., p. 4

[18] Les Anormaux is the collection of the course of lectures delivered to the Collège de France between 1974 and 1975. Published in Italian by
Feltrinelli and in French by Gallimard. I refer to the Italian edition published as Gli anormali, Milano: Feltrinelli, 2000

[19] The Introduction to Parallel lives was recently published in Essential Works: Power, London : Penguin Books, 2002, under the title ‘Lives of
infamous men’ [1977], p.157-175

[20] See M. Foucault, ‘Truth and juridical forms’ [1973], in Essential Works: Power, 2002, p. 57. Today we witness the introduction of a new
coordinating agent of governing predictability and pre-emptive criminalisation: the media. Recent campaigns memorial of witchcraft practices
against dangerous individuals, be it paedophiles, terrorists, hooligans or protesters, have sought to introduce a similar notion of profiling into the
collective imaginary thereby often successfully generating effective practices of social self-regulation based on the mediatic reproduction of a state
of permanent fear.

[21] Ibid. p. 59

[22] M. Foucault, Madness and Civilisation, 2001, p.150

[23] Ibidem

[24] Ibidem. Foucault often resorts to the notion of war and contested spaces when describing the emergence of or change in the epistemic
configuration of a period. To this contest between morality and psychology described in Madness and Civilisation, we might add the opposition
between the historical-political discourse and that of sovereignty (or Germanic and Roman law) outlined in ‘Il faut défendre la société’; the
struggle between disciplinary and juridical power analysed in Discipline and Punish [1975]; the opposition between phenomenology and
hermeneutics we glimpse in The Order of Things. The war paradigm is a productive force throughout his work and we will later argue a similar
outlook when looking at the notion of antagonism in Antonio Negri’s analysis of capital.

[25] M. Foucault, Foucault Live, 1996, p.198

[26] This argument is interestingly analysed by Rudi Visker in Genealogy as Critique, 1995

Kant and Foucault

Part I: Kant’s critique of the dogmatic slumber.

As Foucault tried to critique the anthropological slumber of his times, which he

ascribes to a certain form of neo-Kantianism that poses man and finitude at the
centre as well as the margins of all positivities of knowledge, Kant was engaged in
a monumental attempt at providing an alternative mode of thinking to that which
suffered from dogmatism in his time, i.e. the philosophy of substance. Yet,
Foucault recognises in Kant the potential for questioning the anthropological
slumber he sets out to critique. In fact, Foucault’s critique of the subject shares in
the language and conceptual elements of Kant’s critique of René Descartes. It is
in this tension that we would like to insert our reflections on the meaning of
anthropology today. To accomplish this task it will be necessary to look into Kant’s
Copernican revolution in some detail, for we believe that Kant’s conceptual
categories will lie in the background of a large part of Foucault’s work.

[...]

When Foucault talks of aesthetics of existence, we cannot help reading into it a

recuperation of the role of sensation and the body in the problem of knowledge.[1]
The main issue for our purposes for now is to register the importance of a notion of
experience that in Foucault is essentially transformative rather than logical, (we will
dwell on the importance of this in Part II when exploring his genealogical
reconstruction of the separation between philosophy and spirituality).

[...]

The dialectics shows that human knowledge is limited by experience, but also that
its natural tendency to move beyond it cannot be stopped. The insistence on the
necessity of being vigilant against these tendencies will be interpreted by Foucault
as an awareness of the precarious equilibrium on which the system of knowledge is
built in Kant, being as it is dependent on faculties of relating that can easily
deceive.

However, for Kant, there is a logic to the error man commits when going beyond
experience, and in fact, the last section of the Critique is devoted to the
examination of these errors and to ways to discipline the excesses of reason.
Hence, dialectics for Kant includes both the study and critique of transcendental
illusions. For Foucault this element of Kant’s philosophy posits finitude as the
basis of epistemological activity. As he puts it:

When Descartes says: philosophy is sufficient to itself only for knowledge, and
Kant completes by saying: if knowledge has limits, they are all comprised in the
structure of the knowing subject - in other words, in the very thing that permits
knowledge - the link between accessing truth and the exigency of a
transformation of the subject and its being by itself is definitely broken.[2]

However, the view of Reason as structurally tending towards illusion often comes
close in definition to Foucault’s notion and study of the rationalité of given
historical periods that structurally determines their grille of intelligibility. Arguably,
Foucault critically transposes the problems identified by Kant in the activity of the
knowing subject onto a plane of exteriority where the determining role of Time
and modes of self affection reappear in the context of a critique of the alleged
autonomy of epistemology from ontology.

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[1] Another thinker who has dwelled on the role of aesthetics in the present is Antonio Negri in
Fabbriche del Soggetto, Bimestrale di politica e cultura, 1987. For Negri, a transcendental aesthetics
today is neglected in favour of an analytics of a constitutive power and a negative dialectics of crisis and
illusion. ‘For Benjamin and Adorno, Bloch and Lukács, the feeling of crisis was an exasperated
declaration of impotence. But if human freedom is the foundation, knowledge cannot but present itself as
ethics and constitution. […] How could the ground of our philosophical culture – the dialectics of German
idealism- repeat the atrocious unfolding of the Dialektik der Aufklärung? Why was the immediacy of a
new and powerful transcendental aesthetics, rather than moved towards the sphere of the imagination,
why was it subsumed instead to the mediation of a transcendental analytics and to such artificial prison of
the desire for constitution?’, p. 31 (my translation). Negri inserts his recuperation of a transcendental
aesthetics in a vehement critique of two trends which he accuses of indifference to the real. For Negri, ‘an
analytical sphere of knowledge that has turned into the abstract realm of communication is parallel to a
mode of production that is increasingly reliant on communication and information, whilst remaining self-
referential and tautological.’, ibid., p. 44

[2] M. Foucault, Herméneutique du sujet, [1982] Paris : Gallimard, 2001. p. 27.

Part III. What is it to reason? From sapere aude to mutare aude

We have argued that after Kant modernity ceases to have a relation with the past
in counter posing terms thus ceasing the classical dispute between ancients and
modern. The present as modernity begins to relate to itself. Philosophical exercise
becomes preliminarily determined by the choice to think for oneself, sapere aude,
as an invitation to belong to one’s own time and actualité. Minority is defined by
Kant as a situation of authority whereby one is guided in one’s thoughts by
someone else. The exit from this kind of minority requires a moral-political
attitude precisely because it entails a questioning of authority and its rejection.
Foucault’s association of critique with ‘the art of not being governed, like this and
at this price’ (l’art de n’être pas tellement gouverné) aims to capture the Kantian
motto.

Kant’s sapere aude is a call to dare not to be governed in the usage of reason,
when this is public, when one speaks as a world citizen. This public use of reason
is the cosmic[1] use of reason, which Kant distinguished from the scholastic,[2]
and it is related to wisdom rather than functional ability.

The mightiest revolution coming from inside of man is his departure from his self-
incurred tutelage. Instead of letting others think for him, while he was merely
imitating or allowing himself to be guided by others, he now dares to proceed,
though still shakily, with his own feet upon the ground of experience.[3]

Foucault recuperates the notion of thinking for oneself and shows how this is
inextricably linked to a practical modification in one’s relation to oneself,
consisting in se déprendre de soi-même.

To detach oneself from oneself is an activity carried out through the very process
of reasoning. In this it is close to Kant’s notion of critique in so far as it aims at
investigating the frontiers of the division between the knowable from the
unknowable.

Freedom is never ethics if it conceives of itself as the effect of the elimination of

codes and dislocation of rules: this is why the distinction between processes of
liberation and practices of freedom acquires an important significance. The ethical
dimension is encountered only in the practice of the problematisation of freedom
and in the constant exercise of giving shape and form to one’s existence, of
making it a work of art, as the invitation to an aesthetics of existence suggests.

Foucault’s analysis of disciplinary power has been compared to Weber’s

description of the mechanisms of domination at play in capitalist rationality.[4]
The main point of difference Foucault claims with respect to Weber is that he is
not working through ideal types, nor writing a history of rationalisation per se,
with any ‘anthropological’ invariable.[5] Foucault’s genealogies take rationalities
as the operative framework of discursive practices.

No given form of rationality is actually reason. […] I do not speak of the

point at which reason became instrumental. At present, for example, I am
studying the problem of techniques of the self in Greek and Roman
antiquity; how man, human life, and the self were all objects of a certain
number of tekhnai that, with their exacting rationality, could well be
compared to any technique of production. [6]

But let us look into Kant’s notion of Reason. Kant recognises reason in its generic
connotation as the knowing faculty; however, he also provides it with a specific
meaning in the dialectic, which will become very popular during Romanticism. For
Kant, reason is both a logical and a transcendental faculty. As a logical faculty, it
produces so-called mediated conclusions through abstractions; as a
transcendental faculty, it creates conceptions and contains a priori cognitions
whose object cannot be given empirically.

The transcendental concept of reason is, therefore, none other than the
concept of the totality of the conditions for any given conditioned. Now
since it is the unconditioned alone which makes possible the totality of
conditions and, conversely, the totality of conditions is always itself
unconditioned, a pure concept of reason can in general be explained by
the concept of the unconditioned, conceived as containing a ground of the
synthesis of the conditioned.[7]

For Kant, reason is different from understanding in this respect: ‘In the first part of
our transcendental logic, we treated the understanding as being the faculty of
rules; reason we shall here distinguish from understanding by entitling it the
faculty of principles.’[8] Understanding cannot supply synthetic cognitions from
conceptions, in other words it cannot produce principles. Principles for Kant are a
priori cognitions, like mathematical axioms (there can be only one straight line
between two points). Kant ascribes them a purely regulative, rather than
constitutive function. ‘Knowledge from principles is, therefore, that knowledge
alone in which I apprehend the particular in the universal through concepts.’[9]

So whilst the understanding operates by linking its structures to a given content,

Reason, in its logical and pure use, operates independently of experience.

Understanding may be regarded as a faculty which secures the unity of

appearances by means of rules, and reason as being the faculty which
secures the unity of the rules of understanding under principles.
Accordingly, reason never applies itself directly to experience or to any
object, but to understanding, in order to give to the manifold knowledge of
the latter an a priori unity by means of concepts, a unity which may be
called the unity of reason, and which is quite different in kind from any
unity that can be accomplished by the understanding.[10]

This separation of reason from the realm of experience is of interest to our

exploration of Foucault’s notion of rationalité. Understanding operates through
judgement, whilst reason through syllogism. Whilst synthetic judgements always
entail an element of intuition, syllogism works on the basis of pure concepts and
deduces through mediation the particular from pure principles. The transcendental
dialectic is developed according to a system of transcendental ideas. In the
Commentaire, we find a repeated reference to the role of Geist in the Anthropology,
for Foucault is there attempting to situate the function of such a principle in the
context of a pragmatic investigation.[11] In the Anthropology Kant uses the notion
of Geist as the invigorating principle of Gemüt that moves through ideas.

An idea for Kant is more than an idea. Kant’s point against dismissals, for
instance, of an idea of the absolute totality of all phenomena - which, due to its
irrepresentability, remains an unsolvable problem - is that in the practical use of
reason such an idea has an enormous importance in its regulative function. ‘The
practice or execution of an idea is always limited and defective, but nevertheless
within indeterminable boundaries, consequently always under the influence of the
conception of an absolute perfection’. Thus, despite having no relation to or
correspondence in the concrete [‘the idea can never be completely and
adequately presented in concreto’], an idea is anything but superfluous.[12] Just
as categories were pure conceptions of the understanding, transcendental ideas
are pure conceptions of Reason.[13] Foucault will undermine this in his
Commentaire, for he ascribes to ideas a role in the concrete that goes beyond the
regulative function, or rather, he will point to how this function effectively
operates in the concrete.

However, ideas for Kant are pure absolute ‘forms’ of the structural needs of
Reason: as sensibility had two a priori forms or structures (space/time), and
understanding had twelve categories, so Reason is divided into a tripartite system
of transcendental ideas.

Kant seems so content with his system that he writes that the progression
between one transcendental idea to the next is ‘so natural that it seems to
resemble the logical advance of reason from premises to conclusion’…[14]

The exercise of Reason in Kant functions as a regulative activity, what makes one
think what he does. However, what characterises Foucault’s early works on
madness is that this notion is also taken to signify the thought of transgression
that can inhabit the fragile space between madness and art, or practices of
freedom in aesthetics of existence. To reason is to think the realm of the possible,
and thus also the impossible, Foucault clarifies that through reasoning on the
limits imposed on thinking and acting today what is at stake is not only
description but the theoretical enactment of a counter-practice of subjectivation.
In an implicit critique to modern forms of Weberianism, he says: ‘I don’t believe
one can speak of an intrinsic notion of ‘rationalisation’ without on the one hand
positing an absolute value inherent in reason, and on the other taking the risk of
applying the term empirically in a completely arbitrary way.’[15]
Foucault claims that regimes of practices do not exist without a specific regime of
rationality, with its codification and prescriptions - establishing how it forms an
ensemble of rules, procedures, and relations of means to ends - and true and false
formulations – through which a domain of objects is determined that makes it
possible to articulate true or false propositions.

The study of rationalities for Foucault consists in looking at the interconnections

made between codes that rule over ways of doing things – establishing for
instance how people are to be graded, examined and classified - and the
production of true discourses that serve as a basis and justification, through
reasons and principles, of these ways of doing things.[16] In this, he is both taking
up the regulative function of Ideas in the concrete as well as critiquing the
paralogisms that produce and reproduce them.

Such study is geared towards the creation of possibilities for effective

transformative practices. Foucault’s definition of the aesthetics of existence is in
this respect important for it points to the interconnections of practices of
transformation, knowledge and production.
 Aesthetics of existence and déprise de soi.

For me intellectual work is related to what you could call aestheticism, meaning
transforming yourself. […] I know very well that knowledge can do nothing for
transforming the world. […] But I know that knowledge can transform us, that
truth is not only a way of deciphering the world (and maybe what we call truth
does not decipher anything), but that if I know the truth I will be changed.[18]

We have already mentioned that aesthetics is for Foucault the practice of

transforming oneself. He refers to the Ancients to explain the importance of
aesthetics as an epistemological activity. The study of different practices and
theorisations of the idea of the self, from care to hermeneutics, are shown to
highlight the role of Reason as a universal and regulative principle in philosophy.

The kind of attention that the Stoics wanted people to have towards themselves,
towards the conformity between what they had to do and what they had done,
starts a new kind of relationship to oneself as a permanent attention but the
problem was not at all to decide what people really were. What they were was not
important; the problem was whether the things they had been doing was
conforming to the law. A new relationship becomes important in Christianity:
people started to ask and question the ideas and whether in the things they have
been doing they could recognize what the reality of themselves was: the real
degree of purity of their soul, since the problem of Christianity is to attain a
degree of purity to attain salvation, whilst the relation between purity and
salvation cannot be found in the Stoics where on the contrary you have a problem
of conformity and perfection in this world.[19]

Foucault claims that reason comes to supplant the aesthetics of existence with
the Stoics and that this is relevant for understanding ethics as a practice of
subjectivation.[20] In fact it is the study of the role of reason in the formation of
community and practices of self government that interests us in relation to the
hermeneutics of the self. Thus when he mentions aesthetics of existence, he
refers to the practices of self transformation that can be thought of in a
determinate set of power relations. The accent is on self transformation because
Foucault never claims that power relations can be eliminated: what he calls for is
the reduction ad minimum of government on and by others. It is a particular
political technology that he is criticising, that which subjects and subjugates other
people excessively, outside of the dualistic schema of positive and negative
freedom, for freedom is nothing but the practice of self government. An aesthetic
of existence only has value when inserted within a reflection on biopower and
biopolitics and when it explicitly avoids turning into cults of the self and modern
forms of dandyism. In the following section, we will investigate how Foucault
warned us against them precisely with recourse to the history of practices of self
transformation in their relation to truth and politics. We have already anticipated
that the reflection on aesthetics in Foucault is in our view related to the Kantian
system in so far as it addresses the faculty of perception and its structures albeit
from a social and historical point of view. This is why we would like to look at
Foucault’s work on the history of sexuality as an intervention in the present
through the 1982 set of lectures, for they explicitly point to the role of aesthetics
and transformation in modern philosophy.

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[1] Cosmic knowledge is a science of the relation of each knowledge with the essential aims of human reason. Philosophy, in the cosmic notion, is a
doctrine of wisdom. The cosmic philosopher is (primarily) the legislator of reason. For Kant, an authentic philosopher indicates the ultimate aims of
human reason, self legislation and self government. ‘By a cosmical conception I mean one in which all men necessarily take an interest; the aim of a
science must accordingly be determined according to scholastic [or partial] conceptions, if it is regarded merely as a means to certain arbitrarily
proposed ends.’ I. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 2003, p. 657, B866

[2] For Kant, scholastic knowledge is science that only aims at the systematic unity of its knowledge. Philosophy, in the scholastic perspective, is a
doctrine of ability. The scholastic philosopher is a technician of reason, who aims to speculative knowledge and provides rules for its possible usage.

[3] I. Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, 1996, p. 129

[4] Arpad Szakolczai, Max Weber and Michel Foucault: Parallel Life-Works. London : Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought, 8.
Routledge, 1998. This book is a somewhat existentialist attempt at biographising theories. Half biographical, half theoretical, the comparison
between Weber and Foucault remains unconvincing. For a more Nietzschean reading of the discourse on genealogies of reason, see also David
Owen, Maturity and Modernity: Nietzsche, Weber, Foucault and the Ambivalence of Reason. London : Routledge, 1994

[5]M. Foucault, ‘Questions of method’ in G. Burchell (ed.), The Foucault effect: Studies in Governmentality, Hertfordshire: Harvester Press, 1991,
p.79

[6] M. Foucault, ‘Structuralism and Post-structuralism’ in Essential Works: Aesthetics, 2000, p. 442

[7] I. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 2003, p. 316, B379

[8] Ibid. p. 301, B356. The difference drawn by Kant between Reason (Vernunft) and Understanding (Verstand) will be crucial for philosophy and
human sciences. Hegel praises Kant for this distinction, whilst criticising his idea of the functions of Reason. In fact, we might say retrospectively
and adopting the language of the Romantics that understanding was to concern itself with finitude as much as reason was with the infinite.

[9] Ibid. p. 301, B357

[10] Ibid. p. 303, B359

[11] M. Foucault, Commentaire, 1961, p. 10: ‘The presence of the Geist, and with it, of this dimension of the liberty and of the totality that
transcends the Gemüt, is such that there can be no truthful anthropology that is not pragmatic, each fact is then taken within the open system of
Können and of Sollen. And Kant finds no reason to write of any other [system]. Within these conditions, doesn’t the Geist deal with this enigmatic
‘nature of our reason’ and then with the question of the Dialectics and of the Methodology of Pure Reason? This is the disconcerting notion that
seems to suddenly refer the Critique, once reached its apex, towards an empirical region, towards a domain of facts where man will be doomed to a
very original passivity [longe]; will be given all of a sudden to the transcendental; and the conditions of experience will be related finally to the
primary inertia of a Nature. But does this ‘nature of reason’ here play the same role as the nature of human understanding in Hume: of primary
explication and final reduction?’

[12] It is difficult to establish how Kant read Plato, since it wasn’t until after 1800 that Schleiermacher launched an edition of the dialogues, but he
does refer to Plato’s ideas, albeit in a confusing manner. In fact, whilst he claims to take up Plato’s theorisation of ideas in order to complement it,
Kant’s ideas are very different from Plato’s. In the latter, ideas belong to the world of the hyperphysical and are ‘beyond’ reason, whilst Kant seems
to imply that ideas emanate from Reason and are its absolute paradigms.

[13] Kant summarises it very clearly in this passage: ‘The genus is representation in general (representatio). Subordinate to it stands
representation with consciousness (perceptio). A perception which relates solely to the subject as the modification of its state is sensation
(sensatio), an objective perception is knowledge (cognitio). This is either intuition or concept (intuitus vel conceptus). The former relates
immediately to the object and is single, the latter refers to it mediately by means of a feature which several things may have in common. The
concept is either an empirical or a pure concept. The pure concept, in so far as it has its origin in the understanding alone (not in the pure image of
sensibility), is called a notion. A concept formed from notions and transcending the possibility of experience is an idea or concept of reason.
Anyone who has familiarised himself with these distinctions must find it intolerable to hear the representation of the colour, red, called an idea. It
ought not to even be called a concept of understanding, a notion’. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 2003, p. 314, B376-B377

[14] Ibid. p. 325, B395

[15] M. Foucault, ‘Questions of method’ in G. Burchell (ed.), The Foucault effect: Studies in Governmentality, 1991, p.79

[16] Ibid. p.163

[17] M. Foucault, 'On the genealogy of ethics: An overview of work in progress'. In Paul Rabinow (ed.) The Foucault Reader. 1984, p. 350

[18] M. Foucault, ‘An interview with Stephen Riggins’, in Essential Works: Ethics. 2000, p. 131

[19] M. Foucault, ‘Technologies of the self’, AudioFiles Transcripts of Berkeley Lectures, 1983: for a transcription visit http://www.generation-
online.org/p/fpfoucault4.htm

[20] M. Foucault, ‘On the genealogy of ethics’, in Essential Works: Aesthetics. 2000, p. 264-68

II. From self-affection to technologies of the self

a) Practices of Freedom VS. Processes of Liberation

It is very common for the Left today to concern itself with what are seen as
liberation struggles, resistance to and refusal of domination.[1] Foucault lived
through the heated politics of the 1960’s and witnessed the enormous
significance of discourses of liberation on the Left, both in the anti-colonialist
struggles, the Western ambivalence towards mass production/mass consumption
and the general anti-authoritarian discourse prevailing at the time. Foucault
recognised the power of these movements but also addressed the problem of
‘reconstitution’, the question of a positive ontology of ourselves.

The problem of our day is not to try to liberate the individual from the state
and its institutions, but to liberate us both from the state and from the
type of individualisation which is linked to the state. We have to promote
new forms of subjectivity through the refusal of this kind of individuality
that has been imposed on us for several centuries.[2]

Foucault’s enquiry into the practices of the self is one into the modes of
subjectivity that differently posited the question of self-transformation in relation
to self-knowledge and truth-telling. These studies do not seem to be ‘immediately’
politicised, but we see their import as profoundly political, both in how Foucault
analyses them and in the way we can read them today. Foucault’s preoccupation
with ‘ethics’ emerges in the 1980’s. After writing the first volume of the History of
Sexuality - a tremendously political intervention on the issues of the anti-
authoritarian movements - he turned to the ‘self’ as a category to be analysed
and scrutinised closely. The reasons for this are outlined in the essay ‘The Subject
and Power’, but a close analysis of the texts on the care of the self highlights a
relation of internal dependency of the notion of the self on earlier notions of man
(in the Anthropology) and subject (in his writings on Power). In fact what is
underlined throughout his writings on the matter is a notion of self/man/subject as
a practice in concrete existence.

What was theorised as man in the early writings on anthropology and psychology
is the category of an epistemological paralogisms that underlies practices of
government. The concern with self-government and autonomy expressed in the
analysis of Kant recurs in the latest writings in the form of an attempt at
delineating the task of philosophical exercise. Today we can read his
preoccupation with ethics as a monitoring against the politicisation of identity
which had occurred, retrospectively, in a form that, in his words, ‘we shouldn’t be
proud of’.[3] In fact, identity politics turns to the deciphering of the self in the
form of feelings and interiority, a direct consequence of the explosion of
psychoanalytic categories onto mass culture. Foucault’s struggle against the
philosophy of interiority both in terms of the founding of epistemology and
anthropology and in relation to the exercise of power is here translated into an
attack on a certain mode of conceiving of self-transformation as the by-product of
a search for the truth about oneself. We believe Foucault’s work on the
hermeneutics of the self and practices of self-knowledge can fruitfully be inscribed
in the wider context of a critique of the politics of identity and its naivety in
relation to technologies of self-management and interiorisation of power relation
propelled by the innovation of techniques of control. As he asserts:

I think something is important in the fact that in our society nowadays we

know well that for centuries our morals have been linked with religion as
well as civil laws and the juridical organisation. Morals took the form of a
kind of juridical structure; think of Kant, you know that ethics has been
related to science, medicine and psychology. I think these great
references: to religion, law and science, have now worn out. We know well
that we need an ethics and we cannot ask religion, science or the law to
give us this ethics. We have an example in Greco-Roman society where a
great ethics existed without these three references. The problem is not to
come back to this ancient age but we know that it is possible to research
into past ethics to build a new ethics and give a place to what has been
called the ethical imagination without any reference to religion, law and
science. That is why I think this analysis of Greco-Roman ethics as an
aesthetics of existence is interesting.[4]

The emphasis on practices of freedom rather than processes of liberation is

crucial in defining the positive import of his work outside of the contours of
negative criticism and defensive postures with respect to power and is an apt
continuation of Foucault’s deconstruction of the repressive hypothesis. It also
represents a consistent application of his idea that there is an element of freedom
in all power relations that meets our concern for what is not immediately political
or addresses itself to Power as repression but rather lives in the interstices of the
power-resistance symmetry, a practice of existence that we will later look into by
drawing on the notions of refusal and exodus.

The categories of ethical discourse

One of Foucault’s priorities in this project is to analyse the category of pleasure.
He ascribes the overemphasis on desire to a progressive scientisation of the
ethical discourse that derives directly from an idea of the subject as practised in
early Christianity and will later culminate into the psychoanalytical category of
the Ego. This is the subject that has a particular relation to truth and the practice
of the self in terms of self-negation and self-deciphering. It is crucial for Foucault
to problematise the disappearance of pleasure from philosophical discourse, and
we interpret this move as a reinstatement of his criticism of the repressive
hypothesis, as well as a formulation of the constitutive aspect of freedom within
power relation as opposed to the dwelling on processes of liberation from
oppression and those relations. In fact, in recognising that power can only
operate on the terrain of freedom, those practices are crucial for our
understanding of the forms of subjectivation as well as the possibility of self
mastery intrinsic to these power relations themselves.

I think we have to get rid of this idea of an analytical or necessary link

between ethics and other social or economic or political structures.[5]

Through the distinction between practices of freedom and processes of liberation

Foucault explains best that the study of ethics is really an attempt at delineating
the contours of this realm of freedom for the subject involved in power relations,
and the possibilities within it to constitute himself autonomously, in the form of a
relationship to oneself and a certain attention to oneself. The latter has four
interrelated aspects, Foucault calls them respectively: ethical substance
[substance éthique], mode of subjectivation [mode d’assujettissement], self-
forming activity and telos [téléologie].

For Foucault, the idea of technologies of the self falls into the second aspect:
mode d’assujettissement. Why? Could it not relate to ethical substance, self
forming activity or telos? By mode of subjectivation Foucault aims to expose the
necessarily double aspect of technologies of the self: on the one hand, there is
something we might call force which establishes a priori the position of one
subject objectifying the other; on the other hand, ruling out physical coercion from
the concept of power relations, there is a space for breaking this establishment
which constitutes the subject matter of his genealogical study of conduct. We will
see how in the study of Antiquity and Hellenic philosophy in particular, Foucault
seems to run through three possible questions that emerged in the practices of
the self. Know yourself, care for yourself and finally confess (tell the truth about)
yourself. All these three modes, that respectively related to Plato, the Stoics and
Christianity, equally imply a relation of power where the mode of subjectivation
requires the active participation of the object of transformation: a simultaneous
subscribing to and making of a technology. Thus, whether through the appeal to
a need for proximity to Truth, being part of a higher Rational order, or as a
preparatory process of self-purification before the encounter with God, all modes
entail the interiorisation of power relations. Technologies of the self develop on
the realm left open by the relation between the freedom of the object of a specific
ethical discourse with the discourse itself.

Ethics and morality

As we have seen, the birth of homo criticus gave rise to a whole range of
disciplines that took as their aim to analyse the subject in given societies and
historical periods. Sociological and historical traditions influenced by
psychoanalysis employed a hermeneutics of desire and focused on the restrictions
placed on the subject by moral codes and rules.

In this sense, they primarily conceived of morality as potential for conflict

between the subject’s desires and the limitations imposed upon them and,
through an analysis of moral behaviours, studied the way in which the subject’s
actions are consistent with moral rules of a given period. Historical studies of
ideology would investigate different sets of moral codes and the institutional
conveyers and policing of these codes, the ways in which they are imposed on the
subject, whilst regarding the subject as partially constituted by and operative in
this or that moral discourse, possibly a bearer of these rules of conduct. As we
have seen, the Annales School undoubtedly opened up the scope for historical
research of this kind and influenced a whole generation of French historians and
philosophers. But a project of writing histories of mentalities can consist in
drawing out a ‘history of codes’ or a ‘history of moral behaviours’.[6]

In writing a history of ethics, Foucault aims at complementing whilst challenging

the above mentioned models. Ethics looks at the positivity of the relation between
morality and society, as expressed by the subject. We will later see how his
immediately previous work had focused on power from above and on the
techniques and exercise of Power as authority, with an emphasis on the formation
of codes and discourses of practices that historically shaped power relations. In
his works on ethics, as he also affirms in the essay ‘The Subject and Power’,
Foucault aims at dwelling on the other side of this relation and his choice of
historical period is indicative of a political choice of intervention in the present.
 I wonder if our problem nowadays is not, in a way, similar to this one [the
Greeks’], since most of us no longer believe that ethics is founded in
religion, nor do we want a legal system to intervene in our moral, personal,
private life. Recent liberation movements suffer from the fact that they
cannot find any principle on which to base the elaboration of a new ethics.
They need an ethics, but they cannot find any other ethics than an ethics
founded on so-called scientific knowledge of what the self is, what desire
is, what the unconscious is, and so on. I am struck by this similarity of
problems.[7]

Foucault defines ethics as the reflexive practice of freedom, and in distinguishing

between ethics-oriented moralities and code-oriented moralities; he wishes to
present his project of the last two volumes of the History of Sexuality as a history
of the former. Ethics oriented moralities are those where the emphasis is placed
upon the relation of the subject with himself, where morality demands a certain
work from the subject, which goes beyond the latter’s obedience to a set of rules.
In this sense, the course on L’ Herméneutique du sujet is ‘an analytics of certain
forms of reflexivity, as constitutive of the subject itself’.[8]

Philosophy and spirituality

Foucault’s late move towards ethics is a form of critical intervention on actualité

and part of the project of an ontology of the present, in a relation of continuity
with the exploration of Kantian criticism as exposed in the Commentaire to the
Anthropology: an investigation into the social notion of Gemüt, ethical self-
affection, that undermines the self identical epistemological subject by positing its
relational aspect with the world and its self-transformative potential at the centre
of analysis. Foucault makes a distinction between philosophy and spirituality in
modernity. In this set of lectures, he tries to trace the emergence of the
separation between the two.

Let’s call philosophy the form of thought that enquires into what allows the
subject to have access to truth, the form of thought that attempts to
determine the conditions and the limits of the access of the subject to
truth. Well, if we define philosophy in such a way, I believe we can call
‘spirituality’ the sets of researches, the practices and experiences through
which the subject carries out on itself the necessary transformations to
have access to truth. Spirituality is the ensemble of researches that
constitute for the subject and its being, rather than for knowledge, the
price to pay to have access to truth.[9]

Therefore truth is not revealed to the subject who simply waits to find truth in
knowledge, but is gained through the subject’s own self-transformation. This is
where the critical relation between truth and subjectivation is established. For
Foucault, the working premise of such relation is that ‘what is, is not capable of
truth’.

It is necessary for the subject to modify itself, to transform itself, to

become to a certain extent other than itself for it to have the right to
access truth. The conversion and transformation of the subject can take
different forms. The movement of eros and ascesis are examples of ways
in which the subject can modify itself through labour on himself and raise
him to the level where truth can be revealed to him.[10]

Thus, a transfiguration of the subject is necessary for accessing truth. How this
transfiguration operates in different moments of history is the object of Foucault’s
investigation into the processes of subjectivation and practice of the self. Foucault
notes that in ancient thought philosophy and spirituality are never separated and
that an act of knowledge is always accompanied by an act of self transformation
that entails some kind of action on one’s very being. These actions are
technologies of the self and establish a mode of conduct that is also a self-
affection tightly linked to the emergence of a discourse of truth and objectivity
that is made dependent on the workings of interiority. As we shall see, the
questions of being and knowledge, of experience and existence are here posed in
relation to ethics as a matter of conduct. Surely the fact that experience and
being is detached from knowledge since Kant and reposed as a possible question
is indicative. Foucault criticises the notion underlying modernity whereby the
legitimacy of claims to truth is a concern that remains separated from ontology.

I believe that the modern history of truth begins the moment when what
allows access to truth is knowledge itself and alone.[11]

This investigation into the problems arising from the separation of philosophy and
spirituality relates to the project of an ontology of ourselves: modern philosophy,
in so far as it limits itself to determining the conditions and frontiers of a
knowledge of objects, designs the theoretical tools for the policing of statements
and the establishment of regimes of truth. On this rests his early definition of the
axis of knowledge-power in modern thought. Through the wider notion of
governmentality, Foucault is also shifting the focus from an analysis of the status
of objective knowledge in relation to power, to an analysis that questions the
status of the subject in relation to truth.

If one takes the question of power or political power and replaces it with
the more general question of governmentality –governmentality intended
as a strategic field of power relations, in the broader, not simply political,
sense of the term-, if one takes governmentality as the strategic field of
power relations, in so far as they are mobile, transformable and reversible,
I think that the reflection on this notion of governmentality must go
through, both theoretically and practically, the element of a subject that
would be defined by the relation of the self to the self. In so far as the
 theory of political power as institution normally refers to a juridical
conception of the subject of rights, it seems to me that the analysis of
governmentality –i.e. the analysis of power as an ensemble of reversible
relations-must refer to an ethics of the subject defined by the relation of
itself to itself. I simply want to say that in the kind of analysis that I have
tried to propose for some time, you see that: relations of power-
governmentality; government of oneself and others and relation of oneself
to oneself, all these constitute a chain, a web. It is there, around these
notions, that one must be able to, I think, articulate the question of politics
and the question of ethics.[12]

Foucault urges us to take up a theoretical analysis that makes political sense: ‘it
makes sense for that which we want to accept, refuse and change in ourselves in
our actuality’. This is a political and theoretical analysis that aims to determine
the ‘conditions and possibilities of the transformation of the subject’.[13]

Marxism and psychoanalysis see a resurgence of the preoccupation with

spirituality. In both camps, this resurgence occurs at the price of reducing
the subject and truth to a mere question of ‘belonging’. Spirituality in the
ancient form saw its demise due to a fundamental separation between the
process of accessing truth and that of the subject’s self-transformation. On
the one hand, access to truth was granted by modern philosophy to the
knowing subject, on the other hand, spirituality was translated in a
necessity of a labour on the subject itself. Theology rather than sciences
started off this separation. Extrinsic conditions for accessing truth are not
identified in the structure of the subject as such, but rather in the concrete
forms of existence of the subject in question. Platonism reabsorbs the
exigencies of spirituality within epistemology, by relating the question of
the care of the self to the know yourself (to know oneself, to know the
divine, to recognise the divine in oneself: this is fundamental to the
platonic and neo-platonic forms of the care of the self).

The status of the conditions of knowledge is important: Foucault establishes two

sets of conditions for the attainment of knowledge. First, there are conditions that
are internal to the act of knowing and rules that one has to follow in order to have
access to truth. These are objective conditions, formal rules of method that
determine the structure of the object of knowledge. The problem for Foucault is
that these are all defined from within knowledge itself. As Foucault had attacked
the circularity of the human sciences in The Order of Things and the notion of
finitude as one that posited man as the object of knowledge whilst simultaneously
establishing the structural impossibility for grasping such object, here we see the
repercussions of this notion on practices of self-transformation and the ethical
dimension. Second, Foucault outlines a series of extrinsic conditions. They are
related to ‘health’, (madness makes it impossible to access truth), culture
(education and the participation to a certain scientific consensus are required),
and morality (practical financial interests for instance would be an obstacle to
accessing truth). But he notes that even though the second order of conditions is
extrinsic to the act of knowledge, they are nonetheless indifferent to the subject
in so far as they simply consider the individual in his concrete existence, rather
than the structure of the subject as such. The conclusion of this process is that
‘truth cannot save the subject anymore. As a result of its neglect of the being of
the subject, Modernity has achieved nothing but an endless accumulation of
knowledge.’[14] We can see that Foucault is tracing the genealogy of the subject
by going back to the moment where a ‘culture of the self’ first emerges, where
the technology of the self and the art of life become entangled. This moment he
ascribes to Hellenistic and Roman periods, the Epicureans and Stoics being the
most cited philosophers in his lectures. But the reason for first exploring Plato’s
Alcibiades is that in this text one finds the contradiction which will be taken up
and developed in neo-Platonism and in early Christianity, and which, in a relation
of rupture and continuity, will also adopt the Hellenistic technology of the self for
an entirely different purpose. As we shall see, in the paradox of Platonism
Foucault finds the main contradiction, between the γνώθι σεαυτόν and the επιμέλεια
εαυτού. These two elements, so intertwined in Plato and the Hellenists, are
separated by early Christianity with the birth of theology, which also sanctions the
end of philosophy as spirituality. All this is crucial, for Foucault is not only tracing a
history of the subject and his relation to truth, but also an ontology of self-
transformation that escapes the capture of either religion, science or the law.[15]
This is the foundation, the prequel, rather than sequel, to his previous works on
modernity. Thus the platonic rationalité, the beginning of which he recognises in
early Christianity, is worth discussing in some length alongside the subsequent
clarifications made during the lectures about the role of Descartes and Kant.[16]
Foucault notes that Neo-Platonism reabsorbs exigencies of spirituality within an
epistemology – whereby the latter outlines rules for the process of accessing
truth.[17]

The main reason for which the care of the self has been neglected is the
Cartesian moment. Since then know yourself has become decoupled from
the care of the self and the latter has been disqualified as a philosophical
practice. The Cartesian path has made evidence (what appears, what is
‘given’ just as it is to consciousness, without any doubt) the starting point,
the origin of philosophy. Thus it is to self-knowledge that the Cartesian
path refers itself to, at least as form of consciousness. Moreover, given
that the evidence of the existence of the subject is turned into the
principle of the access to being, it is this self-knowledge (no longer in the
form of the testing of an evidence but in the form of the indubitability of
my existence as a subject) that transforms the ‘know-yourself’ into the
foundation of any access to truth.[18]

In this set of lectures we find continuous references to the present, the problem of
actualité in philosophical criticism, and the path taken by the Cartesian tradition
and the philosophy of the subject in the centuries that are closer to us than those
analysed. We should not underestimate the pregnancy of Foucault’s analysis of
Hellenistic philosophy for today, as a call to resistance to forms of morality and
identity politics, which the 1980s are so imbued with. Foucault keeps writing an
ontology of his present, which transpires from these lectures and takes issue with
the problem of the ‘obsession’ with the self he witnesses. As with the interview on
identity politics and the gay movement, Foucault shows discomfort with the idea
of a juridical subject, of the juridification of life, and of the biopolitical forms of
control enacted on the subject through scientific, religious and juridical
discourses, thus searching for autonomous practices of ethical self transformation
in the writings of Hellenistic philosophers.

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[1] For Foucault the Left is a home rather than a concept. See his ‘For an Ethics of Discomfort’ in Essential Works: Power, 2003. p. 444

[2] M. Foucault, ‘The subject and power’ in H. Dreyfus & P. Rabinow Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Hertfordshire: Harvester
Wheatsheaf, 1982. p. 216

[3] M. Foucault, Herméneutique du sujet, 2001. Lecture held on 24/03/82. This section refers to the 1982 set of lectures delivered at the Collège de
France. It has so far only been published in French (Herméneutique du sujet. Paris : Gallimard, 2001) but an English translation is underway. The
passages quoted are my translations.

[4] M. Foucault, ‘ Berkeley lecture 1984’ Audiofiles. See transcription on www.generation-online.org/p/pfoucault.html (January 2004)

[5] M. Foucault, ‘On the Genealogy of Ethics’, published in Essential Works: Ethics. 2000, p. 261

[6] See M. Foucault, History of Sexuality. Volume II, Penguin, London . p. 29

[7] M. Foucault, Essential Works: Ethics. 2000, p. 262

[8] M. Foucault, Herméneutique du sujet, 2001. Lecture held on 24/03/82

[9] M. Foucault, Herméneutique du sujet, 2001, p. 17

[10] Ibidem

[11] Ibid., p. 19

[12] Ibid. p. 243-244

[13] M. Foucault, unpublished first version of a 1980 conference in America, cited by Frédéric Gros in his postface to L’Herméneutique du sujet,
2001, p. 508

[14] In Foucault’s definition of spirituality, we find the idea that the real conflict within Christianity (5th – 17th century) is between spirituality and
theology rather than spirituality and science (Herméneutique du sujet p. 28). So it is theology rather than science that operates this dissociation within
the principles of access to truth on the one hand as something capable of being carried out solely by the knowing subject and on the other hand as
involving the spiritual necessity of a work of the subject on itself as constitutive of such. This allows us to trace a continuity of intents between the
project of critique of the psychoanalytical discourse that urges the subject to ‘tell the truth about him/herself’ and the parallel Christian notion of
confession.

[15] M. Foucault, ‘ Berkeley lecture 1984’ audiofiles. See transcription on www.generation-online.org/p/pfoucault.html (January 2004)

[16] M. Foucault, Herméneutique du sujet, 2001, p. 183

[17] ‘Se connaître - connaître le divin - reconnaître le divin en soi-même’, Ibid. p. 75

[18] Ibid., p.16

L’Herméneutique du sujet

When we see today the meaning, or rather the almost total absence of
meaning [signification], that is ascribed to expressions that are otherwise
familiar and often recur in our discourse, such as: return to the self, self-
liberation, being oneself, being authentic. When we see the absence of
meaning and of thought of each of these expressions as they are
employed today, I believe that we shouldn’t be too proud of the efforts
made at present to reconstitute an ethics of the self. And it could be that
these series of efforts[1] […] more or less stopped, froze on themselves.
The moment we find ourselves in is one where we continue to refer to this
 ethics of the self, whilst never giving it any content. I think that we are
almost faced with the impossibility of constituting an ethics of the self
today, and this occurs at a time when maybe it is an urgent, fundamental
and politically indispensable task, if it is true after all that there is no other
point, first or last, of resistance to political power but in the relation of the
self to the self.

In L’Herméneutique du sujet Foucault proposes to analyse the relation between

the subject and truth through the notion of the care of the self. This, he admits,
might appear to be a roundabout way to question such relation, given that it had
been traditionally seen through the lenses of the more popular motto ‘know
yourself’. But for Foucault, there are a number of important reasons for the
neglect of the notion of the ‘care of the self’ in the history of thought. Foucault
writes:

A certain tradition prevents us from ascribing a positive value to all these

formulations [regarding the self], and especially from making them the foundation
of an ethics. All these injunctions to exalt oneself, to make a cult of oneself etc.
sound to us as a kind of challenge and bravado, a will to ethical rupture, a kind of
moral dandyism, the affirmation of a state that is aesthetic and unsurpassably
individual. Or they sound to us as the expression, a bit melancholic and sad, of a
retreat of the individual, incapable of keeping hold of a collective ethics and who,
faced with the dislocation of this collective ethics, will no longer have anything but
himself to care about.

The reason for his engagement with this particular notion is that the care of the
self, in all the traditions Foucault addresses in his lectures, has a positive value,
and it is the starting point of the most austere and rigorous ethics of the West that
is not attributable to Christianity. As he notes:

These rigorous values will reappear both within the Christian and the non –
Christian modern ethics in completely different climates. But moral rigour
entails an obligation to something other than oneself, be it the other, the
community, the nation, class etc. All these themes, all these codes of
moral rigour have been founded by Christianity and the modern world on a
morality of non-egoism, but learn from techniques of the care of the self.

Thus Foucault is interested in tracing a genealogy of the care of the self as a

notion and practice within the ancient tradition up to early Christianity. His 1982
lectures problematise the relationship between the subject and truth through an
analysis of the interplay in antiquity and early Christianity of the practices of care
of the self and know yourself; or rather, of the ethical on the one hand and the
epistemological on the other, where ethics is defined as an ontological mode of
self-transformation. We can detect in this concern a direct problematisation of the
ethical consequence of an analytics of truth and by tracing its genealogy;
Foucault will also point us towards the conditions of possibility for an ontology of
ourselves and an anthropology without a Subject and beyond interiority. He
observes that in Antiquity ‘know yourself’ always appears associated and often
subordinated to the ‘care of the self’,[2] and sets out to describe the development
of their relation: How is the care of the self defined? What is the object of care
[the self]?

It is nothing to go back to. But we do have an example of an ethical

experience which implied a very strong connection between pleasure and
desire. If we compare that to our experience now, where everybody –the
philosopher and the psychoanalyst – explains that what is important is
desire, and pleasure is nothing at all, we can wonder whether this
disconnection wasn’t a historical event, one that was not at all necessary,
not linked to human nature, or to any anthropological necessity.[3]

This series of lectures attempts to outline the relation between the subject and
truth in three main traditions: Plato ( IV BC ), Hellenistic and Roman philosophy (I-
II century), and early Christianity (from the III-IV century up until the 17 th century),
especially ascetic and monastic practices. The title of the lecture series is
misleading, in that Foucault does not write of the hermeneutics of the subject, but
rather of all the forms of care of the self that preceded the hermeneutics,
hermeneutics being here understood historically as the particular tradition which
establishes a certain relation between the subject and truth within early
Christianity. The differences between the care of the self and the hermeneutics of
the subject will be outlined later, but first a few words on the content of the
lectures. There are several references to modern philosophy, the import of which
is crucial to position his project within the rest of his oeuvre, especially in the light
of the 1984 essay ‘The Subject and Power’.

The hermeneutics of the subject is recognised as a specific practice and mode of

knowledge that started with Christianity around the III and IV century, especially
with the monastic practices of Cassen. Foucault traces the history of the subject’s
relation to truth in these lectures to show how it was not until Christianity that a
mode of care of the self was attached to practices whereby the truth about the
subject became the object of self knowledge and transformation. The first
subsumption under the rule of religion of such technologies of the self is not taken
for granted by Foucault, who thus attempts to highlight the differences as well as
continuities between the ancient forms of care of the self and the Christian modes
of subjectivation, and hermeneutics of the subject.

Foucault chooses the Alcibiades as the best text to expose the relation between
the subject and truth in Plato’s philosophy. This is mainly due to the appearance
in this text of the two notions that will constitute the link for the whole series of
lectures: self knowledge and the care of the self. Foucault attempts to unravel the
development of their interrelation throughout the three traditions mentioned
above. He does so in order to show how spirituality and philosophy came to
become separate, or rather, how the subject comes to assume the role of object

of his own knowledge and control.

First of all, Foucault starts with the Alcibiades, the first text where the notion of
επιμέλεια εαυτού is problematised. In this text, the appearance in a Socratic dialogue
of the Delphic maxim γνώθι σεαυτόν is analysed in relation to the injunction to care
for the self. Know yourself appears as one of the conditions for the care of the
self, and is explained in terms of knowing one’s limits and ignorance before
proceeding to enact the ethical call for self government and self mastery. As
Francois Pradeau has noted, before Plato, the ancient Delphic precept had moral
and religious connotation and was associated with knowing man’s limited nature
in order to avoid excesses and the ύβρις entailed in acting in place of the gods.
Foucault lists the Delphic precept alongside two others: not asking more than
what is necessary and not promising the gods what you can’t keep. Knowing
oneself entailed an attention to oneself in terms of what one needed to know, i.e.
one’s mortality and one’s place in the κόσμος. Know yourself, for instance, is the
precept used by Aeschylus in his tragedy Prometheus, where the latter is incited
to know his human nature and to not challenge the gods. So how did the Delphic
precept become associated with the wider call for the care of the self in Socrates?

In that context, the precept still entails an acknowledgement of one’s non-divine

and mortal status, and a call that is more ethical than epistemological. However,
its status assumes a more philosophical connotation. By pointing to the
subordination of the Delphic precept to the wider technology of the care of the
self in Socrates, Foucault aims to underline the non-epistemological nature of the
original version of self-knowledge. In other words, he aimed to show how such
precept did not entail a subordination of the subject to truth, or an objectification
of the subject to the knowledge of its own internal structures. In the Delphic
precept, self knowledge is functional to knowledge of one’s position with respect
to the gods, so that access to truth in general is strictly dependent on the
recognition of the divine in oneself. In the Alcibiades, the first question posed in
relation to Socrates’ injunction to care of the self is: what is the self one ought to
take care of, and what does this care as activity consist of? These two questions
are crucial for Foucault, in that the first poses the question of what the subject is,
and in Platonist language, the self is the soul. To know oneself entails knowing
one’s soul, which is in turn a mode of knowing the divine in oneself that in Plato
also equates with justice. This gives rise to what Foucault calls the paradox of
Platonism.
This paradox is at the root of the tradition that will culminate in a hermeneutics of
the subject. In Socrates we find what is also called a form of ethical
intellectualism, the assumption whereby wrong doing is based on lack of
knowledge. This stance does not account for the intention of wrong doing, which
will later acquire an important place within Christianity. So, Socrates urges
Alcibiades to care for himself, and here the know yourself precept requires an
overcoming of one’s unawareness of one’s own ignorance of things. This
ignorance of the Soul is one of simultaneously the Divine and Justice. In fact, at
the end of the dialogue, Alcibiades tells Socrates that he will occupy himself with
himself, or in other words, that he will care for justice. ‘In Platonic reminiscence
one finds, united and blocked in one movement of the soul, both self knowledge
and knowledge of the truth, care of the self and return to being.’[4]

Therefore in Plato, the political and cathartic aspects of philosophy are one and
the same. However, Neo-Platonism will not only invert the relation between self
care and self knowledge, but it will also detach catharsis from politics, through
turning one’s attention to oneself into an end detached from the political aim,
whereas the relation of Alcibiades to the city was crucial in understanding not only
the care of the self but also the art of government in Plato. For Plato, self-
government is functional to the government of others. Taking care of the city
necessitates taking care of the self and, in turn, to care for the self directly entails
a care for the city, since there is a direct reciprocity between the state of the self
and the state of the city: one’s well-being being dependent on the other’s. The
care of the self in the Alcibiades is also linked to entering one’s adulthood, as a
passage from adolescence to maturity, the entry to civic life. The care of the self
has a pedagogical role: Socrates urges Alcibiades to care for himself as a mode of
modifying his relation to government, where governing oneself cannot be
dissociated from governing others.

In the Alcibiades self care is inseparable from the art of governance, of oneself
and of others. Alcibiades in fact aspires to govern the city and Socrates shows him
through maieutic his shortfall whilst pointing him towards the labour of self-
transformation required to undertake such political task. ‘Know yourself’ in Plato
takes the form of overcoming one’s ignorance and entails a seizure of the soul,
which is accomplished through reminiscence. This is the platonic model of self
knowledge.

Secondly, Foucault goes on to analyse Hellenistic philosophy, where the care of

the self assumes a different function in the technologies of self-constitution and
mastery. He looks at the Epicureans and the Stoics, and outlines the differences
between the Socratic version in the Alcibiades and the following versions,
coinciding with the so called revolution in ancient Greece and what many have
named the birth of individualism.[5] Foucault is interested in the Hellenistic model
of the self because in this tradition he claims we witness a form of care of the self
that is an end in itself: it is autofinalised, as he puts it. He is asking what is the
self in Hellenistic philosophy that is neither subsumed not identified with truth
and what are the techniques of the practice of care of the self in a context where
a turn to the self amounts to neither a form of reminiscent knowledge, as with
Plato, nor an exegesis and renunciation, as with monastic-ascetic practices. He
can trace the influences of the Platonic and Christian traditions to modernity,
whilst the Hellenistic modality and paradigm he finds lost in history, somehow
subsumed within a rigorous ethics turned into religion.

The theme of know yourself is analysed as the theme of conversion, in its three
versions.

This theme is important because Foucault’s notion of déprise de soi is theorised in

direct contrast to that of conversion.[6] Foucault notes that in the Platonic
tradition, the theme of conversion entails a form of awakening, in fact Socrates is
defined as the awakener. It entails a turning towards one’s soul in order to find the
truth beyond the images, it is a return to being through reminiscence and it
opposes this world to the hyperworld.

In the monastic and ascetic practises, conversion is defined as μετανόια, and consists
in a passage, a self transfiguration, a move from death to life, a sudden revelation
through self renunciation. By turning towards oneself one can access the truth of
the Word and of Revelation only after a purifying work on the soul, whereby the
subject converts after renouncing itself, which entails a rupture, a sudden event of
death and rebirth. Foucault calls this ‘a sort of interior movement of
transubjectification’.[7]

The model of reminiscence, also known as επιστρώφη, identifies self-knowledge with

the care of the self, in the sense that one arrives at one’s being by turning upon
oneself, so that knowledge of truth and self knowledge are one and the same.
However, in the model of monastic practices, of exegesis and renunciation, the care
of the self is subsumed and absorbed under the process of self knowledge and self
renunciation, so that self knowledge and knowledge of the truth are given in
succession, i.e. the subject knows the truth of the Word only after being purified.
Monastic practices of the care of the self hence entail a form of vigilance against
temptations, against externalities, as well as an exploration of the secrets of
conscience (arcanae coscientiae). This is what Foucault also calls auto-exegesis,
whereby the subject becomes the object of a true discourse, through a knowledge
that entails a work of interiority and the deciphering of the self.

However, the study of Stoicism and Epicureanism presents Foucault with an

entirely different and separate form of relation of the Subject to Truth, one which
we could call an immanent relation. The traditions of Hellenist philosophy offer a
model for self knowledge where the latter is coextensive with knowledge of
nature. Foucault obviously recognises and grants the Hellenistic philosophers,
especially the Stoics, a view that is wholly immanent, of both the subject, truth
and their relation. As Han noted:

The mode of ancient subjectivation thus forms an exact antithesis to the

anthropological structure: the latter is characterised on the one hand by
the immediate definition of the transcendental subject as subject of
knowledge a priori, on the other hand by the redoubling of the
transcendental in the empirical according to the figures of the originary. As
one will see, ancient subjectivation operates on exactly opposite
presuppositions: on the one hand, the subject is in its natural state
incapable of knowing unless it makes itself ‘worthy of truth’, the formation
of knowledge itself is not conceived as a process of the epistemological
order nor as an end in itself, but as a spiritual transformation of the self by
the self, as a ‘conversion’. On the other hand, the subject as such is not
regarded as the object of a possible knowledge: on the contrary, ‘where we
intend, as modern, the question of the “possible or impossible
objectivation of the subject within a field of knowledge”, the Ancient
understood: “the constitution of a knowledge of the world as a spiritual
experience of the subject”’.[8]

This is the first distinctive feature of Hellenistic philosophy Foucault is so keen for
us to pay attention to. For Seneca, sibi servire, being slave to oneself, is the worst
of slaveries; for Foucault, the stoic mode of self-mastery can help us is the search
for an antidote to the epidemics of techniques of control that, with the help of
scientific, medical and legal knowledges and expertise, function on the basis of
the interiorisation of the rule. Important here is Foucault’s analysis of the Stoics’
attitude to representations and the idea that freedom lies in not being passive to
the flux of representations whilst not ordering them. This refers to what he sees
as a lack of method in the Cartesian path as well as the earliest writings on the
relation between spontaneity and receptivity in Kant’s Anthropology as one to do
with man’s being citizen of the world. In fact, there are certain features which
make the Stoic tradition sharply in contrast with that of Platonism and
Christianity, which render it autonomous from what we have previously outlined
as the Platonic paradox. One of them is the relation to nature. The immanent
philosophy of the Hellenists never separates knowledge of the self from
knowledge of the world, in a fashion which renders knowledge useful according to
what can be made of it, rather than its validity as a set of logical rules and
systematic enunciations.
 This [Demetrius’] critique of useless knowledge does not point us towards
the valorisation of a different savoir that has a different content, which
would be the knowledge of ourselves and our interior. It rather points us
towards a different functioning of the same knowledge of external things.
Self knowledge isn’t becoming this deciphering of the arcanes
conscientiae, this exegesis of the self that will be developed by
Christianity. The useful knowledge, the knowledge where human existence
is in question, is a mode of relational knowledge, at once assertive and
prescriptive, and that is capable of producing a change in the mode of
being of the subject.[9]

Knowing nature is liberatory for the subject in so far as it places it in relation with
the wider rationality of the κόσμος, as agent as well as element of it. For Foucault,
it is a case of ‘disengaging [critique] from a humanism so easy in theory and so
fearsome in reality; a case of substituting to the principle of the transcendence of
the ego, the research into the forms of the immanence of the subject.’[10] This is
a crucial aspect of Hellenistic philosophy that we have already explored in our
analysis of Foucault’s reading of Kant. In fact the birth of the homo criticus, which
sanctions the end of philosophy as spirituality, poses the same problem in Kant’s
Anthropology of seeing man both as element and agent, subject and object of
knowledge. In this, the problem of immanence versus transcendence is clear: the
Stoics can conceive of the two without separation, Kant in the Critiques will not be
able to overcome this obstacle in his science, creating man through his doubles,
whilst he will endanger his own science in the Anthropology.

In so far as philosophy regards knowing nature as a recognition of the subject

being part and parcel of a wider reason, this tradition also tells us that through
knowledge the subject can participate to this rationality. In an expression of
Seneca, the subject becomes ‘consortium dei’, looking to itself, ‘contemplatio sui’,
entails a reflection on ourselves within the world and of our belonging to the
present. A virtuous soul is that which communicates with the entire world.
Foucault calls this form of immanence a spiritual modulation of knowledge, where
principles of truth are inseparable from rules of conduct.

Whereas we, the modern, intend the question: ‘possible or impossible

objectivation of the subject within a field of knowledge’, the Ancients of the
Greek Hellenistic and Roman époque intended it as: ‘constitution of a
knowledge of the world as spiritual experience of the subject’. Where we
intend: ‘subjectification of the subject under the order of the law’, they
meant: ‘constitution of the subject as ultimate end for itself, through and
by means of the exercise of truth.[11]

This brings him directly to the question of παρρήσια. In a lecture delivered at

Berkeley University Foucault explains the meaning of this notion, and how
important it is in understanding the relation between the subject and truth, in a
moment in history that first saw the emergence of sovereignty and the ‘prince’,
with correlative alienation of rights and hierarchical structures for decision
making.[12] Παρρήσια must be understood as the practice of the self which entails
most visibly an unbreakable relation between self-transformation and truth telling.
Telling the truth does not entail a set of methodological precautions so that the
truth is correctly exposed and understood, but a series of technologies and
operations that allow for truth to be and remain something that exists within the
bodies of those through which it runs, in a process of subjectivation.

Foucault insists on the fact that the subject and its interiority cannot be a
constitutive field of autonomous knowledge and that rather than a discourse that
aims to tell the truth about the subject, one has to see the ethical project as
working through an embodiment of truth in the subject. Παρρήσια is thus seen as the
making of a conduct adequate to the discourse, in relation to the self, whereby truth
is neither the best approximation of a discourse to its object nor the transcendental
constitution of a field of possible experience, but it is immediately linked to a
structure of subjectivation and conduct. Believing that telling the truth can cure,
believing in the saving power of confession and the hermeneutics of the self can
only ensure obedience. In fact, as philosophy turns into epistemology, spirituality is
also progressively incorporated into disciplinary techniques. The hermeneutics of
the self is thus the production of the subject by the truth on the subject, the
opening up of consciousness as a field of exploration and deciphering, which
radically changes the relation between the subject and truth. In the ancient model
of the care of the self, the self is not the object of a specific production of truth, but
a practice that seeks to transform itself into an active agent, through the
subjectification of truth, with the aim of turning oneself into an ethical subject. In
the hermeneutics the process is one of telling the truth about the self, and the
objectification of the self in a discourse of truth that aims at the production of
obedience. Thus through the notion of the care of the self in Antiquity Foucault
captures the role of a relation to the self that is grounded on a τέχνη τού βιού, and
contrasts it to the form of modern Western subjectivity as that which was
constituted the moment ‘βιός ceased to be the object of a τέχνη, of a reasonable and
rational art’, in order to become an épreuve of the self, whereby the world, through
life, becomes the experience through which we come to know ourselves: the
domain, limit and source of such experience, as we saw in Kant. For Foucault, the
challenge of Western philosophy lies in answering how it is possible that what is
given as the object of a knowledge articulated on the mastering of a τέχνη is at the
same time also the place where the truth of the subject and of what we are is tested
and arrived at. As he puts it:

How can the world, which is given as the object of knowledge, be at the
same time also the place where the ethical subject of truth manifests and
 tests itself? How can we have a subject of knowledge that takes the world as
its object through a τέχνη, and a subject of self experience that takes the
same world, in a radically different form, as the place for its épreuve? And if
the task we inherit from the Aufklärung is to interrogate the foundations of
our system of objective knowledge, then it is also that of interrogating what
the modalities of the experience of the self are grounded on.[13]

As is the case with other issues, most notably his analysis of power, Foucault’s
contribution is itself an épreuve that produces concepts that help us navigate
concrete existence. At this point, we would like to advance further and look into
those analyses that account for silent practices of constitution that go beyond
the self whilst addressing subjectivity today as an ontological question.
Foucault’s contribution has been taken up and enriched by Giorgio Agamben,
Antonio Negri, Paolo Virno, Christian Marazzi and Maurizio Lazzarato, who in
different disciplines have provided the grounds for thinking the social in terms of
a production of subjectivity and have been led by their analysis of the political
economy of current practices of the self, to approach a notion of biopolitics which
can not only help us break out of the power-resistance lock, but also address a
realm of self constitution that requires and takes for granted the collective
intelligence which forms and informs us as subjects, elements and agents. In the
following studies on power and control we would like to move onto an exploration
of the present in the critical spirit of Foucault, taking up the challenge of
interrogating the modalities of experience of the self today and begin to point
towards useful tools for answering the urgent question of an ontology of our
present.

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[1] Foucault had previously mentioned in this tradition of efforts to think of an ethics and aesthetics of the self: Montaigne, Stirner, Schopenhauer,
Nietzsche, dandyism, Baudelaire, anarchist thought.

[2] Ibid. p. 6

[3] M. Foucault, Essential Works: Ethics. 2000, p. 263-264

[4] M. Foucault, Herméneutique du sujet, 2001, p. 244

[5] On the alleged birth of individualism, to which the comedies of Menandros attest explicitly, Foucault’s controversial position is expounded in
History of sexuality. Vol. III. The care of the self, London : Penguin Publishers, p. 42. He sees that individualism is invoked to explain very
different phenomena: the individualist attitude, held by military aristocracies; the positive evaluation of private life, a value of the bourgeoisie in
Western countries during the 19th century; an intensity in the relation to the self, propelled by the Christian Ascetic Movement.

[6] ‘What can the ethics of an intellectual be – I reclaim the term “intellectual” which, at the present moment, seems to nauseate some – if not that:
to render oneself permanently capable of self-detachment (which is the opposite of the attitude of conversion)?’, M. Foucault in ‘Concern for
Truth’, Foucault Live, 1996, p. 461

[7] M. Foucault, Herméneutique du sujet, 2001, p. 249

[8] Béatrice Han, ‘Analytique de la finitude et histoire de la subjectivité’ article sent via email in June 2002, (my translation from French)

[9] Foucault, Herméneutique du sujet, 2001, p. 228

[10] Foucault, cited by Frédéric Gros in his postface to L’Herméneutique du sujet, 2001, p. 507

[11] Foucault, Herméneutique du sujet, 2001, p. 304

[12] Foucault says: ‘In fact, the reason why anger in this period acquires such importance is that at that moment –and it has happened for centuries,
from the Hellenistic period until the end of the Roman Empire- people tried to pose the question of the economy of power relations within a society
where the structure of the city is no longer predominant and where the appearance of great Hellenistic monarchies, the a fortiori appearance of the
imperial regime, pose the problem of the adequation of the individual to the sphere of power and of his position in the sphere of power that he can
exercise in new terms. How can power be anything but a privilege of status to exercise [it] as one wants, when one wants, in accordance with this
originary status itself? How can the exercise of power become a precise and determined function, that finds its rules not in the statutory superiority
of the individual but within the precise and concrete tasks that is has to carry out?’ Herméneutique du sujet, 2001, p. 358-359

[13] Ibid. p. 467

b) The political economy of the production of subjectivity:

a critique of liberal rationality

Foucault introduces a definition of biopower within his wider reflections on the

role of a political discourse on subjectivity. After all, the idea that a social function
of knowledge does not necessarily correspond to its truth value is in itself of little
innovative import. Pointing to the interrelation and mutual constitution of
practices of power and knowledge had already been a preoccupation of the
tradition that ran through historical materialism and sociology of knowledge. What
is of importance in his definition of biopower and discipline is the analysis of the
effects of a horizontal application of knowledge across society in the formation
and the shaping of subjectivities. It is in this context that we also place his
reflections on the materiality of language and the status of man in the positivity of
knowledge. The problem of man’s finitude and the circularity of the human
sciences are there seen as productive of effects at the ontological level. What is at
stake is not only self cognition but also the ordering of our universe according to
criteria of Sameness and self referentiality.

Language is ‘rooted’ in the active subject, not in the things perceived. It is

not a memory that duplicates representation. We speak because we act,
not because recognition is a means of cognition. […] Representation
ceased to have validity as the laws of origin of living beings, needs and
words. It no longer deploys the table into which things have been ordered.
It is not their identity that beings manifest in representation, but the
external relation they establish with human beings. Representation is their
effect, their blurred counterpart in consciousness which apprehends and
reconstitutes them. It is the phenomenon – appearance – of an order that
now belongs to things in themselves and to their interior law. Man’s
finitude is heralded in the positivity of knowledge. At the foundation of all
empirical positivities we discover a finitude. In the heart of empiricity
there’s indicated an obligation to work backwards – or downwards – to an
analytic of finitude in which man’s being will be able to provide a
foundation in their own positivity for all those forms that indicate to him
that he is not infinite.[1]
The result of this process is the overturning of analysis and metaphysics,
whereby in place of a metaphysics of representations and the infinite we find a
metaphysics of life, labour and language; whilst the analysis of living beings,
desires and words is replaced by an analytics of finitude: the endless task of
Modern criticism. This is the place of structuralism and hermeneutics, of
formalism and phenomenology, and finally of psychoanalysis and ethnology
opened up by the appearance of man, their task being to ‘fill in the gap in the
continuum between representation and being’[2].

For instance, in the classical episteme, both for Physiocrats and Utilitarians – who
occupy opposite stances in relation to the analysis of value production- value has
the same function in economics as the verb has in language: as the verb links and
articulates two names and makes it possible to build a proposition, so does value
link two things (regarded as equivalent in their utility) and makes their exchange
possible. This is only possible in so far as continuity between things and their
respective representation is assumed: a relation of continuity and visibility that is
broken down with the emergence of the modern episteme.

Humanism permeates contemporary historical consciousness in a way that traps

thought in a circularity of intents. ‘And it is a fact that, at least since the
seventeenth century, what is called humanism has always been obliged to lean on
certain conceptions of man borrowed from religion, science or politics. Humanism
serves to colour and justify the conceptions of man to which it is, after all, obliged
to take recourse’.[3]

The questions opened up by The Order of Things is one concerning the relation of
truth and being: is there a role and possibility for a non - formal ontology, one that
is not exhausted in the analytics of finitude intended as a science of
measurements, that also avoids a linear historicisation trapped in the
interpretative framework of hermeneutical exegesis? Crucially, the question posed
by the works on ethics, especially in L’Herméneutique du sujet, is: can the task of
a critical ontology of ourselves remain autonomous from the human sciences and
discourses of medicine, politics and religion?

We have explored these two questions in the previous sections: it is now time to
look into the political implications of such positive ontology and ethics. Foucault
keeps working on the instruments for a desertion of the circularities that trap us in
a dialectics of dependency. As he had deconstructed that of man as subject and
object of discourse in his critique of the human sciences by reflecting on the
position of man in the world through Kant’s Anthropology; as he had done through
the deconstruction of the circularity of the hermeneutics of self transformation
and self knowledge by pointing to the interstices opened up by Stoic ethics. Now,
through a critique of the paradigm of sovereignty we shall see how he points us
out of the vicious circle grounded on the symmetrical opposition between power
and resistance. Foucault provides us with invaluable tools for understanding the
meaning and possibility of autonomy of thought and action in our days. The
interrogations on the workings of power in discourses on sovereignty, the subject,
history, war and the state of exceptions posit the urgency for us to rethink the
notion of resistance and politics in our days.

Foucault’s work on discipline and biopolitics is where the most overtly 'political'
emphasis is found but the analyses of historical discourses equally address the
problem of subjectivity and the possibility of what we might call an alternative
anthropology in so far as through them, the empirical positivity of knowledge
throws light on what is productively and indicatively a determining factor in the
emergence of practices of subjectivation on the one hand, and changes in
technologies of the self on the other. Foucault seeks to highlight the dependence
of present discourses and practices of resistance on notions that stem from the
augmentation of the efficiency of regulation. Foucault’s genealogies are carried
out within the framework of a valorisation of the positive and productive force of
power. His genealogical work on medicine, criminology and sovereignty shows
that the productivity of power is realised through policies that allow for the
formation of the individual through plans of disciplinary normalisation and of the
population through biopolitical interventions on a mass scale. We cannot be
satisfied with current forms of struggle demanding protection at the level of
rights, health or communication: they are induced struggles that reinforce rather
than opposing the very mechanisms that produce risk in order to generate
security.

The relation between risk and security is an important one in our days. As a
reflection on actualité Foucault’s writings acquire a greater force in our times of
war on terror. In this spirit we will look at his reflections on the police state,
political economy, political science and liberalism in order to arrive at an idea of
governmentality on which the debate on technologies of the self and biopolitical
production can be grounded.

The emergence of biopower.

For millennia, man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with
the additional capacity for a political existence; modern man is an animal
whose politics places his existence as a living being in question.[4]
The mainstream literature that still constitutes a large part of the hegemonic
paradigm of political theory in our times adopts the notions of the workings of
power as sovereignty, right, duty and contract as the foundation of any possible
reflection and advancement on the idea of government and its exercise. In
Discipline and Punish Foucault carries out a thorough critique of the foundations
of the political theory of sovereignty by introducing his notion of disciplines.
Unlike the judicial power of sovereign right, these were concerned with the
practice of power on the individual and his body.[5]

As a reflection on actualité, Foucault will later observe that a problem arises

when in reacting to mechanisms of disciplinary power we make recourse to a
theory of sovereignty and right, thus trusting one mechanism of power to be fairer
than the other. Part of his critical genealogy of the political rationality of liberalism
consists in laying out the contours of the discourse on government and its relation
to political economy as one whereby the state or political institutions are called
upon as arbiters of right. Foucault questions the supposed neutrality of the legal
apparatus and goes back to tracing the historical emergence of ‘justice as
fairness’ to the moment when duels and violence ceased to be expedient for the
practice of acquisition and exchange. These considerations are to be taken in the
context of the resurgence of civil liberties struggles and the appeal to a politics of
identity that needed to be reaffirmed and sought legitimacy in the sphere of
rights.[6] Foucault questions the idea that discipline can be fought by means of an
appeal to rights by introducing the notion of war in the analysis of the rationality
of strategies and calculations in politics and struggle. This is the one of the most
interesting aspects of his 1976 lectures series called ‘Il faut défendre la société’:
the setting up of the philosophical and juridical discourse on sovereignty - the
foundation of the political theory of a universal rights bearing subject – against
the historical political discourse on politics as war, with its ensuing perspectivism,
a discourse where ‘truth functions as a weapon to be used for a partisan
victory’[7] and that looks, beneath political institutions, at the permanent war
present in society.[8]

The analysis of biopower thus aims at highlighting the introduction of a new

element both with respect to judicial power and disciplinary techniques. The
theory of sovereign right functioned on the basis of the pre-determined and
complementary notions of individual and society, which, at the outcome of the
sovereign constitutive process, turn into the contracting individual and the social
body as constituted through the contract (whether voluntary or implicit). The
notion of biopower introduces a new element to the analysis of power: biopower
deals with neither of the two symmetrical axes constituted around the political
theorisation of sovereignty: society (as the judicial body defined by law and the
contract) and the individual-body. What historically emerges with the introduction
of biopower as a practice is the notion of a ‘social body’ as the object of
government. In other words, it is the emergence of a preoccupation with
population: biopolitics is concerned with population as a political and scientific
problem as well as a biological issue of the exercise of power. Thus, biopower
does not act on the individual a posteriori, as a subject of discipline in the diverse
forms of rehabilitation, normalisation and institutionalisation; it acts on the
population in a preventive fashion. Its legitimacy stems from its preoccupation
with optimising life chances and it operates through surveys for the prevention of
epidemics and scarcity. Its government works through management and the
regulative mechanisms that are able to account for aleatory and ‘unpredictable’
phenomena on a global scale, by determining an equilibrium and keeping events
within an acceptable average. Biopower is not just discipline but regulation on a
global scale, it is ‘the power to make live. Power won’t make die, but it will
regulate mortality.’[9]

According to Foucault, with the emergence of biopower, the power mechanisms

that run through body, organism, discipline to institution are progressively
substituted and in places juxtaposed by those taking population, biological
processes, regulatory mechanisms and the state as their operative field, even
though some elements such as the police are part both of the first and the
second, being concerned with discipline as well as security.

What we understand by biopower is the operative practice of liberalism. As we

shall later see, Foucault’s analysis of modern political rationality demonstrates
how liberalism needs the police to reduce government. What appears to be the
almost physical action-reaction chain that characterises his notion of
power/resistance challenges the idea that there is a possibility to transcend one's
position by positing a challenge from the outside by asserting that in biopolitics
transcendence is impossible since there is no outside. We will later see how Hardt
and Negri’s thesis in Empire is informed by this premise.

Towards a Critique of governmental reason

Foucault's 1979 lecture course entitled ‘Du gouvernement des vivants’ continue
this analysis of the discourse of sovereignty in modernity. Foucault there
specifically analyses the liberal mode of government. The governmentality of
liberalism in its ideology is presented as self-critical in so far as it problematises
state intervention and ‘minimises it’. Foucault asserts that the entry of political
economy in political discourse not only sanctioned the end of the debate on the
natural right to rule, but also introduced the idea of a truth about and a science of
governing. The question of truth and self-limitation of government is introduced
by political economy and in Foucault's words, it supplants the theory of
sovereignty with the art of governing, and opposes to the maximalist idea of la
raison d'état, the 'minimalist' idea of 'liberal government' which emerges parallel
to the German studies on Polizeiwissenschaft. The idea that emerges through
these studies is that liberal governmentality produces as well as organises
freedoms, alongside security strategies, control and surveillance geared to
prevent the dangers inherent to the production of freedom, together with the
ideology of 'dangerous' living aimed to turn individuals into 'abnormal', 'monsters'
etc. In fact, liberalism, the individuating practices of disciplines and the life
management of biopower are co-extensive in purpose and application. They co-
exist and are mutually interdependent and pre-constitute the field of play for the
intransitivity of freedom. For Foucault, the intransitivity of freedom means that
freedom is always present. One is not free to be unfree. In his late essay on ‘The
Subject and Power’[10] Foucault defines government more clearly as the
structuring of the field of action for others. In Foucault’s genealogy of the notion
of governmentality, the latter emerges at the historical juncture where the theory
of sovereignty is substituted by the ‘art of governing’ (the how-to of states, how
to manage individuals, wealth and things). With the appearance of the problem of
population and economics finally the art of governing supplants that of
sovereignty. Biopower, fully operational by the 18th century, is a government that
no longer functions through the administrative or juridical apparatus of
sovereignty, but through control and norms. As Foucault writes: ‘Maybe what is
most important for our modernity, for our actuality, is not the statalisation of
society, but what I’d call the governmentalisation of the state.’[11] If the theory of
sovereignty was concerned with how to ensure obedience in a territory and a
population through the application of the law, the art of government aims to
dispose of individuals and things in the most convenient of manners.

Sovereignty is not exercised on things, but above all on a territory and

consequently on the subjects who inhabit it. […] The definition of
government in no way refers to territory. One governs things: men in their
relations, their links, their imbrication with those other things which are
wealth, resources, means of subsistence, the territory with its specific
qualities […], men in relation to that other kind of things, customs, habits,
ways of acting and thinking; men in their relation to that other kind of
things, accidents and misfortunes such as famine, epidemics, death etc.
Thus the art of government concerns things understood in this way, this
imbrication of men and things.[12]

Following Foucault’s reasoning, the problematisation of governmentality at the

outset was one of the government of the self (concerning morality), the
government of the family (concerning economics) and the science of ruling the
state (politics). In the art of government, contrary to the theory of sovereignty
that sought to establish the limits and field of operation and defences for the
ruling political power with respect to all other kinds of powers, what matters is
how to establish a continuity between these three elements of governance, and to
this end the science of politics needs to incorporate and subsume the
management of the economy. For Foucault the subsumption of economic
rationality into the art of governance is crucial for it paves the way for a discourse
of political rationality for which development, the neutralisation of social conflicts
and the control and surveillance of society as a whole becomes crucial. Civil
society inserts itself in this juncture to ensure the continuity between the state
and the policing of individuals. The main question posed by the emergence of
liberalist political rationality was: what is the raison d’être of government?
According to Foucault, the key to answer this question lies in an analysis of
society itself, rather than some notion of law and obedience: why and how much
does society need governing? Thus the question of government is one of control
over people and in the discourse of liberalism one can see how discipline and
democracy necessarily cohabit in order to make government as economic and
efficient as possible.

‘Il faut défendre la société’

In the course delivered at the Collège de France in 1976, named ‘Il faut défendre
la société’ Foucault develops the notion of political historicism and traces its
emergence at the end of the 16th century. The 1976 lectures present a history of
power, parallel to his history of sexuality. The introduction sets out two traditions
running through historiography: one can be identified with Wilhelm Reich and
refers to the repressive mechanism of power. The other is ascribed to Friedrich
Nietzsche and investigates the foundation of relations of power as one of warring
forces confronting one another. Foucault asks whether these are reconcilable
positions since repression is nothing but the political consequence of war, just as
oppression, within the classical theory of political right, is the abuse of
sovereignty within the juridical order.[13]

The course outlines the notorious reversal of C. von Clausewitz’s formula[14] and
traces the main characteristics of the historical discourse of what he calls the war
of races. The war of races is analysed as the opposite pole of the historical
discourse of sovereignty that refers to Roman law and right. Foucault regards the
discourse on the war of races as a counter-history, which through the description
of rituals, ceremonies and myths, operates as an intensifier of power. On the other
hand, the history of sovereign power is the history that creates the monuments
that he referred to in the Archaeology of Knowledge, one that will crystallise into
the present. Through the counter-history of the war of races and its genealogy he
aims to look at the silent struggles of what remained in the shadow of the history
of sovereignty. We can see that for Foucault this is an example of the buried
historical knowledge and erudition which he aims to bring to light, as we have
seen in part I. Apart from a lecture on England and Thomas Hobbes, the rest of
the course is mostly dedicated to the histories of Henry de Boulainvilliers, of
comte de Montlosier and France and ends with an analysis of the related notions
of revolution and racism through their inscription in the biopolitical discourse of
war in the modern state. In his analysis Foucault takes up anti-historicism and
tries to show how a certain historical political discourse, unlike political theory and
jurisprudence, has adopted the war model as a tool of analysis of political
relations.[15] Foucault's genealogy of this counter-history describes the
mechanisms through which power carries on war in times of peace, namely
through disciplines and later biopower.

As we have seen with Agamben, an analysis of peace is complementary to one of

the state of exception: Foucault claims that nowhere is the notion of peace more
crucial than in Hobbes. His interest in Hobbes dwells on his outline the three
principles of a theory of sovereignty: the Subject, the Unity of Power and the Law.
According to Foucault, Hobbes is the thinker of peace par excellence, because his
idea that politics can pose an end to war was functional to hide the war of his
period.[16] For Hobbes it is the state of war that is a permanent threat to
sovereignty, rather than war itself. Foucault looks into Hobbes in order to
introduce the birth of biopower and the war of races, whereby once the One is
constituted under the Unity of Power, the Subject becomes a biological entity that
needs an Other for its own reproduction. Here we can see the similarities with
Agamben’s critical genealogy of the term people. In Foucault’s lectures, the state
of Britain in Hobbes’ times is analysed at length and described as the field of
emergence of the idea of the 'war of races', which is parallel and co-functional to
the notion of civil society, whereby a state of war internal to a supposedly unitary
sovereign body functions on the basis of an operation of internal colonialism.
Foucault points out that before Hobbes, in political theory, there existed a whole
discourse based on notions of conquest, war and usurpation that looked at the
‘relation of domination of a race on another and at the permanent threat of a
revolt of the defeated against the winners’.[17] Hobbes’ aim was to silence the
historico-political discourse that was operative in the struggles of his time and
that looked at domination rather than sovereignty and law. His natural
jurisprudence aimed at neutralising this radical discourse, which Foucault on the
contrary wants to bring back into play.
This falls into his project of critique as one that as we have seen requires a
resurrection of subjugated knowledge and its coupling with historical erudition.
Foucault explores the idea that the juridical concept of power entails thinking
power in function of war, whereby power relations are relations of force and peace
is nothing but silent war. A study of political struggles in times of civil peace helps
one decipher the form of war and that the history of peace is a history of the
continuation of war. This reversal of Clausewitz’s formula is crucial for Foucault
since it directly points to the juridical organisation of public law as an effect of
surface or appearance and voices the existence of all the disciplinary operations
that render the real function of power that of conducting war in other forms. In
these terms, the juridical-political reading of power in terms of sovereignty is
defined by Foucault as a trap, created by power itself. It is the way power uses to
speak of itself.[18] Foucault regards this move to coincide with the birth of
dialectics and philosophy of history. In fact, he regards the disqualification of
historicism in knowledge to be concomitant with the attempt to exorcise this war
paradigm. As he puts it: ‘War is conducted through the history that is made and
through that which is told’.[19] He had already analysed the profound anti-
historicism of the human sciences in The Order of Things. For Foucault, this is due
to the fact that from the 18th century onwards Western knowledge has been
organised around the ideas of peace and order and has had to disqualify struggle
and war as possible registers of truth. ‘This is what makes historicism unbearable
to us and with it the sort of indissociable circularity between historical knowledge
and the wars that it talks about whilst being traversed by them’.[20]

For Foucault, the analysis of the discourse of war and that of the emergence of
biopolitics and the notion of people are inextricably linked. In this respect, he
analyses Boulainvilliers’ method of writing histories during the period that
precedes the French revolution and observes that the emergence of the discourse
on barbarism -as opposed to that of the noble savage- characterises the epistemic
field of this historical moment that will sanction the anti-historicism of the
bourgeoisie, which then would be later recuperated during the French revolution.
In a concerted effort of jurisprudence and anthropology, these two figures are
pitted against one another: whilst the noble savage in the discourse on civil
society and political theory was presented as a bearer of rights, a juridical subject
and a homo economicus, the figure of the barbarian was one outside recuperation
and inclusion in so far as it directly symbolised a relation of domination. At this
time, according to Foucault, what had once been the historical discourse of the
aristocracy undergoes a tactical generalisation. The term tactical is crucial here,
for Foucault specifies that it entails a function that deeply differs from that
normally ascribed to what is called ‘ruling class ideology’. This function is rather
that of a dispositif of knowledge/power, which in so far as it can be described as a
tactic, is also transferable. According to Foucault, the tactics of this dispositif are
displayed on three directions: that of nationality (language), that of class
(economy), and that of race (biology). Here we can see the same tripartite
structure found in The Order of Things (language, labour, life). The question of
tactics clarifies much of what was left ambiguous in The Order of Things and The
Archaeology of Knowledge:

The tactical reversibility of discourse is a direct function of the

homogenisation of its rules of formation. It is the regularity of the
epistemic field and the homogeneity within the mode of discourse
formation that permits its use in struggles, which on the other hand are
extra-discursive. It is for this methodological reason that I have insisted on
the repartition of different discursive tactics within a coherent, regular and
strictly formed historical-political field.[21]

Hence this tactical generalisation entails a re-assessment of the strategy by

means of the genealogy of struggle and is reconstituted through them. By
reversibility and transferability of tactical dispositif of knowledge/power, Foucault
means that:

One can easily go from one of these histories to another only individuating
few simple transformations in the fundamental propositions. We are here
faced with an epistemic grille that is extremely tight and made up by all
historical discourses independently from what they claim as their theses
and political aims. But the fact that this epistemic grille is so tight does not
mean that all think the same way. On the contrary, it even constitutes the
condition of possibility for thinking otherwise, and makes it possible for this
difference to be politically pertinent.[22]

The emergence of a discourse on barbarism is thus in direct opposition to the

constitutionalist ambitions of the bourgeoisie. The latter, by calling for an a-
historical recourse to natural right, had attempted to exorcise the historicism of
the old aristocracy, which had posited war rather than the political theory of
jurisprudence as the foundation of political relations. The eventual victory of the
third estate also sanctions the emergence of a dialectics of history and a
philosophy of history, whereby the nation is to be referred to an idea of
universalism and its relation to the particular and (in E. J. Sieyès[23]) this comes
to coincide with the third estate, the only social force that can have a
universalising power beyond the particularism of group belonging. This will also
allow for a history of civil relations to substitute that of war relations.

In relation to the role of the present in historical analysis Foucault observes that
from the 18th century authors from different political backgrounds and
perspectives start adopting two main grilles of intelligibility as their reference
point: domination and totalisation.
One is constituted by the attempt to write history according to the present and
with the view of universalising discourse, starting off from the idea of the state
and taking it to be the object of seizure of power by different social formations.
Here the present enters historical discourse as the moment of the expression of
universalism, the immanence force of truth that reveals itself and the past in the
real. The other works along the lines of a history written according to the
paradigm of war and struggle between different ‘nations’ or races with different
internal discourses attempting to seize power by dominating other social forces.
This sees the present as a moment of ‘forgetfulness’ and its task as that of
wakening consciousness through recourse to ‘a reactivation of the primitive
moment in the order of knowledge’. As we can see, the latter notion of power is
symmetrical rather than incorporative.

He provides as examples the histories of comte de Montlosier and Augustin

Thierry. Montlosier represents the ‘right’ of the aristocracy and provides an
elaboration of the historical driving forces leading up to the French Revolution in
terms of the monarch using the people to take power away from the aristocracy.
Absolute monarchy invests the people with the task of revolting against the power
of the aristocracy in a way that ultimately sanctions its own legitimacy. In this
sense, struggle and revolts are political tools in the hands of the monarch.[24]

Thierry, on the other hand, justifies the same event on the lines of a
dichotomisation between rural and urban sites of power that increased in the 19 th
century, whereby the urban centre achieves predominance with the expansion of
commerce and other forms of the economy and finally takes power over rural
sites, imposing its own discourse upon the opposing one. These struggles are not
identified according to a military order but rather seen in their civil status. The
present is seen as the ‘moment of fullness’ where all is reconciled and war
becomes one instrument of this reconciliation rather than the central force behind
its unfolding.

The latter form of historical writing sanctions the birth of philosophy of history in
its dialectical guise: ‘History and philosophy will come to the same question: what
is, in the present, the agent of the universal? What is, in the present, that which
constitutes the truth of the universal? This is the question asked by history, but
also, now, the question asked by philosophy. The dialectic is born.’[25]

It was only with the emergence of revolutionary discourse that the history of the
war of races is reactivated. This posits, beyond the political formalism of the third
estate,[26] the question of what Agamben calls the fundamental biopolitical
fracture.
 The history of races is a counter-history. It aims at showing the sealed truth
of power, how kings, sovereigns and law rest their power on abuse and
murder; unlike Roman history, where the task of memory was to reassure
the non-obliteration and the permanence of law and continuous growth of
the splendour of power. Power is unjust not because it has decayed since
its golden times, but simply because it does not belong to us. The
discourse of biblical character that develops from the end of the 16th
century aims at declaring a war on law. For instance, Petrarch asked in the
middle Ages: is there anything, in history, that is not an elegy of Rome ?
The birth of Europe is sanctioned by blood and war and by this historical
discourse that finally detached Indo-European civilisations from the Roman
inheritance. […] Nowadays, what we ask, following Petrarch, is: is there
anything more to history than the appeal to or fear of revolution? And we
add: what if Rome conquered the revolutions again?[27]

As we have seen, this discourse is a tactical, polymorphous and mobile dispositif,

which has been used by the English radical thought of the 17 th century (the
Levellers and Diggers), subsequently by the French aristocracy against the power
of Louis XIV, which re-emerges in the 19 th century, when it was adopted by post
revolutionary attempts at making a people the subject of history, whilst some
years later it was used to disqualify colonised under-races.

In the discourse where the question is the war of races, the word race does
not have immediately a stable biological signification, yet it is a
determinate word. There are two races when two groups have different
local origins, language, religion, and have formed a political unity through
war and violence. There are two major functions of historical discourse: on
the one hand, the Roman history of sovereignty, on the other, the biblical
discourse of exile and servitude. Revolutionary discourse is situated on the
side of the discourse of war of races, as Marx said to Engels in 1882: ‘You
know where we found the idea of class struggle, in the French historians
who talked about race struggles’. This form of counter history, of history as
vindication, cannot be detached by the emergence and the existence of a
practice of counter history, insurrection.[28]

The moment historic consciousness of modern times replaces the problem of

sovereignty and its foundation with the question of the revolution, there emerges
a counter discourse of races that founds itself on biologism and racism. When
Foucault talks of racism he is not referring to the notion of ethnicity, but to that of
evolutionism. For Foucault, racism is the biopolitical update of this war paradigm,
because the moment life becomes the object of power racism operates in
societies of normalisation as what makes it possible to decide and regulate what
can live and what cannot.
 The discourse of the war of races, with its battles, its victories etc, will be
replaced by a post-evolutionist biological theme of the war for life:
differentiation of species, selection of the strongest, conservation of races
etc. Equally, the theme of the binary society divided in two races and two
groups foreign to one another will be replaced by that of a society
biologically monist. Its character will be that of a society which is
undermined by heterogeneous elements that are not essential because
they do not divide the living social body into two hostile sides, but are
almost accidental. There you have the idea of infiltrated foreigners or
deviants as sub-products of society. Finally, the theme of a necessarily
unjust state, according to the counter history of races, will be transformed
into a state that is not the instrument of a race against another, but the
protector of integrity and superiority and purity of one race. So, the idea of
race comes to take the place of the idea of a war of races.

From the end of the 19th century this racism has undergone two transformations:
Foucault asserts that state racism is biological and centralised; hence, whilst in
Nazism state racism is inscribed back into the legend of warring races, in
Stalinism the adaptation of revolutionary discourse of the war of races is inserted
into scientism and police management. Foucault’s introduction of the notion of
biopower is crucial for a project of an ontology of our present. As we shall see in
the following section it has provided the grounds for an insightful analysis of the
workings of what Deleuze later named the society of control at a number of
levels, from the linguistic, to the historical, to the anthropological and political
economic one. Foucault’s differentiation between disciplinary power and biopower
as outlined in this lecture course draws our attention to a number of important
elements for today: whilst one is certainly the centrality of the notion of struggle
in understanding social relations, the other is the notion of biopower, which urges
us to reflect upon a technology that operates on populations more than
individuals, that is geared towards regulation more than surveillance and that in
so doing reopens the debate on the political role of production and reproduction
today at a time when the crisis of disciplinary mechanisms of social regulation has
been sutured.

Next Chapter

back to Table of Contents

[1] M. Foucault, ‘Man and his doubles. III. The analytic of finitude’ in The Order of Things, 1986, p. 207

[2] Ibidem

[3] M. Foucault, ‘What is Enlightenment?’ in The Foucault Reader, 1984, p. 44

[4] M. Foucault, History of Sexuality Volume 1: The Will to Knowledge, 1978, p. 143
[5] The interrelation between disciplines and sovereignty has been interestingly analysed by Robert Fine in ‘Struggles against Discipline: The
Theory and Politics of Michel Foucault’, Capital and Class, Issue no. 9, Autumn 1979

[6] Still today, for instance, the European Court deliberates on matters of rights in a manner that is exemplary of the decisions to include or exclude
certain practices, in the field of sexuality, reproduction technologies, children’s welfare etc. in an attempt to shape the pioneering force of its
political ethics, many turn to this symbolic whilst executive power to defend and circumscribe the legality of their practices.

[7] M. Foucault, ‘Course summary’, ‘Society Must Be Defended’ [1976], London : Penguin, 2003, p. 270

[8] The notion of perspectivism was one of the main methodological innovations the Marxian current of Operaismo systematically introduced and
carried out during the 1970’s. On this it is interesting to note how for those who defended the autonomy of the political and interpreted
perspectivism in strictly political terms, the project remained trapped in a sociology of class seen as ‘the’ differential subjectivity and became
primarily concerned with correlative strategies of belonging (see Mario Tronti). For others, amongst whom is Negri, this perspectivism was
epistemological and ontological and the question one of constituting an ethics of antagonism (‘The old specialist language of philosophy here is
deficient, and Foucault was right when, by renewing the Nietzschean method of ‘genealogy of morals’, he also renewed the syntactic rules of the
language of moral philosophy. I would like to attempt a similar course of action with respect to the language of metaphysics’. Antonio Negri,
Fabbriche del soggetto. Profili, protesi, transiti, macchine, paradossi, passaggi, sovversioni, sistemi, potenze: appunti per un dispositivo
ontologico. XXI Secolo bimestrale di politica e cultura n. 1. 1987. Chapter 2: ‘No future’ or on the ethical essence of epistemology’: p. 56) – my
translation

[9] Foucault analyses in detail the emergence of biopower in ‘Il faut défendre la société’, see in particular the Lecture held on 17/03/1976

[10] M. Foucault, ‘The Subject and Power’ in H. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow, Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 1982

[11] M. Foucault, Dits et Ecrits Vol III, 1994, p. 656

[12] M. Foucault, ‘Governmentality’, published in G. Burchell (ed.) The Foucault Effect, 1991, Chapter 4.

[13] M. Foucault, ‘Bisogna difendere la societá’, Milano: Feltrinelli, 1998, p. 23

[14] According to Clausewitz, ‘War is nothing but a continuation of politics by other means’; therefore ‘it is not only a political act, but also an
instrument of politics, a continuation of the political process by other means.’ C. van Clausewitz, Vom Kriege, book 1, chapter 1, § xxiv, Berlin , 1832

[15] In this and else he seems to be taking up the 1936 thesis formulated by Meinecke in Die Entstehung des Historismus by defining historicism as
the political-historical discourse of conquest, struggle and races. This hypothesis is developed by Michel Senéllart in his ‘Oltre la ragion di stato’,
published in Situations de la démocratie, 1993 Volume of the journal ‘La pensée Politique’. I have used the online version (in Italian) stored at
http://www.sherwood.it. In this article, Senéllart looks at the question of historicism and Meinecke in the last three pages

[16] These are the years 1640-1660

[17] M. Foucault, ‘Bisogna difendere la societá’, 1998, p. 90

[18] To this Foucault opposes the practice of παρρήσια as the practice of truth telling

[19] Ibid., p. 152. We certainly do not lack the evidence to support and empathise with this statement today

[20] Ibidem

[21] Ibid., p. 180

[22] Ibid., p. 179

[23] E. J. Sieyès, Che cos’é il Terzo Stato? (1789), Roma: Editori Riuniti, 1989

[24] M. Foucault, ‘Bisogna difendere la societá’, 1998, p. 200

[25] Ibid., p. 205.

[26] I here adopt Marx’s definition of political formalism

[27] Ibid., p. 69-70

[28] Ibid., p. 73

III. Technologies of the common.

Reflections on Postfordism
 In Empire,[1] Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have carried out a critique of the
present state form that stems from a productive encounter between French post-
structuralism and the analysis of political economy accomplished by the Marxian
current of Operaismo since the 1970’s.[2] We would like to explore the encounter
between the latter and Foucault’s notions of biopower in order to introduce the
current debates on what has come to be defined as biopolitical production in
postfordism.

The Labour paradigm: Fordism and discipline

In Foucault, the notion of power and the reproduction of its technologies is

crucially linked to the workings of economic rationality. As we have seen, in his
critique of liberal rationality he outlined the way in which political economy
invested the discourse of sovereignty and governmentality became the principle
of biopolitical rule. The question of production and reproduction cannot avoid
taking into account the way in which power normalises, disciplines and regulates.
Foucault’s notion of power is primarily one of a productive force. The question of
how this operates inside (or outside) what is traditionally understood as the realm
of production has guided our research into Postfordism. Negri analyses the
relation between capital and labour from the perspective of power and struggle. It
is clear that in the 1970s his work and that of others in the current of Operaismo
started looking to Foucault’s theory as an important contribution to the critique of
capitalism in its changing form. Being concerned with class composition and the
realm of the social they shared Foucault’s attention to the capillary operations of
power in society. In analysing the shift from factory society to the social factory,
we would like to point to the crisis of the disciplinary regime and the emergence
of biopolitical rule and control society by focusing on the realm of production, a
production that is intended as a force operating at the levels of power as well as
subjectivity. In Negri’s analysis, with the emergence of ‘factory society’ the
artificial separation between the political and the economic lost effectiveness. No
mediation was necessary and accumulation became its own discipline. The state
as the executive organ of capital represented the direct negation of single
capitalists in favour of the class interests of capital. It embodied the ‘political law
of collective capital’ and capital became synonymous with the general interest.

The ‘democracy of labour’ and ‘social democracy’ both reside here: they
consist of the hypothesis of a form of labour that negates itself as the
working class and autonomously manages itself within the structures of
capitalist production as labour-power. At this point capitalist social interest,
which has already eliminated the privatistic (sic) and egoistic expressions
of single capitalists, attempts to configure itself as a comprehensive,
objective social interest.[3]
Thus the post-war revolutionary import of socialist principles in the constitution is
annulled. In fact, organised labour comes to facilitate the restructuring of the
capitalist class.

As an organised movement the working class is completely within the

organisation of capital, which is the organisation of society. Its watchwords
and its ideological and bureaucratic apparatuses are all elements that are
situated within the dialectic of bourgeois development.[4]

At the point where capital is identified with the common interest of society, an
inversion occurs in the realm of social phenomenology wherein the labour nexus
appears as the strength of capital’s valorisation and the basis of society itself.[5]
This is reflected in the incorporation of the socialist principles according to which
labour is the source of all wealth – which Marx had already taken up in the
Critique of the Gotha programme – being instantiated as a principle within the
Bourgeois constitution (Negri calls the integration of this reformism the
constitutionalisation of labour). Foucault analyses what Negri calls the factory
society as the disciplinary regime typical of 19th century capitalism:

Capitalism penetrates much deeper into our existences. In the form in

which it has functioned in the 19 th century, this regime has been forced to
develop a series of political techniques, or power techniques through
which man comes to be linked to something like labour; a series of
techniques by means of which the body and time of men become labour
force and labour time, and can be effectively used to become surplus-
value. But in order to have surplus value there must be sub-power. At the
level of man’s existence, a capillary grille of micropower must be
established, which fixes men in apparatuses of production, which makes
them agents of production, workers. The link between man and labour is
synthetic and political; it is a link that power operates. By sub-power I
don’t mean what is traditionally called political power, it is neither the
apparatus of the state, nor that of the ruling class, but rather the ensemble
of micropowers, small institutions situated at the lowest level.[6]

This regime was the target of the struggles they witnessed and was attacked and
progressively deconstructed in the 1960’s and the following years across the
West. Against the tyranny of both Trade Unions and the Party, with the birth of
autonomism and the creation of resistance cultures this regime of power is faced
with the total refusal of the very ideology of social democracy, organised labour
and their motto: Arbeit macht frei.[7]

The pleasure in work

The question of the emergence of civil society, as we have seen in Hobbes, and
the silencing of the discourse of the war of races is concomitant with the liberal
preoccupation with government that Foucault analyses. Through his contributions
on the emergence of the social and the policing of families, Jacques Donzelot has
carried out a series of researches at a number of levels following Foucault’s
reflections on the issue, in relation to the economy, the police and the welfare
state. Our interest lies in the outlined subsumption of political rationality into
economic rationality and, combined with Foucault’s work on governmentality and
biopower, Donzelot’s analysis of the development and demise of the welfare state
can help us introduce the analysis of biopolitical production proper.

Donzelot analyses the welfare state as an attempt to extend workers’ rights to the
whole national population.[8] In looking at the transition from Taylorism to what
he terms perpetual training, he demonstrates that alongside the process of the
deskilling of the worker (demise of artisan/ professional worker) the political-
juridical nature of his social status was transformed (into being an abstract bearer
of rights).

Equally, at the same time as the worker becomes a subject of rights, he becomes
an object of science. The political and economic struggle engenders new
institutions; medical psychological and industrial doctors study the maximisation
of worker productivity. These two separate discourses around the worker as
subject of rights and object of science, is studied by Donzelot as a changing
relation that is intrinsic to the political developments of the twentieth century. On
one side there is the wage-labour relation. On another side, there is the scientific
discourse. In the interwar period these two separate elements come together. The
scientific and ideological discourses re-introduce the idea of the joy of work which
is attached to social insurance schemes. The merging of the economic and social
discourse into one operative field based on work created the conditions of
possibility for its extreme form wherein the healthy working subject could clash
violently with the non-working, sick outsider.

Donzelot argues that after 1945 the idea of the nation becomes supplanted by
that of society in the political imaginary: if National Socialism aimed to eradicate
the vulnerable, society needed to look after them and heal its own wounds. The
issue of jurisdiction over what Agamben identifies as the biopolitical fracture is
the central function of the welfare state. In fact, Donzelot observes that the post-
war period saw the removal of the notion of mal-adjusted and invalidity from the
vocabulary of industrial relations, and the introduction of terms like handicap and
deficit which aimed to sustain a general notion - and legally sanctioned practice -
that working life, with enough training, could and should include everyone.
Industrial competitiveness and demands for profitability led corporations to
include those portions of society whom they previously would have judged too
volatile. Hence the industrial machinery brought together doctors and
psychologists who could confront problems of absenteeism, alcoholism, work
place accidents and their prevention and could deal with the intrinsic dangers of
refusal. In France in 1975 a law was passed in favour of the handicapped and
declared the category of mal-adjusted obsolete. The significance of this law for
Donzelot is that it effectively generalises the idea of the handicapped whereby a
category of the excluded could be turned into a general figure for inclusion to
support particular and local practices of re-adjustment through the various
institutional mechanisms of the social state.

The redefinition of work and the relations of work become the main factor relating
to productivity. Whilst under Taylorism the occurrence of accidents for instance
was measured and analysed by looking at the technical relation of man and
machine and studied as a predictable and potentially preventable factor, in the
society of the 1950s accidents became increasingly understood as due to failure
of communication in the chain of command and the instance of accidents as being
proportional to the degree of work place satisfaction. Similar conclusions arose
out the studies on absenteeism. This reasoning was also sanctioned by 1975
legislation concerning sick pay. Whilst in the past sick leave was generally paid at
50% of the wage by social security, it now had to be paid in full, half of which was
to be subsidised by the corporation. Hence the responsibility for the working
environment was shifted onto the enterprise.

The neo-liberal offensive of the 1980s and 1990s signified that this arrangement
could no longer be sustained. The responsibility for health and training had to be
transferred from society back onto the individual. Thus the current return to civil
society in the political vocabulary is also a by product of the gradual breakdown of
the welfare state. What new forms of social regulation, inclusion and responsibility
accompany the governmentality of social relations within the context of the
changing relations of work in contemporary Western ‘control’ societies? Civil
society initially will take up the task of ‘taking care of’ the destitute class, the
‘people’ that, as Agamben reminds us, resist juridification into citizens. Recent
developments in the theory of civil society could be seen as an effect of the
legitimation crisis of the sovereign discourse and as an attempt to reconstitute a
unitary political subjectivity. They need to be read in the light of a wider debate on
the autonomy of the political, a debate that is always accompanied by the
theoretical need to reconstitute a theory of sovereignty in the modern day. [9] In
Hardt’s and Negri’s analysis[10] total subsumption is also the process of a
subsumption of civil society.[11] However, at the level of political discourse, this
process appears as its reverse. Seen from another perspective, if civil society is
understood also – as in Hegel: as system of needs, administration of justice and
the police and corporation- as the set of mediating infrastructures that are in part
the locus operandi or at least the laboratory for practices of disciplinary power,
the end of mediation must also be recognised within the progressive collapse of
these institutions. [12]

Postfordism and Control

According to the theorists under analysis, with the paradigm of discipline and the
traditional centres where disciplinary techniques are deployed (class, party,
school, nuclear family, wage labour and what constitutes the realm of civil
society)[13] come to face a deep crisis. Thus disciplinary rationality needs to be
increasingly substituted by more efficient, economical, discrete and implicit
procedures aimed at governing people. In Foucault’s analysis this begins in the
19th century with the emergence of the social insurance systems in France [14]
that prefigures a science of control based on the prevention of risk and enacted
under the auspices of the security of the life of the population. This is also the
time when biopower becomes fully operative within the workings of the modern
state, whereby biopower takes life as its object. Foucault analysed the way in
which disciplinary power has been integrated and increasingly substituted by a
paradigm of control in contemporary society in interventions such as ‘Un système
fini face à une demande infinie’[15], where he analyses the welfare state and its
decline. There he sees the perverse effects of the coupling of assistance and
dependency operated by a system which in the interwar years was designed with
the aim of attenuating social conflicts. For Foucault mechanisms of dependency
are enacted through the normalising functions of integration and marginalisation
against which we ought to react. ‘I think there is a need to resist the phenomenon
of integration. In fact, the individual fully enjoys the whole dispositif of social
welfare only if he/she is integrated in a family group, a workplace or a
geographical territory.’[16]

Foucault’s reflections on the role of war in power relations also highlight the
urgency to rethink the notion of refusal: a refusal to play and to speak the
language of power that characterised the struggles of the 1970s. He recognises
that the response to such refusals was new and required a change in our analysis
of power. It is refusal that introduces the control paradigm. In fact, discipline is
only one mode of 'expression' for power. Once the system has changed to
incorporate the new needs of a post-welfare state and post-pastoral form of
power, from surveillance on criminality we have moved towards the control of the
population. This is due to the endorsement by the system of those resistances
through its adoption of their very techniques and creates a new function for
power.
In our view, what is analysed as control society is the state of 'executive power' or
policing, monitoring and recording that constitutes the excess which is the
actuality of the norm. This political state of permanent exception is tightly linked
to the ideology of governmentability and of security. The way a society of control
functions is no more based on the individuation and subjectifying of individuals as
'types', it doesn't work on individuation of the marginalized finalised to their
subsequent 'inclusive rehabilitation'. Statistics have come to dissect the individual
and fragment it to its smallest components. This is most evident in the division of
labour into skills and of the body into genes. Hence, control can be exercised in
virtue of its own creation and 'positive' determination of multiple subjectifications
within the same individual. The role of law itself changes with it in so far as
instead of functioning as the arbiter or regulator of incompatible interests, it
abdicates its ambition to social integration and with the crisis of welfare it is
forced to reduce its scope to that of only representing negotiable interests whilst
neutralising and silencing the rest.[17]

One of the focal concerns of Hardt and Negri’s use of the formula society of
control[18] lies in the notion of ‘democratisation’ and 'immanentisation' of
mechanisms of command. We have seen that 'exceptionality' refers to the self-
legitimising ideology of continuous policing when looking into Agamben’s State of
Exception and Foucault's reversal of Clausewitz's idea that war is the continuation
of politics by other means. If politics is the continuation of war by other means,
the 'conflicts' arising in times of peace and the internal dissent arising
domestically amount to a re-sanctioning of the same dynamics applied in times of
war. This poses the problem of defining 'the Enemy' as barbarous when it resides
within the social that is the field of modern civil wars. The disciplinary society is in
crisis and traditional modes of normalisation via institutions are replaced by a
more capillary and less dichotomising strategy; thus, attempts at normalising or
justifying forms of institutional marginalisation in the language of social
integration and contractual agreement become superfluous: the question
becomes one of negotiation of hybrid identities. Once the function of the liberal
state abdicates its pretence of neutral regulatory dispositif of conflicting interests
in defence of a contract that aims at social integration and assumes an active role
in neutralising –through 'criminalisation' or silencing- conflicting interests and
identities (when they present themselves as disintegrating forces), then the
function of right and law coincides with the exercise of continuous policing. This is
what Negri and Hardt mean when they assert that there is a 'conceptual
inseparability of the title and the exercise of power'.

Control and Biopower

We would argue that today the science of control functions through a predictive
medicine (with no doctors nor patients) whereby it treats society as a reserve of
diseases and individuals as carriers of pathologies; through an education that is
transformed into life long learning where each individual is compelled to remain
productive throughout his/her life; through a surveillance that is used not as
evidence of crime but as a preventive tool for recognising, inserting into
databases and scanning human bodies and behaviour. Every individual who acts
suspiciously becomes a carrier of criminality. What Hardt and Negri see as the end
of the outside coincides with the crisis of traditional disciplinary institutions and
the diffusion of mechanisms of interiorisation: self-exploitation, self-rationalisation
and internalisation of responsibility prove to be more effective tools of
government. As Deleuze rightly observes:

Factories formed individuals into a body of men for the convenience of a

management that could monitor each component into this mass, and trade
unions that could mobilise this mass resistance; but businesses are
constantly introducing an inexorable rivalry presented as healthy
competition, a wonderful motivation that sets individuals against one
another and sets itself up in each of them, dividing each within himself.
Even the state education system has been looking at the principle of
‘getting paid for results’: in fact, just as business are replacing factories,
school is being replaced by continuing education and exams by continuous
assessment (control). It’s the surest way of turning education into a
business. In disciplinary societies you were always starting all over again
(as you went from school to barracks, from barracks to factory), while in
control societies you never finish anything -business, training, and military
service being coexisting metastable states of a single modulation, a sort of
universal transmutation.[19]

This move towards control societies also causes a re-territorialisation of the place
for struggle. The retreat of disciplinary institutions opens spaces of
‘abandonment’, ghettos, refugee camps, where bare life is at the mercy of the
lawless management of the Polizeistaat, which acts on the basis of a permanent
state of exception. Hardt and Negri see the notion of exceptionality as crucial to

the way power speaks of itself:

Empire is not formed on the basis of force itself but on the basis of the
capacity to present force as being in the service of right and peace. Empire
operates on the terrain of crisis, in the name of the exceptionality of the
intervention there is the creation of a new right of the police.[20]

In the biopolitical paradigm, where regulation and security are the main operative
function of politics, the function of war becomes one of securing the lives of
people, where power speaks of itself in terms of the ‘evolutionist’ racist motto
(mors tua vita mea). As Foucault notes:
 Wars are no longer waged in the name of a sovereign who must be
defended; they are waged on behalf of the existence of everyone; entire
populations are mobilized for the purpose of wholesale slaughter in the
name of life necessity: massacres have become vital.[21]

We have seen that Foucault’s studies on liberalism and the police state point to
the transition from territorial to population state by looking at the introduction of
political economy in the paradigm of sovereignty, which in turn changes the role
of the state from sovereign into government. In the face of the emergence of the
modern state as government, the question of associating the law with legitimacy
by assigning it the role of being ‘the barometer of truth’ collapses onto itself. Law
is to be the last resort of sovereignty, rather than its constitutive foundation, in its
functioning as the legitimate defence of the ‘universality of the few’ or the
‘singularity of the many’. In this respect, it is merely procedural. One of the
features of modern political rationality is that very presupposition that you can
separate and pose against one another right and administration, law and order.
One might argue that the legitimation of the state (the executive) comes today
from this attempt at reconciliation of these two elements, which can only take the
form of an integration of the law in the order of the state. As we have seen,
Foucault’s work on the political historical discourse of the 17 th century, in ‘Il faut
défendre la société’ as well as his 1978-79 course at the Collège de France on
‘Security, territory and population’ show how liberalism needs the police to reduce
government. The main point of Smith’s invisible hand thus lies in its invisibility.
Hardt and Negri see this particular process as culminating in a politics of
avoidance:

In the development of the postmodern liberal argument State power is not

exerted according to what Foucault calls a disciplinary paradigm […]. State
power here does not involve the exposure and subjugation of social
subjects as part of an effort to engage, mediate, and organise conflictual
forces within the limits of order. The thin state avoids such engagement:
this is what characterises its liberal politics. […] The liberal notion of
tolerance coincides here perfectly with the decidedly illiberal mechanism
of exclusion. The thin state of postmodern liberalism appears, in effect, as
a refinement and extension of the German tradition of the science of the
police. The police are necessary to afford the system abstraction and
isolation: the “thin blue line” delimits the boundaries of what will be
accepted as inputs in the system of rule. […]The crucial development
presented by the postmodern Polizeiwissenschaft, is that now society is
not infiltrated and engaged, but separated and controlled: not a
disciplinary society but a pacified society of control. The police function
creates and maintains a pacified society, or the image of a pacified
society, by preventing the incidence of conflicts on the machine of
equilibrium. […] The method of avoidance then carries implicitly a
postmodern Polizeiwissenschaft that effectively, and in practical terms,
abstracts the system from the field of potential conflicts, thus allowing the
system to order an efficient, administered society.[22]
Whereas the factory society corresponded to the Fordist mechanisms of labour
exploitation, which attempted to homogenise labour and break down the power of
the professional worker,[23] the society of control corresponds and is a response
to the movement away from the ‘productive labourer’ as the essential substance
of the alienated labour that produces value and surplus value. Biopower entered
history by turning the ancient right to ‘take life or let live’ into a power to ‘foster
life or disallow it into the point of death’.[24] Foucault writes: ‘this power was
without question an indispensable element in the development of capitalism; the
latter would not have been possible without the controlled insertion of bodies into
the machinery of production’.[25]

Biopolitical production

In his writings Foucault attacked forms of economic determinism that tended to

reinforce the labour paradigm.

It is wrong to say that the concrete existence of man is labour. For the life
and times of man are not by nature labour, they are: pleasure,
discontinuity, celebration, rest, needs, appetite, violence, deprecation, etc.
Capital is supposed to transform all this explosive energy into a continuous
labour force continually available on the market. Capital is supposed to
synthesize life into a labour force, in a way which implies coercion: that of
a system of appropriation. […] If it is true that the economic structure
characterized by the accumulation of capital has the property of being
able to transform the labour force into a productive force, then the power
structures which have the form of appropriation have the ultimate aim of
transforming living time into a labour force. Appropriation is the correlative
in terms of the power of that which, in economic terms, is the
accumulation of capital.[26]

In its current guise, we would say that biopolitics is the form of this appropriation,
one that invests life, and it is precisely the subsumption of living time under
labour time in control society that is analysed by the studies of Postfordism in the
guise of immaterial labour. For Hardt and Negri total subsumption and the society
of control operate at the level of biopolitical production precisely because
production has subsumed life itself, and as the whole of society becomes a
factory (diffuse factory) it also becomes a school, a hospital, a prison and an army.
[27] The studies of Postfordism under analysis here take Foucault’s analysis
further and look at biopolitical production precisely at the point where this process
has reached its apex. In the paradigm of immaterial labour, the body is fixed
capital. Labour is no longer ‘employed’ by capital and the instruments of labour
are the brain-machines of social cooperation.[28] In so far as disciplinary power
was productive of subjectivities within institutions, it had a ‘place’. Now these
institutions are breaking down and with them the function of representation,
negotiation, and delegation. Subjectivity is immediately individuated by power
and made productive by capital; the importance of immaterial and affective

labour lies in its function as producer of value-subjectivities.

From the point of view of labour, the working class through the endeavour of its
own agents collapses the privileged sector of the Fordist worker and instantiates
new forms of subjectivities and a different class composition. Negri is decisive
about the periodisation in the movement towards the social worker. The fact that
he locates it in 1968 shows the persistent political dimension of his thought about
reality and the importance of the event. For our theorists, the 1970s undoubtedly
marked a bloody period in what were the staged battles of this transition. Against
the powerful labour force, the crisis state became centralised as a constant
reality. But what is more crucial perhaps is the birth of struggles outside of the
factory, which was reflected in the extension of the state administration of
discipline (now control) into directly managing the production of subjectivity,
whilst (and as a response to) subjects resisting the reduction of themselves to
labour power. The idea of immaterial labour comes to be theorised as a result of
the changes in the quality of labour brought about by the postmodernization/
informatization of the economy. The Italian tradition of Operaismo links the notion
of immaterial labour to the move from Fordist to lean production (or Toyotism),
where prior to being manufactured, a product must be sold.[29] The main
requirement for the introduction of this model is the establishment of a system of
communication between production and consumption, between factories and
markets. The kind of immaterial labour involved in the industry primarily entails
the transmission of data, which dictates that an increasing proportion of capital
must be invested in the increasing the power of communicative techniques,
corresponding to the increasingly cerebral and affective nature of labour. The
importance of this form of labour is fully recognised by those in charge of
economic policy making, as Christian Marazzi argues in Il posto dei calzini. Under
the name Clintonomics, Marazzi analyses precisely this change in political
economy and provides a great deal of evidence for the significance of policy
makers for the establishment of a new economy.

Clintonomics is the name ascribed to a set of policies implemented during Clinton

’s presidency in the US . It is important for us because its main theory (expounded
in Robert Reich’s The Work of Nations) recognises the need to reconstruct the
economy following a twelve-year period of neo-liberal policies and turns to the
potential of immaterial labour to this purpose. In this respect, it recognises the
crisis of the disciplinary paradigm and the traditional regime of labour and seeks a
more economical and efficient way to exercise power. Robert Reich (Secretary of
Labour under Clinton ) recognises the centrality of immaterial labour for the
reconstruction of a political and social class that seemed to have fallen out of
control in voting Perrot. Immaterial labour is defined as the activity of the
‘manipulation of symbols’. This he recognises as central for a state intervention
that with Clinton takes the form of economic and political engineering aimed at
circumscribing the conflictual situation the US found itself in. Clintonomics puts
industrial politics back on the agenda and recognises the inefficacy of
deregulation for economic growth. Reich’s theory puts forward the idea of
‘externalities’. It starts from the assumption that interactions amongst economic
agents do not necessarily have to go through the market. Externalities (elements
external to the market) can be of a positive or a negative kind. Positive
externalities are things such as professional training and ‘education’. Negative
ones are for instance the effects on the environment. These externalities
represent added costs or benefits that are not included in market transactions and
are ‘regulated’ by the collectivity. It is here, in the regulation of externalities, that
the State can find legitimation for its active intervention. As we can see, once the
inefficacy of deregulation is recognised in economic terms, state intervention can
be justified on the basis that the spontaneous equilibrium of the sum of individual
initiatives is insufficient for an optimal collective equilibrium. Paul Romer focuses
on the gap between rich and poor and its consequence for economic growth. At
the beginning of the 1990s the US experienced a major slow down of economic
growth. Romer identifies ‘inequality’ of distribution of wages and education as its
cause rather than effect. The State needs to intervene in order to regulate the
level of productivity of its population. The idea of endogenous development
hence summarises the effort of Clintonomics towards a synergy of individual
investment and a collective productivity managed by the State. Marazzi provides
an insightful analysis from a macro-economic point of view of the policy changes
undertaken by the US government of the Clinton administration in reconfiguring
its role as maximiser of capitalist productivity. It is Reich in particular who points
to the necessity of investing in immaterial labour not only for economic but
primarily for political reasons in the new global order. As Marazzi argues:

In the long run, the products of immaterial labour will be the crucial assets
for each nation: scientific and technological research, training of the
labour-force, development of management, communication, electronic
financial networks. In the universe of intellectual labour we find:
researchers, engineers, computer scientists, lawyers, some creative
accountant, management consultants, financial advisors, publicists, the
‘practitioners’, editors and journalists, university professors. This ‘rank’ is
destined to accelerate the process of decline of all activities of the Taylorist
kind, i.e. the repetitive and executive ones, that are easy to reproduce in
countries with low-cost labour force; whilst services to people, even though
still important in a society with a strong tertiary sector, cannot benefit
from material subsidies, since they are not, according to Reich, value
creating activities. The economist’s reasoning runs more or less like this:
 the globalisation of the economy does no longer allow one to refer
ownership of capital to the national composition of the means of
production. For instance, a Ford is the result of partial and combined
activities that are dispersed around the globe and concerted within global
webs, where what counts is efficiency and the productivity of
communication. The car that results from this process of production is a
composite of parts produced in different nations, by means of a capital of
multinational ownership. However, what is lost as a consequence of the
de-nationalisation of capital ownership (i.e. the means of production,
constant capital) is recuperated at the level of ownership of immaterial
labour, of the control of knowledge production. The denationalisation of
physical-material capital is counterbalanced by the nationalisation of
knowledge, and the command on its organisation. ‘Buy American’ means
from now on: ‘Valorise American knowledge’. Nationality, according to
Reich’s reasoning, is recuperated through a strategic investment in
activities that create more value, i.e. immaterial activities that
characterise the postfordist mode of production. The income generated by
immaterial activity must be nationalised in order to deal with the
unemployment of the unskilled American labour-force and reduce the
disparity of income between skilled labourers and the working poor
(competition with emerging countries) without inhibiting the comparative
advantage of the US with respect to the rest of the world. American pride
ought to function as solidaristic glue: when compared with competitive
countries, the greater wealth generated by greater productivity and skill of
immaterial labour provides the fiscal means to temper the deterioration of
the life conditions of unqualified and defeated American people.[30]

We can see here how knowledge production becomes crucial to the economy of
control society. This is no longer simply the production of that scientific knowledge
used in the disciplinary operations of integration and exclusion, that which could
‘scientifically’ establish the difference between the sane and the insane, the
dangerous and the safe, the normal and the deviant. Here the double capture of
the worker Donzelot analyses in its inscription into political discourse as the
subject of rights and object of science implodes onto itself. Knowledge production
under Postfordism becomes directly the production of subjectivity, of linguistic
and social performances that are immediately valorised. Whilst in the period of
Fordist manufacture labour activity could be silent and automated, now the
labourer is required to invest his/her subjectivity in the activity of work, for the
latter consists of symbolic interactions and the production of meaning. When
analysing immaterial labour we see how both the labouring activity and the
nature of the products has changed. As far as the products are concerned, the
formation of brands is only one aspect of the process of cultural revalorisation
mentioned by Marazzi. Yet it is important, for one of the shifts occurring in
Postfordism is that an increasing separation occurs between factory and
enterprise,[31] whereby the latter assumes as its main role that of the production
of subjectivity. The idea that immaterial labour directly produces the capital
relation – whilst with material labour, this was clandestine- changes the
phenomenology of capital and the substance of its social power and the nature of
labour, for immaterial workers are primarily producers of subjectivity.[32]
 If production today is directly the production of a social relation, then the
‘raw material’ of immaterial labour is subjectivity and the ‘ideological’
environment in which subjectivity lives and reproduces. The production of
subjectivity ceases to be only an instrument of social control (for the
production of mercantile relationships) and becomes directly productive,
because the goal of our post-industrial society is to construct the
consumer/communicator -and to construct it as ‘active’. Immaterial
workers (those who work in advertising, fashion, marketing, television,
cybernetics, and so forth) satisfy a demand by the consumer and at the
same time establish that demand.[33]

In this sense, the function of the enterprise is one of producing the world which
the consumer, the producer and the product inhabit.[34] This is where the role of
communication and the linguistic production becomes pivotal. ‘Consumption is
not reduced to the act of buying and carrying out a service or a product, as
political economics and its criticism teach, but instead means, first of all,
belonging to a world or a universe.’[35] Thus the basis of postfordist production is
the production of subjectivity in terms of social relations, relations to the self and
to others as well as of a certain way of belonging to the world. This is not an issue
limited to the communicative industry for it extends to the whole of social
production. In fact, our interest in the analysis of Maurizio Lazzarato, Christian
Marazzi and others in relation to Foucault lies in their recognition that language,
far from being simply the means for exchange of data and information, becomes
valorised in its role as a productive force.[36]

The workings of financial capital too are based on the self-referentiality of social
conventions that functions through the production of affects. So alongside the
informational content of immaterial labour, and the cultural aspect of its
productive role, what is valorised in contemporary capitalism is also its ‘affective’
character. Affective labour is that ‘embedded in moments of human interaction
and communication’. It acts wherever human contact is required and is essentially
involved with ‘producing social networks, forms of community and biopower. What
is created in the networks of affective labour is a form-of-life’.[37]

Affective labour ends the dominating tendency in the measure of value that was
only appropriate to the time when labour was outside of capital and needed to be
reduced to labour power.[38] Biopolitical production is directly involved with the
production of social relations and that becomes coextensive with social
reproduction. The biopolitical notions of life and body are determined in the
political constitution and in the real daily affirmations of social subjectivity.[39]
The putting to work of what is common, of language and the intellect, causes a
‘personalisation’ of subjectivation that is all the more evident in the development
of a sinister drive towards self-exploitation of immaterial labourers, one of the
results of the subsumption of life under production,[40] proved by the fact that
rather than reducing labour time, new technologies and the new economy have in
fact increased the length of the working day by exploiting the process that had
driven towards a form of mass entrepreneurship.[41]

However, at the level of labour, the productive subject also has social
cooperation as its absolute basis. Networks of information and communication
form the marrow of every element in the synthesised and globalised productive
space. Immaterial labour and affective labour are the basis for the collapse of
mediation: justification becomes an immanent affair.[42] The myth of a realm of
public space as negotiating ground finally decomposes.[43] The social state in its
traditional guise is substituted by the management of differentiating
subjectivities.[44] The form of capital’s command over labour in biopolitical
production is a sinister state where ‘the new slogan of Western societies is that
we should all ‘become subjects’. This is where Foucault’s warnings against a
discourse on practices of freedom that uncritically poses the self at its centre and
regards subjectivity in terms of self identity become all the more urgent.[45] In
control society, participative management is a technology of power, a technology
for creating and controlling the subjective processes.[46] However, productive
cooperation is at once indispensable and destabilising for postfordist production.

Theories of immaterial labour rely on the idea that communication has acquired
an active role in the process of production, since the shift from Fordist to lean
production. What this entails at the 'bio-political' level and at the level of
subjectivity is not only a change in the nature of labour as productive activity, but
more profoundly of social relations. It means that we are producers at all times,
simply by virtue of communicating, of being social, of speaking and that there is
no realm out of production since the process of valorisation and the time of
exploitation is dislocated in time and space and extended to our whole
lifetime/bios. In this sense, this notion of immaterial labour also sharply opposes
the ‘conventional’ discourse of neo-liberal economics that emphasises that
consumption and demand and supply are a politically 'empowering' feature of
capitalism. Theorists of postfordism shift this political emphasis from the
consumers on the producers, hence emphasising the potential immanent to social
cooperation in productive activity. The process whereby the need for labour to
function through networks of cooperation corresponds to a hierarchical
centralisation of modes of control over production turns command into parasitical
and arbitrary.[47] On the one hand then, the deterritorialisation of production,
fully integrated with techniques of 'labour management', 'place labour in a
weakened bargaining position'[48] at the level of rights, whilst on the other hand,
'the cooperative powers of labour power afford labour the possibility of valorising
itself.'[49] This is a process in the making and not something we can easily take a
distance from: in so far as it is developing and founded upon social cooperation it
is from the latter we need to start to reverse -where possible -or negate- where
necessary - its operations.

Technologies of the common

Negri’s notion of the common and Foucault’s idea of technologies of the self can
aid our project to point towards a theorisation of the possible configurations of a
critical ontology of the present and of resistance to the society of control. In
several writings, Negri has expounded his view that the common cannot be
theorised today in terms of a public sphere or goods. The common today, for
Negri, is primarily the common of exploitation. However, Negri asserts that the
postmodern multitude is a ‘group of singularities whose instrument for living is
the brain and whose productive force consists in cooperation’. The question posed
in relation to the common then becomes one of what forms of self government
modern subjectivity can exercise. Here self-government is seen in terms of a
mode of creative resistance to forms of subjectivation that are immediately
valorised by contemporary capitalism. If by technology we mean the techniques
of power that ensure obedience and the production of subjectivity for capital, the
figures of simple sabotage, resistance or counter-power cannot be productive.
Virno’s notion of exodus in this context is important and in our view it represents
the social correlative of what Foucault’s conceptualised as the individual practice
of déprise.[50] The political aspect of exodus lies in its potential for 'innovation'.
‘The exit can be seen as free-thinking inventiveness that changes the rules of the
game and disorients the enemy' in 'social conflicts that manifest themselves not
so much as protest, but most particularly as defection.'[51] A possible reading of
this ‘exit’ is one that sees it as a form of 'radical disobedience' that in not
'confronting' Power on its own grounds constitutes at once its delegitimisation and
the positing of an alternative. However, when transposed on the plane of
production and labour, following the analysis of biopolitical production of
subjectivity, exodus poses a series of problems. As we have seen, beyond the
scientific knowledge embodied in fixed capital immaterial labour also
characterises the direct production of social relations and, above all, of
subjectivity. Through the destruction of the factory and the expropriation of social
knowledge social cooperation is theorised as ontologically prior to its 'being put to
work', its value-producing use by capital. In this sense as a means of production it
is not all the exclusive property of capital, and thus the possibilities of ruptures
and the vulnerabilities of the current mode of postfordist production referred to
become greater. In concrete terms, forms of immaterial labour that practice
exodus are, for instance, those that ignore copyright laws. The possibility of
positing such practices outside of the capitalist mode of production, in real
subsumption, is hard to conceive of, yet the political importance of this is that
the proliferation of modes of productive activity that use social cooperation in the
manner of exodus, would produce 'against' capital by being 'in spite of it'. Exodus
seems a useful theoretical tool for describing these concrete and social forms of
subversion and constitution of the common, because it points to a refusal to
'speak' the language of Power. It cannot be seen as escapism in so far as exodus
is what follows the exhaustion of the centripetal power vs. resistance repetition
and what at once inserts itself in the interstices between power and resistance.
Even though as this notion might still be loaded with u-topian overtones about
autonomous spheres –especially in Virno-, it nonetheless seems the most
adequate way to address the question of what comes beyond refusal, when the
latter has saturated its 'creationist' impulses: in other words, when the workings
of control are capable of reprogramming themselves with inbuilt immunity against
it through the management of unpredictability. Seeing that Power acts on the
ground of preventive and pre-emptying intervention, the question is how to create
a rupture that is not post-factum? The discourses of resistance and processes of
liberation do not seem to take this operative aspect of control society into serious
account, which in our view the exodus strategy of 'engaged withdrawal' aptly
problematises. The question then needs to be posed in terms of resistance and
creation, and must look into the productive activity of the common as a form of
life that escapes political representation. As Lazzarato writes:

The determination of the relationship between resistance and creation is

the last limit that Foucault’s thought attempted to breach. The forces that
resist and create are to be found in strategic relations and in the will of
subjects who are virtually free to “control the conduct of others.” Power,
the condensation of strategic relations into relations of domination, the
contraction of the spaces of freedom by the desire to control the conduct
of others, always meets with resistance; this resistance should be sought
out in the strategic dynamic. Consequently, life and living being become a
“matter” of ethics through the dynamic that simultaneously resists power
and creates new forms of life.[52]

This limit is the very operative field of subjectivity. However, if one is to take the
theoretical accomplishments of the reconfiguration of the category of subjectivity
seriously, the notion of the self needs to be clearly distinguished from that of the
individual in order to move beyond the sovereign subject as the central point of
political analysis. For this reason, we take the common to name the subjectivity
proper to postfordist production, and its political activity as one of creation of
language and forms of life. This is the reason for our insistence on positing the
debate on language at the centre of philosophical and political analysis. For it is
the very means of reproduction of subjectivity today, of value, affect, as well as
power relations.

Next Chapter

back to Table of Contents

[1] Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri Empire, Cambridge : Harvard University Press, 2000

[2] For definitions of Operaismo, please refer to Matteo Mandarini’s Introduction to Time for Revolution, London : Continuum Books, 2002,
Steve Wrights’ Storming Heaven. Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomism. London : Pluto Press, 2002 and G. Borio, G. Roggero &
F. Pozzi, Futuro Anteriore. Roma: Deriveapprodi, 2002.

[3] Antonio Negri & Michael Hardt, Labor of Dionysus. A Critique of the State Form. Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press , 1994, p.62

[4] ibid. p. 61

[5] see on this Negri’s article on ‘Keynes and the Capitalist Theory of the State’ in Labour of Dionysus, 1994, Chapter 2

[6] M. Foucault, ‘Archivio Foucault, Volume 3. 1998

[7] see Virno’s account of the Hot Autumn in Italy in Hardt and Virno (eds) Radical Thought in Italy, Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press ,
1996

[8] From Graham Burchell (ed.) The Foucault Effect, 1991, chapter 13 ‘Pleasure in Work’, by Jacques Donzelot - “It is not a question of creating
joy through work, nor joy despite work, but of producing pleasure and work, and to better realise this design of producing the one in the other.
Pleasure in work diverts people from individual egoism as much as from nationalistic hysteria putting before them a model of happiness in an
updated, corrected social domain, where attention to the social costs of technique and to techniques of reducing the cost of the social create the
possibility and necessity for a new social concert, in which the effacement of the juridical status of the subject removes inhibitions about his
participation.” p. 280

[9] In fact, in the context of Negri’s analysis, confusion arises when the 'socialised worker' is placed in the context of the 'resurgence of the social'
as substitutive rather than 'incorporative' of the political.

[10] Two important essays analyse the role of civil society and the demise of the political: www.deriveapprodi.org/rivista/17/hardt17.html (it)
www.geocities.com/cordobakaf/crisisa.html (en)

[11] The collapsing of a separation between inside and outside of power re-problematises how Foucault’s explicit writings on power had given
cause to think of power and resistance as symmetrically opposed, as well as how Negri had previously theorised 'antagonism' in terms of autonomy
by building an almost symmetrical relation between labour and capital, whereby the former functioned as the outside of the latter. In fact, the 1997
Introduction to La costituzione del tempo (recently translated by Matteo Mandarini as part one of Time for Revolution, London: Continuum Books,
2003), Negri criticises precisely himself and the tendency in Operaismo to: ‘block research by coming to a standstill at the moment of describing a
topos, a place for struggle, an antagonism intrinsic to capitalist relations that produces two different and symmetrical -in this case- temporalities
and subjectivities.’ (my trans.) He explains this attitude to be the effect of a preoccupation with avoiding the 'dialectical' synthetic (and reformist)
recuperation of the opposing tendencies; however, he blames this experiment for assuming the tones of a negative dialectic, of a space where the
only 'opening' would have to be constituted in ethical terms. Negri poses the overcoming of this impasse in research as the complementing of the
topos with a telos, which he identifies as the constituent side of this relation and the element that immanently causes the explosion of this
symmetrical block. The question on inside and outside in Empire is important for this debate because the collapse of this division is equated with
the end of liberal politics. This is crucial for a critique of the resurgence of a theory of civil society as well as of the 'autonomy of the political'. The
latter has been carried out in the last century by Marxists and non Marxists by means of various re-readings of Aristotelianism and the
rehabilitation of Hannah Arendt but is also the predominant concern in mainstream political theory in so far as it is preoccupied with a 'public
sphere' or a 'space for politics' that is somehow preserved 'immune' from the corrupted, technocratic, instrumental and economic dictates of reason,
or even from the dictates of our situatedness as social beings.

[12] The interesting point of Hardt’s and Negri’s analysis, rather than dwelling on the effects in practices of power for the political discourse of
sovereignty and civil society, concentrates more of a description of the 'subjective face' given to the 'objective process'. For instance, they do not
analyse the American constitution but rather its ambitions and in this they follow the spirit of those who looked to the economically most advanced
country in search of a glimpse on the rest of the world's possible future. Their argument is imbued with a political sociology similar to that of A.
Tocqueville, who recognised the progressive elements of the US constitution and also its intrinsic dangers. At the level of Empire, they analyse a
politically, constitutionally anti-centralistic ambition (in the division of powers and the organisation of state bureaucracy), and its social effects in
terms similar to those of conformism and absolute tyranny Tocqueville warned his contemporaries against. Tocqueville saw it as inevitable that
since all modern Western societies tended to become 'formally' egalitarian (post-rank), the kinds of socio-political regimes likely to emerge as a
result would entail a growth of state power, since power is only stopped by power (in an immanent way). Clearly, Tocqueville’s warning against the
dangers of 'totalitarian democracy' stands closer to the kind of biopolitical imperial order Hardt and Negri are trying to describe than the
Napoleonic/French republican centralist or imperialistic debates on the limits of sovereignty. By refusing the idea that power is centralised, Hardt
and Negri look at the US ambitions in the constitution as the best judicial expression of a 'de-centralised' imperial exercise of command.

[13] M. Foucault, ‘La société disciplinaire en crise’. In Dits et écrits. Vol III, 1994, p. 532-533

[14] M. Foucault, ‘About the concept of the “dangerous individual” in 19 th century legal psychiatry’, in the Journal of law and psychiatry, vol. 1,
1978, p. 1-18

[15] M. Foucault, ‘Un système fini face à une demande infinie', interview by Bono, R., in R. Bono, Sécurité Sociale: l'Enjeu, Paris: Syros, 1983, p. 39-
63.

[16] M. Foucault, ‘La société disciplinaire en crise’, 1994

[17] This is where we think Foucault’s aesthetic of existence is intended as a new and effective form of response to 'control' power.

[18] Negri and Hardt analyse this mostly in chapter 2 of Empire, 2000

[19] Gilles Deleuze, ‘Postscript on control societies’, in Negotiations, 1972-1990. New York : Columbia University Press, 1990. p.179

http://textz.gnutenberg.net/textz/deleuze_gilles_postscript_on_the_societies_of_control.txt

[20] Hardt and Negri, Empire, 2000, p.29

[21] M. Foucault, History of sexuality volume I: The Will to knowledge, 1978 p. 137

[22]Hardt and Negri, Labour of Dionysus, 1994, p. 237

[23] For the attachment of the political organisation of class to the professional worker, see Zygmunt Bauman, Memories of class. The Pre-History
and After-Life of Class. London : Routledge, 1982

[24] ‘faire mourir-laisser vivre/faire vivre-rejeter dans la mort’. In M. Foucault, The Will to Knowledge, 1998, p. 138

[25] Ibid.

[26] Foucault, ‘Le Pouvoir de la Norme’, cited in François Ewald (ed.) Michel Foucault Philosopher. Hertfordshire: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992

[27] For an important contribution to understanding the transition from discipline to control in Foucault, see: Alessandro Pandolfi, Tre studi su
Foucault, Napoli : Terzo Millennio Edizioni, 2000, chapter 2.

[28] Antonio Negri, ‘Back to the future’. In J. Bosma, P. van Mourik Broekman, T. Byfield, M. Fuller, G. Lovink, D. McCarty, P. Schultz, F. Stalder,
M. Wark, F. Wilding (eds) Read me! Filtered by Nettime. Ascii Culture and the Revenge of Knowledge. New York : Autonomedia, p. 182.

[29] For more on this issue, see Lessico Postfordista, Milano: Feltrinelli, 2000, which we are currently translating for Autonomedia Publishers.

[30] Christian Marazzi, Il posto dei calzini. La svolta linguistica dell’economia e i suoi effetti sulla politica . Torino : Bollati Boringhieri, 1999, p.
90-91. In the work of Maurizio Lazzarato, immaterial labour refers to two different aspects of labour. ‘As regards the ‘informational content’ of the
commodity, it refers directly to the changes taking place in workers’ labour processes in big companies in the industrial and tertiary sectors, where
the skills involved in direct labour are increasingly skills involving cybernetics and computer control (and horizontal and vertical
communication).As regards the activity that produces the ‘cultural content’ of the commodity, immaterial labour involves a series of activities that
are not normally recognised as ‘work’ - in other words, the kinds of activities involved in defining and fixing cultural and artistic standards,
fashions, tastes, consumer norms, and more strategically, public opinion.’

[31] ‘In contemporary capitalism, we must first distinguish the enterprise from the factory. Two years ago a large French multinational corporation
announced that it would part with eleven production sites. This separation between enterprise and factory is a borderline case, but one that is
becoming increasingly frequent in contemporary capitalism. In the majority of cases, these two functions are mutually integrated; we presume,
however, that their separation is symbolic of a more profound transformation of capitalist production. What will this multinational corporation
retain? What does it understand as "enterprise"? All the functions, all the services and all the employees that allow it to create a world: marketing,
service, design, communication, etc.’ Maurizio Lazzarato, Struggle, Event, Media published on MakeWorld paper #4 (http://www.makeworlds.org)

[32] When talking of subjectivity we immediately take a distance from the notion of the subject. This is in so far as we recognise being and power
as a series of processes of subjectification that at points become crystallised in mechanisms. Thus, the notion of a subject of resistance is suited to
the contractual (juridical) theories of people, the repressive (institutional) hypotheses, and the discourses of sovereignty and right that dwell on
processes of liberation from alienation, in Marcusean terms. These, we have seen, are processes and discourses that speak through the subject in
order to make it intelligible and identifiable. Foucault historicizes, questions and explicitly rejects these models in favour of a notion of
subjectivation as open process operating at the level of the intransitivity of freedom. 'Power is exercised only over free subjects, and only in so far
as they are free. By this we mean individual or collective subjects who are faced with a field of possibilities in which several ways of behaving,
several reactions and diverse comportments may be realized. Where the determining factors saturate the whole there is no relationship of power,
slavery is not a power relationship.... since without the possibility of recalcitrance, power would be equivalent to a physical determination [...] If it
is true that at the heart of power relations and as a permanent condition of their existence there is an insubordination and a certain essential
obstinacy on the part of the principles of freedom, then there is no relationship of power without the means of escape or possible flight. Every
power relationship implies, at least in potentia, a strategy of struggle, in which the two forces are not superimposed, do not lose their specific
nature, or do not finally become confused. Each constitutes for the other a kind of permanent limit, a point of possible reversal. The agonism
between power relations and the intransitivity of freedom is a permanent political task inherent in all social existence.' M. Foucault, ‘The subject
and Power’ in Dreyfus and Rabinow Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 1982. Negri’s and Foucault’s analysis of subjectivity in post-
disciplinary society is carried out at the price of a clear-cut definition of subversion. There are moments in Foucault’s thought where there is a
symmetrical tension between power and resistance that takes overly Nietzschean tones and sees struggle as constitutive of power relations.
Foucault says that in order to take seriously the assertion that struggle is at the centre of every power relation we should get rid of the old logic of
contradiction and the 'sterilizing constraints of dialectics'. The notions of governmentality and biopower are the grounds of the alternative to
negative criticism, because they point to how our possible field of action is structured by others and more importantly, what precisely is at stake in
the struggle itself. Negri's politics of subversion is also informed by an idea of 'reappropriation', obviously not of a 'lost liberty of human essence'
but of the conditions of production, of that collective field of action where self government is possible, and this runs parallel to Foucault’s criticism
of the analysis that demonises Power per se and his reading of the problem of power as one of limitation of elements of domination.

[33] M. Lazzarato, ‘Immaterial Labour’, in P. Virno & M. Hardt (eds) Radical Thought in Italy, 1996, p. 143

[34] ‘Let us start with consumption, because the relationship between supply and demand has been reversed: the customers are the pivotal point of
the enterprise strategy. In reality, this definition from political economy does not even touch the problem: the sensational rise, the strategic role
played in contemporary capitalism by the expression machine (of opinion, communication, marketing and thus the signs, images and statements).’
M. Lazzarato, Struggle, Event, Media, MakeWorld paper #4, 2004, (http://www.makeworlds.org)

[35] Ibidem

[36] ‘The labourer is (and must be) loquacious. The famous opposition established by Habermas between ‘instrumental’ and ‘communicative’
action (or between labour and interaction) is radically confuted by the postfordist mode of production. ‘Communicative action’ does not hold any
privileged, or even exclusive place in ethico-cultural relations, in politics, in the struggle for ‘mutual recognition’, whilst residing beyond the realm
of material reproduction of life. On the contrary, the dialogic word is installed at the very heart of capitalist production. Labour is interaction.
Therefore, in order to really understand postfordist labouring praxis, one must increasingly refer to Saussure, Wittgenstein and Carnap. These
authors have hardly shown any interest in social relations of production; nonetheless, having elaborated theories and images of language, they have
more to teach in relation to the ‘talkative factory’ than professional sociologists.’ Paolo Virno, ‘Labour and Language’ in Lessico Postfordista,
Milano: Feltrinelli, 2000- in English on http://www.generation-online.org/t/labourlanguage.htm (my trans.)

[37] Michael Hardt, ’Affective Labour’, in boundary2, 26, no. 2 (Summer 1999)

[38] Antonio Negri, ‘Value and Affect’, in boundary2, 26, no. 2 (Summer 1999). Negri makes an interesting point here, that the notion of socially
necessary labour time referred to pre-existing communal norms of consumption and standard of life. So when interior to capital, this measure
becomes perfunctory – beyond measure.

[39] For more on the issue of immaterial workers, see the journal DeriveApprodi on Immaterial workers of the world, Anno VIII, n. 18 Primavera
1999. http://www.deriveapprodi.org/ind18.html

[40] This is best analysed in Franco Berardi (Bifo)’s La fabbrica dell’infelicitá, Roma: Deriveapprodi, 2001.

[41] ‘The notion of a new mass entrepreneurship refers to a new social and productive stratum of society that was consolidated both in terms
of socio-economic and class structure and in terms of political organisation. This new stratum contributed to a radical change of the old
equilibrium that characterised the Italian society of the Fordist compromise and the First Republic . In part, this group has formed the social
bases of the Northern Leagues.’ The various new forms of social transformation that emerged in Italy in the 1970’s – the so-called auto-
reduction struggles, the user and consumer strikes, and the radical critiques of the health care system and the total institutions of disciplinary
society- all were centred precisely in the attempt to re-appropriate the structure of welfare and invert their logic based on the reproduction of
the norm of the wage relationship. From the beginning of the 1970’s this new subjectivity, far from passively accepting the terrain of
productive flexibility, appropriated the social terrain as a space for struggle and self-valorization. The dramatic increase in small businesses
and in the informal economy in the central and northern parts of the country can be understood only in terms of the diffusion across the social
terrain of struggles and practices that attempted to make use of this deepening of the social division of labour between the businesses to
experiment in alternative forms of productive cooperation. There was a new form of mass entrepreneurship that would in the following years
act as the protagonist in the new economic miracle of the so-called diffuse economy. This new subjectivity that was based on the ‘refusal to
work; and on the high education level of the majority of the population invested all the interstices of the clientelist-Mafia model of regulation
of the South along with all the articulations of its integration as dependent participant, realizing finally that class unity between North and
South that Gramsci dreamed of in vain in terms of a social bloc between the industrial workers of the North and the peasants of the South.’ M.
Hard and P. Virno (eds.) Radical Thought in Italy , 1996, p. 83-84. We see a similar process occurring today with the opening of financial
markets to the mass. This is politically analysed by Franco Berardi, whilst at the level of the economy, Marazzi provides useful insights into
the crisis of the financial market and the role of convention, in Capitale e linguaggio. Ciclo e crisi della new economy. Soveria: Rubbettino
Editore, www.rubbettino.it, 2001.

[42] ‘What the theories of power of modernity were forced to consider transcendent, that is, external to productive and social relations, is here
formed inside, immanent to the productive and social relations. Mediation is absorbed within the productive machine. The political synthesis of
social space is fixed in the space of communication. This is why communications industries have assumed such a central position. They not only
organise production on a new scale and impose a new structure adequate to global space, but also make its justification immanent. Power, as it
produces, organises: as it organises, it speaks and expresses itself as authority. Language, as it communicates, produces commodities but moreover
creates subjectivities, puts them in relation, and orders them. The communication industries integrate the imaginary and the symbolic within the
biopolitical fabric, not merely putting them at the service of power but actually integrating them into its very functioning. [...] It is a subject that
produces its own image of authority. This is a form of legitimation that rests on nothing outside itself and is reproposed ceaselessly by developing
its own language of self-validation’. Hardt & Negri, Empire, 2000, p. 33.

[43] With Habermas and Rawls versions of liberalism and discourse ethics as negotiable ethics, a subject centred communication that aims at
reaching rational agreement, so that communicative action limits politics to consent, is opposed to Negri’s idea of the function of command.

[44] On the difference between the rights-state and the social-state: the former operates on the terrain of private and individual interests, and is the
guarantor state, guaranteeing the harmony of competing claims. The social state, on the other hand, that where the social power of labour in all its
connotations is grounded in its political form, is effective at a different level. It interiorises the class relationship, and plans accordingly. It represses
those who do not accept its right to act as stabiliser of the general social (capitalist) interest. The contradiction of the rights state was that of being
effective at the level of private interests and rational order, the order that capital could not practically allow given the demands of accumulation.
Law in this sense was more of an abstract (whilst more pragmatic in the social state) or formal, reflected in the liberal political theory the
corresponding to it, i.e., the problem of rights in the context of pre-constituted facts about social reality. In the social state the attempt is made to
retain most elements of the rights-state, such as freedom and equality, whilst making them compatible with sociality. It does this, in its reformist
guise, with the language of natural right.

[45] When asked about ‘the much-discussed 'recuperation' of the body through pornography and advertising’, Foucault replied: I don't agree at all
with this talk about 'recuperation'. What's taking place is the usual strategic development of a struggle. Let's take a precise example, that of auto-
eroticism. The restrictions on masturbation hardly start in Europe until the eighteenth century. Suddenly, a panic-theme appears; an appalling
sickness develops in the Western world. Children masturbate. Via the medium of families, though not at their initiative, a system of control of
sexuality, an objectivisation of sexuality allied to corporal persecution, is established over the bodies of children. But sexuality, through thus
becoming an object of analysis and concern, surveillance and control, engenders at the same time an intensification of each individual's desire, for,
in and over his body. The body thus became the issue of a conflict between parents and children, the child and the instances of control. The revolt
of the sexual body is the reverse effect of this encroachment. What is the response on the side of power? An economic (and perhaps also
ideological) exploitation of eroticisation, from sun-tan products to pornographic films. Responding precisely to the revolt of the body, we find a
new mode of investment which presents itself no longer in the form of control by repression but that of control by stimulation. 'Get undressed—but
be slim, good-looking, tanned'' For each move by one adversary, there is an answering one by the other. But this isn't a 'recuperation' in the Leftists'
sense. One has to recognise the indefiniteness of the struggle—though this is not to say it won't some day have an end ....’. However, identity
politics can be historically seen as a successful form of recuperation of the struggles that fought against the notion of a formally sovereign political
subject and posed the problem of the everyday. In our days the preoccupation with identity takes the form of a self-obsessed politics. In post
politically correct society identity politics brings about self-victimisation and the hypostasis of the category of experience in its narrowest form
whilst cancelling out any question of the positioning of knowledge and the self in relation to the world. It reasons through the binary mode of
rejection or acceptance and is the result of a progressive psychologisation of politics. Franco Berardi (Bifo) refers to Alain Ehrenberg’s La fatigue
d’être soi, when he writes: 'Depression starts emerging at a time when the disciplinary model of behavioural management, the rules of authority
and conformity to the laws that assigned to social classes and sexes a destiny, fell apart in the face of norms that incite each person to individual
initiative pushing her to be herself. Because of this normativity, the entire responsibility of our lives is placed upon us. Depression then presents
itself as an illness of responsibility in which the feeling of inadequacy/insufficiency predominates. The depressed is not worth it; he is tired to have
to become himself. (La fabbrica dell’infelicitá, 2001, p.10). Identity politics can be regarded as the 'healthy', unfatigued response to this process,
which calls for nourishing the 'responsible' self. Identity politics cannot go beyond self assertion at the expense of some other, but its worst by
product is that it pre-empts political debate though pretending to be having one. It is close to Habermas in its reliance on procedure, the means that
is the end in itself, because in asserting its being it expresses all its fear of becoming. The political theories on networks and networking are
indicative of this procedural obsession.

[46] M. Lazzarato ‘Immaterial Labour’, 1996.

[47] Ibid p. 297

[48] Ibid p. 296

[49] Ibid p. 294

[50] On the question of exodus and its difference from refusal Virno provides an interesting example in his 'Virtuosity and Revolution: the political
theory of exodus' (the North American workers' colonisation of low-cost land in the 19th century and the self-precarisation of young labourers in
late 1970s Italy ). See www.generation-online.org/t/translations.html : Maurizio Lazzarato interviews Paolo Virno on the multitude and the working
class (trans. Arianna Bove). See also his Esercizi di esodo. Linguaggio e azione politica. Verona : OmbreCorte. 2002.

[51] M. Hardt and P. Virno (eds) Radical Thought in Italy, 1996, p. 199

[52] Maurizio Lazzarato ‘From Biopower to Biopolitics’, in Pli. Warwick Journal of Philosophy, no. 12, 2002.

Concluding remarks

What is at stake, for those like us who are outside of discourse and inside
the word, outside of categories but inside linguistic acts, for us who refuse
to be reduced to objects and demand the power to produce ourselves as
subjects, maybe is this: to what extent can the exodus from a world we
don’t recognise as ours be not only resistance but also production? To what
extent can refusal and critique also be moments of invention for everyone?
How to speak a different language and still be understood? This is
‘communication’ but we might call it politics, or we might call it life.[1]

This research aimed to investigate what Foucault meant by ontology of the

present and what it would entail to posit the project of an ontology of the present
as a philosophical task for our times. This led us to follow several different paths:
one was the role of writing history.

The Annales School was the movement that broke with the ‘order of
discourse’ by problematising the ways in which we approach the past in a search
for continuity and causality. Foucault’s genealogies follow the course opened up
by the philosophical reflection on periodisation and interdisciplinarity carried out
by Annales movement, in order to criticise the search for continuity as actually
one for necessity. Complementing their project of the criticism of philosophy of
history, he carries out a critique of the history of philosophy as one of the
progression of ideas in time. This leads him to the notions of discourse, the
episteme and the archive, which as we have seen are the grounding elements of
his project of historical ontology.

These notions, whilst developing out of a reflection on history, also

insert themselves directly in the debate on language. Foucault and the Formalists
strongly criticised analyses of language that made recourse to notions of genesis,
origin and the subject, in order to bring the debate on language to the level of
concrete existence, which is only graspable outside of the framework of unitary
language. What is the constitutive function of language? How is it first and
foremost a practice? What autonomy can a reflection on language have with
respect to a reflection on ontology? The reflection on language is one on
philosophy and its role in relation to science and history. Foucault’s answer to
these questions in the notion of discourse and the archive is also a political
intervention that attempts to criticise notions of a founding subject, philosophy of
consciousness, originating experience and continuity that in imposing an order on
the said are productive of grilles of intelligibility as well as operative in practices
of power relations. The question of subjectivity and language is inevitably one of
the formation and practices of veridiction in their effects, but as the Subject
disappears in discourse, the ‘I speak’ needs to be reconfigured as the point of
convergence and departure for a new way of linking ontology and epistemology
whilst exorcising the dangers of a ‘rational psychology’. Kant thought that this
danger would lead to a substantialism that was ultimately tautological; Foucault
believed it to underlie the scientism that, in its circularity, had great
consequences for the ordering of modern society in the configuration of the
normal and the pathological. If the Subject was structurally presupposed in the ‘I
think’, in the modern episteme the notion of subjectivity stems from the role of
the ‘I speak’ which points to a relation of exteriority. Because of this, through an
analysis of the ontological dimension of language we approach a notion of
subjectivity bound to open up new questions on philosophical anthropology. This
comes to light in Foucault’s Commentaire, where it is in the insertion of linguistic
exchange in the reflection on man that we find the only possible ground for
thinking anthropology in terms of what man makes of himself, in terms of an
ontology of ourselves.

In terms of an ontology of our present, we have suggested, through the

exposition of the theories of Postfordism, how language today can be seen as
productive of subjectivity and forms of life, and have exposed some of the ways in
which, as the order of discourse goes to work, language operates in a field that
now more than in the past is open to recuperation and valorisation of power, with
no mediation. We have seen how this occurs in a realm that is much wider than
the communication industries. What since the explosion of mass communication
has been theorised in terms of the commodification of knowledge and criticised
from the consumer end, Postfordist studies see in terms of production, albeit one
that is antagonistic, conflictual and open and one that we are involved in, not
simply as receivers. To think language today entails thinking subjectivity as
production, and in this context Foucault has a stronger power of diagnosis.
Beyond the paradigm of domination and repression, practices of transformation
need to search for a different language, one that experiments not only in
resistance to discursive effects of interdiction and to incitements to self-
expression and confession, but one that is also capable of capturing the
constituent traits of subjectivity in autonomous practices of self-transformation
and self-valorisation, to use the postfordist lexicon.

As we have pointed out, the questioning of the role of language in the production
of subjectivity also leads us to a reflection on the role of anthropology. In
Anthropology and Myth, Lévi-Strauss wrote: The originality of anthropology has
always consisted in studying man by placing itself at what, in each epoch, has
been considered the boundaries of humanity. [...] As an 'interstitial' science
devoted to the exploration of this mobile frontier separating the possible from the
impossible, anthropology will exist as long as humanity and is, in this sense,
eternal.

In his engagement with Kant, Foucault regards this as the task of

philosophy, but one that needs to expose the epistemological constrictions of an
analytics of finitude as ontological limits placed on being: against a-historical
ambitions to scientism, they represent more than a problem confined to
epistemology. In this sense, the analysis of the role of the inner sense and its
relation to spontaneity and receptivity becomes central. It is Time as a form of the
inner sense that endangers the possibility of synthesising the unconditioned. In
Foucault’s rethinking of Kantian Dialectics Time invests the synthetic activity, and
the world presents itself as the domain, source and limit for Kunst, exercise,
épreuve, τέχνη. Thus Dialectics becomes the study of rationality: not as the faculty
productive of principles with a regulative function, but as what produces codes for
practice as well as their justification. What is it to reason if not the attempt to
unravel the mechanisms effectively operating through the rationality of our time?
What happens when we take the paralogisms of reason and our finitude as the
point of departure from which to break these boundaries? For Foucault, the study
of rationality is the study of paradigms, of what constitutes something whilst
making it intelligible. Inserting an anthropological reflection in the present, one for
which ontology and epistemology remain inseparable from the question of
transformation, demands that we take modern subjectivity as the field traversed
by this rationality. Theorists of Postfordism have partly carried out this research on
the transformations of forms of subjectivity, ways of living, working,
communicating, in the changing mechanisms of subjugation and resistance.

Antiquity is revisited with the Enlightenment motto in mind, precisely to

continue this genealogy into the mobile frontiers established between ontology
and epistemology, philosophy and spirituality. Sapere aude is mutare aude: for
Foucault the ethical task was not one to be carried out in a progression from
knowing to being. For his ethics, to know is to change oneself. Again, counter to
the repressive hypothesis, the antidote to domination cannot entail turning
inwards for a hermeneutics of interiority in the search for a truth that can save us,
but demands for an opening of subjectivity to the relational nature of knowledge
and transformation. In an inversion of the Enlightenment motto, knowledge stems
from freedom rather than the opposite, for ethics is the practice of freedom in the
subjectification of truth and in the infinite labour of critique. What is at stake is
not the insertion of the self as object in an epistemic discourse, but the insertion
of the self in the world as the field and condition of possibility for its épreuve.

In the endless accumulation of knowledge produced by a modernity that

relegated philosophy to the study of epistemology and finitude, Foucault
searches for those discourses that in their time attempted to function as
interventions in the changing forms of the political and social world. There he
finds the historicism of the war of races, which is presented to us in its character
as an event. We chose to analyse this peculiar genealogy of the war paradigm
because by pointing to the tactical reversibility of the paradigm, Foucault is also
trying to capture the elements of this discourse that re-emerged at specific
historical moments under different guises. These are the discourses with an
alternative understanding of political crisis and strategy, which take struggle and
control as the objects of analysis, unlike the pacifying discourses of political
 formalism. We aimed to question the process whereby the reflection on war is
disqualified in a certain philosophy that becomes in modernity the realm of
syntheses and reconciliation, because as a paradigm operative at the level of
knowledge and practices it should not be relegated to the political scientism of
military studies. In fact, war always seems to catch us by surprise.

It is in this spirit that we read Agamben’s intervention on the state of

exception as an update of Foucault’s reversal of Clausewitz’s formula. We have
seen how the historical-political analysis that Foucault outlines in his 1976
lectures operates in the directions of domination on the one hand and totalisation
on the other. The latter is embodied in the discourse on sovereignty, the former in
the paradigm of war. Agamben’s political analysis establishes the relation
between the two in the state of exception, for it is in the relation of sovereignty to
biopower that political discourse attempts to neutralise the fundamental
biopolitical fracture, a discourse that has historically developed from the register
of military war to that of civil war and today of ‘humanitarian’ war, whilst casting
the debate on peace respectively around the notions of political, civil and human
rights.

The studies of Operaismo had worked within the war paradigm in so far
as they saw antagonism as the very lever of innovation and social change.
Following Foucault and taking the analysis of contemporary forms of subjectivity
to be also one of the current modes of subjectivation, current studies of
Postfordism see power relations as always operating through struggle, which also
determines that element of freedom intrinsic to processes of subjectivation, social
determination and resistance.

Because of biopolitical production, a critique of power today is

inseparable from a critique of labour. The social relations that emerged out of the
crisis of the welfare state on the one hand and the critique of the Labourist
ideology on the other, have given rise to phenomena that cannot be parcelled out
into social, political and economic spheres. In this lies the crucial import of
Foucault’s notion of biopower: the ability to diagnose a state of affairs where life is
invested by processes of capital valorisation. The control paradigm uses
technologies and instruments of appropriation that render the separation between
private and public space, free time and labour time, ethics of affect and ethics of
reason, state and civil society absolutely inadequate to capture the conflicting
modes of contemporary processes of subjectivation and valorisation.

The import of Foucault’s work in philosophy is invaluable. He inverts

Descartes in one important respect: if in Descartes the first rule of method that
leads to the certainty of the ‘I think’ was immediate self evidence, for Foucault it
is the breach of self-evidence that constitutes the political and theoretical task of
philosophical exercise. The guiding thread of our research into his thought has
been the notion of an ontology of the present. This is a project in historical,
linguistic, anthropological and political theory that is grounded on an ethics of
freedom. Philosophical critique today could use this force of diagnosis in two
ways: firstly in the medical sense used by Foucault, where diagnosis is not a mere
description, but the process whereby we determine the nature of a problem from
an observation of its symptoms. Secondly, in its etymological sense, where
diagnosis means through knowledge, it operates in a sagittal relation to the
present. In other words, philosophical critique could open up problematisations
that can transform us.

[1] Judith Revel, ‘Idee Parole Linguaggio’. http://www.infoxoa.org/comunica/index.html. (January 2004) (my translation) See also
http://www.generation-online.org/p/prevel.htm