Foucault’s 1970-1 Lecture Course

[©Peter Gratton. These lecture notes are provided for the pedagogical use of students. Bibliographical details are often missing.]

Last week, I provided a substantial overview to the five or six years of Foucault’s

course work we will cover this semester. Tonight, we will cover his 1972 essay,

“Nietzsche, Genealogy, and History”—deservedly, one of his most read—as well as

selections of his 1970-1 lecture course at the College de France, published under the

title Leçons sur la volonté de savoir, Lessons on the Will to Know. Given that the

editors only had Foucault’s contemporary notes for these lectures, they also filled it

out with two remarkable lectures, one titled “Lesson on Nietzsche: How to think the

history of truth with Nietzsche without relying on the truth,” which was a text

delivered at McGill in 1971, as well as the text “Oedipus’s Knowledge,” given at two

American universities in 1972.

At 43, Foucault had been named elected to the College de France, the highest

position in the French university system, taking the title of “chair of the history of

systems of thought.” Foucault’s inaugural lecture, “The Order of Discourse,” in honor

of Jean-Hyppolyte, the famed French Hegelian, was given just one week prior to the

start of this course as we are reading it. These lectures are rather incredible in their

scope and, quite obviously in the course of tonight and given our limited reading of

it, we cannot go through its all of its complexity or its build-up of arguments. The

essay on Oedipus, for example, challenges Freud and other readings, and would be

worthy of two or three of our classes alone. I do not wish to take up our time as I did

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last week before we move to discussion, but let me mark out some important

indices or indications of where a much longer discussion than ours tonight would

have to go.

First:

This text can and should be read as the means by which Foucault showed the

importance of juxtaposing the two “methods” by which he is largely known:

archaeology and genealogy. As I noted last week, the former seeks to understand the

historical conditions of possibility by which any set of propositional truths come to

be taken, well, as true. That is, how does a discourse constitute itself? What are the

specific modes and strategies, that is, the techniques, through which each forms

itself? The problem a genealogy attempts to identify is the specific formations of

power that allowed this constitution of discourse to take place—all the more to then

denaturalize a given discourse and its socio-political ramifications. What does this

make of genealogy? We will see this throughout today.

Second:

In 1974, Foucault derided the “Heideggerian habit” of tracing all of Western thought

back to Greece, saying he did not wish to “fall into the trap of Hellenistic archaism”

(cited in Behrent’s review essay, 160). And it’s certainly true that much of Foucault’s

genealogical work of the 1970s centered on the early and late modern periods, say,

from the 17th centuries to the 20th, without tracing any of this back to the Greeks. As

is well known, Foucault around 1979 returns to ancient sources to discover and

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discuss a “care of the self” on the margins of various apparatuses of power. This

later turn to classical sources, as these lectures make clear, was not a one-off, but

show Foucault’s long focus on this period—however little he published on it during

much of the 1970s.

But despite this change in how we will have to look at Foucault, it is remarkable that

he does perform a certain “Hellenistic archaism” he delineates in others. In fact, this

is one point we can consider when coming to Derrida: is there any link between

what Foucault delineates as a Western will to know and the Western political

theology that Derrida describes in his death penalty lectures? Both Derrida and

Foucault were deeply influenced by Nietzsche and his own genealogies of the will to

power and the knowledges that it parlayed as part of that power. Here’s my quick

thought: there is indeed a deep link between what Foucault details here as the “will

to truth” in the earliest philosophy and the injunction of a certain thinking of the law

in early Greece around Salon’s laws—in short, a certain neutrality of the law and of

truth, with one seeking the other depending on the site within Ancient Greece

(agora or law court)—and the will to supercede finitude, that is, to know death

down to its passing moment in the imposition of the death penalty, as discussed by

Derrida in his most important death penalty lecture. This is a complicated point and

I will need to come back to this time and again this semester—as well as many other

points of convergence. Derrida’s thinking of radical finitude follows in part from a

rejection of making death knowable and meaningful—that is, bringing this alterity

back within the circuit of the will to know. Let’s allow this point to linger.

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But coming back to an overall point about a certain Hellenism in Foucault’s lectures:

we will know nothing of Foucault if we do not understand “power knowledge”—and

then are able to see how Western forms of punishment, right up to today, are

informed by specific discursive formations. But let me pause over what I take to an

important dictum of reading Continental philosophy going back to Heidegger. At

least since Nietzsche, one should also be aware of each philosopher’s relation to

what he called Platonism. Let me give some examples:

Nietzsche argued that Christianity merely took over a vulgar Platonism, where this

life is to be of no value over and against what is not available in the sense world.

Moreover, there was always a politics linked to each form of Platonism—namely a

certain ordering of the polis that followed from the ordering of the cosmos. There is

no thinking of truth, Nietzsche argued, that is not itself a move in an overall

existence “ruled,” if you will, by the will to power. The “will to knowledge,” he

argued, was a particularly ingenious move invented by Platonism, since it gave to an

elite beyond the laboring many access to knowledge that could not be shared, while

also denying, through its very neutrality, the power dynamics that produced this

knowledge.

Heidegger’s relation is far too complex to give in a few words, but here goes:

Heidegger argued that since Plato—at least since Plato—there has been a

fundamental split between praxis and theoria. Platonism, by methodologically

linking philosophy to theory (and we’ll see soon how well this fits with Foucault’s

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diagnosis of Aristotle), then privileged a mode of seeing (theoria in the Greek being

etymologically linked to Idea and other Greek words related to seeing, e.g., theoros is

a spectator, which derives from thea, a view, and horan, which means “to look at”)

that found the truth of things in their correlation of an object of thought back to the

theoretical glance. This theoretical glance, then, would, make present the objects of

thought, and this was based, Heidegger argued, on a notion of presence that made

all of Being an “object” standing over and against the thinking being, that is, present

to a given being. This served to give us an ill-conceived notion of time—vulgar clock

time—as well as a thinking of the human being as primarily a theoretical entity. The

apotheosis of this, he suggests, is Husserl’s phenomenology, and Heidegger’s Being

and Time, as most of you know, begins its Destruktion of the history of ontology by

redescribing Dasein in terms of its practical, worldly engagements that form the

background for any supposed theoretical endeavors—which at best are reductive of

our originary being in the world with others.

Hannah Arendt, in her The Human Condition and other works of the 1950s, argues

that Plato and Aristotle—despite some notable places in the latter—ultimately

confused politics with poiesis or making: they thought politics was not a messy

space of action, but rather one was to take a given Eidos or Idea of the political (for

example, the politeia of Plato’s Republic) and perform the violence necessary to

institute it in the polis, exactly on the model by which one does violence to given

materials in order to bring into the world by way of poiesis a given craft object—a

pair of shoes or what have you. And what made this eidos available was the theoria

of the philosopher. As such, beginning in Plato, philosophy has always privileged

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theoria over praxis, theory over action. The political effect of this is that politics is

seen less as the space of action or praxis than as getting the theory right. One can

see this in so many classes on political liberalism today—so abstracted from

contemporary practices and the historical circumstances in which liberalism came

to be. But it also gives rise to the default Platonism of the philosopher: we—whoever

we are—are to give to the people the proper ordering of the political, which

requires first and foremost not being one of the actors in a democratic space of

action. After Arendt, this calls for a fundamental modesty on the part of the

philosopher: we are to witness moments and spacings of plurality, to recognize our

own praxis in given fields, but not see ourselves as philosophers—a title Arendt

herself rejected—as providing an ordering of the political that would erase the the

plural space of action. This critique of political Platonism is also, in different ways,

shared by Jacques Ranciere.

Derrida’s critique of the history of metaphysics is based, as in Heidegger, on the

metaphysics of presence as well as the later political theology to which it clings. To

skip a few steps in Derrida—we will come to this later obviously—this ultimately

means that all is knowable, and here he follows Levinas in thinking the

comprehension of alterity—including the alterity of the future, of the Other, of death

—is ultimately a subjectivism and violence.

Where does Foucault fit in with all of this? First, it’s clear in these lectures that he,

too, thinks there is an originary “decision” in the West towards a specific definition

of knowledge that afflicts our history no matter its various changes up to the

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present period. Despite his many differences from Derrida and others, he follows a

certain Heideggerian thesis about a closure of the West that circles around a given

view of knowledge from which one can’t extricate oneself by simply moving beyond

this Western paradigm. For Derrida, this will mean a certain “play” found within the

given structures of the West; for Foucault this means thinking history not as codified

knowledge, but as a “carnival” (NGH, 161), as a “counter-history” that seeks to

disrobe the power formations while not making any claims to objectivity or

neutrality for one’s own genealogies of the history of truth.

This brings us to the beginning lectures of Lectures on the Will to Know. Rereading

the first lines of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Foucault aims to show that far from

“innocent,” Aristotle’s opening dictum that each man by nature desires to know

envelops all desire ultimately in a form of knowledge. He writes:

As a result, body and desire are elided; the movement leading to the great

serene and incorporeal knowledge of causes [in Aristotle] is in itself already,

at the level of sensation, the obsure will to this wisdom, it is already

philosophy. Thus philosophy, performing the role of supreme knowledge—

knowledge of first principles and causes—also has the role of enveloping all

desire to know from the start. Its function is to ensure what is really

knowledge coming from sensation, from the body, belonging already, by

nature and according to the final cause that directs it, to the realm of

contemplation and theory (LWN, 12-3).

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The highest pleasure is knowledge itself, or better, pure contemplation is without

any bodily pleasure. This form of Platonism is well known—its disparagement of the

body as well as its occlusion of other forms of knowledge, for example, the tragic

knowledge of an Aeschylus or Sophocles, which associates knowledge with death, as

well as the knowledge of the sophists, which is merely traded like any other

commodity. In this way, desire and knowledge share a seeking of truth—outside the

plays of desires and the body. To put it another way, knowledge, a supposed end in

itself, denies any relation to praxis and power; its neutrality mean that one cannot

contest the philosopher by asking about his or her subject position, his or her

historically situated place from which claims to knowledge are made. Knowledge is

dried of its productive site—and philosophy continues apace as a theoretical

endeavor neutral in its teleological and eternal quest for descriptions of reality. The

task Foucault sets himself—and this is very analogous to Arendt’s move to think a

Homeric notion of politics prior to Platonism, as well as Heidegger’s readings of the

early Greeks to find an originary relation to being covered over by the history of

metaphysics—is to find other relations and forms of knowledge prior to the

Western will to know. We can discuss what these are in a bit.

But—and here all the care in the world must be taken with Foucault’s next few

moves—taking up Nietzsche’s perspectivalism comes fraught with the ultimate

skepticism of knowledge, that is, that any truth claims are simply a product of a

given power, or rather, are moves within overall relations and fields of power, since

on Foucault’s account power is never held in the sovereign self, but is always

relationial.

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In sections we didn’t read for tonight, Foucault highlights Aristotle’s critique of the

Sophists, whom he seems to valorize, a point that would have everyone from Plato

to Heidegger and beyond aghast. For Foucault, philosophers valorize the syllogism

and the logic of the concept dried of language’s materiality and any logic other than

truth and falsity, while the sophists, sounding quasi-Nietzschean, are said to see

language less as apophantic or propositional than as an expression of power, as a

tool in game in which one wins or loses. We know this well from our own law

courts: the legal dictum is that trials are not about the truth, but about winning or

losing. This in many ways will ultimately be Foucault’s view of language—that it is

productive of events that shift balances of power—not a representational apparatus

that is reflective of reality. Language is hence not primarily theoretical but a praxis.

As Korijo Fujita puts it in the recommended reading for today, “there is no

transcendent which sustains, regulates, or referees that confrontation [among

language users] in the background” (120). Knowledge is not outside the play of

power relations, but is itself another power relation, for example, the very relation

of power between the world as represented by a given discourse and the world

itself. Recall a quotation from the essay “Truth and Juridical Forms” I mentioned last

week. Foucault writes: “There can be no relation of natural continuity between

knowledge and the things that the knowledge must know. There can only be [my

emphasis] a relation of violence, domination, power, force, that is, a relation of

violence. Knowledge can only be a violence to the things to be known, and not a

perception, a recognition, an identification of or with those things” (La vérité et les

forms juridique,” 546).

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Thus any genealogy is not itself extrinsic to the historical milieu in which it is

produced, but is immanent to it, taking as its critical task to unmask the attempts of

other discourses to hide what it includes within itself in its exclusion, i.e., desire. To

put it another way, philosophy constitutes itself, Foucault argues, through a relation

to “an outside whose elimination makes possible the very existence of philosophy;

an outside on which philosophical discourse obscurely depends” (38). This outside

is “desire” and Foucault makes clear, alas in a crucial passage we didn’t read for

tonight, the ultimate import of this, since on the first page of our reading, he

announces that he is particularly interested in the human sciences of psychiatry,

history, and so on:

[If] we accept that science had its origin within philosophical discourse, we

can see what is at stake in the problem posed. The act that, by exclusion,

defined an outside of philosophical discourse and tied philosophy and truth

together in a certain mode, must in fact characterize our will to know. It is

that act that has to be uncovered” (38).

It is this “act” that must be uncovered at each turn in each claim to scientificity. As

Chris Chitty puts it, “this challenges a basic assumption of the entire Western

philosophical tradition: that knowledge of the world is desirable for itself and is

politically neutral” (review in New Inquiry). In his early works, such as the History of

Madness, Foucault had argued that reason announced itself in modernity by what it

is not, namely madness, and thus this exclusion produced modernity. In these

lectures, he uses this logic of exclusion in order to show how philosophy itself—

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which, recall, begins in Socrates’s dictum that the true desire is to know, to love the

truth—excludes desire, the body, in short, the praxis out of which any knowledge

claims are made, and thus constitutes itself as neutralized of this. In order to keep

this from going too long, this is precisely what is behind his lecture on Nietzsche,

and describes what he takes from Nietzsche. We will move into that discussion in a

moment.

Before handing off things to Kyla, I should note another crucial part of these

lectures, namely Foucault’s genealogy of the juridical subject in early Greece, who is

the subject who faces the rule of law, under which each is said to be equal—the law

is universal or it is nothing. Under this paradigm, which Foucault dates after

Homeric Greece and after the production of Hesiod’s Works and Days circa 700BCE,

a judge makes evaluations based upon his supposed neutrality and objective

descriptions of evidence and so on. This paradigm, as we know, is very much with us

today, at least the regulative ideal of our legal systems. Michael Behrent summarizes

this nicely:

At the risk of oversimplication, Foucault sees Western culture as resting on

twin pillars: the myth of truth’s incompatibility with power and the reality of

a discreet but highly effective form of power-knowledge in the wielded

through the legal system. It is the very denial of power-knowledge in the

West that explains the most characteristic form of power-knowledge, of

which the judge is emblematic. (166)

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That is, the particular long-range power-knowledge of the West is that it sees any

form of knowledge qua knowledge as neutrally pronounced, even in the most

political of circumstances, as in the political practice of judges. But more

importantly, though in a quick search I didn’t find a spot in the text where Foucault

says this explicitly, it’s notable that the juridical form of power-knowledge he

explains is prior to the philosophical claims of Aristotle that he spends much time

on. In short, the philosopher who would say he does not belong to a given historicity

in fact is produced out of a given historical milieu or politics that had already

situated desire on the outside of knowledge and which philosophy used as its model.

Arendt, in several key essays, makes similar claims, namely, that philosophy’s toolkit

—so matter of course after several millennia, is but a mimesis of other, supposedly

lower, forms of earlier Greek life.

The radicality of this position—or rather, a non-position, since no genealogy holding

the above can ground itself outside the event of its discourse—is, of course, up front:

to those who claim to do a given science, such as the psychiatries of the 20 th century

investigated in the lectures we will be reading starting next week, Foucault argues

that these supposed apophantic discourses of propositions cover over their own

place within a given set of power dynamics. To those who would wish to unmask the

misogyny of Freud’s account of the unconscious, or the commodification of the

human down to the synapse in the age of neuronal man and his big Pharma

counterpart, we would of course cheer quickly Foucault’s obliteration of their

pretense to neutrality. Of course it’s clear that it’s a form of power-knowledge that

produces the very subjects that it diagnoses. But Foucault’s point in these lectures, by

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going back to Aristotle and making claims for philosophy’s self-avowed task ever

since, is to target metaphysics tout court. The ideal of any metaphysics—using the

term more loosely than Heidegger and Derrida—is to describe reality as it is, even if

after Kant this means a speculative twisting away from the fact of subjectivity to the

nature of which that subject is a part. In his later work, Husserl attempted to

historically situate the rise of geometry from the practices of farmers and such in

Egypt. This making-historic mathematics, though, was ultimately to ground

mathematics in history while never questioning its objectivity and universality.

Foucault’s moves here are clearly different: he privileges a pre-Platonist conception

of truth as event, not as established fact, not as universal and objective; to read

these lectures is to be reminded that, however very different in style and politics,

Foucault’s historicism owes much to Heidegger’s Destruktion of the history of

ontology and the latter’s own genealogies of apophantic discourse in such places as

Being and Time and the later lectures on technology. But what does this do to what I

think many of take to be dear here at Memorial, namely metaphysics as practiced by

Jim Bradley, Sean, and perhaps even on occasion myself—let alone a host of others?

Any metaphysics, on Foucault’s account, must realize it is a mode that neutralizes its

own modes of production, speaking to a reality that it can’t help but produce all its

own. To some this is the power of Western thought—namely it comes out of a

special and specific delineation of power-knowledge that looks to differentiate itself

from the movements of power that produced it. Moreover, some would say that of

course metaphysics grew out of a given historical milieu and nothing Foucault (or

Heidegger or Arendt for that matter) write, despite the polemics of their prose, says

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anything more than that. To say this is merely to say that humans, not gods,

philosophize—and then fill in the details: it grew out of this set of practices and

philosophy’s continued existence meant the loss of other forms of life, such as the

tragic view of knowledge and so on. Yes it might have grown up using the

metaphors, models, and such, derived from the spaces of action, etc., in Ancient

Greece. But this is a specific achievement, not a loss, and we need not adhere to any

belief that says we are all fallen since Plato—yawn. Nevertheless, the question

Foucault leaves open for us is whether indeed our claims to truth have ever been so

innocent and necessarily carry along a politics that must be given over to critique

and genealogy. What would it mean to think truth as event and not as adequation?

Discourse as contest and not a neutral aggregation of facts, even the facts of

existence, or systems that arrange these very facts? Should not the claim to any

metaphysics—to bring this to more contemporary or direct questions, especially

those that claim to be neutral of any gender propositions—entail first thinking

through the very language, means, and techniques of its production? Broad

questions—but nice ones to come back to perhaps later tonight, given the pints on

hand here at Bitters.

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