Foucault's Critical Philosophy of History: Unfolding the Present 1793651205, 9781793651204

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Foucault’s Critical Philosophy of History

Continental Philosophy and the History of Thought Series Editors: Christian Lotz, Michigan State University, and Antonio Calcagno, King’s University College at Western University Advisory Board: Smaranda Aldea, Amy Allen, Silvia Benso, Jeffrey Bloechl, Andrew Cutrofello, Marguerite La Caze, Christina M. Gschwandtner, Dermot Moran, Ann Murphy, Michael Naas, Eric Nelson, Marjolein Oele, Mariana Ortega, Elena Pulcini, Alan Schrift, Anthony Steinbock, Brad Stone The Continental Philosophy and the History of Thought series seeks to augment and amplify scholarship in continental philosophy by exploring its rich and complex relationships to figures, schools of thought, and philosophical movements that are crucial for its evolution and development. A historical focus allows potential authors to uncover important but understudied thinkers and ideas that were nonetheless foundational for various continental schools of thought. Furthermore, critical scholarship on the histories of continental philosophy will also help reposition, challenge, and even overturn dominant interpretations of established, wellknown philosophical views while refining and reinterpreting them in light of new historical discoveries and textual analyses. The series seeks to publish carefully edited collections and high-quality monographs that present the best of scholarship in continental philosophy and its histories.

Titles in the Series Foucault's Critical Philosophy of History: Unfolding the Present, by Adam Takács Reading Continental Philosophy and the History of Thought, edited by Christian Lotz and Antonio Calcagno Reframing Twentieth-Century French Philosophy: The Roots of Desire, edited by Elodie Boublil Hegel and Heidegger on World and Nature: Reconciliation or Alienation, by Raoni Padui The Idea of Beginning in Jules Lequier’s Philosophy, by Ghislain Deslandes Hannah Arendt and the History of Thought, edited by Daniel Brennan and Marguerite La Caze Rethinking Philosophy with Borges, Zambrano, Paz, and Plato, by Hugo Moreno The Ontological Roots of Phenomenology: Rethinking the History of Phenomenology and Its Religious Turn, by Anna Jani Negative Dialectics and Event: Nonidentity, Culture, and the Historical Adequacy of Consciousness, by Vangelis Giannakakis Marxism and Phenomenology: The Dialectical Horizons of Critique, edited by Bryan Smyth and Richard Westerman Groundwork of Phenomenological Marxism: Crisis, Body, World, by Ian H. Angus Max Stirner on the Path of Doubt, by Lawrence S. Stepelevich

Foucault’s Critical Philosophy of History Unfolding the Present Adam Takács

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE Copyright © 2024 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Takács, Ádám, 1970– author. Title: Foucault’s critical philosophy of history : unfolding the present / Adam Takács. Description: Lanham : Lexington Books, [2024] | Series: Continental philosophy and the history of thought | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023042966 (print) | LCCN 2023042967 (ebook) | ISBN 9781793651198 (cloth) | ISBN 9781793651204 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Foucault, Michel, 1926–1984/ Classification: LCC B2430.F724 T34 2024 (print) | LCC B2430.F724 (ebook) | DDC 194—dc23/eng/20231011 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023042966 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023042967 ∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Contents

List of Abbreviations for Foucault’s Texts Introduction: Doing Critical Philosophy in the Field of History 1 The Project of the “History of the Present”

vii 1 9

2 The Formation of the Past

45

3 Foucault’s Constructive History

65

4 The Mapping of Being: Foucault’s Historical Ontology

85

5 History as Critical Philosophy

117

Bibliography 153 Index 161 About the Author

167

v

List of Abbreviations for Foucault’s Texts

A –  Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France 1974–1975, trans. Graham Burchell. New York: Picador, 2003. AB –  About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self. ed. HenriPaul Fruchaud and Daniele Lorenzini, trans. Graham Burchell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. AF – Raymond Aron – Michel Foucault. Dialogue. Paris: Nouvelles Éditions Lignes, 2007 AK –  The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon Books, 1971. BB –  The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collčge de France 1978– 1979, trans. Graham Burchell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. BC –  The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Vintage Books, 1994. BD –  Le beau danger. Entretien avec Claude Bonnefoy. Paris:  Éditions EHESS, 2011. CM –  Considerations on Marxism, Phenomenology and Power. Interview with Michel Foucault. Foucault Studies, No. 14, pp. 98-114, September 2012. CT –  The Courage of Truth. The Government of Self and Others II: Lectures at the Collège de France 1983–1984, trans. Graham Burchell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. vii

viii

List of Abbreviations for Foucault’s Texts

DE1 –  Dits et écrits, vol. 1., eds. Daniel Defert and François Ewald. Paris: Gallimard, 1994. DE2 –  Dits et écrits, vol. 2., eds. Daniel Defert and François Ewald. Paris: Gallimard, 1994. DE3 –  Dits et écrits, vol. 3., eds. Daniel Defert and François Ewald. Paris: Gallimard, 1994. DE4 –  Dits et écrits, vol. 4., eds. Daniel Defert and François Ewald. Paris: Gallimard, 1994. DP –  Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage, 1995. DT –  Discourse & Truth and Parrēsia. ed. Henri-Paul Fruchaud and Daniele Lorenzini ed. Trans. Nancy Luxon. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019. EW1 –  Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984: Ethics, Subjectivity, and Truth, James D. Faubion. New York: The New Press, 1997. EW2 –  Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984: Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, ed. James D. Faubion. New York: The New Press, 1998. EW3 –  Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984: Power, ed. James D. Faubion. New York: The New Press, 2000. FL – Foucault Live: Collected Interviews, 1961–1984, ed. Sylvere Lotringer. New York: Semiotext(e), 1989. GL –  On the Government of the Living: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1979–1980. ed. Michel Senellart. Trans. Graham Burchell. New York: Picador, 2014. GS –  The Government of Self and Others: Lectures at the Collège de France 1982–1983, trans. Graham Burchell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. HM –  The History of Madness, trans. Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa. London: Routledge, 2006. HS –  The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France 1981–1982, trans. Graham Burchell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. HS1 –  The History of Sexuality, volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage, 1990. HS2 –  The History of Sexuality, volume 2: The Use of Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Random House, 1985. LC –  Language, Counter-memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault, ed. Donald F. Bouchard. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977. LW –  Lectures on the Will to Know: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1970–1971. ed. Daniel Defert. Trans. Graham Burchell. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

List of Abbreviations for Foucault’s Texts

ix

OD –  Michel Foucault, The Order of Discourse. In ed. Robert Young, Untying the Text. A Post-Structuralist Reader, Translated by Ian McLeod. London: Routledge &Kegan, 1981. OT – The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, anon. trans. New York: Vintage, 1994. PP –  Psychiatric Power: Lectures at the Collège de France 1973–1974, trans. Graham Burchell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. PPC –  Michel Foucault, Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interview and Other Writings, 1977–1984, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman. New York: Routledge, 1988. PS –  The Punitive Society: Lectures at the Collège de France 1972–1973. ed. Bernard Harcourt. Trans. Graham Burchell. Basingstoke: Picador, 2015. PT –  Penal Theories and Institutions: Lectures at the Collège de France 1971–1972, trans. Graham Burchell, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. QC – Qu’est-ce que la critique? suivi de La culture de soi RC –  Religion and Culture: Michel Foucault, selected and edited by Jeremy R. Carrette. New York: Routledge, 1999. RF –  Michel Foucault, Roger-Pol Droit, entretiens. Paris: Odile Jacob, 2005. SD –  “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France 1975–1976, trans. David Macey. New York: Picador, 2003. ST –  Subjectivity and Truth: Lectures at the Collège de France 19801981. trans. Graham Burchell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. STP –  Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–1978, trans. Graham Burchell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

Introduction Doing Critical Philosophy in the Field of History

I

t hardly seems justifiable, nor particularly wise, when embarking on a comprehensive philosophical interpretation of Foucault’s work, to overlook the momentous and apparently irrevocable judgment passed upon his accomplishment by one of the most prominent French historians of the twentieth century, Jacques Le Goff. As Le Goff puts it, apparently aiming to encapsulate all the essential elements in a single phrase, “Foucault proposed an original philosophy of history closely linked with practice and with the methodology of the historical discipline.”1 This formulation epitomizes everything that a leading member of the Annales school might be concerned about, namely, the primacy of historical theory, its close relationship with the historian’s practice, and the fusion of the two in pursuit of a scholarly designed mode of history writing. In the realm of progressive historiography, at least, one can hardly ask for more than that. At the same time, however, it would be just as careless of us to ignore the fact that Le Goff’s acclamation also reflects those aspects of Foucault’s work which might irritate other historians and, above all, the philosophers who, out of a speculative or transcendental impulse, are engaged with the question of history. The unabashed blending of theory and practice, the mixing of values and historical facts, and the integration of philosophical questions in an empirical—if not downright positivist—research agenda: this may seem to many like original sin. But even if it must be admitted that Foucault’s originality is such that he can break through barriers that remain closed to others, Le Goff’s succinct 1

2

Introduction

enthusiastic assessment does not really tell us much about the motivations and justifications behind these transgressions. In particular, it is not immediately clear why a “philosophy of history” should be labeled “original” simply because it resorts to the practice and methods of factual history writing; nor is it obvious why it might be beneficial for the discipline of history if it enters into a binding working relationship with the theoretical demands and commitments of a field alien to it, philosophy. Problems like these touch on the perpetually contentious issues in the Foucault scholarship when it comes to clarifying the relationship between the landscapes of philosophy and history. One of the main priorities of this book is to provide clarity on this matter. At any rate, it is noteworthy that what some philosophers and historians find puzzling, if not infuriating, about Foucault’s work is precisely the same tendency that his professor, Georges Canguilhem, considered early on to be most remarkable about his approach, according to his report on Foucault’s doctoral thesis, the History of Madness: “a professional historian could not help but be sympathetic with the effort made by a young philosopher to access primary sources. On the other hand, no philosopher will be able to reproach Mr. Foucault for having alienated the autonomy of philosophical judgment in submission to sources of historical knowledge.”2 Without a doubt, these are words of benevolence and praise which are also effective as a way of advocacy. But since these words were uttered, we find that the opposite evaluation has often been expressed: the initial sympathy towards this interdisciplinary scenario had been replaced by moments of reproach. Most notably, it has often been said that the zig-zag movement between philosophy and history in Foucault is fraught with ambiguities that may not be comforting for either discipline. Now, it is not implausible to believe that Canguilhem’s optimistic assessment might have had wider resonance if Foucault had remained a historian of science and, following many others in France, had sought to reconcile the issues of historiography and philosophy from within the conceptual framework of the French epistemological tradition.3 As is well known, however, he soon ventured into other realms of thought and made an indelible mark, not only on the field of the history of scientific knowledge, but also on the problem of discourse (the topic of knowledge), the field of social and political theory (the problematic of power), and the philosophy of the subject (the question of the self). Indeed, this fact has even often disconcerted those who have maintained sympathy for Foucault’s work all along, as they have usually been obliged to seek refuge for his project in either philosophy or history or to simply leave the question of the relationship between the two altogether in abeyance, as if the sense of Foucault’s cross-disciplinary engagement did not require additional clarification.

Introduction

3

The situation is further complicated by the fact that Foucault apparently delighted in diverging from pre-existing disciplinary or doctrinal lines, preferring instead to allow his position to unfold in accordance with the inner force of his actual questioning. But although he always refused, as a matter of principle, to restrict his thinking to one domain or the other, he also routinely played a game of hide-and-seek, as it were, with philosophy and history. This is illustrated by a remark in the introduction to the second volume of The History of Sexuality, where Foucault explains that “the studies that follow, like the others I have done previously, are studies of ‘history’ by reason of the domain they deal with and the references they appeal to; but they are not the work of a ‘historian’” (HS2, 9). Is this then the work of the philosopher? By all accounts, yes, but only if we take into account the somewhat restrictive condition that Foucault formulates in another text as follows: “my books aren’t treatises in philosophy or studies of history: at most, they are philosophical fragments put to work in a historical field of problems” (EW3, 224). It is with this context in mind that this book aims to show that Foucault’s sophisticated yet playful theoretical attitude is in effect always rigorously grounded and is infused with a passion for inquiry which delivers a rare forcefulness when it comes to exposing certain philosophical problems, and the critical levity required for addressing topical social issues. Together, these traits make Foucault’s work an indisputable and inescapable touchstone in the spectrum of contemporary thought. If, therefore, his thinking, his procedures, and his intelligibility resist conformity with prior frameworks, this does not signify a frivolous maneuver so much as an autonomy of thought that can only be measured by the highest philosophical standards. The fundamental thesis of this book is that Foucault’s thinking can be best understood if it is framed as a “critical philosophy of history.” Although this is a label which he himself never used, its interpretative employment is not unjustified because, as our analyses will try to show in detail, these terms appear in varying combinations and contexts but recurrently and emphatically in defining the nature of Foucault’s theoretical position. It can be argued that Foucault not only associates a new meaning, tailored to his own procedures, with all the terms in question but also defines each of them in such a way that their meaning is always defined by means of the other two. Accordingly, philosophy here becomes an enterprise that derives its meaning from the theoretically engaged critical use of historical research; history becomes the marker of a dimension or mode of analysis, which offers its own temporal and spatial perspectives and materiality to philosophical and critical work; and social criticism, in its turn, finds its most intimate objects and principles at the crossroads of philosophical approach and historical investigation in the mid of the problems of the present. Thus, this conceptual transformation

4

Introduction

is accompanied by a no less powerful shift in the nature of philosophical problematization, in leveling historical methodology and research practice, and in mapping out the sociocritical possibilities thus opened. In this sense, Foucault’s “critical philosophy of history” appears as a highly sophisticated theoretical and practical endeavor where each of the elements is supposed to carry the same weight, while their unique stratification marks out the contours of an overarching theoretical and analytical orientation. This is precisely what distinguishes it from the other enterprises that lay hold of this label or make use of the conceptual pairs it generates.4 One of the principal objectives of this book is to show that this theoretical and research strategy—anchored in the analysis of different areas, topics, and problems—creates a unique force field in Foucault’s work that is largely responsible for its esteem in philosophy, the field of historical studies, and the arena of critical theory. At the same time, the analyses presented in this book set themselves an additional goal. Namely, to point out and elaborate the fundamental and formative problematic to which Foucault’s agenda of a “critical philosophy of history” is born as a response. This book contends that the problematic which so dominates Foucault’s oeuvre is that of “the present” and attempts to unpack and elucidate this topic by appealing to those Foucauldian expressions which recurrently imbue his philosophical discourse with a theoretical and critical stake, such as “the diagnosis of the present,” “the history of the present,” “the critique of the present,” and “the ontology of the present.” This issue is of central importance not only because occasionally Foucault himself takes the view that “maybe the most certain of all philosophical problems is the problem of the present time, and of what we are, in this very moment” (EW3, 336) but also because, as will be argued in the following, the “present” is virtually the only philosophical leitmotif that retains its name, value, and meaning throughout the whole development of Foucault’s thinking, from the early 1960s up until his death. Using this perspective, I will demonstrate that the focal point of the present constitutes the referential milieu and axe of problematization through which the forces and procedures of philosophy, history, and critique are articulated and interwoven throughout Foucault’s work. At the same time, I will also argue that the present constitutes a point of attraction around which the fundamental questions of “knowledge,” “power,” and “subjectivity” emerge and consolidate in his work, together with all the transformations and ramifications that characterize the empirical and theoretical assets of these questions. In other words, we will find that the problematic of present has a kind of architectonic function in the sweeping intellectual dynamics Foucault sets in motion—a role which, in the case of other philosophers of similar stature, is usually performed by a “system.”

Introduction

5

The five main chapters of the book thus undertake to explore and assess Foucault’s thought, from the standpoint of the question of the present, as a work that meets the criteria of a “critical philosophy of history.” The first chapter examines Foucault’s strategic combination of philosophical questioning and historical analysis under the heading of “the history of the present.” Here, a concerted effort is made to demonstrate that Foucault’s orientation toward empirical historical analyses in his various works is not the result of some audacious experiment but is in fact a very deliberate move to tackle the problem of the philosophical apprehension and use of history. In short, Foucault’s fundamental innovation here lies in his use of the historical dimension to problematize the present in its concrete unfolding and perspectives rather than adopting a speculative or transcendental approach to history. The second chapter takes a closer look at the particular conception of the historical past that is implied by the philosophical enterprise of the “diagnosis of the present.” As I will argue, it is only by focusing on the question of historical objects, the meaning of historical positivity, and the understanding of the past as a heterogenous set of historical relations that the full richness of Foucault’s historical problematization will be revealed. With this context in mind, the third chapter examines the essentially constructivist historiographical practice that Foucault deploys in all of his historical investigations, which allows him to grasp historical reality in a way that is simultaneously amenable to philosophical interests. The issues of historical objectivity, historical temporality, and historical nominalism will primarily be discussed in this section. The fourth chapter, drawing partly on the findings of the previous ones, shifts to proper philosophical concerns, with an inquiry into the ontological implications and significance of Foucault’s concept of history and its all-pervasive articulation in the problem of the present. I will argue that, contrary to many previous interpretations, Foucault advocates a distinct ontological approach which, however, should not be read as a theory of being per se but as a regional ontology of historical modes of being. Having established this framework, it will then be possible to discuss Foucault’s early problematization of “discursive existence,” as well as the issues which later surround what he calls the “historical ontology of ourselves.” Finally, the aim of the last, fifth chapter—whose subject matter is nevertheless implicitly present all throughout the interpretative reconstruction of Foucault’s project of the book—is to scrutinize the philosophical-historical approach that he introduces under the label of the “critique of the present.” This evaluation will in turn motivate an interpretation of “our present” as a target of social criticism within the scope of Foucauldian thinking, so as to expose the notion of normativity that this ambition implies, as well as the claims and possibilities that such a “genealogical” critique entails in relation to the political understanding of the notion of subjectivity.

6

Introduction

To accomplish these things, the book adopts an analytical approach that focuses primarily on the methodological, procedural, and epistemological elements of Foucault’s thought. In part, then, this is an attempt to secure an analytical domain in which Foucault’s thinking can be brought into confrontation with his own procedures. To be sure, however, this is not done in preparation for any kind of deconstructive reading but is supposed merely to reveal those theoretical gestures, analytical motifs, and procedural aspects which, when gravitating around the problem of the “present,” tend to solidify into doctrinal components, but which often remain implicit in Foucault’s concrete and empirically driven investigations, and whose articulation thus requires a separate interpretative engagement. In this interpretative work, however, it was also necessary to condense in a certain way the extremely rich and varied Foucauldian analyses, focusing on the philosophical aspects of particular interest to us. Thus, this book could not take on the task of presenting the development of this thinking in its chronological unfolding and in its various historical contexts. But neither does it necessarily try to bring Foucault’s various problems, research phases, and periods into a common hypothetical ground, thus risking blurring their alterations and internal dynamics for the sake of a systematic presentation. Rather, I will attempt to systematically highlight those philosophical issues which can be seen to have been a recurrent preoccupation of Foucault’s thought and which he himself often considered worthy of clarification. Nevertheless, the book’s analyses do not spare the occasional attempt to trace the philosophical influences and confrontations that have contributed, in one way or another, to the formation of the Foucauldian problematic. In doing so, particular attention will be paid—especially in the first three chapters of the book—to certain historiographical discourses, mainly those produced by the members of the Annales school, such as Le Goff’s comment on Foucault at the beginning of this chapter. The primary reason for this privileged treatment is linked to the fact that while the current philosophical scholarship seeks to unravel every conceivable interpretative niche that might meaningfully connect, through factual influences or imagined analogies, Foucault’s thought to other major modern philosophical figures—such as Kant, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, Habermas, Butler, and others—its links to relevant historiographical conceptions in France and elsewhere have been, rather regrettably, relegated to the background.5 But precisely because of the profound ways in which his work is embedded in historical research, these historiographical perspectives ought to prove just as informative and insightful as comparisons with various philosophical agendas, assuming our goal is an accurate mapping of the motifs that inform Foucault’s philosophical procedures and their epistemological position.

Introduction

7

This book is not intended as a memorial to Foucault nor a tribute to his historical importance. Its explicit philosophical aim is rather to bring the problem of the present itself back into the forefront of contemporary philosophical, historical, and critical discussions.6 Because for a thinking that feeds on history, the present is a privileged philosophical theme, whose analysis or critical reflection, precisely because we are dealing here with a profoundly historical matter, requires a persistent intellectual engagement. At the same time, as is evidenced by the relentless stream of texts, editions, and interpretations—to which this book itself attempts a contribution—there is no doubt that the philosophical and interpretive possibilities contained within Foucault’s works are far from being exhausted today. But not surprisingly, this is not due simply to the fact that his thinking never fails to provide us with new intellectual lessons; rather, Foucault’s enduring relevance ultimately stems from the fact that it is precisely our own historical present that constantly confronts us with hitherto unknown challenges and promises. NOTES 1. Jacques Le Goff, History and Memory. Trans. S. Rendall and E. Cloman. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992, 178. 2. Georges Canguilhem, Report from Mr. Canguilhem on the Manuscript Filed by Mr. Michel Foucault, Director of the Institut Français of Hamburg, in Order to Obtain Permission to Print His Principal Thesis for the Doctor of Letters. Trans. Ann Hobart. In Arnold I. Davidson (ed.), Foucault and His Interlocutors. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997, 26. 3. Foucault himself expressed his sympathy toward this tradition in one of his late essays “Life: Experience and Science,” which served as an introduction to the English translation of George Canguilhem’s book The Normal and the Pathological (EW2, 465–478). 4. It is worth noting that the term “critical philosophy of history” does not possess a well-established meaning in the philosophical or historical literature, nor is its referent exemplified by any particular movement of thought. In the French context, the use of this term was pioneered by Raymond Aron in his book La philosophie critique de l’histoire. Paris: Vrin, 1938, in order to generally denote German historical thought of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and especially the works of Dilthey, Simmel, Rickert, and Weber. More recently, the term has been used to describe Reinhart Koselleck’s enterprise in historical theory. Cf. Christophe Bouton, The Critical Theory of History: Rethinking the Philosophy of History in the Light of Koselleck’s Work. History and Theory 55, no. 2 (2016): 163–184. 5. Valuable, although not recent exceptions in this respect are Clare O’Farell’s Foucault: Historian or Philosopher? New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1989 and Martin Kusch’s Foucault’s Strata and Fields. An Investigation into Archeological and

8

Introduction

Genealogical Science Studies. Dordrecht: Springer, 1991. More recently, Judith Revel has emphasized the role of the Annales school historians in the development of Foucault’s conception of history. J. Revel, History. In L. Lawlor and J. Nale (eds.), The Cambridge Foucault Lexicon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014, 187–199. 6. For a recent example of such an undertaking, although with a different orientation, see Gabriel Rockhill, Counter-History of the Present. Untimely Interrogations into Globalization, Technology, Democracy. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017.

1 ✛

The Project of the “History of the Present”

THE PROBLEM OF THE HISTORICAL PRESENT: AN OVERVIEW If Marc Bloch is right to claim that the knowledge of history must perpetually oscillate between what is actual and what is left behind us, this implies that the past-present relationship is theoretically formative for all approaches to history or historiography. In epistemic, methodological, and even political terms, this relationship marks the dimension within which historicity can gain a compelling meaning in our modernity. To be sure, this portrayal is as well suited to most nineteenth-century historiographical procedures as it is included in almost all twentieth-century theories of history. Indeed, in one of Foucault’s lectures given at the Collège de France, he dwells at length on the fact that the birth of the modern scientific and philosophical discourse on history in the nineteenth century is essentially concomitant with the moment when the present as such ceases to be regarded as a mere ephemeral phenomenon and becomes the fundamental “principle of intelligibility” of historicity itself. As he argues, It is at this point that the universal comes into contact with the real in the present (a present that has just passed and will pass), in the imminence of the present, and it is this that gives the present both its value and its intensity, and that establishes it as a principle of intelligibility. The present is no longer the moment of forgetfulness. On the contrary, it is the moment when the truth comes out, when what was obscure or virtual is revealed in the full light of day. As a result, the present both reveals the past and allows it to be analyzed. (SD, 227–228) 9

10

Chapter 1

In fact, it is not at all difficult to verify the validity of this thesis in detail. One can even find a concern for the present in a historian, such as Leopold von Ranke, who was the first to argue that the scientific rigor of the historian’s work must derive from the unconditional privileging of factual historical data over the moralizing attitudes of society. But Ranke was also the first in acknowledging that as soon as history comes into contact with political reality, one must recognize that “the knowledge of the past is incomplete without an acquaintance with the present; an understanding of the present is impossible without a knowledge of the past. They clasp one another’s hands. One cannot exist, or be complete, without the other.”1 This idea also receives a more theoretical, epistemological reinforcement from J. G. Droysen with his 1858 work Outlines on History, wherein he observes that “the data for historical investigation are not past things, for these have disappeared, but things which are still present here and now,”2 and contends moreover that historical research possesses an intrinsic “double nature” consisting in the “enrichment and deepening of the present by clearing up past events pertaining to it,” in which “clearing up” occurs by “unlocking and unfolding certain remnants” of those events.3 In its essentials, this interpretative framework also characterizes the French historiography of the time. The meaning of Jules Michelet’s fabled remark in the preface to The People, according to which “whoever will confine himself to the present, the actual, will not understand them,”4 unfolds in the light of a conception of history, which holds that the resurrection of the depths of time should be put at the service of the present because historical education “has to link the present to the past and prepare the future.”5 In the same vein, Victor Langlois and Charles Seignobos’s authoritative 1894 book on historical methodology goes further yet by arguing that the analogy between the past and the present constitutes one of the most important prerequisites of historical intelligibility. Translated into the procedural vocabulary of “historical construction,” this means more precisely that “whatever chance there is of finding the causes which explain the evolution of past societies must lie in the direct observation of the transformations of present societies.”6 From this perspective, the corresponding thesis—namely, that “history enables us to understand the present in so far as it explains the origin of the existing state of things”7— thus follows quite naturally. The widespread acceptance of these ideas at the time is most strikingly attested by the fact that when the positivist historian Fustel de Coulanges, embarking on the completely opposite theoretical path, wanted to establish history as a “pure science,” he believed that this was only achievable by “removing from the spirit everything that has to do with the present.”8

The Project of the “History of the Present”

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In his earlier-mentioned lecture, Foucault repeatedly comments on the historical logic behind these developments. For example, he argues emphatically that, “from the nineteenth century onward something new— and, I think, something fundamental—began to happen. History and philosophy began to ask the same question: What is it, in the present, that is the agent of the universal? What is it, in the present, that is the truth of the universal?” (SD 237). If we look for concrete contexts for these assertions, we can first of all refer the works of Wilhelm Dilthey and Benedetto Croce, who both strove, under the influence of Hegel, to give a balanced analysis of the subjective and objective components of the historical life of the spirit, but in such a way as to ensure that the contributions of the modern historical sciences, and of historiography in particular, were properly incorporated. Significantly, Dilthey is also the first to give precedence to the present-past relationship when it comes to analyzing the relationship between subjective or psychological temporality and historical objectivity. For him, the fact that “the present is filled with the past”9 does not simply apply to the subjective realm of temporality; through the “meaningfulness” of life, as he argues, the historical past and present are inextricably interconnected, and so much so that “in the objective spirit [.  .  .] in which a commonality existing among individuals has objectified itself in the world of the senses, the past is a continuously enduring present for us.”10 According to Croce, meanwhile, it is the category of “contemporaneity” that is designed to capture the fundamental epistemic component of the historical orientation of the spirit. He argues that every history is necessarily a contemporary history insofar as “it is evident that only an interest in the life of the present can move one to investigate past fact. Therefore, this past fact does not answer to a past interest, but to a present interest.”11 From this premise, he seeks to establish—through a detailed analysis of the theoretical issues and achievements of modern historiography, including those of Ranke, Droysen, and Michelet—that “the past does not live otherwise than in the present, as the force of the present, resolved and transformed in the present,”12 and that ultimately the present is nothing else, but “the eternal life of the past.”13 In the first half of the twentieth century, and under the influence of Dilthey in particular, radically divergent philosophical endeavors sought to capitalize on the philosophical potential of this notion of the “historical present”; indeed, its versatility was such that it could be employed in a Marxist context by Lukács in History and Class Consciousness, and yet also find a proper place in Heidegger’s early phenomenological project. In Lukács’s view, Marxism had to be transformed into a philosophy and a methodology of history, but in such a way that it also had to involve the rearticulation of all the qualities of the historical past in light of a critical

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and revolutionary appropriation of the present. Lukács can therefore claim that Marxism is the only authentic theory of history insofar as it alone can articulate the “relation between the tasks of the immediate present and the totality of the historical process.”14 Thus, historical materialism is here understood as a critical endeavor that permits us “to view the present historically and hence scientifically so that we can penetrate beneath the surface and perceive the profounder historical forces which in reality control events.”15 Far from making concessions to the dogmatism of Marxist orthodoxy, however, Lukács hereby grasps the historical condition in a profoundly dialectical manner. For the critique of the present opens up the past, which in turn provides the present with the necessary historical pathway to its own transcendence; and consequently, as he claims, “every piece of historical knowledge is an act of self-knowledge. The past only becomes transparent when the present can practice selfcriticism in an appropriate manner.”16 The fact that this period revolved around the same questions of the historical present is well illustrated by the case of the philosophy of the young Heidegger. Despite drawing his ideas from quite different sources and carrying them in quite different directions, he nevertheless advances positions concerning the linkage of the historical past and present, which are almost identical to those of Lukács—and even does so in the very same year as the publication of History and Class Consciousness. During this period, Heidegger’s philosophical engagement mainly revolves around the phenomenological problems of “factical existence” and historical “destruction,” since he argues that Husserl’s phenomenology is only rendered consistent once the motif of returning to an original sphere of factical experience is complemented by a profound critique and retrieval of the philosophical tradition. From this perspective, then, it is precisely the problem of the relation between the historical present and past which fundamentally exposes and critically refocuses the main thrusts of phenomenological inquiry. Heidegger thus implicitly aligns himself with Lukács when he is consequently led to insist that “it is only by way of a radical historical critique that any philosophical research can get to the bottom of things at all,”17 and that “history is something that we ourselves are; by contrast, what is presented to us as a past is not a past at all but rather a paltry present.”18 He therefore concludes, again in accordance with Lukács, that “the critique of the historical is nothing other than the critique of the present, a critique such that, through it, the situation of the interpretation itself becomes transparent and critically tilled.”19 Accordingly, “far from dismissing the past, the critique has precisely the opposite tendency of bringing the object of the critique to light in its primordial past,”20 so that “the past first becomes visible as something that we genuinely have already been and can be again.”21 These ideas would

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acquire their most dramatic phenomenological formulations a few years later in Being and Time. It is not unrelated that in the 1930s, Raymond Aron retrospectively examined the tendencies and achievements of then-current German historical thought—including, among others, those of Dilthey, Husserl, and Lukács—and offered a conceptual panorama that was at once systematic and critical. The title of his conclusive 1938 work on this topic, Introduction to the Philosophy of History: An Essay on the Limits of Historical Objectivity, clearly defines the parameters within which this theoretical clarification had to take place. For Aron, the “limits of historical objectivity,” whether exposed in the context of naturalist, sociologizing, positivist, or historicist conceptions of history, are revealed by the factum of the inescapable mediation between past and present. More importantly, his critical approach is stimulated and directed by the following question: “to what extent do we understand the past in the light of the present?”22 In this regard, Aron argues that the knowledge or meaning of history, in all its forms, is fundamentally conditioned by a perspectivism, where “by perspective we mean the view of the past ordered by reference to the present.”23 In the final analysis, these arguments constitute an assumption that historical perspectivism is not only inescapable, but also tends to “overcome the opposition of present to past”24 by instantiating an experience of the historical present in which it is the political dispositions, rather than the epistemological, which are supposed to animate a historical orientation. Interestingly enough, in a conversation with him, Foucault himself recalls this philosophical position of Aron and does not see it to be completely alien to his own “diagnostic” approach (AF, 22). On the other side of the French philosophical and political arena, however, it was undoubtedly Jean-Paul Sartre who most fully expounded the problem of the historical present during his gradual transition from existential phenomenology to Marxism in the 1960s. Although already in Being and Nothingness Sartre argued for the “original ontological synthesis” of past and present,25 this relationship was imbued with a more profound historical meaning in later texts. In his Critique of Dialectical Reason, the category of synthesis is replaced by a “totalization” which integrates, without any further mediation, the original deployment of the qualities of human temporality, praxis, and experience into a comprehensive historical choreography. According to Sartre, historical intelligibility emerges in this process from the mutually supportive interplay of the synchronic relations given in the “ensemble of the present” and the diachronic relations which form the “depths of the past.” In this configuration, historical reflection is based on a reconstituting knowledge of the present, which is in turn accomplished through a distancing orientation toward the transcendent past by virtue of the elements that this past has itself deposited

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in the present.26 Within this dialectical circuit, it is the dominant movement of totalization—which faces the future, and which is deployed in various ways at the levels of concrete human existence, praxis, and intelligibility—that puts each historically meaningful element at the service of all others. As Sartre puts it in the introductory essay of the book, “the dialectical totalization must include acts, passions, work, and need as well as economic categories; it must at once place the agent or the event back into the historical setting, define him in relation to the orientation of becoming, and determine exactly the meaning of the present as such.”27 It is worth noting, as we shall see in detail, that it is precisely against this totalizing tendency that Foucault develops his own diagnostic approach to capturing the historical present. In parallel with these philosophical developments, among the historians, it is certainly the members of the Annales school who have gone the furthest in stressing the constitutive role of the present in historical research. The outlines of this approach are given clear articulation in the work of Marc Bloch, who discusses this question from two angles in his now-classic 1944 text on historical methodology called The Historian’s Craft. According to Bloch, it is not only the past that can serve as a key to understanding the present; conversely, the present also serves as an important reference point for understanding the past. For if, as he puts it, “it happens that, in order to find daylight, the historian may have to pursue his subject right up to the present,” then it must be typically admitted “that the knowledge of the present bears even more immediately upon the understanding of the past.”28 Indeed, one of the most important features of the problem-centered historiography represented by the Annales school is the contention that the initial questions of historical research are to be determined by the scientific or social implications of the present situation. As Lucien Febvre argues in an article praising Bloch, this methodological position thus implies not only that “it is according to its present needs that it [history] systematically collects, then classifies and groups the past facts,”29 but moreover that “organizing the past according to the present” here manifests itself as the “social function of history.”30 Fernand Braudel, too, undoubtedly sees himself as a champion of the same tradition when he discusses the potentials of historical science when it comes to a “face to face” relationship “with the present.”31 In this effort, he demonstrates how even a longue durée historical approach can be used in a fully legitimate way to understand the present, such that the temporal context of the present could then be interpreted as a pattern of civilization and not merely as a “state of the moment” informed by historical events. Thus, while Braudel is obviously far from sympathetic to Sartre’s dialectical totalization model, nevertheless, he can still claim that “all history must be mobilized if one would understand the present.”32

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Ultimately, then, we find that if French historians tended to conceive the past-present relationship as a paradigmatic form of historical intelligibility and social engagement, this is because it served to both rearticulate the transformative potential of historical research and also extend it beyond the scopes of academic scholarship. As Philippe Ariès, who was in many ways close to Annales—and to Foucault, too33—puts it in his 1954 book The Time of History, “history is not anymore simply a technique of a specialist, but it becomes a mode of being in the time of modern man.”34 But Ariès goes even further, and in an illuminating comment on the role of historiography in capturing the present, contrasts the role of the “historian of the past” with that of the “historian of the present”: The historian of the past must relate to his present. The historian of the present must, on the contrary, abandon his present to relate to a past of reference. The historian of the past had to have of his present a naive conscience of a contemporary. The historian of the present must adopt an archaeological knowledge of his present as a historian. Otherwise, the structure that he wants to define is too natural for him to perceive it clearly. The historian of the present, and not that of the past, must leave his time, not to be the man of no time, but to be the man of another time.35

There can hardly be any doubt that this portrayal of history, along with that of the role of the “historian of the present” and the “archeological knowledge of the present,” played a fundamental role in shaping Foucault’s philosophical and historical commitments. All these elements, with the attractive and repulsive echoes of the centuries-old tradition behind them, and combined with new tools and topics of historical research and theoretical insight, contributed to the formation of his distinctive philosophical position on history. FOUCAULT’S PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY AS THE “HISTORY OF THE PRESENT” Philippe Ariès’s assertion in The Time of History that history is ceasing to be an object of simple curiosity or scientific treatment and is rather becoming “a mode of being of modern man”36 expresses a basic concern of the post–World War II intellectual situation in France and beyond. Theorizing man predominantly in terms of history and historicity challenged deep-rooted thought patterns and triggered far-reaching consequences. During this period, more than anything else, it was noticeable that various philosophical movements sought to radically expand the apprehension of “human reality” by freeing it from the somewhat limited realm of inner experience articulated at the level of individual consciousness and

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its similarly restricted notion of temporality and action. The revival of totalizing models of dialectical thinking, exemplified by the renaissance of Hegelianism in France, the spread of Marxism, and a widespread turn toward dialectics—even in the existentialism of Sartre or MerleauPonty—all ventured to conquer the empire of human experience by means of history.37 This tendency also resonated with the “total history” approach promoted by the Annales school historians, and with other impulses coming from the field of social sciences, such as structuralism. In a word, historical thinking offered a new and dynamic alternative to speculative and phenomenological approaches to the analytic of the human condition; for due to its intrinsic dependence on temporal and spatial mediations, the recourse to history necessitated a conceptual engagement with reality rather than simply relying on the movement of consciousness or the unfolding of experience. As Foucault points out in a text devoted to the philosophical landscape in post-war France, in this period, the preeminence of historical reason almost always served to vindicate the rights of a “philosophy of concept” over the assets of a “philosophy of life or consciousness (EW3, 466–478). Yet this blatant historicisation of thought could not escape a radical confrontation. For precisely insofar as this sweeping turn toward history reintegrated the objects of reflection in the web of historical mediations and references, it thereby also eroded the prerogatives of philosophical reflection itself. The basic problem was that the consistent exposure to history encompassed not only the object of thought but also the very subject and the act of thinking itself. But if a philosophical reflection holds that there is no element of reality, no concept, and no problem which exists without a complex historical development, then how is it possible to secure the knowledge of history? How is it then possible to think history in such a way that this thinking itself is able to retain all the historical determinations and contingencies that allowed it to come into being in the first place? Nietzsche, whose postwar influence in France rivaled that of Hegel and Marx, investigated these questions with his genealogical method in a number of different ways,38 and in his exemplary reading of thought, Gilles Deleuze formulated the problem in the following manner: “Dialectic loves and controls history, but it has a history itself which it suffers from and which it does not control.”39 From a Nietzschean perspective, the issue thus stems from the fact that when we make history into a total dimension, we tend at the same time, and indeed by this very maneuver, to endow the totalizing act itself with an extra-historical meaning. However, if the situation in which a given philosophical reflection is rooted, along with its interpretative horizon and conceptual apparatus, all have historical formations of their own, then the possibility of obtaining well-founded philosophical knowledge of history is put in jeopardy.

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Paradoxically, then, in attempting to take history seriously, philosophical thinking thereby seems precisely to deprive itself of the possibility of comprehending history at all. It is from within this theoretical context that we can properly understand Michel Foucault’s ambition—expressed both explicitly and implicitly throughout his career—to write the “history of the present.”40 In its negative aspect, this position contends that no form of human experience or objective knowledge whatsoever can subsist without historical conditioning: everything is historical, and the same holds also for the premises of philosophical knowledge and the experience of history itself. That is, Foucault wholly embraces Nietzsche’s rejection of any “supra-historical perspective” in the treatment of history; thus, he denies that history can be understood as the result of any empirically or transcendentally subjective activity of sense-giving, and also repudiates the historian’s pretension to a perspective that “finds its support outside of time and claims to base its judgments on an apocalyptic objectivity” (EW2, 379). In this sense, the “history of the present” signifies a critical enterprise directed against all those systems or elements of thought which rest upon ahistorical foundations. In determining the positive side of this approach, however, Foucault differentiates himself from most of his predecessors and contemporaries. When he mentions in a 1966 interview how struck he was by “the impossibility of our culture of raising the problem of the history of its own thought” (EW2, 267), he does not do so to urge the adoption of a traditional historical-philosophical position. According to Foucault, the intellectual challenge imposed by this situation does not call for the construction of a general philosophy of history that would seek to explain the constitution, meaning, and design of human experiences within the totality of their historical conditions; nor does he envisage historical thinking simply as a kind of toolbox that can be used to unpack or liberate certain intellectual contents for the sake of a social criticism; and finally, his dissatisfaction also partly extends to the efforts of certain prominent historians who abandon the philosophical approach to history altogether and therefore try to limit the scope of theoretical questions to mere methodological issues in historical research. In short, when faced with the problem of the historicity of thinking, Foucault refuses to follow philosophers such as Jean-Paul Sartre,41 maintains reservations toward the sociocritical project of the Frankfurt School,42 and affirms historians such as Fernand Braudel and the Annales school43 only up to a certain point. The positive significance of Foucault’s method chiefly lies in the nature of the philosophical problematization that it makes possible. First and foremost, this begins with the redefinition of the notion of a “philosophical problem” itself. For if a certain historicity underlies all kinds of

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knowledge in general, including the philosophical, then, it is clear that the problems of philosophy cannot be regarded as timeless units of thought which, by some inherent quality, would be capable of resisting historical change. For Foucault, philosophy must renounce its privileged claim to timeless questions; rather, questions must be posed or invented with respect to a given historical situation in which they can either be validated or dismissed. The historical “present” and “actuality” thus constitute a field and a resource of philosophical inquiry, and from the mid-1960s onward, Foucault describes, with various formulae, this decisive theoretical attitude: he speaks recurrently of a “diagnosis of the present” (RC, 91) and of the need to “diagnose the present of a culture” (RC, 105), to perform a “work of excavation beneath our feet,” “to bring to light the thought before thought” (FL, 14), to undertake an “analysis of our own subsoil,” and to present an “ethnology of the culture to which we belong,” and finally also of the necessity of “bringing out an autonomous domain which would be that of the unconscious of knowledge” (FL, 54). These designations are alike inasmuch as they all advocate a rejection of totalizing philosophical approaches to history and call instead for the adoption of a new kind of theoretical and analytical method that focuses on the present as a privileged historical situation. Accordingly, when Raymond Aron asked him in 1967 where he would situate himself with respect to philosophy, Foucault made these commitments explicit: Now you ask me where I am, I will answer you, quite simply, in today. Perhaps the role of the philosopher, the role of the philosopher today, is not to be the theorist of the totality but the diagnostician, if I may use that word, the diagnostician of today. Philosophy consists in diagnosing and it is obvious that all the divisions, all the periodizations, etc., are organized around this break, this opening, in which we are, and which is today. (AF, 22)

It is worthwhile to note here that in contrast to Foucault’s later texts, where the philosophical problematization of “today” is taken up within a predominantly Kantian framework, his initial approach to a philosophical diagnostic of the present is Nietzschean in character; in fact, Foucault’s provisional efforts to redefine philosophy as a diagnostic endeavor followed upon his conviction that Nietzsche was the first modern representative of such an orientation. Hence, his insistence on this double attachment in another interview given during the same year: It is very possible that my work has something to do with philosophy, above all in so far as, at least since Nietzsche, the task of philosophy has been to make diagnoses, and its aim is no longer to proclaim a truth which would be valid for all and for all time. I seek to diagnose, to carry out a diagnosis of the present: to say what we are today and what it means, today, to say

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what we do say. This work of excavation beneath our feet has characterized contemporary thought since Nietzsche, and in this sense I can declare myself a philosopher. (RC, 91)

But the Nietzschean provenance of Foucault’s diagnostic project had other advantages beyond simply providing historical support for his philosophical claims. Foucault’s persistent constructive engagement with Nietzsche from the late 1960s into the early 1970s allowed him—both retrospectively and prospectively—to elaborate or clarify many of his own fundamental concepts.44 Of particular importance in this respect are the university lectures given in Tunis in 1967 that specifically analyze the topic of philosophy as “diagnosis” and the “today” as a philosophical problem in a historical context.45 No less significant, however, is the fact that in this period, Foucault draws on Nietzsche in order to articulate a nonphenomenological and nonstructuralist concept of interpretation that would challenge the thesis of the “original subject” (LW, 213) and instead prioritizes a philosophical notion of understanding which establishes itself as a “historical process” before any “problematic of truth” and any “subject-object relation” (LW, 214). For Foucault, philosophy thus names a specific critical inquiry into the conditions that underlie our actuality. But he deliberately adopts this philosophical attitude, so understood, as his own because he considers the present to be a fertile region which enables us, by analyzing our cultural certainties and symptomatic tensions, to witness in concreto the dynamism of our own historical becoming. As Foucault explains in the previously cited interview, “in trying to make a diagnosis of the present in which we live, we can isolate as already belonging to the past certain tendencies which are still considered to be contemporary” (RC, 92). In this sense, then, the present does not mark a particular temporal span per se, but rather a topological position which grants access to the past; and although it certainly places a limitation on our own experience, this sense of limitation is necessitated by a philosophical endeavor which, while fully respecting the effects of history, wants to deal above all with topical philosophical questions with genuine contemporary relevance. With that being said, the fact that Foucault seeks to de-absolutize the notion of history with regard to the present in no way suggests that he believes that this relativized history could provide answers to the problems of our actuality without any further specification. History does not offer itself unreservedly to the diagnosis of the present—neither as an objective process nor as the product of subjective practices—and this is why, Foucault can claim that history cannot play the role of a “philosophy of philosophies” or “language of languages,” as was advocated by the “nineteenth-century historicism that tended to endow history with the

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lawgiving and critical power of philosophy” (EW2, 292). Indeed, if history possesses a privilege here, it is only because it broaches an operative field within which the formative trajectory of certain phenomena—at the level of their quality and content, and by their capacity to generate transitions between the present and the past—makes visible those particularities that reveal the nature of our dependence on historical conditions. To use Foucault’s words, history is privileged insofar as it “serves to show how that which is has not always been; that is, the things which seem most evident to us are always formed in the confluence of encounters and chances, during the course of a precarious and fragile history” (EW2, 449). This transformation of the philosophical question of history, which is at once theoretically grounded and charged with a concrete analytical ambition, explains Foucault’s historical orientation—something which was far from being typical for his time.46 The concrete objects of his research—such as madness, hospital, human sciences, prison, sexuality, and self—were carefully selected in each case to favor a historical analysis pertaining to the problematization of the present. Nevertheless, the historiographical aspirations of these projects should not obscure the fact that Foucault’s work was also principally directed toward an explicit reformulation of certain philosophical problems from within a historical context; questions of knowledge, power, and subjectivity are the issues that best cover this set of problems. Thus, he had every reason to characterize the nature of his own approach as follows, “my books aren’t treatises in philosophy or studies of history: at most, they are philosophical fragments put to work in a historical field of problems” (EW3, 224). Such an aim can already be found in the historical works which preceded Foucault’s explicit discussion of a diagnosis of the present. For example, the fact that, in History of Madness, the problem of “reason” had to be posed in terms of the phenomenon of “madness” indicates a certain intricate relationship between historical and philosophical concerns with an eye on the present, since the very problem of an “experience of madness” is, first and foremost, precisely a problem of modern time and our own present. Thus, on the one hand, a confrontation with madness—that quintessential matrix of unintelligibility—points toward a rather influential source of tensions in late modern culture; but on the other hand, madness also constitutes an eminently historical phenomenon, in the name of which, as Foucault painstakingly shows, the separation between “reason” and “unreason” transpires concretely in Europe over the course of the eighteenth century—which division continues to allow us to have something like an experience of madness to this day. Consequently, the problematization of madness requires a two-fold approach, namely, a contemporary philosophical survey and a well-documented historical elaboration. Therefore, what Foucault accomplishes in this work is not

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at all a history of a collective psychological phenomenon and its attendant institutions or a sort of history of mentalitiés, as some of his fellow historians interpreted it;47 it is rather the manifestation of a radical line of thought which, in the midst of concrete historical investigations, opens up the present to the possibility of a philosophical critique—in this case, the historical critique of rationality. In retrospect, Foucault declares that the significance of his early work mostly derives from this making possible: If I had wanted, for example, to do the history of psychiatric institutions in Europe between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, obviously I wouldn’t have written a book like Madness and Civilization. But my problem is not to satisfy professional historians. My problem is to construct myself— by passing through a determinate historical content—and to invite others to share an experience of what we are, not only our past but also our present, an experience of our modernity. (EW3, 242, translation modified)

Invariably, Foucault’s other historical research expresses the same intent. Thus, we find, in The Birth of the Clinic, that Foucault places the problem of the “body” at the center of his investigations but addresses this question in the context of the genesis of clinical practice in the eighteenth century. Interpreting critically the history of this institutional transformation as the emergence of a new type of “perception” of the body, he indicates some of its consequences for modern humanity’s relations to illness, medical knowledge, and death: “the research that I am undertaking here therefore involves a project that is deliberately both historical and critical, in that it is concerned with determining the conditions of possibility of medical experience in modern times” (BC, xix). But he emphasizes that this historico-critical discovery is itself retroactively possible only through the mediation of the present; that is, it is possible because “a new experience of disease is coming into being that will make possible a historical and critical understanding of the old experience” (BC, xv). Furthermore, the problematization of modern “man” as such motivated Foucault to investigate the various forms of scientific discourses that, historically, turned the human being into an object of critical knowledge. He took up this task in The Order of Things under the label of an “archaeology of the human sciences,” with the clear goal of developing an alternative to the thenprevailing phenomenological, existential, and social scientific discourses on human reality. Here, too, the critical, present-centered aspect of his method is unmistakable; according to Foucault, the “diagnosis of humanism” is made both possible and necessary at once by the contemporary fact that, due in large part to the structuralist project, the “anthropologicohumanist structure of nineteenth-century thought” seems to be “coming apart, disintegrating before our very eyes” (RC, 92).

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If in this respect, Discipline and Punish occupies a special place in Foucault’s oeuvre, it is not only because the term “history of the present” here finds its first explicit conceptualization. Again, we find that the aim of the work is in equal measure philosophical and historical: Foucault sets out to trace the “correlative history of the modern soul and of a new power to judge” in the context of eighteenth-century Western European history (DP, 21). However, paradoxically, this task also implicates “a genealogy of the present scientifico-legal complex from which the power to punish derives its base” (DP, 21) and that clearly indicates that relying on the present is not random or accidental choice here. If one is interested not only in the chronology of the development of the prison system or the history of techniques of punishment in Europe but also in the analysis of the complex strategy that Foucault calls “power,” then it is essential to open up a perspective that can harness the intellectual and social resources of the present in order to access the past. Indeed, the history of power can only be written by exploring the strategies of power, something for which the experiences of present struggles can provide the basic retrospective conceptual roadmap. As Foucault observes, “that punishment in general and the prison in particular belong to a political technology of the body is a lesson that I have learnt not so much from history as from the present” (DP, 30). Consequently, over and above a mere history of penal mechanisms, this particular text constitutes a specific experimental articulation of the problem of power. In a debate with historians concerning this book, he makes a sharp distinction between an “analysis of a period” and an “analysis of a problem” and identifies his work with the latter, thereby situating his enterprise squarely within the framework of a larger theoretical problematization of the history of “punitive reason” (DE4, 14). At the same time, he makes no secret of the fact that the outcomes of such an examination may lead, by means of a historical feedback mechanism, to a critical analysis of power relations in contemporary society; and in doing so, he once again demonstrates why the “history of the present” (DP, 21) ought to be recognized as a complex theoretical and critical enterprise that combines philosophical interrogation with concrete historical research in a hitherto unseen fashion. The fact that in these historical studies, as in the later ones on sexuality, biopolitics, governmentality, and subjectivity, the problem of the “present” is only addressed in a transversal or retrospective way does not undermine its fundamental importance. On the contrary, since Foucault’s notion of the present has nothing or very little in common with the historiographical notion of “contemporaneity,” the sociological notion of “actuality,” and the philosophical notion of “presence,” it can only be defined by means of historical detours. In this way, transversality and

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mediatedness are at their core, and precisely, this is what endows the focus on the present with a new kind of philosophical significance for history. UNFOLDING THE PRESENT: DIAGNOSIS, DISCONTINUITY, AND DISTANCE Foucault’s insistence that his historical work has a fundamental philosophical diagnostic orientation runs throughout his oeuvre. But generally speaking, a diagnostic activity is neither an intuitive nor a reflexive procedure: its primary function is to interpret an assemblage of phenomena as signs and indicators in the light of their corresponding structural or generative relations. In such an operation, the elements and their relationships take precedence over the self-disclosing properties of appearances. In this sense, all diagnoses are, first and foremost, guided by rules of conceptual classification rather than the logic of experiential or reflexive engagement; and even if the object of a philosophical diagnosis happens to be our own individual or collective “self,” its effectivity depends upon the decomposition of pregiven identities. Indeed, the self of “self-diagnosis” is never less than a divided self, and therefore, what a diagnostic process brings into play is detachment and dispersion—even in such situations of self-disclosure, where immediacy and identity tend to be the prevailing norms. A diagnosis thus does not merely record differences; it also allows them to take shape. If such an activity is directed, as it is markedly the case with Foucault, to capture our own historical conditions and the meaning of “who we are today,” then these differences will take shape between the past and the present, between our own former and actual historical sceneries and their various constitutive layers. With this in mind, it is not at all surprising to see that in response to an interview question about the nature of his philosophical diagnosis, Foucault can emphasize that, in general, it employs “a form of knowledge which defines and determines differences” (DE2, 369), but it can also be related to a type of knowledge which consists precisely in “allowing the emergence of a new objective field” (DE2, 370). These remarks clearly imply that for him the agenda of the philosophical diagnosis embraces an outlook for which “difference” and “emergence” are the principal operational categories. Also, when it comes to define the profile of his diagnostic analysis, this may help us to understand why Foucault’s entire intellectual strategy can be seen as a polemic against an epochal or unmediated understanding of the “historical present.” For although the present marks a privileged field for him, this privilege is reserved for an

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area of historical operation, not for the credentials of some overarching experiential or existential situation. What is striking in this analytical strategy, above all, is that Foucault does not attribute to the notion of the “present” a meaning that refers to some discernible individual or collective experiential state of affairs. Manifestly for him, the present has no distinctive subjects (specific classes or groups), nor privileged processes (economic forces, social trends, or struggles), and its contours are marked by its difference from the past rather than by its own constitutive social qualities. That is why to diagnose the present means, as he affirms in another conversation, “to say what the present is, and how our present is absolutely different from all that is not it, that is to say, from our past” (FL, 53). Even when Foucault occasionally identifies the question of the present with the question of “today” or that of “actuality,” he does so in most cases in an interrogative mode, like when he wonders about “what we are today and what it means, today, to say what we do say” (RC, 91), or when he asks questions such as “what are we today?” and “what is this ‘today’ in which we live?” (RC, 96–97). This suggests that the present essentially signifies a problem for him rather than an experiential resource of a collective situation or a marker of social position. However, it is equally clear that its problematic character derives from the contention that the present constitutes a historical configuration in every respect. The present is a generative social context of polysemic and multilayered unfolding which, therefore, does not imply any radical temporal starting point or teleological endpoint in the course of history. It is quite emblematic in this regard that in one of his late interviews, Foucault identifies the tendency to conceive “the analysis of the present as being precisely, in history, a present of rupture, or of high point, or of completion or of a returning dawn” as “one of the most harmful habits in contemporary thought” (EW2, 449). He contrasts this tendency with a different strategy—using Kant’s essay “What is Enlightenment?” as a guide—which would simply aim at describing the “nature of today and ourselves in today” as “a time like any other time” but which, at the same time, “is never quite like any other” (EW2, 449). The historical salience of the present is therefore not due to any epochal exceptionality or experiential self-referentiality, but to its analytical potential. However, it is also true that this operative understanding of the present tacitly sets in motion, and in such a way as to eventually make them explicitly visible, those constitutive driving forces that underpin Foucault’s general conception of history. In this respect, it is telling that his definition of philosophy as a “diagnostic activity” of the present first appears at a highly important juncture in his thinking. Triggered by the success of his earlier “historical” books, especially The Order of Things from 1966, Foucault subsequently turned his focus toward formulating

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and theorizing his epistemological commitments. In fact, The Archaeology of Knowledge itself, along with a number of shorter methodological-theoretical texts and university lectures leading up to it, as well as the emblematic address “The Order of Discourse” in 1970 can all be read as attempts to expound the question of the diagnosis of the present in relation to a larger historico-philosophical context. Yet, this process of elucidation was not without some hesitation. In fact, whereas he kept insisting on the diagnostic design of his approach, in different occasions, he identified different theoretical frameworks in which such an undertaking was to be situated. From embracing structuralist philosophy as an “activity that makes it possible to diagnose what is today” (DE1, 581) to situating his work outside of the field of structuralism and even of philosophy as an “analysis of the cultural facts characterizing our culture” and as an “ethnology of the culture to which we belong” (RC, 91), Foucault navigated in a wide field of theoretical alternatives. Being strongly reluctant to phenomenology, certain forms of Marxism certainly ruled out some options.48 But even in his polemical exchange with Sartre in 1967, when he reaffirms philosophy’s role as a “diagnostic activity of the present” and confronts it with the totalizing aspects of the existentialist approach, he also redefines his work as procedure of unearthing, in the field of the history of science, an autonomous domain that would be “the unconscious of knowledge” (FL, 53–54).49 Oscillating between the territories of philosophy and human sciences, between accepting and refusing the structuralist label for his work, and between the factual and the unconscious, Foucault was manifestly in search of his theoretical stance rather than simply drawing on existing philosophical positions. Nevertheless, it can be argued that what these orientations, despite some significant differences in approach and emphasis, all bring to the fore is none other than positioning, in radical fashion, the questions of temporal and structural discontinuity, heterogeneity, distance, and dispersivity as the cruxes of a new philosophical approach to history. From this point of view, it is worth remarking that in his 1968 text “Response to a Question,” Foucault projected a forthcoming book under the title “The Past and the Present: Another Archaeology of Human Sciences” (DE1, 676, note 1). This is a clear indication that during this period he was specifically concerned with questions of historical knowledge and historical temporality. Although he eventually abandoned the writing of this book, and instead concentrated on exposing the methodological underpinning of his earlier historical works in The Archaeology of Knowledge, he would not leave unaddressed the general philosophical questions of time and history. It is precisely from this perspective that the problem of historical “discontinuity” comes to inhabit the center of his analyses already in the “Response to a Question” article. Indeed, the problematics and

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vocabulary of continuity and discontinuity form a fundamental epistemological touchstone which allows Foucault to demarcate between different ways of approaching history paradigmatically; more precisely, it is by criticizing an idealized and uncritical application of the idea of temporal continuity that Foucault rejects those standpoints that aim to reduce, in the name of a subjective grounding or collective totalization, the fundamentally heterogeneous figure of social, linguistic, and material becoming that manifest historicity. Hence, he explicitly distances his own strategy from any “totalizing themes” of history and from those that would find support in a “unitary spirit of a time, a general form of its consciousness, or something like a ‘Weltanschauung’” (DE1, 676–677). Within the same framework, and on the same premises, Foucault also proposes that the notion of “abstract and monotonous successive change,” as well as that of “uniform becoming,” ought to be replaced with a conception of historical “transformation” that foregrounds discontinuity (DE1, 677). The basic objective of these positions is thus clearly to supplant the privilege of transcendentally or empirically grounded ideas of historical permanence with an alternate approach according to which historical reality or existence is articulated as a “dispersive” set of relations of temporal ruptures, shifts, subsidences, and emergences. Or in other words, as Foucault, interpreting Nietzsche, approvingly states, “history is the concrete body of becoming; with its moments of intensity, its lapses, its extended periods of feverish agitation, its fainting spells” (EW2, 373). The introduction of The Archaeology of Knowledge both extends and deepens these analyses while assigning the notion of discontinuity a pivotal role. Moreover, Foucault here also mentions the empirical and intellectual achievements that have influenced his own thinking. These citations express the decisive importance of historians, in particular, the members of the Annales school, for whom, as Foucault argues, discontinuity is the primary means of access to the multiple realities of the historical past.50 As he notes in one of the earlier text exposing the problematic of the Archaeology, “We must be prepared to understand what has become history in the real work of the historians: a certain controlled use of discontinuity for the analysis of temporal series” (EW2, 300). This reference is significant in the first instance because it highlights Foucault’s attachment to a kind of operative and analytical conception of history; but it is especially so because it is precisely by appealing to the notion of discontinuity, and to the historian’s implementation of it, that he seeks to distance his own undertaking from some of the predominant philosophical approaches of history. As Foucault observes, the profound effectiveness of this new historical methodology reveals the great extent to which one has progressed from “what constituted, not so long ago, the philosophy of history, and from the questions that it posed” (AK, 12). Exemplary in this respect is

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how the theory of historical discontinuity helps to overcome one of the most stubborn transcendental prejudices of history—that is, the thesis of subjective foundationalism. For, as Foucault argues, “continuous history is the indispensable correlative of the founding function of the subject” insofar as “making historical analysis the discourse of the continuous and making human consciousness the original subject of all historical development and all action are the two sides of the same system of thought” (AK, 13). This is the experiential and conceptual universe with which the dispersive—that is, multilayered and rupture-centric—conception of history seeks a radical break. This philosophical repudiation of the idea of historical continuity directly engages the question of the present and the diagnosis of the present.51 Already in his discussion of the principal assets of the methodology of the “new history” in the Archaeology, Foucault stresses that the notion of discontinuity is not a mere object but a tool of historical approach, one that sets the focus of the research on a multilayered and multivalent past and also marks its location. In this sense, the notion of discontinuity is said to be “a paradoxical one: because it is both an instrument and an object of research” (AK, 10). Moreover, according to Foucault, it is precisely this notion that makes visible and legitimatizes the historian’s attachment to his own present, since discontinuity is “not simply a concept present in the discourse of the historian, but something that the historian secretly supposes to be present: on what basis, in fact, could he speak without this discontinuity that offers him history—and his own history—as an object?” (AK, 10). Discontinuity is thus endowed with the operative function of designating the locus of the present as that eminently open position from which history as such is to be explored. It is certainly noteworthy that the same idea recurs in a later part of Archaeology when Foucault has to define his own historical objects of research as an “archive.” In characterizing the latter as the heterogeneous and intermittent historical existence of discourses, he points out that what the reference to this discontinuous profile of existence delineates in its own temporal contiguity is nothing else but the contours of the diagnosis of the present. Thus, just as he has claimed before, discontinuity is not simply the object but also the instrument of his research making visible, in a particular way, the very temporal standpoint from which it arises: The analysis of the archive, then, involves a privileged region: at once close to us, and different from our present existence, it is the border of time that surrounds our presence, which overhangs it, and which indicates it in its otherness; it is that which, outside ourselves, delimits us. The description of the archive deploys its possibilities (and the mastery of its possibilities) on the basis of the very discourses that have just ceased to be ours; its threshold of existence is established by the discontinuity that separates us

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Above all, however, Foucault specifies that this diagnostic orientation contributes to the exposition of an operative situation which articulates the relation between past and present and not to the elicitation or affirmation of any overarching epistemological or existential position: the present is the site of the polyphonic operation of historical time, not its ontological basis. In light of this, we can see that its underlying sequential unfolding—that which makes the present “present”—is not governed by a logic of permanence or a surviving identity but by a play of differences that are not bound together a priori by any given temporal or cultural unity. To this extent, the diagnostic function of archaeological analysis is to discover ourselves in our present, not simply to recognize ourselves. In this sense, then, “the diagnosis does not establish the fact of our identity by the play of distinctions. It establishes that we are difference, that our reason is the difference of discourses, our history the difference of times, our selves the difference of masks” (AK, 147). This diagnostic difference, however, derives its power and meaning from the operative notion of discontinuity, which is situated in the forcefield of past and present. A deeper insight into the relation between diagnosis and discontinuity allows us to raise anew the question of the philosophical framework implied by a history of the present. For the rejection of all subject-based or continuity-centered conceptions of the present can at the same time make Foucault’s epistemological commitments clear and explicit. First of all, it is evident that on the basis of this model, access to the historical past cannot be achieved by drawing on the notions of collective memory, historical teleology, or an unbroken tradition of cultural practices: Foucault’s radical resistance in The Archaeology of Knowledge to the conflation of his own approach with any genre of historical or cultural permanence and resilience—whether it be a tradition, worldview, genre, or scientific discipline—provides ample evidence of this.52 At the same time, it is also clear that his approach cannot rely on any concept of the historical past supported by the individual or collective experiential capacities given in the present in such a way as to motivate an appeal to a kind of genetic or generative phenomenological approach.53 The archaeological and genealogical design of Foucault’s historical approach has nothing to do with the problem of experiential generativity based on cultural sedimentations. In sum, the program of the history of the present does not aim at a past that could ever be resurrected or recovered based on the experience of living today. The past targeted by Foucault’s historical analyses is rather

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a past that is precisely not directly accessible from the present—and one which may have never even been present as such. The past at issue here obeys the logic of historical operations without marshaling any evidence for what can be called “historical reason,” “historical consciousness,” or “historical life.” If these operations are connected to the present, it is because in their initial problems and their diagnostic implications, they create a historical landscape of the present. This is all simply to say that writing the history of the present, as Foucault says, does not simply consist “in writing a history of the past in terms of the present” (DP, 31) but precisely in making the present visible as a historical formation through the distanced mediation of the past. Paradoxically, then, in order to historically problematize the present, Foucault insists that we must first of all distance ourselves from our present, from its familiarity given in the immediacy of individual and social life, and from everything that maintains its continuity with the past. In particular, one must avoid making recourse to any possible form of historical self-awareness or self-presence, whether this is based on individual interiority or collective engagement. This condition thus requires that in order to reach the present, the historical approach must first think through the past. But precisely, to think the past means to bring about and sustain a different analytical relationship with the past than is possible from the living present. Accordingly, to borrow Hayden White’s term, Foucault’s goal here is to “defamiliarize”54 ourselves from our present and our past—but only so as to prepare for a critical re-establishment of this relationship; in Deleuze’s words, in Foucault we have to “think the past against the present and resist the latter.”55 But this also illustrates that in this historical framework thinking about the past is not an end in itself. It is essentially a procedure for thinking about the present since it discovers elements that historically shape our lived present but which, for precisely this reason, are not directly visible from this present. The diagnostic distance required for the historical analysis of the present is thus created by reaching back into the past. The whole project of Foucault’s “history of the present” can therefore be articulated in a single formula: to think the present by thinking the past in opposition to the lived present. Represented schematically, the process looks like figure 1.1, where the arrows indicate the direction of analysis. ​ Foucault’s historical method thus employs a logic whose main organizing principle are the ideas of discontinuity and distance. The diagnostic distance required for the analysis of the present in the present is made possible by the instrumentalization of the discontinuity between the present and the past. In this regard, Foucault approvingly quotes Nietzsche, for whom “effective history” consists in an operation “which studies what is closest, but in an abrupt dispossession, so as to seize it at a distance (an approach

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Figure 1.1.  The analytical structure of Foucault’s ”history of the present.“ Created by Adam Takács.

similar to that of a doctor who looks closely, who plunges to make a diagnosis and to state its difference)” (EW2, 382). More generally, however, this suggests that Foucault intends the figure of distanciation to take over the role that “continuity” and “identity” usually play in traditional or transcendental philosophies of history. Indeed, Foucault frequently opposes the idea of temporal permanence in favor of the idea of historical dispersity in many of his theoretical texts. For instance, in his 1972 writing “Return to History,” he appeals to the historical methodology of the Annales school to show how their studies treat temporal relations as essential variables that are adapted to the nature of historical events and changes rather than the other way around. If he eventually goes so far as to claim that, from this perspective, contemporary “history got rid of time,” this is chiefly because Foucault detected that the idea of unitary temporality is being replaced by the idea of a “multiplicity of time spans that entangle and envelop one another” (EW2, 430). To be sure, however, this does not imply some kind of abstract extrapolation of time, instead, it is about making temporal processes as concrete as possible, where “each one of these spans is the bearer of a certain type of event” (EW2, 430). Likewise, in a lecture called “The Order of Discourse,” Foucault rejects any concept of temporality that derives the logic of historical succession from the sequential duration constituted by subjective experience and advocates instead a theoretical position which affirms the existence of temporal discordances and distances produced by events and series inherent to historical reality: “we must conceive relations between these discontinuous series which are not of the order of succession (or simultaneity) within one (or several) consciousnesses; we must elaborate—outside of the philosophies of the subject and of time—a theory of discontinuous systematicities” (OD, 69). In this endeavor, he is supported by an operational concept of time that works, following a logic of distancing, to dissect the temporal unity of the present and the past into a multifaceted configuration of historical change and persistence. The strategy of bypassing the configuration of the living present and the past in favor of displaying and putting into work a historically

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constructed discontinuous and distanced past-present relation can be traced in many of Foucault’s historical works. It could even be argued that this approach is already implicitly present in the History of Madness. For although this first edition of the work is based on a notion of historical “experience” that was later abandoned, Foucault’s historical exploration of the premodern phenomenon of madness precisely forgoes any reference to the contemporary experience of mental illness echoed by discourse of psychiatric science. But such a method thus also entails a radical break with any rational and cumulative portrayal of historical development and presents a radical challenge to the notions of “historical succession” and “teleology of knowledge” (HM, 122). Accordingly, Foucault here focuses his attention instead on the historically decisive division between “reason” and “unreason” which suspends the vital continuity between past and present , inasmuch as it is precisely this segregative motif that first provided the rational basis for the self-establishment of psychiatry as a science, and thus also for the image of madness that eventually gained recognition in the modern era. To this extent, then, we find that one of the basic purposes of these historical analyses is to discover and maintain a sense of what Foucault calls, in History of Madness, the “legitimate strangeness” (HM, xxxxvi) of the past in the face of the various discourses of “mental illness” of the present. The establishment of a discontinuous relationship between the present and the past is not at all unrelated to the problematics of Discipline and Punish. On the contrary, while Foucault investigates certain issues surrounding contemporary punitive practices, he makes sure to identify which of our present perspectives must be broken with in order for his historical analyses to be productive. In particular, a specific understanding of power—which holds that it is exclusively political in nature and which thus prioritizes agents and institutions—falls victim to this historical maneuver, along with “a whole tradition that allows us to imagine that knowledge can exist only where the power relations are suspended and that knowledge can develop only outside its injunctions, its demands and its interests” (DP, 27). In other words, the exploration and analysis of the historical configuration of what, in the context of the development of punitive and disciplinary technologies in the eighteenth century, Foucault labels the “microphysics of power” can only be carried out against certain fundamental and consensual frameworks that define our present relationship with power, among which the most prominent are the “model of knowledge and the primacy of the subject” (DP, 28). Thus, in the midst of a confrontation with the present fueled by the idea of discontinuity, Foucault is forced to think about the past in a different way than that offered by the present in its consensual configuration. But he is thereby also barred from following up the history of the development of “punitive mechanisms”

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or of the “process of individualization” (DP, 22), approaches based on the idea of continuity of past and present, since these perspectives are already linked to predominant contemporary ways of thinking; and so he must articulate a conception of power which is made indiscernible from the past by prevailing interpretations of the present and of which, as he argues, “none of its localized episodes may be inscribed in history except by the effects that it induces on the entire network in which it is caught up” (DP, 27). Finally, we find that Foucault formulates similar reservations and historical maneuvers against the evidences of the present in the first volume of The History of Sexuality. In this text, Foucault argues that if the problem of sexuality is inherently intertwined with the problem of power, according to which the discourse of sexuality in modern European societies finds itself in a controlled and repressed situation, then there are not only conceptual reasons for this but also reasons arising from the historical circumstances of the present. Consequently, an alternative conception of sexuality—specifically one which goes against a whole economy of “discursive interests” (HS1, 8) of the present—must imply the rejection of its corresponding conception of power. Once again, this rejection concerns the evidence of a dominant interpretation of power in the present, which in this case is identified as a legal-based approach. However, Foucault cautions that if in understanding modern sexuality we were to ascribe power solely to the configuration of law and sovereignty, this would merely universalize regularities whose history seems stable and continuous only in retrospect. Therefore, he argues, “It is this image that we must break free of, that is, of the theoretical privilege of law and sovereignty, if we wish to analyze power within the concrete and historical framework of its operation” (HS1, 90). In more concrete terms, this image also defines our present as a historically constructed complex of sexuality and power, which Foucault diagnoses and designates in this context under the name “repressive hypothesis.” This hypothesis maintains that discourse about sexuality in modern societies is constrained by the language and intervention of legal power, and thus, if Foucault’s goal in this work is to go against this deceptive or superficial evidence and launch an effective historical analysis of past configurations of power for a better understanding of our present, we ultimately find that in order to “bypass the repressive hypothesis” (HS1, 13), we must also bypass first of all the realm of the lived present. HISTORIOGRAPHICAL OPERATION AND METHODOLOGY Foucault’s refusal to embrace any continuous or teleological concept of temporality undermines the suggestion that his notion of the present

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might plausibly be understood as the residue of a certain “epochal thinking” or of a simply chronological concept of history.56 The Foucauldian present does not define a historical era that would sequentially follow other eras or an overarching form of collective experience situated at the end of history, nor is it reducible to an elusive product of abstract representation. Yet if, despite all this, the present does indicate some form of experience, it is only insofar as it highlights a certain form of social synchronicity, as indicated by the vague term “living in today.” However, it should be also noted that this reference to a synchronicity principally signifies a common matrix of social practices rather than a collective phase of social existence. Accordingly, Foucault uses the word “today” as a temporal-situational designation, while “the present” denotes a historical field of social practices within which the term “actuality” is used to indicate a certain set of compelling issues. In this regard, Foucault’s interpretation of his own historical endeavor as a diagnostic project deserves particular emphasis, since it shows that he does not pay special attention to various contemporary practices of knowledge, power, and subjectivity because they somehow derive legitimacy from a shared rhythm of collective historical becoming or from a common experience of contemporaneity; these practices rather prove themselves to be relevant insofar as they open up, within a well-defined research agenda, historical lines of thought and perspectives, which gives us an insight into the nature of certain social developments and struggles in progress. Within this framework, Foucault’s explicit aim is thus to disengage us from the natural or experimental character of the present time by representing it instead as a field of historical configurations. These latter, however, are supposed to guide us toward the transformation of our actuality into a practice of thinking which, while retracing its path to history, diligently avoids any direct involvement with the problematic of the lived experience of temporality or historicity. This also explains why Foucault seeks, when articulating his notion of the present and his understanding of history, to separate himself from almost all the theoretical approaches—of mostly nineteenth-century origin—which interpret the relationship between the past and the present in terms of some kind of historical transition or entanglement, or as a “resurrection of the past.” In addition to all historicist ideas of history,57 various dialectical or Marxist-inspired concepts are also affected by this repulsion.58 In opposition to these concepts, Foucault points out that the “role of history now must be reconsidered if history is to be detached from the ideological system in which it originated and developed. It is to be understood, rather, as the analysis of the transformations societies are actually capable of” (EW2, 423). At the same time, it is obvious that Foucault’s historical orientation displays a strong anti-phenomenological

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bias. History does not provide him with a comprehensive model for the grounding of reason and the cultural sedimentation of meaning like it does for Husserl, nor does it outline a radical historicization of the configurations of existence or the epochal manifestations of Being, as in Heidegger.59 For Foucault, the disavowal of the immediate dialectical and ontological qualities of historical temporality galvanize a technique of decomposition that compartmentalizes the supposed unity of historical experience according to the inherent logic of various relations manifested at the level of discourse, power, and subjective practices and agencies. From this perspective, then, history appears not as a kind of overarching experiential horizon or resource for a dynamic ontological categorization but as a fundamental medium for a problematizing vision on the social fabric. In light of this theoretical yet practice-oriented transformation of the question of history, it should come as no surprise that Foucault thereby removes—one might even say liberates—the problem of history from the scope of philosophical thinking in a certain way. In fact, it is about shifting the emphasis of epistemological issues, as well as methodological questions, analytical considerations, and verification criteria, to the practical field of history writing. However, to then associate this interdisciplinary plasticity with some kind of philosophical ambiguity or hesitation in Foucault would signal a misunderstanding. Rather, this flexibility should be seen as a sign of a deliberate epistemological effort to make the most out of a discontinuous understanding of history. For if one is truly committed to cutting the ties of cultural sedimentation and memory that bind us to the present and to the immediate past of the present, then one is left with no other option than to resort to those forms of thought which are capable of rearticulating emerging epistemological distances and shifts by means of specific operational procedures. In this respect, it is almost impossible to overlook the significance of the fact that Foucault’s critiques of continuity- and subjectivity-based conceptions of history and his propagation of an alternative construction of historical time correspond precisely with his valorization of the work of certain prominent historians.60 The references to Marc Bloch, Fernand Braudel, Pierre Chaunu, and other representatives of the Annales school concerning the decomposition, leveling, and serialization of historical time provide Foucault with a model for interpreting the past in terms of its multidimensionality and heterogeneity, such that experiential, social, and discursive mechanisms cannot be integrated in a single process but can only be arranged into meaningful configurations by an analytical intervention. In other words, the targeted past is constructed rather than lived, and it is to be approached exclusively through indirect intellectual maneuvers, and this holds even if the aim of the analysis is to create a diagnostic distance in favor of the critical

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analysis of the present, which also means that the recourse to historiographical tools and models does not here serve merely historiographical purposes but those of a philosophical endeavor which aims to problematize, not to record facts. This consistent interplay of critical questioning and historiographical operation is a remarkable feature of Foucault’s work, and it exemplifies the more general tendency of his philosophical program to account for the diversity of the principal differential assets of the historical condition with maximum gravitas. Hence, the distinctive fluctuating nature of Foucault’s archaeological and genealogical methodological insights and procedures derives from the fact that they are products of processes of historical problematization rather than principles of a rigorous and self-sufficient theoretical position. So much so that their design and applicability are therefore primarily shaped by the specificities of historical analytical work conducted outside any all-encompassing doctrinal framework or philosophical position. Consequently, we find that these methodological concerns are articulated differently during different periods in Foucault’s career and are occasionally even assigned antagonistic roles. Neither is the use of corresponding vocabulary chronologically homogeneous: while the term “archaeology” remains operative for a long period in Foucault’s discourse, the term “genealogy” gradually gains currency and becomes the dominant name of this methodology from the 1970s onward. More importantly, however, this nominal change coincides with a pronounced thematic shift in the focus of Foucault’s research, whereby the historical study of different forms of knowledge (savoir)—for example, psychology, medicine, and human sciences—is replaced by inquiries into complex formations of power (pouvoir)—for example, disciplinary power, body, sexuality, biopower, and subjectivity. This perceptible repositioning thus seems to make plausible to divide Foucault’s oeuvre into two distinct periods so as to examine his archaeological and genealogical methodological dispositions separately. Such an approach might find that while Foucault’s “archaeological period” substantiates a pure description of different forms of knowledge as past “discourses,” the genealogical method, by contrast, cultivates a “history of the present” and introduces a new kind of historical perspective focused on power relations.61 Ultimately, though, it should be acknowledged that drawing such a sharp distinction between the archaeological and genealogical methods has limited hermeneutic value. Alternatively, one might notice instead that it is possible to comprehensively subsume the whole of Foucault’s methodology under the unique epistemological stance that is labeled at first as a “diagnostic of present” and later on as a “history of the present.” Though care must, of course, be taken to avoid confusing the domains of the archaeological and genealogical approaches, or denying the

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alternation of problematizations and analytical techniques in Foucault’s oeuvre, this solution is preferable because it more accurately represents these two procedures as mutually complementary components of within the same logic of historic problematization. In this way, too, the methodological and thematic shifts which characterize Foucault’s work can be interpreted rather as operative “pulsations” of a historico-philosophical praxis than as inconsistencies in the process of establishing a “correct” doctrinal position.62 Moreover, even if one temporarily accepts the schematic according to which “archaeology” focuses on the past while “genealogy” comprises the history of the present, it can be shown that Foucault’s early books— three of which carry the term “archaeology” in their titles or subtitles63— already express a fundamentally genealogical aspect, namely, a radical break with the horizon of the lived or immediate present. It is quite justified to regard this rupture as a genealogy avant la lettre insofar as the implementation of methodological discontinuity is here never an end in itself but always works to generate critical perspectives on the present. In short, and in general, it could thus be said that to the extent it is grounded in historical discontinuity, all archaeological research is necessarily genealogically motivated. However, it is also clear that if archaeology is the methodological stance which consists, as Foucault argues in The Archaeology of Knowledge, in the uncovering and localization of “archives”—that is, those discursive practices that exist in the form of effective utterances throughout a given historical period—then within this orientation, the motif of privileging the past is indisputable.64 But by its very movement and operative tendency, even this positioning can be seen as marking out the “place of the present” within the historical dimension. This is because by resorting to a vantage point from which historical discontinuity can manifest discourses in terms of their historical positivity and archival forms of knowledge as historically “other,” archaeological inquiry thus mobilizes a diagnostic potential. It is no accident, then, that Foucault admits in a 1968 interview that “my archaeology owes more to Nietzschean genealogy than to structuralism properly so called” (EW2, 294). Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that in his lectures throughout the 1970s, Foucault attempts to distinguish his approach, which at this juncture he expressly understood as genealogy, from the archaeological design of history he had previously adopted. In this regard, both “The Order of Discourse” and “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” are noteworthy in that they accord theoretical significance exclusively to the concept of genealogy and often do so along epistemological lines, which are very similar to those that Foucault previously attributed to archaeology, namely, discontinuity, dispersivity, multilayeredness, and lack of subjectivity. Additionally, the lectures given at the Collège de France during this

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period also indicate a change of direction with respect to his historical analyses: “after an archaeological type of analysis, it is a matter of undertaking a dynastic, genealogical type of analysis, focusing on filiations on the basis of power relations” (PS, 84). This clearly suggests that from this point onward, the main object of his study will not be historical contexts of discourses per se, but specifically different social practices pertaining to the effectuations of power, together with the new and distinct types of historical relations and transformations which correspond to these activities. As he explains in another lecture, “in comparison with what I call archaeology, the discursive analysis of power would operate at a level [.  .  .] that would enable discursive practice to be grasped at precisely the point where it is formed” (PP, 13). This means that instead of focusing on the positivity of the utterances that are produced at the level of discourse, genealogical analyses intend the practices that first create these discourses and give them their proper significance and authority. Therefore, the contrast between the “archaeology of knowledge” and the “genealogy of technologies of power” seems to be exhibited best by the following discrepancy: that is, that the former concerns the facticity and function of the discursive formations of a given field in a given society during a given period, whereas the latter captures these formations “according to its objectives, the strategies that govern it, and the program of political action it proposes” (STP, 59). In this sense, the broadest definition of genealogy is that it is a “form of history that can account for the constitution of knowledges, discourses, domains of objects” (EW3, 118) and thus also for a genealogy of the “subject” (EW1, 262). With that being said, this apparent thematic shift from knowledge to power and subjectivity does not necessarily entail a paradigmatic change in Foucault’s basic methodological framework. Rather, we find that most of the philosophical strategies that were originally introduced in the 1960s under the heading of the “diagnosis of the present” later reappear, albeit in a much more critically sophisticated way, within the genealogical project. This is why the intellectual enterprise of writing a “history of the present,” as mentioned in the first part of Discipline and Punish, cannot constitute an isolated initiative but must be embedded within a broader program of research. Foucault repeatedly stresses the diagnostic profile— which is simply to say the problem—and present-centered design—of genealogy: “I start with a problem as if it were posed in contemporary terms and try to make a genealogy of it. A genealogy means that I conduct the analysis beginning with a current question” (FL, 460). Crucially though, this process does not merely begin from current problems; its proposed solutions, too, are conceived for the sake of the present; thus, genealogy does not solely “constitute a historical knowledge” but also attempts “to make use of that knowledge in contemporary tactics” (SD,

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8). This diagnostic orientation ultimately culminates in a conception of the critique of the present, which organically integrates the genealogical program without totally renouncing the archaeological approach. In certain later writings, Foucault refers to this unified procedure as “historical ontologies of ourselves” and even explicitly emphasizes that such a philosophical critique must be “genealogical in its design and archaeological in its method” (EW1, 316), which simply means that it is destined to bring into play those historico-critical inquiries that conquer “their methodological coherence in the at once archaeological and genealogical study of practices” (EW1, 319). All this seems to confirm that while, in the final analysis, Foucault’s archeological and genealogical approaches pursue distinct historical and analytical objects and aims, this difference is not necessarily reflected at the fundamental level of his methodological attitude. In fact, many of Foucault’s texts and statements emphasize the methodological complementarity of these two procedures. Thus, we find early lectures in which the two concepts are effectively synonymous (A, 60), while in later texts, we find attempts to situate all the early archeological works—from History of Madness to The Order of Things—within the genealogical framework (EW3, 262–263). Similarly, there are early writings which qualify the “genealogy of knowledge” as the “indispensable historical other side to the archaeology of knowledge” (PP, 239), and there are later proposals to underpin the construction of the “genealogy of the subject” through recourse to an “archaeology of knowledge” (AB, 23). This operative multiplicity in Foucault’s work reveals a kind of methodological plasticity, but more importantly, it demonstrates the bifocal direction and mechanism of action which characterize the project of the “history of the present.” In a discussion after one of his talks in 1983, Foucault once ventured to clarify the relationship between these two methodological components and formulated it as follows: With the term archaeological research what I want to say is that what I am dealing with is a set of discourses, which has to be analysed as an event or as a set of events. [. . .] Genealogy is both the reason and the target of the analysis of discourses as events, and what I try to show is how those discursive events have determined in a certain way what constitutes our present and what constitutes ourselves: our knowledge, our practices, our type of rationality, our relationship to ourselves and to the others. So genealogy is the aim of the analysis and the archaeology is the material and methodological framework.65

This last statement provides an opportunity to update the diagram of Foucault’s historical approach that we introduced earlier. As we have now shown, the movement from the present to the past is best described as “archaeological,” while the movement from the historically constructed

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Figure 1.2  The methodological structure of archaeology and genealogy in Foucault. Created by Adam Takács.

past to the present is “genealogical”; but ultimately both these moments work together to open the diagnostic and critical and distance between the lived evidence of the present and the historically conceived present, as seen in figure 1.2. ​ NOTES 1. Leopold von Ranke, The Theory and Practice of History. G. Iggers (ed.), Trans. W. A. Iggers. New York: Routledge, 2011, 142. 2. Johan Gustav Droysen, Outlines of the Principles of History (Grundrisse der Historik). Trans. B. Andrews. Boston: Ginn & Co., 1897, 11. 3. Ibid., 50. 4. Jules Michelet, The People. Trans. C. Cocks. London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1946, 6. 5. Jules Michelet, Philosophie de l’histoire. A. Armini (ed.). Paris: Flammarion, 2016, 59. 6. Victor Langlois and Charles Seignobos, Introduction to the Study of History. Trans. G.G. Berry. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1904, 293–293. 7. Ibid., 319. 8. Fustel de Coulanges, L’histoire, science pure (1875). In François Hartog, Le XIXe siècle et l’histoire. Le cas Fustel de Coulanges. Paris: PUF, 1988, 341. 9. Wilhelm Dilthey, Selected Works. Vol. III. In R.A. Makkreel and F. Rodi (eds.), The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002, 252. 10. Ibid., 229. 11. Benedetto Croce, Theory and History of Historiography. Trans. D. Ainslie. London: G.G. Harrap & Co., 1921, 12. 12. Ibid., 92. 13. Ibid., 93. 14. Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectic. Trans. R. Livingston. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1971, 24. 15. Ibid., 224. 16. Ibid., 236.

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17. Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Phenomenological Research (1923). Trans. D.O. Dahlstrom. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994, 163. 18. Ibid., 82. 19. Ibid., 88. 20. Ibid., 86. 21. Ibid. 22. Raymond Aron, Introduction to the Philosophy of History: An Essay on the Limits of Historical Objectivity. Trans. G. J. Irwin. Boston: Beacon Press, 1961, 31. 23. Ibid., 126. 24. Ibid., 136. 25. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness. A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology. Trans. H. E. Barnes. New York: Pocket Book, 1978, 114–115. 26. Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, vol. I. Trans. A. SheridanSmith. London and New York: Verso, 2004, 55–56. 27. Jean-Paul Sartre, Search for a Method. Trans. H.E. Barnes. New York: Alfred A. Kopp, 1963, 133. 28. Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft. Trans. P. Putnam. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992, 37–38. 29. Lucien Febvre, Combats pour l’Histoire. Paris: Armand Colin, 1952, 436. 30. Ibid., 427. 31. Fernand Braudel, On History. Trans. S. Matthews. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1980, 209. 32. Ibid., 177. 33. On the relationship between Ariès and Foucault, see the important details, G. Gros, Ariès Newsletter, 5, “Michel Foucault, Philippe Ariès: regards croisés,” Site dédié à Philippe Ariès, http://philippe​-aries​.histoweb​.net, hiver-printemps 2014 (consulted on 2022 March 17). 34. Philippe Ariès, Le Temps de l’histoire. Paris: Seuil, 1986 (1954), 257. 35. Ibid., 293. 36. Ibid., 257. 37. “In 1945, all that was modern sprang from Hegel,” writes Vincent Descombes in his Modern French Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981, 12. On the rise of the problematic of history in postwar French thought, see Thomas R. Flynn, Sartre, Foucault and Historical Reason, Vol. 1. Toward an Existentialist Theory of History. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1997, and François Dosse, La saga des intellectuels français I: À l’épreuve de l’histoire (1944– 1968). Paris: Gallimard, 2018. 38. On these questions, see Anthony Jensen, Nietzsche’s Philosophy of History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013, and Jacques Le Rider, Nietzsche en France. De la fin du XIXe siècle au temps présent. Paris, PUF, 1999. 39. Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson. New York: Continuum, 1983, 161. 40. In this explicit formulation, the term “history of the present” occurs only once in the Foucauldian corpus (DP 31), but its motifs, aspects, and conceptual variations, as we shall see in detail, permeate his entire oeuvre. 41. Beyond the critical remarks directed at Sartre’s existentialism in various interviews, Foucault also expressed strong reservations about his historical

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philosophy. As many comments devoted to dialectics, totalization, human practice, and experience all show, The Archaeology of Knowledge can be conceived as a partial polemic against Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason. 42. In a number of small writings and interviews, Foucault expresses his indebtedness to and criticism of the achievements of the Frankfurt School. While acknowledging the legitimacy of their historical approach, he also rejects their attempts to establish a normative foundation for historical development. For more on this, see the section 5, chapter 2 of this volume. 43. Braudel’s name appears only in passing in Foucault’s texts and interviews. In the introduction to The Archaeology of Knowledge, however, Foucault clearly has the Braudelian approach in mind when he presents the problem of “long periods” as a model for a progressive structural approach in historiography (cf. AK, 3–8). 44. On Foucault’s various approaches to Nietzsche in this period see Bernard E. Harcourt, Five Modalities of Michel Foucault’s Use of Nietzsche’s Writings (1959–73): Critical, Epistemological, Linguistic, Alethurgic and Political. Theory, Culture & Society (2021 January), DOI: 10.1177/0263276421994916. 45. Cf. M. Foucault, Le discours philosophique. Cours de Tunis 1966–1968. Eds. O. Irrera and D. Lorenzini. Paris: Gallimard/Seuil/EHESS (under preparation). For a detailed account of these lectures, see Luca Paltrinieri, L’archive comme objet: quel modèle d’histoire pour l’archéologie?. Les Études philosophiques N° 153 (2015/3): 353–376; and Daniele Lorenzini, Philosophical Discourse and Ascetic Practice: On Foucault’s Readings of Descartes’ Meditations. Theory, Culture & Society (2021, January), DOI: 10.1177/0263276420980510. 46. While Foucault identifies in his Introduction to The Archaeology of Knowledge a number of philosophical and historical undertakings that have influenced the development of his problematic (Bachelard, Canguilhem, Serres, Gueroult, Althusser), it is clear that none of these fully cover his approach. 47. Cf. Robert Mandrou, Trois clés pour comprendre la folie à l'époque classique. Annales. Économies, sociétés, civilisations 17 (1962): 771–772. 48. As Foucault affirms in his foreword to the English translation of his The Order of Things, “If there is one approach that I do reject, however, it is that (one might call it, broadly speaking, the phenomenological approach) which gives absolute priority to the observing subject, which attributes a constituent role to an act, which places its own point of view at the origin of all historicity—which, in short, leads to a transcendental consciousness” (OD, xv). 49. In the same period, Foucault also referred to his archaeological work as seeking to analyze “the ‘unconscious,’ not of the speaking subject, but of the thing said” (EW2, 309), or “to reveal a positive unconscious of knowledge” (OT, xi). 50. Although Foucault does not name the historians he considers authoritative in this regard in the introduction of The Archaeology of Knowledge, his explicit references to the notions of “long periods,” “material civilization,” and “serial history” make it quite obvious that he has Fernand Braudel, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, and Pierre Chaunu in mind, respectively. 51. Judith Revel stressed the fundamental importance of the concepts of discontinuity and the present in Foucault’s thought: Foucault, une pensée du discontinue. Paris: Mille et une nuits, 2010. 52. Cf. AK, 23–25.

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53. On the question of the problematics of generative phenomenology, see Anthony Steinbock, Home and Beyond. Generative Phenomenology After Husserl. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1995. 54. Hayden White, Foucault Decoded: Notes from Underground. In White: Tropics of Discourse. Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1978, 256. 55. Deleuze, Foucault. Trans. Sean Hand. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988, 120. 56. As suggests Jocelyn Benoist, Rompre avec l’idealisme historique: respatialiser nos concepts. In Jocelyn Benoist and Fabio Merlini (eds.), Historicité et spatialité. Le problème de I’espace dans la pensee contemporaine. Paris: Vrin, 2001, 98–99. See also Gabriel Rockhill’s critical remarks, which conclude that “Foucault .  .  . supplies us with a discontinuous history founded on a largely chronological conception of history, which generally eliminates the geographic and social dimensions.” G. Rockhill, Interventions in Contemporary Thought. History, Politics, Aesthetics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016, 51. 57. On the rejection of historicism as a universalist approach to history, see Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics, p. 3. 58. In the Marxist tradition, for example, while otherwise stressing the motif of historical discontinuity, Walter Benjamin nevertheless bestows his concept of the present, that is, the “time of now,” with a messianic significance (Cf. W. Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History. In Benjamin, Illuminations. London: Jonathan Cape, 1970, 265), meanwhile Lukács, in the History and Class Consciousness, considers the present to be an arena for social struggles of a totalizing nature. If, in the final analysis, Foucault remains to some extent committed to Althusser’s historical thinking—as is signaled in the introduction to The Archaeology of Knowledge—this is due precisely to the latter’s support for the idea of radical discontinuity, as well as his anti-historicism and general opposition to linear dialectics. 59. On this question, see chapter 3 of this book. 60. Consider, for example, the following passage from a 1969 interview: “I am completely opposed to a certain conception of history which takes for its model a kind of great continuous and homogenous evolution, a sort of great mythic life. Historians now know very well that the mass of historical documents can be combined according to different modes which have neither the same traits nor the same kind of evolution. The history of material civilization (farming techniques, habitat, domestic tools, means of transportation) doesn’t unfold in the same way as the history of political institutions or as the history of monetary flows. What Marc Bloch, Febvre and Braudel have shown for history tout court can be shown, I think, for the history of ideas, of knowledge and of thought in general” (FL, 66). 61. Of all the secondary literature on Foucault, Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow’s Michel Foucault. Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982 is the first book to strongly affirm this interpretation. 62. On this point, consider this comment that Foucault makes in 1977: “I do not have a methodology that I apply in the same way to different domains. On the contrary, I would say that I try to isolate a single field of objects, a domain of objects, by using the instruments I can find or that I can forge as I am actually

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doing my research, but without privileging the problem of methodology in any way” (DE3, 404). 63. The Birth of the Clinic. An Archaeology of Medical Perception; The Order of Things. An Archaeology of the Human Sciences; The Archaeology of Knowledge. 64. In an interview, Foucault justifies the use of the word “archaeology” by observing that it is an investigation of the past, which is neither simply “history” nor “epistemology,” but which precisely seeks beyond the “origins” and the “hidden” dimensions of history to explore the subsistence and transformation of discourses (FL, 57). 65. Foucault replies to questions from the audience. Berkeley’s History Department in 1983 (transcribed by Arianna Bove), http://var​iazi​onif​ouca​ultiane​ .blogspot​.com​/2011​/12​/foucault​-replies​.html (consulted on the June 11, 2022). In an emphatic passage taken from his 1975–1976 Society Must be Defended lectures, Foucault reconciled the two methodological motifs in a similar way: “Archaeology is the method specific to the analysis of local discursivities, and genealogy is the tactic which, once it has described these local discursivities, brings into play the desubjugated knowledges that have been released from them” (SD, 11).

2 ✛

The Formation of the Past

THE OBJECT OF HISTORY AND THE HISTORICAL OBJECTS The term “history of the present” designates for Foucault a complex critical enterprise which derives most of its philosophical significance from the efficacy and validity of historiographical procedures. It must be said, however, that this philosophical strain of historical work is not the result of a contingent or eccentric gesture on his part, as if he deliberately sought to blend genres and forms of thought in search of some kind of eclectic experimental style; and even if experimentation is not altogether foreign to Foucault’s habitus as a thinker, this impulse always falls within a wellordered scope of conceptual analysis and concrete historical research. In general, what we find is that the combination of philosophical and historiographical perspectives and assets here specifically revolves around, and responds to, the necessities of an exceptionally compelling problematic, namely, the question of how to think about our “present,” that is, our world and our collective social practices, in such a way as to open concrete analytical possibilities but without resorting to the theoretical options of subjective grounding or dialectical totalization. The confrontation with phenomenology and Marxism was a formative intellectual experience in postwar France.1 But, as Paul Veyne eloquently put it, in this period “Foucault’s problem was the following: how can one do better than a philosophy of consciousness and still avoid falling into the aporias of Marxism?.”2 In other words, for him the most pressing concern was not so much to delve deeper into this problematic, as it was to find, or even 45

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invent, a theoretical apparatus which might be capable of addressing it in a new way.3 In this context, any philosophy devoid of empirical applicability and any social-scientific analysis lacking philosophical depth seemed equally fruitless. A different strategy was required, and Foucault’s philosophically motivated interest in concrete historical research grew out of this need, as he explains in a late interview: It was necessary to go and seek, define and work out a historical object. It was the only way to give to the reflection on ourselves, on our society, on our thought, our knowledge, our behaviors a real content. It was inversely a way not to be, without knowing it, imprisoned by some implicit postulates of history. It was a way of giving to the reflection on historical objects a new profile. (DE4, 413)

Of course, the task of redefining the objects of history does not come without its challenges; particularly, if it is embedded in a philosophical framework—in this case, that of the historical diagnosis of the present—which makes the historical perspective conceivable only in terms of a rupture between the present and the past. For if one is dedicated to disregarding all experiential and cultural links between the present and the past, the following question arises: How, and according to what criteria, can one single out objects of thought for historical consideration? In other words, what properly constitutes something as a “historical object”? Moreover, how are we to even think of such objects? How can the expression “thinking the past” be given an appropriate and operative meaning in this context? Such questions thus do not merely relate to the nature of Foucault’s role as a historian but also implicate the deeper problem of what is fundamentally envisaged, empirically or ontologically, under the category of “historical reality.” At any rate, we see clearly that if it is possible to find an answer to these queries in Foucault’s oeuvre, it will assuredly be defined by the demands imposed by his unique philosophical approach to history. First of all, we observe that in elaborating the idea of historical discontinuity, and in thinking about how to devise new kinds of historical objects, Foucault was able to draw on the achievements of the Annales school and the trend of the Nouvelle Histoire.4 He emphasizes this debt to French historiography in many of his writings. Nevertheless, the limitations of this attachment are obvious, insofar as the philosophical treatment of history is essentially at odds with the line of the Annales school, which sets bounds to any initiative that seeks to exploit the results of historical research in a purely theoretical or conceptual framework. In this respect, Foucault’s broadest concepts—for example, knowledge, power, and subjectivity—have often been the subject of disputes with the representatives of the Annales school.5 All of this points to the fact that the philosophical project of a “history of the present” cannot simply rely on the ordinary

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or self-evident premises of the historian’s work, if these are understood as elements of empirical elements of reality given in the exploration and criticism of historical sources. So even if Foucault does not shy away from accommodating the register of “facts,” “events,” and “objects” when defining what he calls the “positivities” of the past, their meanings and referents still indicate complex historical realities. This means first of all that the positivities of the past cannot be factual positivities, if by “fact” we mean something like a simple historical datum which the historian can extract as a definitive given from the sources. Likewise, if traditional historiography, through a predominantly political-historical approach, privileges the notion of the “historical event”—where this is implicitly understood as an element of a comprehensive temporal process beginning in the past and continuing into the present—then for a historical approach based on the principle of discontinuity, this notion must lose its primacy. Finally, it goes without saying that Foucault also rejects any procedure that would encapsulate the object of history in some purely objective element (social or economic processes) or anthropological constant (consciousness, existence, or psyche, whether individual or collective). In short, by Foucault’s approach, historical research cannot embrace any domain of factuality that pretends to be too simplistic or too conclusive. In The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault argues that when “thinking the past,” one must refrain from taking historical givens in general as empirical facts, from grasping historical events in their continuity with the present, and from positing any unity based on the “synthetic activity of the subject” (AK, 15). These attributes must be disentangled with regard to the dispersed heterogeneity of the past. At the same time, instead of appealing to certain pre-existing or conventional unities, and to those continuities rejected along with the primacy of the lived present and its inherited past (such as oeuvre, book, science, literature, politics), the archaeological project must manifest a type of objectivity that retains its “positivity,” that is, its capacity to provide appropriate objects for historical depiction. The positive task, then, is to identify and portray specific historical units just as they were, without eliminating their uniqueness or dissolving them in the complexities produced by their own overarching economical, anthropological, or discursive contextualization. Here, therefore, it is not simply a matter of following upon the natural disposition of the economic, social, or intellectual historian by complementing the analysis of the facts with an exploration of their specific background; in fact, this procedure requires us precisely to dispense with the distinction between historical facts and contexts. Evidently, then, when Foucault points out in the Archaeology that the historical work he advocates for must focus essentially on discursive “relations” and discursive “formations” (AK, 35–42), he does so against this epistemological background.

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The Archaeology of Knowledge is a theoretical work that represents the object of historical research as a “set of relations,” and the operation of historical analysis as “relation-making.” Thus, it brings a philosophy of relations into play in an explicit and deliberate way. In this sense, this book not only provides a retrospective theoretical elucidation for Foucault’s earlier historical work—which is its declared ambition—but also foregrounds a paradigmatic element of the historico-philosophical orientation that more generally characterizes his thinking, namely, his tendency to conceive the objects of historical research as a web of heterogeneous relations rather than as pregiven entities. In the context of the Archaeology, this mainly, though not exclusively, involves privileging discursive practices and events as the primary targets of historical study. Foucault’s principal aim here is to demonstrate that the field of relations deployed between the surface of enunciative facts or events (i.e., the fact that something was said), and their contextual social arrangements (i.e., the conditions under which something could be said) recasts a genuine historical subject matter which proves itself suitable for both empirical exploration and conceptual elaboration. Indeed, it is these relations which reveal discourses in “their coexistence, their succession, their mutual functioning, their reciprocal determination, and their independent or correlative transformation” (AK, 32). But from this same angle, it also becomes clear that it is necessary to recognize specific historical “systems of relations” at the level of the “conditions of appearance” of those units, formations, objects, concepts, modalities, and strategies which belong to the proper functioning of discourses;6 so much so, in fact, that Foucault believes that if one were to embark on this analytic path, the delineations of historical relations and their configurations would quickly engulf the field of historical inquiry: These relations appear at the level of “institutions, economic and social processes, behavioral patterns, systems of norms, techniques, types of classification, modes of characterization” (AK, 49). Such a proliferation of relations naturally calls for historical and analytical classification, which Foucault attempts by reconnecting them with different descriptive possibilities governed by a “system of real or primary relations, a system of reflexive or secondary relations, and a system of relations that might properly be called discursive” (AK, 50). With respect to their own themes in general, and from the philosophical perspective of The Archaeology of Knowledge in particular, all of Foucault’s historical works define the object of history as a set of relations that simultaneously indicates and animates the specific historical objects to be studied. This strategic aspiration determines both the descriptive and critical possibilities of his philosophical-historical enterprise. This is true even for the History of Madness—whose historical choreography is still bound by an unresolved oscillation between a structuralist stance

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and an experiential-historical approach—since Foucault already in this text projects his historical writing as “a structural study of the historical ensemble—notions, institutions, judicial and police measures, scientific concepts—which hold captive a madness whose wild state can never be reconstituted” (HM, xxxiii). Consequently, what is at issue here is not simply a history of madness considered as an “object” of various social and scientific practices but a history of relations in which the recourse to discursive interaction plays a prominent role. Therefore, we would not be merely rationalizing ex post if we were here to conclude, as Foucault himself does in The Archaeology of Knowledge, that the unity of discourses on madness would not be based upon the existence of the object “madness”, or the constitution of a single horizon of objectivity; it would be the interplay of the rules that make possible the appearance of objects during a given period of time. (AK, 36)

This clearly indicates the fact that, for Foucault, the historically articulated “experience” of madness, and the forms of knowledge by which this experience is constituted are always contingent on the complex and temporally variable existences of various epistemic, institutional, and social relations.7 Madness only appears as an object of discourse due to the intervention of an amalgamated system of relations between different objects produced by different social practices, such as “objects that are shaped by measures of discrimination and repression, objects that are differentiated in daily practice, in law, in religious casuistry, in medical diagnosis, objects that are manifested in pathological descriptions, objects that are circumscribed by medical codes, practices, treatment, and care” (AK, 36). But, this simply demonstrates that for an archeological and critical account, the proper subject matter of historical investigations is not the produced object taken in itself but the productive, objectifying relations that happen to mobilize over a given spatiotemporal period. Of capital importance in this respect is Foucault’s assertion in the Archaeology that although a historically articulated object such as madness only “exists under the positive conditions of a complex group of relations,” nevertheless these relations “are not present in the object” (AK, 49–50). That is, these relations are not reducible to relations between objects expressing causal or temporal succession or to relations of economic reality or social mentality. The apparatus of traditional or Marxist historiography thus runs aground here. In general, the relations traced by Foucault’s historical approach tend rather to establish a comprehensive and complex system of social, institutional, and intellectual under- and overdetermination—a systemic heterogeneity of practices and their conditions—without subsuming everything under a single form of social

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configuration, eventfulness, or objectivity. On the contrary, the identification of a unity, event, or object only possesses explanatory power if it is integrated within a system of relations which reaches beyond the scope of any particular referent and always presupposes a richer and more complex historical reality than the one which can be revealed by an isolated or dialectical examination of an element of the past. With his interpretation of the object of history as a relation, Foucault hews closely to the intellectual profile of his so-called “genealogical period,” during which his study of discursive and knowledge relations was gradually replaced by a critical exploration of the mechanisms and technologies of power and subjectivity. From the early 1970s onward, Foucault researched the history of the social function of discipline, punishment, and normality—along with the practices of power associated with these—by studying a group of well-defined historical phenomena (psychiatric practices, medical norms, disciplinary mechanisms, penal institutions, etc.). His approach to this investigation follows a now familiar path: just as before, we find that the objects of interest are not isolated historical events, contextual social conditions, or material or ideological processes but the specific relations that have made possible the emergence and perpetuation of the power structure, rules, and practices surrounding normality and abnormality, and which have rendered the latter a recognizable historical phenomenon. If one were to ask, “How does power manifest itself?” Foucault would thus reply that this happens through “relations of force” that shape and give historical permanence to the norms represented, to the situations of decision, and to the strategies of action (PT, 44). Or, to put it another way, if Foucault hereby seeks to scrutinize the social practice of “exclusion,” then his primary objective is “to break it down into its constituent elements and to find the relations of power that underlie it and make it possible” (PS, 8). Accordingly, instead of focusing on simple events, historical developments, or oppositional positions, it is necessary to pursue these relations wherever they may lead: that is to say, it is necessary to understand normalization, as it is clearly stated in the Discipline and Punish, not merely as a “repressive” phenomenon but as a “complex social function”; to analyze punishments, not as elements of “social structures,” but as “political tactics”; to examine the discourses of criminal law and the human sciences, not in isolation, but on the basis of their “common epistemological-legal formations”; to describe the techniques of judging and sentencing, not in the light of their institutional development, but in the context of “power relations” (DP, 23–24). On the surface, the social history of normalization may look to be the result of changes in legal regulation, the development of disciplinary techniques, or a process of social engineering typical to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but Foucault insists that no historical occurrence of

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any consequence boasts a simple origin or linear cumulative trajectory. The change in the moral and sensual status of the body, and in tandem with this, the alterations in the legal perception of punishment, the consequent transformation of social life and rule-following behavior, the emergence of new types of discipline and regulation which inaugurate a new social division of time and space and thereby impacting the most diverse areas of social life (army, hospital, school, and factory), all these form a whole complex of interdependent relationships that is responsible for the emergence of a modern form of social “normality” that obviously cannot be reduced to a simple or gradual change in law-making or social attitudes. As Foucault tells us, “the disciplinary mechanisms (dispositifs disciplinaires) secreted a ‘penality of the norm,’ which is irreducible in its principles and functioning to the traditional penality of the law” (AK, 183). Foucault’s entire theory of power, and every one of its corresponding historical investigations, is based on exhibiting networks, strategies, and connections—even in cases where the question of power touches on the problem of the constitution of individuality or subjectivity. This approach thus provides an opportunity for concrete historical analyses to map out, within the social fabric, the “system of differentiations,” “the types of objectives,” the “instrumental modes,” the “forms of institutionalization,” the “degrees of rationalization,” and their corresponding ways of individual and collective experiencing and acting (EW3, 44). But power relations, or relations between forces, are also always, as Deleuze argues, “microphysical, strategic, multipunctual and diffuse”;8 or, to use Foucault’s own words, “there is only power because there is dispersion, relays, networks, reciprocal supports, differences of potential, discrepancies” (PP, 4). This shows that, for Foucault, the spheres of concrete historical objects delineated by the empirical and conceptual apparatuses of discourse, power, and subjectivity first become visible when one defines the object of historical investigation in terms of fluid and heterogeneous relations, which means that only this kind of strategy is able to account for the specific features of each of the historical spheres mentioned and—as it is stated in the highly self-reflective introduction to the second volume of The History of Sexuality—for the interrelations between the “formation of knowledge,” the “systems of power,” and the “forms within which individuals are able, or obliged, to recognize themselves as subjects” (HS2, 4). And even if, in order to address these historical topics, Foucault had to subject his approach to a series of “theoretical shifts” (HS2, 6)—first, from the analysis of discursive relations to the analysis of power relations, and then again in the transition to the exploration of subjectivity as a “relation to self by which the individual constitutes and recognizes himself qua subject” (HS2, 6)—this relocation never affected the objective facet of

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the historical orientation in the slightest. The same historical reality that, for traditional or Marxist history writing, proves to be at once elementary (factual) and continuous (sequential), appears from Foucault’s perspective to be heterogeneous, discontinuous, and complex—yet without losing its objective positivity. Of course, this also betrays the fact that for Foucault—in his firm commitment to conceiving the past in terms of the primacy of relations for the sake of formulating new descriptive possibilities through the construction of new historical objects—the question of historical relations is at the center of his theoretical efforts, not only from an empirical and methodological point of view but also in a quasiontological and critical sense. THE POSITIVITY OF THE PAST One of the most noteworthy elements of Foucault’s “history of the present” is that it wholly redefines the focal point of the philosophical interrogation of history. This manifests itself above all in the way in which history becomes the object of reflection in his work. Though he never fails to make explicit theoretical claims when it comes to explain a specific step in his problematization or a methodological issue, his approach is not designed to deliver its findings in the context of systematic philosophical inquiries (ideas, principles, arguments, etc.). Foucault’s analyses tend rather to unfold their conceptual potential, as it is shown by the analyses of The Archaeology of Knowledge, within the medium of concrete historical problems, research agendas, and empirical investigations. Thus, for example, the philosophical question of “reason” is addressed in the historical context of madness, that of the “body” in the context of clinical knowledge, and that of “knowledge” in the context of the historical development of the human sciences. In this framework, the philosophical and historiographical reflections draw on each other and, while mutually transforming their respective attributes, they create a radically new way of dealing with history. However, this may give the impression that what we have here is a kind of epistemological confusion on Foucault’s part, or perhaps a “category error” somewhere within his methodology, inasmuch as the commingling of philosophical claims and historiographical findings suggests a dubious blending of values and facts that can only lead to equivocation. One thus seems entitled to speak, as Jürgen Habermas does, of a certain “systematic ambiguity” in Foucault’s thinking which is expressed in the irreducible opposition between a “critical claim” on the one hand and a “positivistic attitude” on the other.9 From this perspective, then, what Foucault offers is a confused theoretical practice which, however productive it may be, can hardly account for its own legitimacy.

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Yet it could be argued that Foucault’s deliberate move toward empirical historical research is nothing less than the very response to the philosophical problem of understanding history; the difference is just that instead of presenting a comprehensive theory of temporality or historicity, Foucault relies upon a particular practice of history to show us how to think adequately about the historical condition. In the lecture “The Order of Discourse,” Foucault identifies some of the fundamental philosophical presuppositions which, throughout Western history at least, have tended to determine the conception of history in general, and also the ways of its discursive articulations: on his account, the theses of the “founding subject,” “originary experience,” and “universal mediation” were chiefly responsible for governing the proliferation of discourses on historical (OD, 65–66). This phenomenological-dialectical vision has, however, in Foucault’s estimation, prevented history from being understood in terms of its own underlying dynamics and characteristics. For if history is indeed constituted in accordance with universal experiential or conceptual regularities, then over the course of the exploration of these patterns, philosophical thinking cannot avoid ultimately recognizing itself as “absolute knowledge” with a foothold outside time and history. Against this, Foucault advocates for a categorical apparatus that derives its legitimacy and explanatory power from the landscape of effective historical conditions and, to this extent, from the field of history writing. Accordingly, concepts drawn from the “effective work of historians”—especially the notions of “event” and “series,” along with related ideas like “regularity, dimension of chance (aléa), discontinuity, dependence, transformation, and rupture”—are here intended to replace the “traditional thematics which the philosophers of yesterday still take for ‘living’ history” (OD, 68). In this sense, Foucault’s approach substantiates “no longer a reflection on history, but a reflection in history” (DE4, 413), which means simply that he is here concerned with finding “a way of exposing thinking to the test of the historical work; and a way also of putting the historical work to the test of a transformation of the conceptual and theoretical frames” (DE4, 413). In this framework, an empirically driven research based on the “history of the present” implies not an uncritical mixing of facts and values but a new type of access to the question of historical reality. For, as the historians of the Annales school have demonstrated, in progressive historiography, facts and concepts are not mutually exclusive, but mutually reinforcing. To put it schematically, it could be said that for the “historian of the present,” the past possesses the same degree of factuality as it does for traditional historiography or social collective memory; that is to say, the Foucauldian past still refers to a factual “happening” whose history can be reconstructed. But this reconstruction is by no means a simple recording of facts. Indeed, it is just the opposite: if there is no natural

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or inherent arrangement of the past that offers itself readily to historical contemplation, then the acquisition of factual historical knowledge necessarily requires an active involvement in the fabric of the past. But this does not imply either that Foucault seeks to substitute some self-evident quality of the past with an artifice or contrivance, intent on relativizing history and subjecting it to a kind of philosophical experimentation. The point is that with the recognition of the force of discontinuity, that is, with the recognition that there is no natural, temporal, or spiritual link leading from the past to the present, conceptual intervention becomes the only “natural” medium for historical research. Therefore, we see that Foucault’s strategy of “thinking the past” in the name of the history of the present does not actually reject the factuality and evidentiary integrity of the past but only challenges a specific philosophical understanding of it. From this perspective, one might herald Foucault as a “completely positivist” historian, as Paul Veyne has suggested;10 though, to be precise, his innovations concern the very way in which historical positivity itself is asserted. The latter, of course, does not denote a factually existing historical reality, something whose empirical givenness would simply and naturally offer itself for further explanation. Yet, if the operative use of the term “positivity” pervades the vocabulary of Foucault’s early works, it is because he was looking for a term that, in contrast to phenomenological or dialectical approaches, would highlight the self-assertive nature of the reality of the historical past. Already in History of Madness, Foucault makes it quite clear that his aim is to establish a new relationship between historical reality and historical complexity: the necessity of “approaching the experience of madness in its positive reality” (HM, 122) or of uncovering the “positive forces of unreason” (HM, 207) goes hand in hand with the elaboration of a new form of historical taxonomy of knowledge and discourse. Similarly, the impulse, expressed in The Birth of the Clinic, to analyze discourse in terms of the “fact of its historical appearance” (BC, xvii) indicates that in the historical dimension, factuality has a controlling power over appearances. Moreover, Foucault refers to this novel factual systematicity in The Order of Things when he claims that, within the context of the archaeological analysis of knowledge, “one must reconstitute the general system of thought whose network, in its positivity, renders an interplay of simultaneous and apparently contradictory opinions possible” (OT, 83). Generally speaking, then, his theoretical procedure is based on the following simple, yet radical, argument: if we do not assume an inherent and progressive continuity between the past and the present, and if we do not regard the past as the simple empirical origin of our actuality, then the idea that the past is a unified and self-identical set of facts prearranged in some fixed constellation simply dissolves; and by the same token, the past as such becomes discontinuous, multilayered,

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and heterogeneous—but in such a way that this heterogeneity appears as an ultimate and self-assertive historical given, that is, as a “positivity.” A development like this thus in no way contributes to any kind of empty relativism in historical thinking and research, though it does institute a new type of historical conditionality and factuality. The concept of “positivity” appears prominently in Foucault’s historical analyses from the early 1960s onward, eventually becoming one of the key elements of the archaeological approach. During this period, however, the term also undergoes a noticeable semantic expansion: whereas in History of Madness “positivity” mostly denotes a historical mode of the emergence and validation of a new type of rational knowledge which is captured at the level of the medicalization of madness,11 by the time of the publication of The Order of Things, it is a substantive indicator of a general type of historical factuality. Looking back, this change was foreshadowed by the reflections that Foucault devoted, in unpublished notes, to the relationship between the archaeological procedure and the notion of positivity in the early 1960s.12 In these notes, positivity is presented as a historical marker of forms of knowledge in which “articulation”13 and “affirmation”14 are equally present. Against this backdrop, Foucault comes to the conclusion that “only the archaeology of positivities can be a discipline in which there is at once history and conditions of knowledge.”15 This range of meanings is subsequently carried forward and given explicit conceptual form in The Order of Things, such that the concept of positivity is there emphatically affirmed as a genuine historical correlate of archaeological analysis. Foucault even interprets “positivities” as the “evident arrangements” of historical events (OT, 237). This is already underlined by a significant epistemological claim in the introduction, which states that: “archaeology, addressing itself to the general space of knowledge, to its configurations, and to the mode of being of the things that appear in it, defines systems of simultaneity, as well as the series of mutations necessary and sufficient to circumscribe the threshold of a new positivity” (OT, xxv). This shift from a merely descriptive to a properly methodological usage of the term “positivity” culminates in the historical epistemological analyses of The Archaeology of Knowledge. In the course of these investigations, we find Foucault facetiously endorsing the applicability of the term “positivist” to his own work (AK, 141), but we also discover that he accords a precise methodological meaning to the concept of positivity. First, given the fact that it refers to historical constants that cannot be traced back to the meaning-giving performances of an experiencing or constituting subject, it is apparent that the term is designed to convey an anti-phenomenological attitude. Furthermore, these positive historical realities are also antithetical to any dialectical approach because they are

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incommensurable with rational totalities and teleological processes. Here, positivity marks out a domain of historical reality linked to the existence of statements that is endowed with a distinctive meaning by virtue of the fact that it singles out a common horizon of factuality and heterogeneity linked to the past. Expressing this in terms of the problematics of his Archaeology, Foucault says: To describe a group of statements not as the closed, plethoric totality of a meaning, but as an incomplete, fragmented figure; to describe a group of statements not with reference to the interiority of an intention, a thought, or a subject, but in accordance with the dispersion of an exteriority; to describe a group of statements, in order to rediscover not the moment or the trace of their origin, but the specific forms of an accumulation, is certainly not to uncover an interpretation, to discover a foundation, or to free constituent acts; nor is it to decide on a rationality, or to embrace a teleology. It is to establish what I am quite willing to call a positivity. (AK, 141)

The framework elaborated earlier contextualizes the juxtaposition of the notions of “discursive formations” and historical “positivity” in Foucault’s archeological project. In its descriptive usage, positivity expresses the nature of the specific historical conditions which, as systems, must account for a given set of statements (EW2, 321). In this sense, positivity is made co-extensive with the “historical a priori” of a certain regime of knowledge which can arise and disappear like every other historical formation.16 In its methodological usage, however, positivity is a general indicator of the “existence”—emergence, persistence, transformation, etc.—of discourses in historical contexts.17 Thus, to the extent that archaeological research, as Foucault claims, aims at a “pure description of discursive events” (AK, 29) or “discursive facts” (AK, 32), this second meaning of positivity covers the dimension of the historical factuality that assumes the name of “archive.” The archive is that dimension of the past in which actual statements and discourses reveal themselves as historical elements and become accessible in this form: it is, Foucault says, what grants statements “their paradoxical existence as events and things” (EW2, 309) and what attests to “the fact and conditions of their manifest appearance” (DE1, 682). Nevertheless, this dimension does not stand for historical reality as a unifying spiritual form or as an overarching intellectual context. The positivity of the archive consists rather in making historical reality appear as a space of dispersion “which differentiates discourses in their multiple existence and specifies them in their own duration” (AK, 146). With the advent of the 1970s, however, Foucault’s historical project underwent a major terminological and thematic upheaval, to which some of the basic conceptual components of the archaeological

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approach—including the terms “discursive formation,” “archive,” and “positivity”—fell victim.18 As a kind of send-off, the lecture “The Order of Discourse” returns to this intellectual terrain and portrays the historical domains of objects as “positivities,” and the new genealogical profile of historical research as “a happy positivism” (OD, 73). In spite of this, it is quite clear that Foucault’s understanding of the epistemological or ontological status of the historical past as a reality does not undergo any radical changes. The past remains a privileged dimension which, through its documented factuality and its discontinuous heterogeneity, offers up its own positive reality for further exploration. This at once heterogeneous and positive quality of historical reality does not seem to be altered by the fact that Foucault’s historical attention, in this later period, is no longer trained on historical discourses but is predominantly focused on the various fields and phenomena of power and the exercise of power, as well as on the practices of subjectivity. The epistemological role that Foucault assigned to statements “actually” said in his earlier research is now taken up by the “effectivity” of power relations and the “experiences” of the practices of subjectivity. These terms represent different types and qualities of historical positivity which articulate the factual and heterogeneous forms of the historical past. Within this framework, the fabric of historical facts, events, and practices constitutes the exclusive benchmark for historical intervention. Yet, Foucault’s frequent transformations of historical interest and vocabulary change neither the profile of the “history of the present” nor the fact that the latter is supposed to realize its philosophical potential through the analysis of specific historical objects and the substantiation of historical relations revealing the positivity of the past. HISTORICAL REALITY AND HISTORICAL RELATIONS In a 1972 interview wherein, among other things, Foucault gave an account of the changes in his approach to archaeology and criticized the weaknesses of the Marxist historiography of his time, he also significantly remarked that “the analysis of historical reality is my concern.”19 For all its succinctness, however, we properly understand this statement only so long as we remember that Foucault’s concept of reality is devoid of any substantialist determination. All that history, understood discontinuously, has to offer appears in patterns of heterogeneity, diversity, and dispersion. In this light, what is most striking and stimulating about Foucault’s idea of historical past is that he locates the formation of historical constants at the level of reality effects or lateral emergences. Paul Veyne rightly observed that one of the most exemplary features of Foucault’s work is the elimination of historical invariants:20 if the figures of madness,

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human body, man as an object, prison, sexuality, biopolitics, or the self are suitable for archaeological or genealogical investigation, it is precisely because they do not own a definitive provenance—because their reality is formed, at various points in time, by a multitude of material, social, and intellectual forces. Historical configurations such as these are therefore essentially dependent on relations that, as Foucault puts it in one of his lecture courses, “gradually take shape on the basis of multiple and very diverse processes which gradually coagulate and form an effect” (STP, 325). This does not mean, however, that the relations which are destined to form the configuration of historical reality echo some kind of opaque disorder; rather, the relational aspect of historical reality exhibits a dimension of the past in which objects and subjects, positions and effects, subjections and agencies and the like are arranged according to patterns of—to use Foucault’s term from another lecture—“well-ordered dispersion” (PP, 3) which are always historically specific. In this way, Foucault seeks to liberate history writing from the substantive dualities of subjectobject, fact-context, event-structure, and occurrence-process and replace these with an approach that constructs its own objects from the available sources in such a way that they reflect as much as possible the relational nature of historical reality. While many prominent historians regard the invention of new “objects” as one of the most important merits of Foucault’s history writing,21 it would be misleading to assume, in addition, that the conception of historical reality as a relational dimension was itself another of Foucault’s inventions, for the founders of the Annales school had already articulated such a view. Marc Bloch, for example, claims emphatically that “reality offers us a nearly infinite number of lines of force which all converge together upon the same phenomenon”;22 and at the other end of the Annaliste tradition, the medievalist Georges Duby holds that “historiography is first and foremost about forming relations. Our dream is to extend the scope of these relations to the limits of infinity.”23 Of course, everything ultimately depends on the specific kinds of relations that one admits as constitutive elements of historical reality, and if the priority of purely economic or mental relations is alien to the Foucauldian enterprise, this is not accidental. Indeed, it is practically axiomatic to say that, for Foucault, those relations which epitomize the primacy of representations or of intersubjective relations in the formation of historicity—from the phenomenological tradition to the project of the history of mentalités—or which uphold the preeminence of economic production—as in most traditional Marxist explanations—are removed from the list of viable options. This is because, in their more or less committed hunt for “ultimate instances,” these systems of relations tend not so much to unravel as to encapsulate or unilateralize the approach to historical reality. Foucault’s work, on the

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other hand, does not seek to instantiate but to systematically exemplify the arena of compelling relations. In this framework, the historical relations displayed at the level of discursivity, power, and self do not appear as common elements of some tangible totality or unified social order; rather, they exhibit different social apparatuses or dispositifs of the past which do not necessarily fit together but represent different dimensions of an in itself heterogeneous reality. Thus, as Deleuze observes, Foucault thinks that “Knowledge, Power and Subjectivity are by no means contours given once and for all, but series of variables which supplant one another.”24 Things become particularly interesting when Foucault discusses the interplay of different systems of historical relations and shows how the configurations within each system complement, modify, or even eclipse the characteristics of the others. The methodological chapter of the first volume of The History of Sexuality and the various texts where he addresses the question of the formation of power and subjectivity are especially instructive in this respect. In the former text, Foucault explains that “the multiplicity of force relations [are] immanent in the sphere in which they operate and which constitute their own organization” (HS1, 92), and that “it is the moving substrate of force relations which, by virtue of their inequality, constantly engender states of power, but the latter are always local and unstable” (HS1, 93). In more philosophical parlance, this means that power relations constitute a type of social reality wherein the substrate is conditioned by inequality and the states are characterized by instability. From a historical perspective, it is precisely this collection of attributes of power that, according to Foucault, “makes it possible to use its [the power’s] mechanisms as a grid of intelligibility of the social order” (HS1, 93). Moreover, these characteristics make power “omnipresent” (HS1, 93). However, it must be said that this is not the consequence of some diabolical, all-encompassing design but stems simply from the fact that the workings and effects of power can adapt to, or arise from, any other system of relations. Thus, in virtue of the logic of their operation, “relations of power are not in a position of exteriority with respect to other types of relationships (economic processes, knowledge relationships, sexual relations), but are immanent in the latter” (HS1, 94). However, a certain kind of historical omnipresence does not imply historical invariance. From this point of view, it is at least remarkable, if not exceedingly significant, that according to Foucault the scope of the operation of power mechanisms does not seem to extend to certain very conspicuous historical formations, such as the constitution of the self. For, while it is obvious that some modes of subjectivation are fundamentally shaped by the productive relations of power, these same relations, as the second volume of The History of Sexuality aptly demonstrates, prove

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unsuitable for exploring the historical configuration of the subject’s relation to itself; hence, the necessity of a “theoretical shift” that, by Foucault’s own account, recenters his investigations around the “relationship of self with self and the forming of oneself as a subject” in a historical framework and “domain of reference,” which must be called “the history of desiring man” (HS2, 6). With this move, though, Foucault is not merely exchanging one historical topic for another; he is trying to expose a system of relations that, with respect to its historical determinations, does not concern the same type of historical realm as the one accommodating mechanisms of power. In both conceptual (the techniques of the self) and methodological (the hermeneutics of the self) respects, then, this genealogical investigation attempts to open up a different kind of access to historical reality. To be sure, however, this multiplying of realities is not emblematic of a theoretical incoherence or historical relativism; it indicates, instead, that no prevailing regime of effective relations can fully overrule the positive heterogeneity of the past, and that historical reality ultimately manifests itself, not some kind of imperishable sphere of being, but as a preeminent conceptual force field of thinking. If, according to Foucault, relations cannot be straightforwardly deduced from the various formations they produce, this alone points the way to a proper understanding of the type of historical existence we are dealing with in the case of historical relations. First of all, this position implies that the kind of reality which characterizes historical relations is neither an ideal or structural condition nor some purely empirical mode of givenness. In The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault insists that relations, qua positivities, are the concrete “conditions of existence” (AK, 30) of a discursive object or event, and are, specifically, those conditions which actually prevail in a given historical context and which effectively determine the appearance and persistence of discursive formations. With that being said, he also recognizes that such relations are not directly observable; nor does it have a manifest quality that would make it easy to read off of the emerging surface of the reality of the past. The relations at issue here always form a context which is inherently complex and perpetually amenable to new description, which can either be discursive or nondiscursive, in the latter case operating at the level of the body, the institutional or legal practices, or the subject—all without ever making recourse to a supreme determinant that would testify to the “most real” component of historical reality. So, even when Foucault uses the term “historical a priori” in the Archaeology, we must keep in mind that this refers to an open set of dynamic relations and not to their ideal or empirical totality: “Nothing would be more pleasant, or more inexact, than to conceive of this historical a priori as a formal a priori that is also endowed with a history” (AK, 144). That is to say, this a priori conditioning merely

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reveals the specific context within which historical relations can appear “in their dispersion, in all the flaws opened up by their non-coherence, in their overlapping and mutual replacement, in their simultaneity, which is not unifiable, and in their succession, which is not deductible” (AK, 143). As we can see, then, Foucault’s concept of “historical reality” remains faithful to his discontinuous and heterogeneous concept of history since he characterizes this reality in terms of connections, formations, structures, strategies, and arrangements which, taken as a whole, reveal the historical field to be a multilayered dimension wherein the different relations and systems of relations represent, in each case, specific historical developments imbued with their own temporal determinations and local necessities. At this level and formulation, nothing can be associated with ideal or simply structural conditions. As Foucault noted, here it is rather a matter of the “play and development of diverse realities that are articulated onto each other” (EW3, 232). By the same token, it is also clear that if one defines the nature of historical reality as heterogeneity, and the object of historical research as relations, then it is impossible to give a single exhaustive historical description of any particular historical phenomenon or segment. Accordingly, if one appeals to different relations, one can obtain different perspectives on the same area or object, which can complement or even rival each other. In this way, Foucault comes very close to the Braudelian postulate, according to which “history can be conceived only in n dimensions.”25 Consequently—and to the extent that Foucault’s historiography focuses primarily on the relations that constitute a “reality” within the fabric of societal realm—his manifold vision thus also entails a transformation of the very notion of “social reality” itself. In a particularly lucid response given during a debate with French historians, Foucault elaborates upon this implication: It is necessary to demystify the global instance of the real as a totality to be restituted. There is no “the” real that one would reach on condition of speaking of everything or of certain things more “real” than the others, and that one would miss, to the benefit of inconsistent abstractions, if one limits oneself to making other elements and other relations appear. Perhaps we should also question the principle, often implicitly accepted, that the only reality to which history should lay claim is society itself. A type of rationality, a way of thinking, a program, a technique, a set of rational and coordinated efforts, objectives defined and pursued, instruments to reach it, etc., all this is reality, even if it does not claim to be “reality” itself nor “the” whole society. And the genesis of this reality, as soon as one brings the relevant elements into play, is perfectly legitimate. (DE4, 15)

To be sure, by claiming that historical relations intersect with a type of reality whose “genesis” is inseparable from a “bringing into play” of certain

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pertinent elements, Foucault seems to take pleasure in radicalizing a historiographical position whose underlying principles and methodological features have already been laid out by the Annales school. Indeed, emphasizing the constructive nature of historical practice over the passive observation of historical reality was already a fundamental merit of the work of the founders of this school. Marc Bloch already claimed that “every historical research supposes that the inquiry has a direction at the very first step. In the beginning, there must be the guiding spirit. Mere passive observation, even supposing such a thing were possible, has never contributed anything productive to any science”26; to which Febvre added: “to elaborate a fact is to construct. If you wish, it is providing an answer to a question. And if there is no question, there is only nothingness.”27 This can be traced back to the antipositivist and antihistoricist assumption that a historical relation, although it can be a real element of the past, is never a plainly observable phenomenon.28 Historical reality is not the correlate of “brute” factual or spiritual relations that exist by their own merit. Relations are expressed through social mechanisms, actions, and agencies whose analytical explication requires an intervention in the form of historiographical activity, construction, and explanation; and thus, merely acknowledging that things happened in various ways in the past is far from a legitimate analytical historical procedure. Similarly, then, if Foucault subscribes to an archeologically or genealogically informed approach, he must presuppose both the positivity of relations and the production of these relations through the historian’s own labor. This stems from the fact that the heterogeneity of the historical field prohibits any single authentic and veridical state of historical reality from serving as a final reference point for the historian attempting its description. Thus, in the last instance, if the historical past proves to be heterogeneous, then construction is the only appropriate method for articulating positive relations. What, then, is a historical relation? It is neither an empirical given nor simply a conceptual construct but belongs instead to a peculiar third dimension. Relation is the result of a positive relating. Therefore, when Foucault defines a historical phenomenon or object in terms of relations and proceeds to claim, on the basis of their positive subsistence alone, that they are real, this does not mean that these relations once constituted a reality or a world actually experienced by social actors. On the other hand, however, these relations are not part of some ideal or purely structural order; nor are they merely theoretical phantoms which exist solely in the mind of the historian. It could be said that a relation constitutes a dimension of historical reality which, as such, was never actually present, but is nevertheless entirely real and palpable; for they do not appear on the surface of what was formerly assumed to be reality but are to be found rather in its conditions, formative elements, deep layers, that is,

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in those historical locales which Michel De Certeau collectively names the “nocturnal underside of reality.”29 As it is not explicitly present in actual circumstances, the historian can only render this dimension visible through a deliberate effort of unraveling, connecting, linking, and implicating. Thus, the relation itself is a genre of historical reality that must first be marked out, discovered, and designated in order to be recognized and described. In general, then, we see that relations function in Foucault as an eminent form of historical complexity armed with a compelling validity, since they are constructed entities which nevertheless contain an unambiguous descriptive historical content and intelligibility. NOTES 1. On the importance and interweaving of these two traditions in France, see, Alexandre Feron, Le Moment marxiste de la phénoménologie française. Sartre, MerleauPonty, Trần Đức Thảo. Phaenomenologica 231. Cham: Springer, 2022. 2. Paul Veyne, Foucault Revolutionizing History. In Foucault and His Interlocutors, 179. 3. Foucault’s trailblazing in this regard is illustrated by the fact that whereas he was still experimenting with a phenomenological concept of the world in the mid-1950s (cf. Foucault, Phénoménologie et psychologie, Paris: EHESS/Gallimard/ Seuil, 2021), he turned to Nietzsche only a few years later; and then, when writing The Archaeology of Knowledge, he was preoccupied for a short time with the possibility of a purely philosophical analysis of language (Cf. « Introduction » à L’Archéologie du savoir. Les Études Philosophiques 2015/3 N° 153: 327–352). On Foucault’s early trajectory, see Stuart Elden, The Early Foucault. London: Polity Press, 2021. 4. On the Annales school’s influence on Foucault, see Jacques Le Goff, Foucault et la ‘nouvelle histoire’. In Au risque de Foucault. Paris: Centre Pompidou, 1997, 129–139. 5. See, for example, the exchange between Foucault and some prominent French historians concerning the notion of “power” in M. Perrot (ed.), L’impossible prison. Paris: Seuil, 1980, 29–56. Partial English translation, Foucault, Questions of Method. EWF 3. 223–238. On the differences between the positions of Foucault and the Annales school, see Gérard Noiriel’s comprehensive and insightful paper, Foucault and History: The Lessons of a Disillusion. The Journal of Modern History 66, no. 3 (September 1994): 547–568, and also, Jacques Revel, Machines, stratégies, conduites: ce qu’entendent les historiens. In Au risque de Foucault, 109–128. 6. Cf. The chapter “Discursive Regularities” (AK, 23–88). 7. Frédéric Gros presents a spectacular diagrammatic representation of all the different kinds of relations (madness as consciousness, border phenomenon, mode of separation, geographic and geometrical relation, social practice, theoretical opposition, and synthesis) whose discontinuous distribution over the Renaissance, classical and modern ages Foucault tries to uncover, describe, and analyze in History of Madness. Gros: Foucault et la folie. Paris: PUF, 1997, 43.

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8. Deleuze, Foucault, 36. 9. Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Trans. Frederick Lawrence. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987, 270. 10. Paul Veyne, Foucault Revolutionizes History. In Arnold I. Davidson (ed.), Foucault and his Interlocutors. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997, 147. 11. Cf. “Madness was no longer to be inscribed in the negativity of existence, as one of its most brutal figures, but now progressively took its place in the positivity of known things” (HM, 443). 12. Some of the content of these notebooks is quoted and presented in ClaudeOliver Doron, Course Context. Sexuality: Lectures at the University of ClermontFerrand (1964). In C.-O. Doron (ed.), Foucault, Sexuality. The 1964 Clermond-Ferran & 1969 Vincennes Lectures. Trans. Graham Burcell. New York: Columbia University Press, 2021, 299–322. 13. Quoted by Doron, Ibid., 307. 14. Cf. a note from July 16, 1963, where Foucault states that the task of archaeology is “restoring to the positivity as such its power of affirmation. What is positive in the positivity is not the transcendental act that gives meaning, it is, in the things themselves . . . the affirmation,” quoted by Doron, Ibid., 319. 15. Quoted by Doron, Ibid., 218. 16. Cf. “Positivity plays the role of what might be called a historical a priori” (AK, 143). 17. Cf. “What I try to show through my analysis [is] the positivity of discourses, their conditions of existence, the systems that govern their emergence, their functioning and their transformations” (DE1, 692). 18. Indeed, Foucault describes the development of his own work in terms of consecutive “theoretical shifts” (HS2, 6). 19. “L’analyse de la réalité historique m’incombe” (DE2, 407). 20. Veyne, Foucault Revolutionizes History, 175. 21. Cf. Roger Chartier, Foucault et les historiens, les historiens et Foucault. In Au risque de Foucault, 235, Michel de Certeau, Heterologies. Discourse on the Other. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986, 189. 22. Bloch, The Historian’s Craft, 159. 23. Guy Lardreau, Dialogues avec Georges Duby. Paris: Flammarion, 1980. 24. Gilles Deleuze, What Is a Dispositif? In Michel Foucault, Philosopher. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992, 159. 25. Braudel, On History, 131. 26. Bloch, The Historian’s Craft, 54. 27. Lucien Febvre, Combats pour l’histoire. Paris: Armand Colin, 1952, 22. 28. On this question, see also the important contributions of François Furet, L’Histoire quantitative et la construction du fait historique. Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales (January–February, 1971): 63–75. (English translation of an earlier abridged version, “Quantitative History,” Daedalus (Winter, 1971): 151–167.) 29. De Certeau, Heterologies, 173.

3 ✛

Foucault’s Constructive History

FROM DOCUMENTS TO MONUMENTS: TOWARD A CONSTRUCTIVE HISTORICAL THINKING The success of the Foucauldian historical-philosophical enterprise largely depends on its ability to retrieve historicity—that is, the domain of intelligibility which contains the linkages between the past and the present— without taking past facts as empirical givens and without implementing a purely conceptual projection of history. For, in the former case, which describes the procedure of traditional historiography, to conceive the past as mere historical “raw material” is to subordinate the disclosure of history to the supposed perspective of the empirical consistency of the past; and in the second case, which basically expresses the traditional method of the philosophy of history, a purely conceptual approach runs the risk of replacing the reality of history with a purely spiritual or ideal framework. In both cases, uncontrollably, certain seemingly natural evidences of the present guide the historical interest. In the face of these insufficient options, Foucault attempts a solution with his program of thinking constructively the positivity of the past from the vantage point of the problems of the present, which may also shed light on his views on thinking in general. Foucault does not believe that philosophical activity conforms to the models of close-to-life description or abstract conceptualization; he thinks that “thought is freedom in relation to what one does, the motion by which one detaches oneself from it, establishes it as an object, and reflects on it as a problem.”1 When applied to history, we see that this recovery of the free problematizing orientation of thought points to a more specific 65

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philosophical strategy, insofar as these motifs of the detachment from the evidences of the present, the objectification of the past, and the critical problematization of the present together delineate, quite accurately, the contours of what Foucault calls the “diagnosis of the present,” and later, the “historical ontology of the ourselves.” The principal operative elements of Foucault’s historiographical practice—namely, his rejection of the continuum of historical time, of the assumption that the past is a mere factual assemblage, and of the empiricalhistorical or ideo-historical conception of historical reality—indicate some of the pivotal features which distinguish his work from the majority of scientific or philosophical approaches to history while aligning it with others.2 But these aspects also prefigure the constructive nature of his historical apparatus because, as the historian Roger Chartier observes, in Foucault “the transformation of the object of the writing of history necessarily leads to a modification of the form of the writing of history.”3 This modification, in its negative aspect, entails the dismissal of any historiography based on pure description, commentary, dialectical mediation, or hermeneutic procedure. Essentially, Foucault here breaks as decisively as possible from the kind of analysis that might be called a “history of the referent” (AK, 52). However, if the past neither offers itself for description nor organizes itself into preconceived conceptual arrangements, then historiography itself must first create the specific forms of distance, perspective, and intervention which, in a highly specialized way, simultaneously reveal the positivity of the past and conceptualize historical phenomena. From this point of view, then, we see that historical thinking cannot manifest itself otherwise than as inherently formative activity; and this is the precise activity which, at the level of Foucault’s various historical investigations into forms of knowledge, power, and subjectivity, is embodied in the concurrently expository and constructive motifs of historiographical mapping, framing, and naming. The constructive nature of Foucault’s archaeological and genealogical project is demonstrated by the fact that the processing of historical source material already requires relation-making; and this is an angle which once again demonstrates his affinity with certain progressive tendencies in modern historiography, especially those of the Annales school. This kind of historiographical adaptation, embedded in creative reinvention, already begins at the level that constitutes the absolute starting point of all historical research, namely, in the treatment of historical sources. In fact, the introduction to The Archaeology of Knowledge clearly explains what is at stake when it comes to the similarities between archaeology and certain other types of historical research. As Foucault points out, a constructive impulse emerges at the level of documentation whose effects must come to pervade all subsequent levels of historical analysis: “history has altered its

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position in relation to the document” because “it has taken as its primary task, not the interpretation of the document” but rather its extension, so as “to work on it from within and to develop it” (AK, 7). Accordingly, he also insists that the document, so conceived, is “no longer in history an inert material through which it tries to reconstitute what men have done or said, the events of which only the trace remains; history is now trying to define within the documentary material itself unities, totalities, series, relations” (AK, 7). In doing so, however, he not only highlights the status of the “mass of documentation” that is “inextricably linked” with modern society but also shows the way in which the concept of historical material—the kind existing in the form of “books, texts, accounts, registers, acts, buildings, institutions, laws, techniques, objects, customs, etc.” (AK, 7)—can help capture the past in its archival positivity and heterogeneity. It is important to notice that by clarifying the status of the “document,” Foucault thereby marks out, with a single epistemological gesture, both the place of a certain kind of historical empiricism in his own work as well as the trajectory of his historical constructivism. Fundamentally, the historical document is a set of materially existing signs and marks that can only acquire its true empirical value through conceptual intervention. In this respect, Foucault’s contention, as expressed in the Archaeology, that the historical document is becoming a “monument” is quite significant. He adopts this concept from Georges Canguilhem, who, in his review article on The Order of Things, contrasts the archaeological approach to history with geological techniques and concludes that “geology deals with sediments, archaeology with monuments.”4 But Foucault takes this one step further for the sake of drawing an important distinction in regard to the status of historical documents: “let us say that history, in its traditional form, undertook to ‘memorize’ the monuments of the past, transform them into documents [. . .] in our time, history is that which transforms documents into monuments” (AK, 7–8). Beyond its rhetorical value, this comment is intended to highlight the fact that a documentary source does not accrue meaning simply by reporting historical occurrences or things but by manifesting the relations it itself engenders through its own past existence. In the first step, this strategy possesses a critical edge. In reference to Foucault’s document/monument distinction, the historian Jacques Le Goff argues that “it is necessary to de-structure the documents to detect its conditions of production.”5 To achieve this, however, the historical approach must forgo its interpretative inclinations and instead treat the document as an element in a system of relations. In other words, historical material is here to be understood not as a vehicle for exegetical or hermeneutical content but as a body of references which unlocks historical reality to reveal lines of force and makes it accessible to a new kind of objective processing.

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In his text “Return to History,” Foucault uses the example of “serial history,” and more specifically the work of the Annales historian Pierre Chaunu,6 to illustrate the relational approach to historical documents. The choice of example is not coincidental, as The Archaeology of Knowledge already made extensive appeal to the notion of a “series” in its capacity as a progressive historical model (AK, 7–8). On this basis, Foucault reasons that if serial history uses a collection of available documents in order to define its subject matter, then “the object of historical research is to establish, on the basis of these documents, a certain number of relations” (EW2, 427). These documents may reflect occurrences of different scales (eventbased, process-based, global); they may reveal different historical features (economic, social, and political); and they may represent different historical unfoldings (causal, structural, temporal, and spatial)—but what really matters here is that one “does not interpret the document in order to reach behind it and grasp a kind of hidden social or spiritual reality,” and ensures instead that “the internal or external relations of this corpus of documents are what constitute the outcome of the historian’s work” (EW2, 427). From an epistemological point of view, therefore, the core of this practice resides precisely in the renunciation of interpretation and the exegetical method which locates historical meaning outside of the texts and documents.7 The historian’s work, in Foucault’s estimation, rather “consists in manipulating and processing a series of homogeneous documents relating to a particular object and a particular epoch” (EW2, 427). Insofar, then, as a traditional or hermeneutical historical model would generally suppose a reserved domain of meaning waiting to be unfolded, Foucault hereby distances himself from these approaches while at the same time developing an argument, first laid out in the Archaeology, as to why historical documents should be understood as sets of signs which must first be constructed if their meanings are to be determined as properly historical. At this level, the archaeological approach does not simply read its object or decipher its hidden signification; archaeology treats the object, “in its own volume, as a monument. It is not an interpretative discipline: it does not seek another, better-hidden discourse. It refuses to be ‘allegorical’” (AK, 155). All this emphasizes Foucault’s strong commitment to a kind of historiography which echoes, to use Marc Bloch’s graphic expression, the motif of the “revenge of the intelligence over the given.”8 If genealogy, as Foucault puts it, is indeed “gray, meticulous, and patiently documentary” (EW3, 369), then the constructive approach to historical material is not merely compatible with this design but also constitutes the very element of its operation. In fact, all of Foucault’s historical inquiries witness a complex and constructive treatment of a specified historical source. And if, in his later work, he apparently refrains from using the concept of “monument”—as well as the notions of “positivity,”

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“archive,” and “historical a priori”—this can only be because he simply takes it for granted, for Foucault maintains that there is no use of historical empirical data which does not obtain its intelligibility and referentiality from the context of a system of predominant relations. Historical relations, however, can never exist without the intervention of historical thinking, and this point is as valid for the exploration and analysis of discourse or disciplinary power relations as it is for the analysis of governmentality, or biopolitics, or subjectivity. Nonetheless, if some historians have expressed perplexity at Foucault’s employment of certain constructive framings, or his use of terms such as “episteme,” “strategy,” “mechanism,” “apparatus,” and “technology” in relation to historical phenomena,9 this is not only because Foucault, with his concrete analytical work, envisages the possibility of a radical, if not virtually unrestricted, expansion of the constructive space of historical relations and their conceptual background; it is due also to the fact that, unlike a historian, he does not simply perceive relations as the objects or fallouts of an analytically bounded research framework but also as a way of conceiving the horizon of the past as an arena of existence in its own right. Deleuze insists that the Foucauldian interpretation of “monument” as archive denotes the fact or presence of statements and also indicates the existence of discursive formations which together constitute a specific corpus. This corpus, however, cannot be traced to underlying structures or to the utterances of speaking subjects.10 In other words, at this level, discourse is an autonomous regime of relations and not a representation of some supporting reality. This does not mean, however, that discursive relations somehow duplicate reality, thereby supplementing the world of social actors with another, invisible world: if discourses, in Deleuze’s words, can be both “fictional” and “real,”11 it is not because they move us beyond reality, but because they stress that particular quality of reality, which can be called historical. Foucault himself alludes to this when, while briefly revisiting the notion of monument in his 1980–1981 lectures at the Collège de France, he talks about the historical use of discourses which serves not to bring us into contact with some reality but to show the historical existence of discourse in its own right (ST, 235). When seen through the lens of archaeology or genealogy, the intrinsic historicity of discursive relations is jointly revealed by their prior existence, their uniqueness, and their capacity for transformation. As Deleuze points out, “whether discursive or not, formations, families and multiplicities are historical. They are not just compounds built up from their coexistence but are inseparable from ‘temporal vectors of derivation.’”12 Historicity thus expresses a heuristic and an ontological feature, respectively: for on the one hand, it is the product of a particular research procedure, and on the other hand, it is a dimension that is endowed by the dimension

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of temporal becoming associated with events, actions, and objects with a specific inescapable quality and consistency. Foucault’s “monumental history” therefore aims to capture and describe historical relations at their own specific scale and level of formation and transformation. In order to do this, though, he must first extract the “series,” and the “series of series,” from the available documents, so that the systems of relations can be presented in their proper form. Terms such as “knowledge,” “power,” or “subjectivity”—or even the earlier “episteme”13—and operational concepts such as “apparatus,” “strategy,” or “mechanism” designate these systems at the broadest level of their historical existence. If for the traditionally trained historian’s ear, these concepts sound artificial, however, and if they give the impression of being the representees of a kind of alienated or abstracted reality, this is because they have never actually comprised the simply accessible part of the reality they describe. Systems of relations never manifest themselves in their pure form on the historical scene; they are not historical events, actions, or facts. The monumental use of documents suggests precisely that relations must be constructed and invented—which at the level of historiographical practice means that they must be marked out, framed, and named. FRAMING THE PAST: THE TIMES OF HISTORY “How can history be done if one fails to take time into account?” (EW2, 241)—asks Foucault in the already discussed text called “Return to History” echoing the frequent phenomenological or existentialist critique of the overly synchronic treatment of history in the structuralist approach. Yet the question is not merely rhetorical, for it draws attention to a problem which, at a certain point, must eventually concern all historical thinking, namely, how to account for the temporal features or constitution of things past. In this respect, Foucault’s new understanding of the relation between the present and the past clearly demarcates itself from two possibilities: neither human consciousness, primary experiences, or intersubjective relations can account for the temporality of the relations that form the framework of history nor can the vision of the development of societies or cultures bring us closer to understanding the real problems of historical time. According to Foucault, the conception of historical time as a homogeneous and continuous order testifies, in two ways, to an ideological strain descended from the nineteenth century. It relates indirectly to the modernist idea of “resurrecting the national past” (EW2, 423) and again, but under a different banner, to an uncritical attempt to insert a scientific, and specifically a biological, developmental principle into

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history (EW2, 431). As an alternative, he presents a concept of time, wellrepresented in recent historiography and most notably in the Annales tradition,14 that compartmentalizes past episodes and processes for the sake of discovering their specific temporal trajectories. From this standpoint, “the object of history is no longer given by a kind of prior categorization into periods, epochs, nations, continents, forms of culture,” because “the two fundamental notions of history as it is practiced today are no longer time and the past but change and the event” (EW2, 423). Historiography, in this form, thus no longer functions through the superimposition of homogeneous chronological time, this being a simple acquisition of the supposed “natural” or “lived” units of time. Instead, it presents historical time as a “tangle of superimposed discontinuities” from which emerge the “different types of time spans in history” (EW2, 429). However, if history itself thus resists a single and unitary durée in favor of a “multiplicity of time spans that entangle and envelop one another” (EW2, 430), we are left with the following question: How, and on what basis, does one acquire the art of multiplying historical time? In other words, what validates the construction of its temporal units? It can be argued that the entirety of Foucault’s specific historical research elaborates a strategy for dealing with these questions and also provides his own answers. At the basic level of chronological organization, almost all of his major historical undertakings—with the exception of his later genealogical investigations of practices of the self—follow a historical schematization which distinguishes the Middle Ages, Renaissance, Classical Age, and Modern Age.15 With that being said, the division of these periods and the determination of their precise temporal ranges are never settled, and Foucault himself even admits at one point that “the periodization of fields of knowledge cannot be carried out in the same way according to the levels at which one is placed” (EW2, 282). This corresponds with his rejection, as intended in The Archaeology of Knowledge, of a kind of “totalitarian periodization” (AK, 165) that would conceive each epoch as an overlapping homogeneous temporal and social aggregate; but it also suggests that, however, instructive these periods may be, they are only supposed to provide an initial framework for a historical contextualization that is concerned with more sophisticated qualitative units and sequences of historical time. For Foucault, the real challenge here stems from the fact that “every periodization carves out in history a certain level of events, and, conversely, each layer of events calls for its own periodization” (EW2, 280), or more precisely, “depending on the level that one selects, one will have to delimit different periodizations, and, depending on the periodization one provides, one will reach different levels” (EW2, 281). This constructivist procedure thus follows the pattern of certain historiographical practices which try to do away with the

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concept of homogeneous historical time, but which are therefore charged, as Le Goff notes, with “creating a new scientific chronology that dates historical phenomena according to the duration of their effectiveness in history rather than depending on the date of their production.”16 When it comes to establishing his own temporal framework, however, Foucault is far from simply adopting ready-made historiographical designs, like those which belong to the Annales tradition. Indeed, he invents new temporal units that have provoked at least as much awe as controversy. For instance, while such epochal units as the “Classical Age,” first introduced in History of Madness, enjoyed widespread acceptance, his framing of the “Great Confinement” period in the same work was met with scholarly resistance and confusion.17 Nevertheless, one might legitimately contend that Foucault’s innovations in periodization have less to do with the delineation of the great periods of European history than with the construction of series of historical variables; for it is in the course of this latter enterprise that the temporal agendas associated with the socio-epochal unfolding of various crucial historical phenomena emerge, for example, the “medical gaze,” the various “epistemes,” the “disciplinary society,” the “repressive hypothesis,” “governmentality,” and “biopolitics.” The study of these forms and figures of knowledge and power—and also, in different ways, of the various historical modes of relations that shape subjectivity—must always be grounded on the constructive designation of temporal frameworks. At the same time, it is important to see that the temporality at stake here cannot be understood in terms of an intersubjectively informed anthropological time or a merely chronologically structured historical time; it rather revolves, almost exclusively, around the social changes or transformations disclosed by the specific historical relations under study. This is why Foucault sometimes labels the periods he studies “confused unities” (AK, 165). But this label also denotes one of the most crucial aspects of Foucault’s constructive history, because to designate a historical context as period is not to resort to some self-imposed rhythm of time but is to create and name a historical framework through the study of a historical object in terms of an analysis focused on the resilience, mobility, and versatility of positive relations. In this sense, Foucault’s historical project is part of a tradition of “experimental” historiography that does not hesitate to put the thinking of the past into practice by setting up, as it were, “periods without dates.”18 When Foucault, in The Archaeology of Knowledge, aims to tackle the problem of periodization and chronology a little more stringently and finds it to be inseparable from the question of the establishment of relations and series, it is due to this experimental attitude. The questions of the “criteria of periodization” and the “large-scale chronological table” are there intertwined with the question of the “hierarchy, dominance,

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stratification, univocal determination, circular causality” of historical relations, and of the “series of series” (AK, 4) that may be placed between them. For this reason, Foucault does his best to defamiliarize the concepts of time, period, change, and event. With respect to the problematic of discursive relations, he thus explains that “archaeology disarticulates the synchrony of breaks, just as it destroyed the abstract unity of change and event. The period is neither its basic unity, nor its horizon, nor its object: if it speaks of these things it is always in terms of particular discursive practices, and as a result of its analyses” (AK, 195). Generally speaking, this explains why Foucault can provide historical classifications that define knowledge as “episteme” or power as “disciplinary”; for they are not articulated in terms of the relations belonging to a particular historical epoch or to a chronologically identifiable sequence of the past, but in terms of a temporal framework set in motion by the unfolding of a particular system of relations. In doing so, he also demonstrates that the operation of discursive and power relations is not necessarily temporally coincident with the appearance of the phenomena which they produce (e.g., madness as pathological behavior, modern prison, and sexuality). On the one hand, this simply implies that such relations may exist long before the phenomenon itself ever becomes explicit in discourse or social practice; but it also means that the historical advent and progression of something can never be straightforwardly traced back to the “development” of its attributes. Thus, for example, the modern emergence of “madness” cannot be explained by a uniform and gradual development of social relations, or by their instantaneous alteration, since the diversity of relations requires mapping a multiplicity of temporal variables.19 Ultimately, all this points to the fact that, for Foucault, the course of historical becoming is not marked by the continuous or simply fragmented alternation of historical epochs or overarching time sequences. This function is instead transferred to constantly changing systems of social relations, in the context of which certain configurations acquire the traits of historical constancy or resilience through the stabilization of tangible relations whose temporal trajectories never fail to go beyond their current states. The liberation from chronological constraints frees Foucault’s thinking from conceiving historical time and the historical past as ready-made dimensions. Instead, his approach becomes particularly sensitive to the exposure of historical phenomena that exhibit “multiple dating” in terms of “inventions,” “mutations,” and “renovations,” for example, in the analysis presented in the History of Sexuality (HS1, 115). These microtemporal factors can then be used to mark the temporal contours of a broader historical configuration. This kind of “contrastive treatment of time,” to use Jacques Revel’s term, is the seminal core of a particularly powerful form of constructive historical analysis, even if the constitutive role of

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the alleged “rhetorical elements” in this process is not negligible.20 For the rhetorical or conceptual construction of time is not in itself a betrayal of history. Indeed, such a procedure seems indispensable for an analysis that does not rely on units of time which are taken for granted but actually extracts the clusters of temporal divisions from the very properties of the historical relations under study. Accordingly, historian and philosopher Daniel Milo locates the fundamental originality and importance of Foucault’s procedure in the conceptual, rhetorical moment in the discontinuous treatment of time. In his estimation, the construction of historical units “does not take place by the setting of chronological boundaries, but around semantic fields of magnetization (champ magnético-sémantique). Around one or more metaphors.”21 At the level of temporality, Milo argues that this metaphorical affinity serves to make historically conceivable what is otherwise “true but unprovable (vrai improuvable).”22 He concludes that, “for Foucault, ‘rhetoric’ implies, among other strategies, a considerable machinery of metaphors. But is there any other means of making discontinuity in the strong sense imaginable and manageable than the one Foucault offers? In my opinion, the answer is negative.”23 If Foucault’s late texts and his lectures at the Collège de France on the question of the practices of the self exhibit somewhat less virtuosity with respect to his treatment of historical temporality and his choice of chronological points of reference, there are a few good reasons for this. In part, it stems from the fact that, in some of these cases, he carried out primary research anchored in textual analysis which, at least at this level, did not call for any forceful substitution or re-articulation of certain well-established historical periods (e.g., late Roman, Hellenistic, and Christian). On the other hand, however, in the mid-1970s, Foucault simply integrated the problems of periodization into the framework of genealogical analysis. In fact, within this analytical framework and style, Foucault never ceases to revisit, shift, and modify the temporal coordinates of historical analysis, as is evidenced by his use of concepts such as “chronological gap” (PT, 39; 44), “chronological twins” (PS, 135), “chronological markers” (PS, 170), “chronological displacement” (EW3, 205), “chronological arrangement” (HS2, 12), “chronological breadth” (EW1, 116), and “chronological order” (HS, 386). But this only tells us that the mode of historical analysis has here been aligned with the modes of temporal expression through a more or less controlled use of concepts and metaphors. As Milo has pointed out, Foucault’s concepts constitute temporal gravitational fields that allow for a constructive chronological ordering. For if it is true, as Foucault claims already in the Archaeology, that, for instance, the “Classical age, which has often been mentioned in archaeological analyses, is not a temporal figure that imposes its unity and empty form on all discourses,” but is rather “the name that is given to a tangle of continuities and discontinuities”

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(AK, 195, my emphasis), then the practices of conceptualization and naming clearly play an essential role in the mapping of historical temporality. The time of the past is encoded in the names of the past. Far from competing with the elements that allow for the unfolding of temporality, though, this level of historical construction is organically embedded in a historical practice that mobilizes the past, not for its resurrection, but in order to problematize the present. THE NAMES OF HISTORY: FOUCAULT’S HISTORICAL NOMINALISM When Jacques Rancière published his 1992 book The Names of History— which was originally supposed to be called “The Words of History”—many anticipated a manifesto of sorts,24 which sought to radically reclaim the truth value of historical knowledge and its political role in contemporary society. For the author had made no secret of his theoretical adversary: it was the Annales school, and specifically, the scholarly attitude by which it eliminated the socially evocative aspects of storytelling from historical discourse. While undoubtedly making the study of history more rigorous and effective, Rancière claims that the scientific approach of the Annales nonetheless neutralized historical knowledge insofar as it undermined its ability to influence society. Hence, Rancière’s objective is to re-establish the value of the words and names of history, and their capacity to promote social truth, in order to thus overcome the distinction between the past qua reality and veracity, and the past qua discourse. In other words, Rancière believes we need a “poetics of historical knowledge,” as opposed to a scientific construction. This need, however, is not imposed by some philosophical commitment, but by the interest and sense of historical writing itself; Rancière maintains that “history can become a science by remaining history only through the poetic detour that gives speech a regime of truth.”25 But to bring the instance of truth into play by means of poesis is simply to reconfigure the discourse of history “in the modes of interpretation, but also in the style of the sentences, the tense and person of the verb, the plays of the literal and figurative.”26 Moreover, the motive of truth brings an explicit political aspect to the fore—one typically played down by the Annales style of scientific history writing—insofar as a solidarity with the names and truths of the past enables those who have been silenced by history to finally be heard. It is somewhat ironic that Rancière’s book does not contain the name of that author whose perhaps most iconic historical book includes the term “words” in its title. Neither Les mots et les choses (The Order of Things) nor Foucault’s work in general is subjected to Rancière’s analysis, and this is

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perhaps because the former writer uses a model of historiography which desists from framing the poetically and rationally constructive elements in a mutually exclusive or conflicting way. One can see this in many of Foucault’s shorter writings, where the triangulation of the tropes of reality, veracity, and style enacts a historical discourse that might even meet Rancière’s criteria. For instance, “The Life of Infamous Man”— which Deleuze regards as a “masterpiece”27—aims to portray the real struggles of real characters from the past along with their circumstances of life whose historical truth consisted precisely in the desperate search for social truth. As Foucault puts it, this text focuses on people from the eighteenth century—swindlers, vagrants, rogues, and impostors—who “actually existed,” in the context of their “ill-fated and obscure” life, and whose stories, when put into words, “give rise to a certain effect of beauty mixed with dread” (EW3, 159). And while he tried not to intervene with their accounts “in the way of imagination or literature,” so as to rely as much as possible on “the mere fact that they are known to have lived,” this is precisely how he learned to acknowledge that “these discourses really crossed lives; existences were actually risked and lost in these words” (EW3, 160). At the same time, this almost Rancièrian infusion of history with poetics strikingly reveals an element of historical reality which apparently does not belong within the private regime of truth of those who actually experienced that reality, since it is only through their “clash with power” (EW3, 163) argues Foucault, that these lives could survive and be recorded. In this sense, power is just as protagonistic and real as individuals, only it has a historical design that is discernable only to the historian in its full potential, and thus, it does not simply absorb the poetic truth value of history, but rather channels it toward an arena of highly meaningful, but intangible relations. Similarly, power does not erase the names of history, nor does it silence the truth of the past; on the contrary, it discloses these in a novel conceptual form that was, however, inaccessible to those who were then living. With respect to those people, then, power enacts “the only monument they have ever been granted: it is what gives them, for the passage through time, the bit of brilliance, the brief flash that carries them to us” (EW3, 162, my emphasis). As we can see, Foucault’s approach thus does not assume an inherent incongruity between the names of history and the concepts of history; and it refrains, furthermore, from appealing to a kind of veridical, and somewhat elegiac, mediation between reality and discourse. Instead, it grants access to historical reality by means of conceptual relations that possess specific constructive rigor without having to forfeit their proper poetic character. When it comes to the philosophical treatment of history, it is customary to use a purely conceptual framework—from Hegel to Sartre—to grasp the relations that are supposed to manifest the truth of the past;

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but a comparable procedure also found a place for itself in the practice of contemporary historiography—for instance, in the work of Paul Veyne. Veyne, who is close to Foucault in many respects, understands historiography as an essentially conceptual activity, and he uses a method called “a conceptualizing history” (histoire conceptualisante)28 to displace or transcend historical accounts which, in his view, stem from a “confused totality” and “event-centered” approach. The historian’s need to project their research in conceptual terms arises alongside the need to deal with problems of typology, classification, comparison, inference, variation, and generalization. Historical inquiry cannot proceed without concepts because they are the only way to “become aware” of those historical realities that otherwise can only be vaguely intuited and inadequately thematized: “the conceptualization makes the interest of history. This interest is not just curiosity about origins or a taste for human warmth, it is more intellectual.”29 It is so intellectual, in fact, that Veyne insists that “the historical effort resembles the philosophical effort more than the scientific one. History explains less than it explicates.”30 This kind of theoretical framing seems very much in line with Foucault’s preferred approach to history. For if confronting the past means imposing an explicative agenda on the practice of source selection and periodization, then obviously this disposition must deploy a conceptual apparatus. Conceptual activity thus emerges as a further constructive component in a project that seeks not only to embrace the past in its factuality but also to demarcate it along specific lines of philosophical problematization. Here, the term “problem” denotes all those themes—for example, madness, clinic, prison, body, sexuality, and subjectivity—which Foucault transforms into historical objects and thereby subjects to examination by means of a diagnostic critique of the present. In a polemical engagement with historians concerning the problematic of his genealogy of power, Foucault distinguishes his method, which he defines as “problem-analysis,” from the conventional historiographical practice of “studying periods” (DE4, 13). On this basis, he claims that his historiographical procedure unfolds its analytical potential along the following trajectories: the selection of historical material in relation to the problem at hand; the concentration of analysis on the elements relevant to the elaboration of the problem; the identification of the relations that are instrumental to the historical exposition of the problem; and lastly, the discipline to refrain from “addressing everything” in any given investigation (DE4, 13). Foucault’s strategy thus proves to be entirely active and properly creative, but all this activity and creativity ultimately aims at a more focused appropriation and conceptualization of the past. To put it another way, the establishment of relations, the making of distinctions, and the framing of chronological and thematic contexts come together to form a possibility of thinking about the past which, by the very

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rationality of its design, highlights the significance of another type of operation undertaken by the historian, which is the application and creation of concepts. Marc Bloch noticed that “two distinct orientations almost necessarily divide the language of history.”31 On the one hand, the historian works with the language of the documents of their chosen topic and period; but on the other hand, this procedure sacrifices some of its explanatory power if it is not coupled with the categories of the historian’s own time and its interpretative terminology. It is precisely this double maneuver which lets historical research shed its status as mere storytelling or commentary and transform into a properly constructive treatment of the past. Manifestly, this requirement is voiced, in Foucault’s case, with an even more pronounced modulation. For, as we have seen, he does not merely portray a historical period or a series of events, and his definition of the object of historical research as a relation clearly precludes historiography from employing any inherited or purely descriptive language. The making of distinctions, the delineation of relations, and the creation of context represent those moments where the implementation of an autonomous conceptual matrix becomes indispensable to the historian’s labor. It is at this point that such labor takes on, as if by default, the characteristics of conceptual constructivism. As Foucault observes in The Archaeology of Knowledge, if the task of his discourse is to “make differences,” this requires him “to constitute them as objects, to analyze them, and to define their concept” (AK, 226). But the concept is more than a simple word, or a general signifier of the thematic results of historical research; it is also what first opens up the field of historical articulation, insofar as it makes visible and articulates relations—for example, at the level of the formations of knowledge, power, or subjectivity—which would otherwise remain undetectable. It is not by chance that in one of his often-quoted texts, Foucault approvingly refers to Nietzsche, whose genealogy seeks to explore “under the unique aspect of a concept” the proliferation of the events in their effective historical unfolding (EW2, 374). In his case, these concepts are the operative ones employed for the historical problematization of the present such as madness, body, human sciences, prison, and sexuality. Foucault’s historical strategy therefore promotes a distinctively nominalist position, and in the second half of the 1970s, the term finally enters his vocabulary. It should immediately be emphasized, however, that his nominalism in no way implies that history instantiates some purely “categorical” realm or could ever be associated with a conceptual dimension detached from the reality of the past. This is why, during one of his lectures at the Collège de France, Foucault rejects the traditional philosophical framing of the problematic of “nominalism” and opts instead to understand the

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latter as a “refusal of universals” (GL, 80). At the same time, the nominalist approach to history, influenced to some extent by Paul Veyne’s position, remains integral to his reflections as a “test” method (BB, 317–318). This just indicates further that Foucault’s nominalism is thoroughly historical rather than metaphysical, which is to say that it assumes that the historical past embodies a reality that can only be captured through names and concepts.32 It bears repeating here that these concepts correspond not to the elements or properties of purely categorical reality but to those relations which form historical reality and make it explicit. To this extent, the thesis of nominalism is fully consistent with Foucault’s contention that historical relations constitute a reality and agency that cannot be absorbed by the reality proper to either historically existing objects or historical actors. As Foucault himself understands, then, what is at stake in this methodological nominalism is precisely “the effects, on historical knowledge, of a nominalist critique arrived at by way of a historical analysis” (EW3, 328). If historical nominalism works at the level of conceptualization and semantic composition, it is a legitimate and constructive element of those historiographical practices which seek to liberate the past from its ideohistorical or commemorative structure. Arguably, such a procedure is already in effect in the problematic and methodology of History of Madness, as the introduction to the first edition of this work stresses the need to harbor a “language without support” (langage sans appui) (HM, xxxv). In other words, this means that the phenomenon of madness can only be addressed by using a language that is “quite neutral (fairly free from scientific terminology, and social or moral options),” but which still remains “sufficiently open for the decisive words through which the truth of madness and of reason are constituted” (HM, xxxv). It could be said, then, that Foucault here attempts to explore the multiplicity of social relations and events that produce the historically detectable division of reason and unreason, all from the exclusive perspective of the problematic concept of “madness,” while relying on the two distinct orientations of the language of history detected by Bloch. But we can also see how the constructive conceptual demarcation of a phenomenon (madness) makes a critical contribution to the exploration and description of its complex historical “reality.” To this extent, this approach, as Veyne has already pointed out, comprises a genuinely nominalist position:33 for the analytic language of madness—as is shown in The Archaeology of Knowledge—is neither “formalizing” nor “interpretive” (AK, 151) insofar as it sets forth relations of historical intelligibility through the very act of designation. In this way, Foucault can claim that his method is a kind of “rewriting” of history, so long as this is understood as “a regulated transformation of what has already been written” (AK, 156) and not as some kind of free-floating or textually constructive intervention.

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Of all Foucault’s genealogical works, Discipline and Punish and The Will to Know are those which most intensely and consciously embrace a distinctive historiographical terminology. These analyses are pervaded by a powerful metaphoricity which transmits the analytical preferences of a problematizing vision into the relevant historical source material. According to Daniel Milo, Foucault’s discourse in Discipline and Punish creates “semantic fields of gravitation” around one or more metaphors, which set the historical context and identify the phenomena to be examined. In particular, Milo distinguishes two groups of metaphors at work here: the “ritual-theatrical” metaphors and the “technical-economic” metaphors, the role of which is not merely rhetorical but genuinely constitutive, inasmuch as they make possible a common analytical horizon for a series of very different historical phenomena and areas (social, legal, institutional, and technological), and thereby illuminating a dimension of the past that is largely inaccessible to other kinds of historiographical procedures.34 Likewise, Michel De Certeau hails Foucault’s strategy as a radical and emancipatory application of a historiographical method which, in his view, enables a new type of conceptual and philosophical understanding but also establishes a kind of “theoretical panopticon” which grounds a comprehensive yet focused historical interpretation of a past social landscape.35 The investigation of the phenomenon of sexuality in the first volume of The History of Sexuality is similar in many respects. When outlining the methodological considerations of this book, Foucault states that the question of sexuality should not be analyzed according to the rhetoric of repression or the terminology of psychoanalysis; rather, he insists that “we must conceptualize the deployment of sexuality on the basis of the techniques of power that are contemporary with it” (HS1, 150). This implies, then, that one can “use its mechanisms as a grid of intelligibility of the social order” (HS1, 93). But this tends to reinforce the prevailing thesis that power is a system of real relations of force that permeate and determine the functioning of a society at the level of norms and collective behavior, and so is only perceptible to the historian. For Foucault, however, relations require problematization and a corresponding practice of conceptualization if they are to become discernible in their proper historical character. Power, therefore, is not simply historical given in Foucault’s discourse: it is a name that simultaneously signifies one quality of reality for those who actually participated in a given social actuality, and another, different quality for those historians who subsequently go on to analyze this reality as a system of relations. “One needs to be nominalistic, no doubt, [. . .] power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society”

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(HS1, 93). Concepts as historical names are here at the service of a historical thinking that is committed to conceptual construction as the only possible approach to the discontinuous and heterogenous reality of the past. Moreover, such an approach has no need to urge a return to the “poetic quality” of historical knowledge, as in Rancière: the Foucauldian historiography is inherently rooted in the art of concepts. NOTES 1. Foucault, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. EWF 1. 117. 2. In his reconstruction of the archaeological project, David Webb pays special attention to the thinkers who may have influenced Foucault, such as Bachelard, Cavaillès and Serres, but makes no mention of the representatives of the Annales school. D. Webb, Foucault’s Archaeology. Science and Transformation. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013. 3. Chartier Roger, Foucault et les historiens, les historiens et Foucault. In Au Risque de Foucault, 236. 4. Georges Canguilhem, The Death of Man, or Exhaustion of the Cogito? Trans. Catherine Porter. In Gary Gutting (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Foucault. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, 77. Foucault, in his 1968 text “Reply to a Question,” alludes to borrowing the concept of the monument from Canguilhem, which he contrasts with the “commentary-like” treatment of past discourses, noting that “I borrow this word from Mr. Canguilhem. It describes better than I did myself what I wanted to do.” Foucault, Dits et écrits I, 682. For further background on this concept in Foucault, see Luca Paltrinieri, Archéologie. Le Télémaque 48, no. 2 (2015): 15–30. 5. Jacques Le Goff, L’Histoire Nouvelle. In Jacques Le Goff (ed.), La Nouvelle Histoire. Paris: Éditions Complexe, 2006, 63. 6. Cf. Huguette et Pierre Chaunu, Séville et l’Atlantique (1504–1650). Paris: SEVPEN, 12 vol., 1955–1960. 7. Foucault argues that “when they deal with documents, historians do not treat them as something to be interpreted, that is, they don’t look behind or beyond them for a hidden meaning. They treat the document with a view to the system of its internal and external relations” (EW2, 280). 8. Cf. “une grande revanche de l’intelligence sur le donné.” Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft, 53 (translation modified). 9. Cf. For example, Jacques Léonard, L’historien et le philosophe: À propos de “Surveiller et punir. Naissance de la prison.” Annales historiques de la Révolution française n°228 (1977): 163–181; Jacques Revel, Le moment historiographique. In Luce Giard (ed.), Michel Foucault, lire l’œuvre. Grenoble: Jérôme Millon, 1992, 83–96. 10. Cf. Deleuze, Foucault, 16–17. 11. Ibid., 18. 12. Deleuze, Foucault, 21 (translation modified).

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13. It is in this sense that Samuel Talcot talks about the “monument” in Foucault “that attests to the existence of the episteme as an inexhaustible, because indefinite, field of relations between discursive practices.” Talcot, Episteme. In David Scott (ed.), Understanding Foucault, Understanding Modernism. London: Bloomsbury, 2017, 242. 14. Apart from Pierre Chaunu, who Foucault explicitly names in this text, it is clear that the main inspiration behind the references to the “imperceptible” temporality of economic cycles and social processes is Fernand Braudel’s historical theory of time. Cf. Fernand Braudel, History and the Social Sciences: The Longue Durée; and Toward a Serial History: Seville and the Atlantic, 1504–1650, both in Braudel, On History, 25–54; 91–104. On the constructive treatment of historical time in the Annales tradition, see also: Jacques Le Goff, Time, Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages. Trans. A. Goldhammer. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1980. 15. Only in The Order of Things does Foucault seem to offer a somewhat rigorous chronological account of these periods. There, the transition between the Renaissance and the Classical periods occurs in the 1660s, while the Modern period takes place between 1775 and 1825. Cf. Foucault, The Order of Things, 63, 239. 16. Jacques Le Goff, L’Histoire Nouvelle. In La Nouvelle Histoire, 64. 17. The debates which continued up until the 1990s concerning the Foucauldian historical periodization are insightfully summarized in Clare O’Farell’s Foucault, Historian or Philosopher? 44–64. 18. Daniel Milo examines different historical periodizations in a global context, arguing for a conception of “experimental historiography” that deliberately uses periodization as a scientific hypothesis. To do so, Milo draws heavily on Foucault. D. Milo, Trahir le temps (histoire). Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1991. See in particular chapter 8 of this work: “Undated Periods: The Metaphors of Discipline and Punish,” 147–178. 19. Foucault discusses the various periodizations of the relations that constitute the phenomenon of madness in his lecture “Madness and Society” (EW2, 335–342). 20. In one insightful essay, Jacques Revel expresses his doubts about Foucault’s practice of periodization: after noting that “Foucault’s time is not a simple chronological time,” he observes that, in Foucault’s view, “this contrastive construction of time is above all a rhetorical product” whose use is not entirely convincing, and whose procedure requires further justification. Jacques Revel, Le moment historiographique. In Luce Giard (ed.), Michel Foucault, lire l’œuvre. Grenoble: Jérôme Milion, 1992, 95. 21. Milo, Trahir le temps (histoire), 149. 22. Ibid., 152. 23. Ibid., 170. 24. Jacques Rancière, The Names of History. On the Poetics of Knowledge. Trans. Hassan Melehy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994. The first French edition was published in 1992 under the title Les mots de l’historie. 25. Ibid., 89. 26. Ibid. 27. Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations 1972–1990. Trans. M. Joughin. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995, 90, 108, 150.

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28. Paul Veyne, L’histoire conceptualisante. In Jacques Le Goff and Pierre Nora (eds.), Faire de l’histoire, vol. I. Paris: Gallimard, 1974, 92–132. 29. Ibid., 123. 30. Ibid., 94. 31. Bloch, The Historian’s Craft, 131. 32. Guy Lardreau excellently outlines the problems of historical “nominalism” in relation to Georges Duby’s interpretative method, showing how this approach imposes scholarly and ethical demands on the work of historians and how it can be used to transform the conceptual framework of overarching historical models, such as Marxism. Guy Lardreau, Georges Duby ou la nouvelle positivité de l’histoire. In G. Duby and G. Lardreau (eds.), Dialogues. Paris: Flammarion, 1980, 5–35. 33. Paul Veyne, Michel Foucault, sa pensée, sa personne. Paris: Albin Michel, 2008, 26. 34. Milo, Trahir le temps (histoire), 152. 35. Michel de Certeau, Microtechniques et discours panoptique: un quiproquo. In De Certeau, Histoire et psychanalyse entre science et fiction. Paris: Gallimard, 1987, 46.

4 ✛

The Mapping of Being Foucault’s Historical Ontology

HISTORICAL CONDITION AND INDIRECT ONTOLOGY Few statements from the late writings of Michel Foucault have been afforded more attention than those in which he labels his own work as “historical ontology.” For these declarations do not merely reaffirm and expand the orientation of Foucault’s earlier remarks on the explicit philosophical bearings of his own thinking but also serve to cast them in a brand-new light. Most noteworthy in this regard is a lecture given at the Collège de France in 1983, in which Foucault for the first time describes, with direct allusions to the Kantian problematic, his own philosophical project as an “ontology of the present, of present reality, an ontology of modernity, an ontology of ourselves” (GS, 21). Subsequently, this conceptualization reappears in a different talk on Kant’s “What is Enlightenment?,” wherein the project of a “historical ontology of ourselves” is unfolded along the following lines of inquiry: “How are we constituted as subjects of our own knowledge? How are we constituted as subjects who exercise or submit to power relations? How are we constituted as moral subjects of our own actions?” (EW1, 318). Finally, the same topic is revisited in an interview where Foucault retrospectively likens the project of “historical ontology” to his project of genealogy, inasmuch as it is a type of research that examines, in a historical framework, the question of “the constitution of ourselves” in terms of knowledge, power, and ethics (EW1, 263). In these formulations, we find that Foucault’s prior philosophical commitments are confirmed insofar as the problematic of historical ontology 85

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is still clearly understood as a confrontation with our historical “actuality” by means of a critique of the “present.” But what is certainly new here is that instead of referring to Nietzschean genealogy or to his own previously voiced convictions about the “present” as a privileged site of philosophic-historical research, Foucault explicitly connects this set of questions to the Kantian problematic of critical philosophy. At the same time, however, Foucault also distances himself from Kant by stressing that, in his understanding, philosophy as a critical endeavor should not inquire into the general conditions of possibility of knowledge or the formal conditions of truth, but should rather attempt, in the face of a given historical situation, to answer the following questions: “what is present reality? what is the present field of our experiences? what is the present field of possible experiences?” (GS, 20). What makes all this simultaneously stimulating and challenging is that in a talk entitled “The Culture of Self,” Foucault takes up this theme within a historical framework that divides modern philosophy into two opposing orientations: thus on the one hand, we find the projects of a “formal ontology of truth” or the “critical analysis of knowledge” linked to traditional philosophical questions: “what is the world? what is man? what is truth? what is knowledge?,” and on the other, a series of impassioned, concrete investigations which find expression in questions such as “what is our actuality? What are we as part of this actuality? What is the purpose of our philosophical activity insofar as we belong to our actuality?” (QC, 84). And while in this context, he does not fail to make brief references to Kant—and also highlight the role of Fichte, Hegel, Nietzsche, Weber, Comte, and even the Husserl of the Crisis in interrogating actuality—Foucault clearly, and to some extent distinctively, situates himself on a philosophical horizon that prominently features the present as its primary point of reference. For it is the present in its historical constitution which is supposed to accord the “historical ontology of ourselves” its proper focus and stake, and thereby ultimately allow it to be framed as a “critical history of thought” (QC, 84). However, it is undeniable that the use of the term “ontology” in this particular context is rather unusual, not only because it is almost entirely absent from Foucault’s earlier philosophical vocabulary, and not only because it is a term which is not at all characteristic of the orientation of Kantian critical philosophy, but above all because it raises the question as to which doctrine of “being” or “existence” could possibly correspond to a kind of historical thinking that seeks to anchor its own interrogations about the past in the constellation of the events and the meaning of its own present. What would be that distinctive ontological motif which could serve as the historical connection between “past,” “actuality,” and “ourselves”? Now, the fact that Foucault often links the question of this motif to his earlier historical research on madness, medicine, crime,

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punishment, and sexuality partially answers this point. For when he seeks to shed light on his own ontological orientation, noting as he does that “any ontological history of ourselves must analyze three sets of relationships: our relationships to truth, our relationships to obligation, our relationships to ourselves and to others” (QC, 84), he also argues that this framing takes on ontological values only by engaging the historical dimension of thinking. As Foucault puts it, “it is through thought that we are beings” who seek to acquire the truth, who accept or refuse obligations, and who have relationships with themselves and others (QC, 84). He cautions, however, that this does not mean that his investigations seek to answer the general question “What is a thinking being?” Rather, it is a matter of relating the question of being to the basic condition of historicity through the mediation of the historical question of thinking, precisely by asking, “How did the history of our thinking make us who we are?” or “how can we analyze how we have formed ourselves through the history of our thinking?” (QC, 84–85). No less important, and in fact crucial, is Foucault’s insistence that “thinking” in this context does not denote some kind of privileged intellectual capacity or experience or a theoretical disposition based on specific cognitive attitudes; it is not related to “philosophy, theoretical thinking or scientific knowledge” QC, 85). The thinking which is at stake here is rather constituted at the level of social practices, institutionalized behavior, and the rationalities that permeate them, and thus as a dimension that informs the relations between individuals and groups in a society. Thinking is a social practice, which has its own historically specific rules and modus operandi. This is why he can claim that, in exploring the question of our actuality in its historical setting, his “problem is to analyze through social practices, institutions, types of conduct, what has been the relation to truth, the relation to law and to obligation, the relation to ourselves” (QC, 85). All of this shows that Foucault’s ontological project, at least in these late formulations, intends to avoid privileging either subjective or objective beings, subjects, or entities, as well as any intermediate dimension, for example, any kind of “world” or “lifeworld,” whereby the originary interrelation between subjects and entities could ultimately unfold. It is an ontology that is driven mainly by indirect targets and effects because it has neither an explicit experiential or categorical focal point nor even a specific method. If anything, the principal aim of this ontology is simply to be historical, inasmuch as it seeks to bring the present within its scope through the discontinuous mediation of the past. Paradoxically, however, this implies that the notions of beings and “Being,” or those of entities and existence, linked in any way to subjective or objective positions, are hereby subordinated to the notion of historical change. In fact, if anything, then it is the multifaceted dimension of history that provides the final

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framing and concrete content to this ontological problematic, which also answers the question of why one cannot find an “ontology of history” in Foucault. History as such proves to be an inadequate ontological object or category because it simply names the uncategorizable multiplicity of ways in which the relations of objects and individuals in a given place and time are distributed according to their own local circumstances and necessities. If an ontology is possible in this framework, it can only be done indirectly, by asking questions about the existence of specific historical objects (e.g., discourses), or the meaning of being in specific historical situations (e.g., our own actuality). In any case, one obvious way of indirectly exploring Foucault’s ontological commitments would be to contrast his approach with similar tendencies found in Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, or even Sartre. Such an approach can certainly help to identify the points where the Foucauldian treatment of history comes into contact with an ontological problematic. Furthermore, a procedure like this could thus also be used to unpack the ontological presuppositions or concerns lurking in some of Foucault’s texts and translate them into explicit theses. This is one of the most common approaches in those readings which seek to elaborate Foucault’s concepts of “being” and “existence” in the various phases and layers of his thinking. In this regard, the Foucault-Heidegger relationship usually receives particularly strong attention—and not unjustifiably.1 For while Foucault’s reservations about Heidegger’s early existential ontology are evident from the outset, and are at times even explicitly expressed, this same skepticism does not necessarily apply to the later, historical orientation of Heidegger’s thinking. In particular, affinities between Foucault’s historical project and the “history of Being” appear particularly feasible when it comes to the question of the unfolding of the different historical phases of knowledge and power. This rapprochement is further supported by Foucault’s late admission that, for him, “Heidegger has always been the essential thinker” (FL, 470). The acknowledgment of this influence has thus motivated various attempts to bring Foucault’s ideas into direct conversation with certain claims of Heideggerian ontology. For instance, while The Order of Things can be read as a critique of Heidegger’s phenomenologically secured existential analysis, it can also be argued that, insofar as it confronts the concept of “existential finitude” with the “spatiality of the body, the yawning of desire, and the time of language” (OT, 343), there is a certain likeness in the way that Heidegger and Foucault treat historicity as an overarching category of knowledge and being. On this basis, it is argued that this particular text, while “drawing heavily upon Heidegger in formulating the very notion of an episteme and its ontological import,” also seeks to “rewrite the history of Being as an epistemic

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history of the experience of order.”2 In part, this claim may be supported by the more radical contention that Foucault’s “archaeological” distinction between connaissance and savoir—which is especially significant for the problematic which leads from The Order of Things through to The Archaeology of Knowledge—operates more or less explicitly on the model of Heidegger’s notion of the ontological difference. From this perspective, Foucault’s archaeology ought therefore to be understood primarily as an “ontological theory of knowledge,” which includes the question of historicity in its scope precisely under this heading.3 Finally, an even more sweeping, albeit proportionally less convincing, approach to the relationship between these two philosophers is that which seeks to elucidate Foucault’s notion of “power” in relation to Heidegger’s idea of “Being.”4 On this reading, it is the function of these concepts that provides the basis for comparison, as well as the ontological contours of the historical dimension they set in motion. Nevertheless, the major weakness of these interpretations stems from the fact that nowhere in Foucault’s work can we discern that same comprehensive—or rather, in terms of its ontological emergence—substantive and epochal vision of Being as History which pervades Heidegger’s thought. One should thus be cautious of subscribing to the idea that “Being is, for Foucault, revealed as experiences, not from the standpoint of the individual phenomenological subject, but as a range or field of possible ways of thinking and acting (i.e., a world),”5 if only because it is not at all clear what the Foucauldian equivalent of a unified concept of “world” would be in the context of archaeologically or genealogically driven historical explorations. Perhaps slightly less prominent and challenging, but by no means less important, are the connections that can be established between some of Foucault’s ontologically oriented assumptions and Merleau-Ponty’s corresponding theses concerning being and history. It should be immediately noted, however, that Foucault’s rejection, on epistemological grounds, of a unified phenomenological or experiential account of the human condition and historical reality—a rejection which is especially prominent in his early works—can also be applied to Merleau-Ponty’s thought. The critical remarks in The Archaeology of Knowledge that argue against any conception of discourse which would expose the relationship between meaning and knowledge as dimension of a tacitly and uniformly shaped experiential realm6 also clearly target any ontological framework wherein meaning, perception, and the world of bodies and social relations are understood as conjointly articulated dimensions. This kind of framework is certainly not something that is alien to Merleau-Ponty at any point of his thinking. At the same time, however, it is often argued that both Foucault’s historical endeavor and Merleau-Ponty’s late thinking feature philosophical elements that tend to mutually complement or reinforce each other, or

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at least establish a common ground for a dialogue.7 It is in this vein, for instance, that in a wide-ranging and simultaneously composed analysis, Judith Revel tries to highlight the points of connection that can make Foucault’s historical thinking and Merleau-Ponty’s late ontology stand representatives of the same philosophical problematic. According to Revel, it is the idea of chiasmus that provides a common ground for the two thinkers, insofar as they both ultimately present history as an ambiguous product of determination and freedom.8 In this sense, argues Revel, Foucault comes close to Merleau-Ponty’s ontological insights, because he, too, presents history as a dimension which, while not bounded or determined by anything from the outside, produces from within itself all that is in the final analysis irreducible to it: “it is like a folding of history on itself: nothing is foreign to it, everything is immersed in it and produced, and yet its own fecundity generates what, coming only from it, cannot be reduced to it.”9 Taking up a similar line of thought, another interpretation that draws on Merleau-Ponty’s notions of “indirect ontology” and “vertical history” attempts to establish a link with Foucault’s historical thinking by showing that ultimately openness and incompleteness are fundamental ontological determinants for both philosophers.10 But this perspective, while undoubtedly joining the two thinkers in a productive dialogue—or, as the authors would put it, in a “constructive dissonance”—also reveals malgré tout that the dialectical motifs in the late Merleau-Ponty’s historical thinking, or declarations such as “history is the house of Being,”11 may actually render his approach unworkable for Foucault’s own ambitions. Because while the motif of “historical openness” may appear here as a common feature, the possibility remains that the focus of this openness is radically different in each case. According to Foucault, the ontological world-concept grounded in perception, embodiment, and the linguistic dispersion of meaning, which never forfeits its phenomenological attestability, is to be replaced by a historical and historically shifting modeling of being in terms of knowledge, power, and self—a modeling that, as we will see, needs no recourse to any overarching ontological notion of world or Being.12 From this point of view, Deleuze’s thought-provoking observation that Foucault first converts “phenomenology into epistemology”13 and then transforms “epistemology to strategy”14 may prove particularly instructive. Although this interpretation emphasizes that “Foucault found great theoretical inspiration in Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty,”15 it also points out that, in contrast to these two others, for Foucault, it is also a matter of radically relocating the focus of ontological interrogations. In Deleuze’s interpretation, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty’s conception of the “fold” or “reversibility” of Being is one that keeps refining and pushing the model of intentionality toward its very limits, whereas Foucault goes beyond

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this by thinking in terms of different figures of Being that, despite all their mutual implications, bring forth indifferent or even competing modes of being.16 Knowledge, power, and the self, understood as modes of being, are not historically different manifestations of the same Being but of very different possibilities of existence as subjects and objects in specific, historically given circumstances.17 And behind the latter, there is no unified horizon, either in the form of an “ontological difference” or the chiasmic articulations of what counts as “visible and invisible,” which would rule the possibilities, in each situation, of coming into being and ceasing to be, or of acting, thinking, and speaking. History, radically conceived, takes us to the threshold of the multiplication of being, and not toward ontological univocity. Ultimately, this all suggests that Foucault’s historical ontology rejects any inclusive articulative dimension between being and historicity, and any kind of reversibility or complicity that would subsume the relations between the “present,” “ourselves,” and the facts of “history” under a unified movement or pattern. Being historical here refers precisely to an ontological characteristic that must be devoid of any instance of constitutive or categorical unity grounded in the self, time, or the world. Thus, from this ontological perspective, discontinuity translates into indeterminacy, which implies determinacy only at local or regional levels of historical reality. In this respect, it could even be said that the specific questions of “historical ontology,” which Foucault calls compelling in his later texts—that is, the questions of knowledge, power, and ethics—are not in fact overarching “final” questions, but the regional products of the very historical trajectory that our culture has pursued thus far at the level of its social development. In conclusion, we venture that if, for Foucault, being is constituted historically, and as that of knowledge, power, or self, then one must first of all raise the question of the mode of being of history. But this is only possible in an indirect way because history never presents itself in its “pure” form, but only ever as formations and articulations of relations and practices which are heterogeneous in themselves. While studying these relations may allow us to recapture what it means to “exist” as either an object of knowledge, force of action, or experience of self within historically formed social circumstances; nevertheless, history is not Being, and being does not equal History. Talking about historical existence—as argued by Foucault about “discourse” in The Archaeology of Knowledge—is only possible in relation to specific entities which are suited to different modes of historical emergence, becoming, and recurrence. In this sense, Foucault’s key ontological term is not “being” or “existence,” but “mode of being,” which always refers to multivalent, always diverse, always relative, always specific relations referring to ways and forms of objective

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and subjective instantiations. In this framework, even the consciousness and the world are imprints of diverse and historically changing relationships. Modes of being can therefore exist without Being because there is no prior structure that could determine which experimental or ontological configuration they belong to.18 They have no distinctive ontological sovereignty, only a history. But ultimately this also means that, for Foucault, history only becomes suitable for ontological thematization if this is done indirectly and regionally, and never “fundamentally.”19 Historical being is only given as a function of concrete domains of historical beings. In other words, historical existence only lets itself be captured through the construction of retroactive ontological models which focus on the past from the vantage point of the present, and thereby reveal the underlying historical positivities as a heterogeneous set of relations. For this reason, an experience or hermeneutically driven uncovering of Being as such cannot serve as a guiding thread within the reconstructive process. And that is why, according to Foucault, such a task calls, not for a historical Destruktion as in Heidegger, nor for a dialectical or hyper-dialectical involvement as in Merleau-Ponty, but for a multitude of concrete, historical inquiries which are to be carried out circuitously and regionally. FOUCAULT’S CRITIQUE OF PHENOMENOLOGY Clarifying the relationship between Foucault and phenomenology may be important not only because this relationship may shed light on the often obscured ontological motifs of his thought, but also because phenomenology emerges as a seminal philosophical treatment of the themes of “present” and “presence” and that of actual existence as influenced by historical traditions. On this basis, it can be seen as one of the main adversaries of the philosophical agenda of the “history of the present.” This can explain why Foucault has an ambiguous relationship with phenomenology, to say the least. Even a nominal glance at his basic topic reveals that phenomenology is something to which Foucault’s thinking is at once profoundly averse and vigorously attracted. The anti-phenomenological tone of some of his concepts is obvious, for example, the notions of “discourse,” “knowledge,” and “power,” while in others it is not difficult to detect a certain affinity to it, for example, the notions of “experience,” “body,” and “subjectivity.” The issue is further complicated by the fact that in many of his reflections and interviews, and especially in the first phase of his career, Foucault characterizes his philosophical project as overtly “anti-phenomenological” in both its orientation and design. Nevertheless, many contemporary interpreters still contend that Foucault is best understood in terms of a phenomenological framework.20

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Revisiting the question of Foucault’s relationship to phenomenological thinking with these difficulties in mind could thus prove to be useful; not only because it would provide an opportunity to coherently reconstruct Foucault’s fragmentary objections against phenomenology and existential philosophy, but also because it would allow us to see that, in fact, he had a genuine and profound understanding of what was at stake in this confrontation. Indeed, we might find that Foucault’s dismissive attitude toward phenomenological philosophy was not a circumstantial or ill-conceived motif in his thinking, but that in most cases, he felt justified in his reluctance to make concessions—even though, in all probability, he was not fully aware of the scope and impact of phenomenological research in France and elsewhere during his lifetime. This interpretive perspective could thus help us to appreciate Foucault’s ontological commitments and reservations as elements of a deliberate philosophical strategy. Thanks to some recent publications, it is now known that during his formative years, and even as a young researcher, Foucault engaged in an intensive dialogue with the works of Edmund Husserl.21 Furthermore, his research on Ludwig Binswanger’s phenomenological psychiatry reveals a deep familiarity not only with Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology but also with Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit.22 Of course, his understanding of these phenomenological achievements was influenced very early on by the French interpretive tradition that was taking shape at that time. As Foucault recalls in an interview, “I belong to a generation of people for whom the horizon of reflection was defined by Husserl in a general way, Sartre more precisely and Merleau-Ponty even more precisely” (FL, 55).23 Thus, it would be reasonable to suggest that the emergence of Foucault’s critical understanding of phenomenology was mingled, if not overshadowed by, with his understanding of the existentialist thinkers in the 1960s. As is well-known, following the publication of The Order of Things, which could itself be considered an anti-existentialist treatise, Foucault engaged in an open polemic with Sartre concerning the concepts of “man” and “history,” and their relevance for contemporary philosophizing.24 But this debate also served as an opportunity for Foucault to engage critically with phenomenology through existentialism, as shown by an interview in which he rejects both the Sartrean thesis of the cogito and the “existence of a pre-reflexive cogito” as modes of a philosophical “totalization” that embodied the most essential ambitions of the phenomenological approach (RC, 94). With that being said, it is also plausible to contend that the real target of Foucault’s critical discussion in The Order of Things was not, in fact, phenomenology as such, nor even existentialism, but above all, the thinking of Maurice Merleau-Ponty.25 The title of the second chapter of that work, “The Prose of the World,” is suggestive in this regard,26 but on the other

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hand, it could also indicate that Foucault’s critique of phenomenology actually derived its basic orientation from Merleau-Ponty in the first place. In any case, Foucault does not shy away from acknowledging MerleauPonty’s merits in a way that he disregards to do with Husserl, Heidegger, or Sartre. For instance, in a late interview, he complimentarily portrays Merleau-Ponty as a phenomenologist of “signification” rather than a phenomenologist of the cogito and reminds us that he was the first in France to introduce Saussure to the “cultured public” and was therefore also the first to raise the question of language in phenomenology (EW1, 436). In another text, Foucault claims that Merleau-Ponty’s work “established a meeting point between the academic philosophical tradition and phenomenology,” and in this way “extended existential discourse into specific domains, exploring the question of the world’s intelligibility, for example, the intelligibility of reality” (EW3, 247). Finally, Foucault reaffirms his appreciation for Merleau-Ponty during a reflection where he claims that, generally speaking, phenomenology has embarked upon two distinct paths. On the one hand, he argues, phenomenology, for Husserl in particular, encompassed “an interrogation of science, in its foundation, its rationality, its history,” while on the other hand, it evolved as a “more existential phenomenology of the lived-through (le vecu).” But ultimately, Foucault insists, it was “the work of Merleau-Ponty” which attempted to “recapture the two dimensions of phenomenology” (EW3, 252). In the wake of these observations, it becomes clear that Foucault disagrees philosophically with the orientation of phenomenology on several points. First of all, and in particular, he problematizes the fact that a phenomenologist’s experience is basically a way of “bringing a reflective gaze to bear on some object of lived experience in order to grasp its meanings” (EW3, 241). On the other hand, and in the context of a more systematic diagnostic snapshot, he complains that phenomenology itself is thus an “attempt to recapture the meaning of everyday experience in order to rediscover the sense in which the subject (. . .) is responsible, in its transcendental functions, for founding that experience together with its meanings” (EW3, 241). On this ground, it is easy to see that Foucault’s main line of confrontation with phenomenology revolves around the role that the “subject” plays in meaning formation and in the constitution of reality in general—and especially how this ensures that language, science, and indeed knowledge, in general, can only ever be delineated as the depository of a relation that is ultimately supported by that same subject. This critical approach can be traced back to a number of interrelated objections to the phenomenological contention that subjectivity is the founding dimension of all that is lived, said, and done. In fact, the claim that phenomenology is unable to break with its anthropological presuppositions, and therefore, ineluctably remains a philosophy of “man” or “subject,” is already

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a basic feature of Foucault’s thinking in The Order of Things. In that work, he argues, contra Husserlian phenomenology, that “it is probably impossible to give empirical contents transcendental value, or to displace them in the direction of a constituent subjectivity, without giving rise, at least silently, to an anthropology” (OT, 270). The book thus portrays phenomenology as a kind of existentialism avant la lettre, for “even though it was first suggested by way of anti-psychologism (. . .) it has never been able to exorcize its insidious kinship, its simultaneously promising and threatening proximity, to empirical analyses of man” (OT, 350). This argument, that phenomenology is not simply a philosophy of experience, but also inevitably entails a revaluation of subjectivity anchored in the figure of the cogito, is a recurring motif in Foucault’s critique: “although phenomenology—he argues—brought the body, sexuality, death, and the perceived world into the field of analysis, the cogito remained central to it” (EW2, 447). But in a more provocative and forward-looking way, he also points out that if it is essentially the “subject” that is supposed to give meaning to the world, then one can rightly ask, “Can it be said that the subject is the only possible form of existence? Can’t there be experiences in the course of which the subject is no longer posited, in its constitutive relations, as what makes it identical with itself?” (EW3, 248). The tenor of these questions indicates Foucault’s dissatisfaction with the restriction that phenomenology places upon the possibilities of experience and knowledge due to its privileging of subjectivity. Thus, it is understandable that this tone becomes even more pointed when it comes to the matter of history and the foundations of historical reality, because in this context, the privileging of the subject’s position becomes a major obstacle to understanding history, because in this case the question precisely is the following: “is the phenomenological, transhistorical subject able to provide an account of the historicity of reason?” (EW1, 438). In particular, what seems to bother Foucault here is the fact that, for phenomenology, the history of “reason” or “knowledge” remains indebted to a subjective or intersubjective temporal process of constitution or sense-making. For him, however, it is by no means self-evident that the concept of history and its basic operations at the level of meaning-making presuppose a subjective grounding. Accordingly, Foucault responds with a radical refusal to admit any correlative a priori dimension between the objective and subjective elements of history that would allow for a constitutive reduction of the former to the latter. Instead, he aims to articulate a philosophical perspective from which both subjects and objects could be revealed as constituted through historical processes. As he explains in an interview, “where I establish myself farthest in relation to phenomenology, it is to the extent that what I try to do is rather the correlative constitution, throughout history, of objects and the subject” (CM, 110). Thus, his

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main concern is to “reconstruct the way possible objects of knowledge are constituted, and on the other hand how the subject constitutes itself, that is to say, what I call subjectification (l’assujettissement)” (CM, 110). However, Foucault warns that with this approach, it is precisely not a question of cultivating “a historical phenomenology of different intuitions of the world, different modes of perceiving objects, while maintaining a fixed subject” (CM, 110–111). This last remark is of particular importance because it implicitly addresses Foucault’s understanding of the historical subject in a way that clearly distinguishes his approach from the phenomenological projects of Heidegger, Sartre, and even Merleau-Ponty. For Foucault, the “historical constitution of the subject” means something radically different than a sophisticated contextualization of human existence within the world that enables it to perform its proper perceptual, linguistic, and practical capacities in a historically established way. History must therefore not be an attribute or context of the subject but a force that shapes its own mode of being. However, in principle, Foucault has nothing against the term “historical contextualization” in this framework, so long as it refers to “something more than the simple relativization of the phenomenological subject” (EW3, 118). As he strongly emphasizes: I don’t believe the problem can be solved by historicizing the subject as posited by the phenomenologists, fabricating a subject that evolves through the course of history. One has to dispense with the constituent subject, to get rid of the subject itself, that’s to say, to arrive at an analysis that can account for the constitution of the subject within a historical framework. (EW3, 118)

The radicality of Foucault’s position regarding the debased status of the historical subject represents a fundamental divergence from phenomenology’s ontological conceptions of historicity. At issue here is the fact that they each accord a completely different meaning to the term “historical existence.” In phenomenology, this concept usually covers the whole realm of subjective or intersubjective dispositions owing to which the self and its world acquire their historical significance, continuity, and complexity. For the early Heidegger, it is the ecstatic temporal disposition of Dasein that allows for the genesis of historicity as existential modus, and consequently, history itself as a form of knowledge or world-forming condition. In Sartre’s early ontology, history arises insofar as “my beingfor-others as the upsurge of my consciousness into being has the character of an absolute event,” because “this event is at once an historization—for I temporalize myself as presence to others—and a condition of all history.”27 And for Merleau-Ponty, the historical character of existence is constituted through the being with others but only on the condition if “along with sensory fields and the world as the field of all fields,

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consciousness discovers in itself the opacity of an originary past.”28 Contrary to these views, however, in Foucault, “historical existence” refers to the production, subsistence, and transformation of specific social arrangements which include—within their own realm of temporality, spatiality, and meaning—events of vision, discourse, and action that condition the emergence of various historical forms of objectivity and subjectivity.29 Of all Foucault’s theoretical writings, The Archaeology of Knowledge undoubtedly goes the furthest in undermining phenomenology, especially inasmuch as the latter seeks, at the foundational level of experience and temporality, to impose a barrier against the unreserved historical conditioning of knowledge, language, and discourse. The principal aim of this work is to establish a position which can account for the constitutive role of language and history at the level of discursive social interactions. However, in order to properly articulate such a position, it was first necessary to eradicate all those elements from the notions of language and history with phenomenological connotations. Thus, if Foucault was obliged to embrace the historical formation of discourse as a “mode of being” of its own, then it had to be done “in the discontinuity that no teleology would reduce in advance; to map it in a dispersion that no pre-established horizon would embrace; to allow it to be deployed in an anonymity on which no transcendental constitution would impose the form of the subject” (AK, 223). Significantly, this formulation reveals the fact that, for Foucault, breaking with the idea of temporal continuity—whether it takes the form of time-consciousness or of an existential inclination to constancy—is an essential element in historicizing discourse. Consequently, the notion of “discontinuity” appears in the Archaeology as one of the key counter-phenomenological concepts which underpins the analysis of history as socially embedded and discursively dispersive praxis (AK, 223–224). As Foucault reaffirms in a later interview, “the use and abuse of the notion of threshold, rupture, discontinuity, break, this abuse has corresponded at a certain point with something that I think is important, and that was the possibility of breaking free from phenomenology” (CM, 103). Thus, we see that in The Archaeology of Knowledge, it is specifically the historical problematic of discourse—along with all of its implications at the level of time, sociality, events, meaningfulness, etc.—which brings Foucault’s anti-phenomenological tendency into full relief. Accordingly, it is from within a horizon of “de-subjectivation”30 that he attempts to frame his theory of history as a theory of discursive practice. But it is within this same horizon that the ambition of “freeing history from the grip of phenomenology” (AK, 224) finds its counterpart in “suppressing the stage of ‘things themselves’” (AK, 53), that is, in resisting the inclination to reduce discourse to an objective referent in an a priori correlational relationship or to consider it as an index of a pre-discursive element of originary experience. As

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Foucault points out, in an undeniably anti-phenomenological tone, “what we wish to do is to dispense with ‘things,’ to ‘depresentify’ (dé-présentifier) them. To conjure up their rich, heavy, immediate plenitude” (AK, 53). Or again, as he explains in a related interview—and not without a critical reference to a certain prominent phenomenological thesis: “what I am looking for are not relations that would be secret, hidden, quieter or deeper than the consciousness of men. I try on the contrary to define the relations on the very surface of the discourse; I attempt to make visible what is invisible only because it’s too much on the surface of things” (DE1, 800). Foucault’s “de-subjectivation” of history is thus reinforced by a strategy of “de-presentification,” which targets the elements that would replace the heterogeneous and anonymous dimension of history with the foundations of a lifeworld. Instead, Foucault argues for a conception of history that reveals from its own elements rather than from a constituting subject or a constituted objecthood, the way subjects and objects function historically. It should come as no surprise, then, to find that in The Archaeology of Knowledge, these theses form the touchstones of a new kind of ontological approach. FOUCAULT’S PHILOSOPHY OF EXISTENCE: DISCOURSE, BEING, AND HISTORY In a book dedicated to identifying the ontological presuppositions in Foucault’s project, Béatrice Han argues that his work is affected by a vacillation between transcendental and empirical historical perspectives.31 According to Han, one should consider “whether perhaps Heideggerian ontology might not be read as the unthought of Foucault’s oeuvre,” and thus whether we should “seek in hermeneutical phenomenology a more coherent basis for the ‘historical ontology of ourselves’”32 that the one Foucault o ­ ffers us in general. However, in light of Foucault’s own pronouncements on the matter, one could argue with equal legitimacy that his ontological commitment is best understood not by assimilating it to another philosophical position, for example, hermeneutical phenomenology, but by taking it seriously as an exhortation to work with concrete historical material. In a similar vein, it could also be said that Foucault’s historical methodologies comprise a new, heuristic form of ontological analysis which, instead of appealing to an all-encompassing transcendental or existential theory of being, opts to take the various elements of historical reality as its point of departure. And it is solely on the basis of this premise that an ontological exploration of the general forms of objects and subjects becomes possible within the context of diverse systems of spatio-temporal and social relations. Thus, if one had to briefly encapsulate Foucault’s ontological position, the concept of a regional and material historical theory of existence would be most appropriate for the task.

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Now, although his reservations about German and French existentialism are well-documented, it is worthwhile to note that when Foucault distances himself from the main existentialist philosophical positions of the 1960s, he does not utterly abandon the vocabulary of “existence,” but simply re-appropriates it for his own purposes. In an interview given to Claude Bonnefoy in 1968, Foucault frames his philosophical preoccupations in the following manner: The problem I am currently dealing with, and which I have been dealing with in the past ten years, is this: in a society like ours, what does the existence (existence) of statements, of writing, of discourse mean? It seemed to me that one did not accord sufficient importance to the fact that, after all, discourses exist (les discours, ça existe) [.  .  .] Discourses have their proper consistence, depth, density, and functioning. The laws of discourse exist just like economical laws do. A discourse exists (ça existe) as a monument, as a technique, it exists as a system of social relations, etc. (BD, 34)

The attention given here to the concept of “existence” suggests that it possesses more than a merely rhetorical significance. Moreover, this term appears consistently in Foucault’s philosophical texts up until the mid-1970s. But he was much too involved—personally, even—with the debates taking place in France at that time for us to believe that this choice of existentialist terminology was arbitrary. What is certain, however, is that Foucault’s use of this term is not intended to establish any kind of positive correspondence between his own work and phenomenological or dialectical theories of existence including such ambitious ontological endeavors like Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason.33 On the contrary, in all evidence, the framework within which Foucault finds a place for the term “existence” is itself predicated upon a rejection of phenomenological, Marxist, and even structuralist approaches. Accordingly, if Foucault sought—and this is in fact the case—to carve out some kind of existential philosophical position during the archaeological era of his research, this is only reflected in the fact that he grants priority to the concrete dimension of historical conditions and phenomena, and to the objectifying and subjectivizing possibilities that arise therefrom. It must be acknowledged, however, that reading Foucault’s The Archaeology of Knowledge as an ontological treatise seems like an odd strategy. After all, the prevailing view is that for Foucault, the discourses which constitute the central topic of this work “are situated at the level of historical specificity and not that of ontology.”34 Nevertheless, one should not overlook the fact that Foucault deliberately adopts an ontological terminology which is designed to have an explicit descriptive potential. Indeed, it seems that he resorts to the language of “existence” and “event” in order to highlight the fact that discourse is more than the social fact of “speaking” or the effect of an always ephemeral subjective

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act of enunciation. This also explains why the project of The Archaeology of Knowledge, which is defined therein as a “pure description of discursive events” (AK, 29) first requires one to ask, “what is this specific existence that emerges from what is said and nowhere else?” (AK, 31). But this is just the beginning. One can see how the language of existence, once unleashed, quickly takes over strategic points in the analysis and activates an examination of language in terms of its own being; and this is exactly what happens in this work when the rules of discursive formations, which are themselves major descriptive anchors for archaeology, are labeled “conditions of existence” (conditions d’existence) (AK, 42). Furthermore, when it comes to conceptualizing the statement (énoncé) as a specific discursive event, rather than as an ensemble of linguistic signs or cognitive contents, Foucault’s explanations tread paths opened by the questions concerning the linguistic nature of being. In this regard, claims like “the threshold of the statement is the threshold of the existence of signs” obviously call for further inquiry, but in particular, Foucault insists that it is “the meaning of a term like ‘the existence of signs’” (AK, 95) which really requires elucidation: “what does one mean when one says that there are (il y a) signs, and that it is enough for there to be (il y a) signs for there to be (il y a) a statement? What special status should be given to that verb to be (il y a)?” (AK, 95). Together, these questions motivate an analysis that, over the course of the Archaeology, will routinely lead us back to the site of language-being, a region free from any constitutive reference to a pre-established notion of object or subject, and which rather creates its own unique arena of objective and subjective positioning.35 In this domain, statements are formed in enunciative practices which “systematically form the objects of which they speak” (AK, 54), but on the other hand their formations are deployed “as an anonymous field whose configuration defines the possible position of speaking subjects” (AK, 137). Accordingly, the énoncé is here defined as the “modality of existence” (modalité d’existence) of all those signs produced from impersonal and interpersonal linguistic performances (AK, 120). The very possibility of making sense thus derives from this operative mode of being.36 Indeed, even the term “discourse” itself ultimately draws its meaning from a linguistic-ontological resource insofar as it functions within the modality of existence of statements as their sequence and law of formation as series (AK, 121). This patent ontologizing tendency profoundly influences the entire argument of The Archaeology of Knowledge, as well as its descriptive possibilities. But it is pushed even further when Foucault attempts to identify the principal qualities of the socio-historical production of discursive formations. For as he argues, what is necessary here is to “discover what mode of existence (mode d’existence) may characterize statements, independently of their enunciation, in the density of time in which they are preserved, in which they are reactivated and used” (AK, 139). Manifestly, the question

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of linguistic existence thus culminates in the question of historical and social existence. This ontological conversion is of the utmost importance because it shows how a strictly discursive existence—which was hitherto only ever treated separately from speaking subjects and the objects of speech— is generated by social practices and conditioned by historical determinations. As Foucault explains in a text containing a preliminary sketch of the problematic subsequently pursued in The Archaeology of Knowledge: A statement is always an event that neither language nor meaning can completely exhaust. A strange event, certainly: first, because, on the one hand, it is linked to an act of writing or to the articulation of a speech but, on the other hand, opens for itself a residual existence in the field of a memory or in the materiality of manuscripts, books, and any other form of record; then because it is unique like every other event, but is open to repetition, transformation, and reactivation; finally, because it is linked both to the situations that give rise to it, and to the consequences it gives rise to, but also at the same time and in quite another modality, to the statements that precede it and follow it. (EW2, 308)37

Thus, from this novel ontological perspective, discourse is reconceived as a mode of “survival in time,” or as an objective “remanence” (remanence) (AK, 140). But Foucault immediately stresses that there is no need for a strict separation between the existential registers of language and time, because the tendency of discourses to exist historically does not extend beyond the scope of the underlying statements. Indeed, the situation is quite the reverse: “this survival in time is far from being the accidental or fortunate prolongation of an existence (existence) originally intended only for the moment; on the contrary, this remanence is of the nature of the statement” (AK, 140). Linguistic existence as a discursive mode of being is thus anchored in the modality of being of statements, and so forms that unity named discourse which constitutes a proprer historical dimension: Discourse in this sense is not an ideal, timeless form that also possesses a history; the problem is not therefore to ask oneself how and why it was able to emerge and become embodied at this point in time; it is, from beginning to end, historical—a fragment of history, a unity and discontinuity in history itself, posing the problem of its own limits, its divisions, its transformations, the specific modes of its temporality rather than its sudden irruption in the midst of the complicities of time. (AK, 131)

It would be rather surprising, then, if this deep ontological commitment did not have significant consequences for the unfolding of the doctrinal position taken up by Foucault in The Archaeology of Knowledge. The concept of historicity is most impacted in this regard, and we can comprehend the effects by tracing a corresponding transformation of Foucault’s terminology. First, by employing the term “positivity” to designate the mode of existence

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that is proper to discourse, and by using it to define the notion of a “historical a priori,” Foucault takes a decisive step toward outlining an ontological conception of history. For as he explains, appealing to these ideas enables one to describe “the conditions of emergence of statements, the law of their coexistence (coexistence) with others, the specific form of their mode of being (mode d’être), the principles according to which they survive (subsistent), become transformed, and disappear” (AK, 143). Far from being associated with any subjectively founded condition of possibility, then, Foucault’s concept of a historical a priori refers rather to a regionally and objectively discernible ontological sphere—but only insofar as it unveils a “history that is given, since it is that of things actually (effectivement) said” (AK, 143). With this context in mind, Foucault then introduces the term “archive” in order to emphasize the discursive nature of historically existing systems of statements. In the course of analyses, this concept tends to collect potent historical-ontological connotations precisely because an “archive” is supposed to exemplify that particular mode of being which enables a discourse to appear—in a socially given temporal and spatial context—as the conjuncture of shared practices and the social significations which these produce. An archive is thus articulated as a system of discursivity that (i) “governs the appearance of statements as unique events” (AK, 145); (ii) “differentiates discourses in their multiple existence (existence multiple) and specifies them in their own duration” (AK, 146); and (iii) provides to any statement “its modes of appearance, its forms of existence and coexistence (formes d’existence et de coexistence), its system of accumulation, historicity, and disappearance” (AK, 146–147). Accordingly, “archive” is, in effect, the name given to any historical configuration of discursive existence that emerges as a “general system of the formation and transformation of statements” (AK, 146) within which one can identify and classify specific corresponding events and practices in their historical unfolding. There is no doubt that this ontologically designed approach to language, being, and history was motivated by Foucault’s dissatisfaction with both the structural and existential models of linguistic enunciation and their social relevance. It is therefore important to point out that it was precisely by bringing the notion of existence into play that he sought to distance himself from the structuralist positions. “Unlike those who are labeled ‘structuralists,’” he explains in an interview, “I’m not really interested in the formal possibilities afforded by a system such as language. Personally, I am more intrigued by the existence of discourses, by the fact that words were spoken” (EW2, 289). And on another occasion he clarifies that his question “is not that of the codes, but that of the events, and the law of existence of statements which made them possible” (DE1, 681). But it is also clear that by centering the problem of existence— specifically that socio-historical existence which is performed through

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language—Foucault was attempting both to avoid the structuralist reduction of the language to formal possibilities and to escape the realm of lived experiences and existential dispositions conditioned by speaking subjects. He invested his opposition to phenomenology and existentialism in the evocation of an alternative philosophy of existence, and that is precisely why his analysis of discourse lacks “any reference to the living plenitude of experiences” (AK, 53). Instead, Foucault seeks to recapture the functioning of social performances proper to discursive practices and their social unfolding in time and space at the level of their own mode of being—all without ultimately reconnecting them to transcendental conditions or to anthropological invariants forged in experience. To be clear, discursive existence is not hereby wholly detached from social experience. The crucial point, rather, is that for Foucault, this experience is not authorized by any correlation between subject and world, or between self and signification. Discursive performance does not consist in simply conferring meaning upon the world, nor does it first require one to be subdued by the inherent complexity of life; it simply signifies that one is situated in a historically conditioned field of linguistic events, practices, and social interactions. Consequently, the effectivity of discourse does not derive from the facticity of a world constituted or lived by subjects, but from a dimension of sociality within which exchange and communication play a constitutive role. However, this also means that the subject of discourse, properly speaking, does not exist: only the “discourse-being” exists, and it exists only insofar as it is performed, produced, and reproduced in those specific instances where there is always an indefinite number of possibilities to charge anonymity with specific nominal content, that is, in social situations. Discourse qua experience thus shapes everyone but belongs to no one. This is, perhaps, why Foucault felt that the structuralist and phenomenological frameworks were essentially inadequate for his task. It is obvious, then, that Foucault’s archaeological project entails a basic ontological claim. Within the framework of The Archaeology of Knowledge, being is understood as discourse, for example, as linguistically articulated fundamental social quality that possesses specific forms of temporal unfolding and historical transmission through the practices that produce them. Foucault’s ontological investigations thus revolve here around the specific conditions of specific experiences of specific social objects. This is mainly significant because it highlights the radically regional, material, and indirect character of his ontology, which denies universality and permanence even to society and history themselves, but it also points ahead to Foucault’s subsequent analyses of existence and being. Indeed, when Foucault, in a much-quoted late text, characterizes “the historical ontology of ourselves” as a “historical investigation into the events that have led us to constitute ourselves and to recognize ourselves as subjects

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of what we are doing, thinking, saying” (EW1, 315), we again find that, just like in the Archaeology, the relevant questions of history and being are to be made tangible through the investigation of real events: “these historico-critical investigations are quite specific in the sense that they always bear upon a material, an epoch, a body of determined practices and discourses” (EW1, 318). Historical ontology is thus never free from regional and subject-matter-related bindings; historical existence thus knows no vacuum or omnipresence; and the historical past thus never exists purely in itself, as a kind of virtual dimension, but only ever as the past of something once actual, relational, and concrete.38 Accordingly, we see that, far from serving merely as illustration or evidence, concrete historical research provides Foucault with the very premises of his ontological interrogations. And this remains the case even when the target of ontology turns out to be the experience of subjectivity, because historical being can only be captured through thematically arranged analyses of its concrete, eventful, and existential materializations. MODELS OF EXISTENCE: THE SUBJECT IN HISTORICAL-ONTOLOGICAL CONTEXT In many respects, the emergence of analyses devoted specifically to the forms of subjectivity and “practices of the self” marks a new beginning in Foucault’s work. As Deleuze notes, however, given the orientation of the early works—wherein Foucault even goes so far as to proclaim the “death of man”—this should not be taken straightforwardly as some kind of “return to the subject.”39 In fact, Foucault’s dismantling of the modern concept of man and his critique of the founding role of the subject are far from being complementary with an elimination of all forms of subjectivity from historical processes. Instead, as he reminds us in his famed lecture “What is an author?,” his project is also about finding a way “to grasp the subject’s points of insertion, modes of functioning, and system of dependencies” within such processes (EW2, 221). Therefore, although on the one hand, the traditional concepts of humanity and subjectivity are clearly incongruous with both Foucault’s early philosophical concerns and late notions of “self” and “subjectivation,” on the other hand, in his writings, the extent of the problem of subjectivity is greatly expanded, broaching the topic even in seemingly unrelated discussions. For the historical exploration of each domain of objects can never be complete without taking into account the corresponding subjective positions.40 The analysis of different forms and configurations of knowledge, power, and discourse thus never fails to implicate, explicitly or implicitly, those patterns of subjective relations and realizations which manifest in discursive practices, social action, bodily states, submission, normalization, and

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even acts of resistance. Accordingly, it does not seem improper to claim, as Foucault himself does in some of his later texts, that in fact the examination of the figures and formations of subjectivity operating on the level of the various systems of knowledge, power, and ethical relations is one of the essential purposes of his genealogical project.41 What shows up as a new element in the late writings, however, is that these lines of inquiry are together supposed to constitute the main concern of a philosophical and critical approach which focuses on the “present” along with a new labeling, that of the “historical ontology of ourselves.” Now, if we take this ontological ambition at face value, it can be plausibly situated within that tradition of a historical critique of subjectivity which begins with Hegel and continues with Marx, Nietzsche, and Dilthey, before culminating in Heidegger’s early ontology. In the first place, Foucault, too, spurns any belief in the substance of human nature, or in an ahistorical transcendental structure of being and thinking. But what predominantly links all these thinkers together is the fundamental conviction that the subject must necessarily undergo a radically transformative encounter with history: On the one hand, the very conditions of subjective existence themselves bring forth history, and on the other hand, the unfolding of historical existence in turn transforms those same conditions by elevating the conditions of the internal experience of history to the external conditions of the existence of the world. Thus, even in Hegel, it is not simply a question of attaching a historical component, for example, the elements of objective spirit, to an otherwise ahistorical subjectivity. History does not merely provide the categories of existence with social forms and significations; it also engenders concrete and material forms of exposure (irreversible happenings, irrevocable exteriority, and inevitable and violent negativity). Immediately upon their first contact, then, history endows existence with an ontology whose basic principle is difference.42 But the status of the subject is thereby directly threatened. As soon as it takes precedence, history immediately outgrows the subjectivity that seeks to contain it and subsequently reverses the operation of its own interiorization by localizing the subject in time and space—thus, relegating the latter to the realm of external forces alongside nature, community, and society.43 By the same token, however, if this exteriorization generated by history itself is effective, then it necessarily also thrusts the subject—who meanwhile suffers an existential dislocation—into a new attitude, a new mode of reflexivity, by means of which it is ultimately enabled to relocate and recognize itself, only this time within a finite historical situation.44 Thus, conceived, history imposes a logic of finitude upon subjective existence, and therefore, we see why concrete differentiation and situated self-reference are, at least since Hegel, the primary consequences of a history internalized by a subject externalized to itself.45

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With that being said, what is of critical importance here is really what ensues after the subject’s dramatic encounter with history, and we find that it is by his answer to this question that Foucault departs most decisively from the aforementioned tradition of the philosophy of history. Above all, it is clear that for Foucault, dealing with the question of the subject—specifically the one made “unhappy” by the recognition of its own historicity—cannot appeal to any conception of history as a kind of impersonal, fate-like force, or as a pure structural determination. Foucault follows Nietzsche in the contention that the demolition of the cognizing and truth-seeking subject does not eliminate the subject from history, replacing it with a sort of “autonomous and ideal history,” but instead actually reproduces it in the various forms of the “will to know” (LW, 3–4). For the same reason, he does not subscribe to certain Marxist solutions, like those of Louis Althusser, which seek to go beyond the question of the historical subject by means of a radical “dehumanization” of history.46 On the other hand, despite his aversion to all forms of phenomenology—be they Hegelian or Husserlian in nature—Foucault does not seem to think that the course of history is reducible to some purely objective or otherwise “a-subjective” process, or that the historical critique of the subject should give way to an apologia for impersonal social structures; and thus, he refuses to adopt the structural or mentalité historical approach propounded by the Annales school. Indeed, already in The Archaeology of Knowledge, we find a gesture of dissociation from these ideas: “If I suspended all reference to the speaking subject, it was not to discover laws of construction or forms that could be applied in the same way by all speaking subjects, nor was it to give voice to the great universal discourse that is common to all men at a particular period” (AK, 220–221). As his analyses of discursive existence demonstrate, the “anonymity” of historical processes never excludes but only relativizes and situates the subject’s position within said processes. At the same time, even if this relativization prevents us from understanding the Foucauldian subject either as a maker or vehicle of history, the status of the form of self-reference, which is supposedly exclusive to subjectivity, remains problematic. To be sure, Lukács’s attempt, in History and Class Consciousness, to recover the autonomy of the subject within a self-regulating system of collective thought and action by converting the question of the cognizing subject into that of the historical subject or Sartre’s appeal to the dialectical and self-reflexive movement of collective historical practice in The Critique of Dialectical Reason is equally untenable for Foucault. The issue is that these models only ever seek to regain, through the application of a teleological schema, the provisions of a historical determinacy that they forfeited by sacrificing the sovereign subject. Foucault also forgoes any theoretical procedure that, while drawing on the constitutive experiences that are meant to give inherent vitality to history,

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nevertheless gives ontological significance to the transition from temporality to historicity. For instance, in Being and Time, Heidegger poses a fundamental question, namely, “why and on the basis of what ontological conditions, does historicity belong to the subjectivity of the ‘historical’ subject as its essential constitution?”47 And he responds by articulating the horizonality of Dasein’s original temporality, the ecstatic character of which is ultimately supposed to accommodate history as the outcome of its own constitution.48 Ultimately, Foucault deliberately contravenes all such attempts to clarify the relationship between history and subjectivity and advocates instead for an approach that aims to recapture history “in the discontinuity that no teleology would reduce in advance; to map it in a dispersion that no pre-established horizon would embrace; to allow it to be deployed in an anonymity on which no transcendental constitution would impose the form of the subject” (AK, 223–224). Accordingly, we see that if the Foucauldian subject is to prove itself as an object of ontological concern in its own right, it must take the form of an “element” of historical processes, which in turn means that it cannot seek refuge in ideal, teleological configurations, or in the intimate realm of existential constitution. Therefore, the goal is to understand “how a subject came to be constituted that is not definitively given, that is not the thing on the basis of which truth happens to history . . . a subject that constitutes itself within history and is constantly established and reestablished by history” (EW3, 3). Foucault’s fundamental ontological innovation is thus twofold: after first depriving the subject of all its substantive properties, he shows that the relations in which something like the “experience” of subjectivity can be articulated are, in fact, historical variables. In this respect, he adheres most closely to Nietzsche, for whom, Foucault says, “historical sense reintroduces into the realm of becoming everything considered immortal in man” (EW2, 379). In turn, this conceptualization of subjectivity as an arrangement of historically produced relations places great importance upon the role of specific mechanisms, operations, and practices in the constitution of the self. Hence Foucault’s interest in so-called “technologies of the self,” which denotes those existential practices “which permit individuals to effect by their own means, or with the help of others, a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being” (EW1, 225), or, in other words, which otherwise allow them, “through the management of their own life, through the control and transformation of self by self,” to “attain a certain mode of being” (ST, 35). At the same time, this strategy presents the subject as an existent that is constantly a variation of itself and a being in interminable transition. Foucauldian subjectivity is thus equipped with a certain inherent and formative dynamism, but one that has nothing to do with the experience of temporality or existential or incarnate self-affection, as in

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most phenomenological or existential ontologies. Instead, this dynamism is anchored in experiences marked essentially by self-care, desire, bodily forces, and figures of socialization. The subject’s capacity for historical change therefore derives from the historical plasticity of relations that are capable of engendering the diverse possibilities of subjective formation and self-formation at the social level. As Foucault notes, “there are two meanings of the word ‘subject’”: “subject to someone else by control and dependence, and tied to his own identity by a conscience or self-knowledge. Both meanings suggest a form of power that subjugates and makes subject to” (EW3, 331). But it is only this latter system of forces, in the strict sense, which marks out the proper territory of those historically constituted modes of being that characterize something like a “subjectivity.” The possibility of being an identical subject, then, is here undergirded, not by structurally invariant subjective dispositions such as self-affection, reflexivity, or pre-ontological understanding, but by historically and socially changing patterns of self-care or self-production, whose general ontological figure is best depicted, as Deleuze suggests, by the motif of “folding.”49 It is therefore more accurate, as Foucault often does, to speak in this case of “modes of subjectivation” (HS2, 28) inasmuch as the subject qua historical being is never a finished project. We thus see why, for Foucault, the ontological question of the existence of the subject remains strictly bound, if not directly subordinated, to the historical question of the formation of its modes of being. The issue here is not what characterizes the being of the subject, nor is Foucault interested in the meaning of its existence in general; rather, he asks, “how and in which ways have individuals in Western societies become subjects—ethical, political, epistemological, juridical subjects? How and by what process did the relation to oneself take the shape it did in the domain of ethics, of politics, of science, etc.?” (DT, 63). Crucially, what prevents this kind of research from devolving into a mere social history is the fact that Foucault represents the “relation to oneself” as a particular site and way of being that cannot simply be derived from external relations of knowledge or power relations. In a word, the distinctive ontological character of the Foucauldian approach to history stems from the fundamental decision to treat the subject as a specific mode of practical becoming, and not as a historical formation. Strictly speaking, it is only through the processes of subjectivation that the subject can transform over the course of history and take on diverse forms and functions; and thus, to this extent, subjectivation is nothing other than a decisive sociohistorically changing operation of being oneself within determinate social structures. For, relative to the self’s subjection to external relations—which is more or less deterministic—its internal subjection, on the other hand, is always more or less a field of freedom or underdetermination, that is, of situated indeterminacy. Subjectivation for Foucault therefore shows itself to be that paradoxical process whereby the individual

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renders their own historically produced subjectivity indeterminate through the very movement by which they seek to determine the “self” of their self-determination. In this process, however, there are neither invariant patterns, nor fixed phenomenological structures, nor dialectical mediations: precisely because it requires the subject’s intervention, the relations of subjective determinacy and indeterminacy are not historically predetermined. This is why Foucault studies subjectivity in terms of practices that manifest the ways “for setting up and developing relationships with the self, for selfreflection, self-knowledge, self-examination, for the decipherment of the self by oneself, for the transformations that one seeks to accomplish with oneself as object” (HS2, 29). In this regard, the two key philosophical concepts that deserve special attention in Foucault’s late analyses of subjectivity are those of existence and model.50 These concepts play the role of operative descriptors because their meaning is usually inferred from the analysis of “proper” historical concepts such as parrhesia, aphrodisia, bios, metanoia, and askesis, and the various types of self-formations these bring into play. On the one hand, the use of terms like “arts of existence,” “style of existence,” “techniques of existence,” and “practice of existence” accentuates a particular region of experience and a particular practice of self that are exclusive to the subjective mode of existence. On the other hand, the term “model” indicates that there are no immutable ontological structures or necessary modes of experience lurking behind these modes of existence, which means that they can only be properly grasped in their being by means of a historical examination of the possibilities of their emergence, persistence, and alteration. In other words, it is only through the historical modeling of existence that Foucault’s philosophical investigations are able to reveal the relations which contributed to the emergence of techniques of subjectivity and practices of self in a particular historical period or situation. Foucault’s existential models are thus the indications of an indirect and regional ontology which at the same time, and for this very reason, draw on the evidential force of historical sources to substantiate its own conceptual claims. In this sense, then, these ontological models are also qualitative inasmuch as they do not subsume the facts of existence under some formal aspect but embrace these instead within the historically attestable contexts of concrete human experiences and practices.51 Moreover, the qualitative character of these models necessitates a commitment to indirect and exegetical historical analysis, and thereby prevents any appeal to direct experimental analysis or argumentative construction, as if one were conducting some kind of historical phenomenology. It is in this context that Foucault’s late lectures at the Collège de France engage the topic of “models of subjectivity.” One of these is the “great model of subjectivity” offered by early Christianity, which Foucault contrasts with the Greek concept of the practice of the self—best captured by the

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term “bios” (ST, 253). In later lectures, this initial presentation is further nuanced by a distinction that Foucault makes between “two great models, two great schemas of the relation between care of the self and knowledge of the self” (HS, 254), namely, the Platonic and Christian models. He explains that while the Platonic model articulates being in terms of “the subject’s recollection of himself,” for the Christian model, it is “the subject’s exegesis of himself” which provides the essential and practical content of the self-related existence (HS, 257). It is from within this basic framework that Foucault introduces a third, so-called “Hellenistic” model, which he alleges “was concealed historically and for later culture by two other great models,” and which he therefore wants to “free from these two other model” (HS, 254). The Hellenistic model of subjectivity, which is expressed historically by the Epicurean, Cynic, and Stoic texts, is essentially distinguished by the fact that “it tends to accentuate and privilege care of the self, to maintain its autonomy at least with regard to knowledge of the self” (HS, 257) and is ultimately “centered on the self-finalization of the relationship to self and conversion to self” (HS, 258). Finally, in the course of the lectures that Foucault explicitly devotes to the study of Cynic subject-formation—a “historical category which, in various forms and with diverse objectives, runs through the whole of Western history” and thus comprises an integral part of the “history of Western thought, existence, and subjectivity” (CT, 174)—a new model of existence comes to the fore. This fourth form, which Foucault calls the “material model of existence” (CT, 265), is epitomized by a Cynic conception of life that is based on the tenets of a “physical model of truth” (CT, 310) and the concept of a “model of behavior” in accordance with the “idea that the human being must not have as a need what the animal can do without” (CT, 265). This model-based method of ontological inquiry constitutes a true theoretical novelty, and it is one of Foucault’s most vital philosophical contributions. As we have shown, such a procedure fundamentally emphasizes the principle of the indeterminacy of subjective existence and demonstrates that it can only be explained within a historical agenda and by historical means. But despite the fact that it is, after all, the facticity of human existence which is thus necessarily exhibited, nevertheless, these models do not establish a unified ontological vision because the experience of “existing” only gains its qualitative meaning through the intersection of historically given practices and their corresponding normative standards. This, in combination with Foucault’s wide-ranging historiographical analyses of subject formation and technologies of the self from antiquity through to the modern period, is what imbues his ontological undertaking with its distinctive indirect and regional character; indeed, “modeling” appears to be a fundamental and necessary corollary of any regional ontological approach. Lastly, but crucially, Foucault’s approach is noteworthy because he was able to effectively test it

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in the field of the problem of subjectivity. In this sense, his project ought to be understood as a historical ontology of human individuation. For if Heidegger, in Being and Time, can claim that “the transcendence of the being of Da-sein is a distinctive one since in it lies the possibility and the necessity of the most radical individuation,”52 we must admit that it is precisely such radical possibilities of human individuation that Foucault’s ontological modeling is exploring—although by necessity without the existential-analytical framework and within a uniquely historical framework.53 But these philosophical investigations merit the label of “existential models” for another important reason, namely, because they constitute the very premises of a “historical ontology of ourselves” in general. On one occasion of reflection, Foucault explains that his “machine is good; not insofar as it transcribes or provides the model of what happened, but insofar as it succeeds in giving a model of what happened such that it allows us to free ourselves from what happened” (DE2, 644, italics are mine). To be sure, these remarks may apply not only to his archaeological or genealogical method but also to the very problematic of an ontology of the present itself. For as Foucault argues in “What is Enlightenment?,” the basic purpose of this ontology is not to “deduce from the form of what we are what it is impossible for us to do and to know” but to “separate out, from the contingency that has made us what we are, the possibility of no longer being, doing, or thinking what we are, do, or think” (EW1, 315–316). In the context of this ontological approach to history, then, it is clear that the deployment of existential models of contingency not only provides an account of the past in its “positivity” and “reality” but is also explicitly intended to have a concrete impact on our socioexistential actuality. It is at the very moment that Foucault’s ontology of the present calls for a critique of the present that we find it transforms into one. NOTES 1. Cf., for example, the following emblematic work, which also seeks to shift the focus, in providing a detailed analysis of Heidegger’s place in Foucault’s thought, from the field of ontology to the issue of the “experience of thinking”: Timothy Rayner, Foucault’s Heidegger: Philosophy and Transformative Experience. New York: Continuum, 2007. 2. Michael Schwartz, Epistemes and History of Being. In A. Milchmann and A. Rosenber (eds.), Foucault and Heidegger. Critical Encounters. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2003, 173. 3. Stuart Elden, Mapping the Present: Heidegger, Foucault and the Project of a Spatial History. New York: Continuum, 2001, 99. 4. Hubert L. Dreyfus, “Being and Power” Revisited. In Foucault and Heidegger. Critical Encounters, 30–54. It is worth noting that in one of his texts, Foucault

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explicitly refuses to allow his theory of power to be “ontologically” interpreted. As he puts it, “if mine were an ontological conception of power, there would be, on one side, Power with a capital P, a kind of lunar occurrence, extra-terrestrial; and on the other side, the resistance of the unhappy ones who are obligated to bow before power. I believe an analysis of this kind to be completely false, because power is born out of a plurality of relationships which are grafted onto something else, born from something else, and permit the development of something else” (FL, 260). 5. Robert Nichols, The World of Freedom. Heidegger, Foucault, and the Politics of Historical Ontology. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014, 148. 6. In short, it could be said that Foucault’s notion of “discourse” as developed in his Archaeology is directed against a conception for which “to return to things themselves is to return to that world which precedes knowledge, of which knowledge always speaks, and in relation to which every scientific schematization is an abstract and derivative sign-language, as is geography in relation to the countryside in which we have learnt beforehand what a forest, a prairie or a river is.” Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge, 2002, ix–x. 7. See, in this respect, Etienne Bimbenet’s illuminating and carefully argued analysis of the two philosophers’ “common definition of thinking,” E. Bimbenet, Après Merleau-Ponty. Études sur la fécondité d’une pensée. Paris: Vrin, 2011, 20. 8. Judith Revel, Foucault avec Merleau-Ponty. Ontologie politique, présentisme et histoire. Paris: Vrin, 2015, 13. 9. Ibid., 109. 10. Duane H. Davis and Tony O’Connor, Intentionality, Indirect Ontology and Historical Ontology: Reading Together Merleau-Ponty and Foucault. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 39, no. 1 (January 2008): 57–75. 11. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, unpublished notes, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Preface to Signes, Vol. IV, p. 19. quoted in Davis and O’Connor, Intentionality, Indirect Ontology and Historical Ontology, 71. 12. On the question of historical modeling of being in Foucault, see chapter 4 of this section. 13. Deleuze, Foucault, 110. 14. Ibid., 112. 15. Ibid., 110. 16. This is a clear indication of the fact that, despite the deep sympathy between the two thinkers, there is a gap that separates Foucault’s ontology from Deleuze’s theory of being, in that the former does not share the latter’s thesis of the “univocity of Being.” That is to say, Foucault is far from sharing what he otherwise appreciates in Deleuze, namely, that “being is the recurrence of difference, without there being any difference in the form of its expression. Being does not distribute itself into regions” (EW2, 360). At the same time, Deleuze also points out that with Foucault “these three dimensions—knowledge, power and self—are irreducible, yet constantly imply one another. They are three ‘ontologies.’” Deleuze, Foucault, 114. 17. As Deleuze puts it, “given certain conditions, they do not vary historically; but they do vary with history,” Ibid., 114.

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18. In this sense, it can be said that Foucault is in fact working with the very notion of an “ontology without being” that one of his interpreters has criticized him for lacking. See, G. Rockhill, Interventions in Contemporary Thought. History, Politics, Aesthetics, 51. 19. The notion of “regional ontology” is a phenomenologically inspired concept that Husserl uses to denote the types of objects belonging to specific disciplines (similar to the notion of material ontology), as opposed to formal ontology, which is a discipline for describing the ontological properties of objectives in general. Cf. E. Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. First Book. Trans. F. Kersten. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1983, 162–163. In Heidegger, the fields of beings investigated by each scientific discipline are labeled “domains of being,” which contrasts with fundamental ontology, which is a phenomenologically grounded approach to the study of Being in general as the Being of beings. Cf. M. Heidegger, Being and Time. Trans. J. Stambough. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996, 7–9. 20. For a few examples, see Béatrice Han, Foucault’s Critical Project: Between the Transcendental and the Historical. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002; Rudi Visker, Truth and Singularity. Taking Foucault into Phenomenology. Dordrecht: Springer, 1999; Johanna Oksala, Foucault on Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005; Séphane Legrand, “As Close as Possible to the Unlivable”: (Michel Foucault and Phenomenology). Sophia 47 (2008): 281–291. 21. Cf. Foucault, Phénoménologie et psychologie (1954). Paris: Seuil/Hautes Études, 2021. 22. Cf. Kwok-Ying Lau, “Foucault and Husserl’s Logical Investigations: The Unsuspected French Connection.” In K.-Y. Lau and J. J. Drummond (eds.), Husserl’s Logical Investigations in the New Century: Western and Chinese Perspectives. Springer, 2007, 153–168; Hans Sluga, Foucault’s Encounter with Heidegger and Nietzsche. In Gary Gutting (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Foucault. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, 210–239. 23. In this regard, it might be also important to note that there is no sign in Foucault’s later writings that he had paid any attention to the later development of French phenomenology, such as the works of Paul Ricoeur, Jean-Toussaint Desanti, Emmanuel Lévinas, or Michel Henry. 24. Jean-Paul Sartre, “Jean-Paul Sartre répond,” 87–96. and FL, 51–56. As a follow-up of this debate see also DE1, 513–514, EW1, 279–280. 25. Cf. Gerard Lebrun, Note sur la phénomenologie dans Les Mots et les choses de Michel Foucault. In Michel Foucault philosophe. Paris: Seuil, 1989, 33–55; Philippe Sabot, “Foucault et Merleau-Ponty: un dialogue impossible?.” Les Études philosophiques 2013/3 (n° 106): 317–332. 26. Merleau-Ponty’s text of “The Prose of the World” was still unpublished in this period, but its existence was known in France. Cf. The “Editor’s Preface” in Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973, xi–xxi. 27. Sartre, Being and Nothingness. An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology. Trans. Hazel E. Barnes. London: Routledge, 1956, 282. 28. Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Donald A. Landes. London and New York: Routledge, 2013, 366.

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29. There is no question that in his late ontology, Merleau-Ponty sought to develop a notion of historical Stiftung that goes beyond the realm of subjective or existential grounding and replaces it with an emphasis on the constitutive role of nature, language, and social institutions. However, even within this ontological framework, it is apparent that, for him, sensibility or sensory experience is destined to play the role of a kind of underlying phenomenological binder. Cf. M. Merleau-Ponty, Institution and Passivity: Course Notes from the Collège de France (1954–1955). Trans. Leonard Lawlor and Heath Massey. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2010. 30. The term “de-subjectivation” (dé-subjectivation) appears in one of Foucault’s interviews where he confronts the phenomenological concept of experience with the views of Nietzsche, Bataille, and Blanchot. Foucault, EW3, 241. 31. Han, Foucault’s Critical Project. 32. Ibid., 13. 33. For an informative account of the confrontation between Foucault and the existentialist conceptions of history, see Thomas R. Flynn, Sartre, Foucault and Historical Reason. Volume II. A Poststructuralist Mapping of History. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005, 177–207. 34. Sluga, “Foucault’s Encounter with Heidegger and Nietzsche,” 219. 35. As Deleuze points out, “statements are not directed towards anything, since they are not related to a thing any more than they express a subject but refer only to a language, a language-being, that gives them unique subjects and objects that satisfy particular conditions as immanent variables,” Deleuze, Foucault, 109. 36. As Foucault explains, “the sudden appearance of a sentence, the flash of meaning, the brusque gesture of the index finger of designation, always emerge in the operational domain of an enunciative function” (AK, 126). 37. It is worth noting that the question of existence was already for Sartre inseparable from the question of the “historical event.” As he explains, “existentialism . . . can only affirm the specificity of the historical event; it seeks to restore to the event its function and its multiple dimensions.” Sartre, Search for a Method, 124. 38. This is one striking difference between the Foucauldian historical ontology and the temporal ontologies of Bergson or Deleuze, for whom the “pure” existence of the past reveals the possibility of a virtual superimposition of reality. 39. Deleuze, Negotiations, 93. 40. As Foucault puts it in 1978, “everything I’ve been concerned with up to now has to do basically with the way men in Western societies have produced these experiences—fundamental ones, no doubt—which consist in engagement in a process of acquiring knowledge of a domain of objects, while at the same time they are constituting themselves as subjects with a fixed and determinate status” (EW3, 256–257). 41. Cf. EW1, 263. 42. On this topic, see above all Alexandre Kojève’s ontological interpretation of Hegel in his Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit (James Nichols trans, Cornell University Press 1980), whose decisive influence on postwar French philosophy was discussed by Vincent Descombes in Modern French Philosophy, 27–48.

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43. The whole of Dilthey’s later work is marked by a struggle to come to terms with just these relations and their ontological consequences. On this question, see my paper, “Heidegger, Dilthey et le problème d’une ontologie historique aujourd’hui.” In Jean Grégory and Ádám Takács (eds.), Traces de l’Etre. Heidegger en France et en Hongrie. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2014, 173–188. 44. This is how Foucault himself interprets these processes of the effects of history Cf. OT, 282–286. 45. For an analysis of Hegelian thought and its legacy from this perspective, see the analyses of Jean Hyppolite, who was particularly important for Foucault: Situation de l’homme dans la « phénoménologie » hégélienne. In Hyppolite, Figures de la pensée philosophique. vol. I. Paris: PUF, Paris, 1971, 104–121. 46. On the differences between Foucault’s archaeology and Althusser’s theory of history, see Robert Paul Resch, Althusser and the Renewal of Marxist Social Theory. Berkeley-Los Angeles-Oxford: University of California Press, 1992, 233–241. 47. Heidegger, Being and Time, 350. 48. As Heidegger explains, “the analysis of the historicity of Da-Sein is attempted to show that this being is not ‘temporal’ because it ‘is in history,’ but because, on the contrary, it exists and can exist historically only because it is temporal in the ground of its being.” Ibid., 345. 49. Deleuze, Foucault, 102–106. 50. The remarkable prevalence of both terms in Foucault’s late lectures shows their importance and the way they acquire their consolidated philosophical meaning in the concrete labor of historical analysis. 51. All this is worth highlighting because there is a philosophical enterprise that seeks to elevate the phenomenon of existence to an ontological level by means of formal modeling grounded in set theory. This is the ambition of Alain Badiou’s Being and Event. Trans. Olivier Feltham. New York: Continuum, 2007, the methodology of which he partly elaborated in his earlier work The Concept of the Model. Ed. and trans. Z. L. Fraser and T. Tho. Melbourne: re​.pres​s, 2007. 52. Heidegger, Being and Time, 34 (italics in the original). 53. In this respect, it would be worthwhile to compare Foucault’s model-based ontological approach with Gilbert Simondon’s natural science-inspired “ontology of individuation.” Apart from the fact that they were both students of Georges Canguilhem, and both earned Deleuze’s unconditional appreciation, they also both ultimately embraced a view of existence that emphasizes its dynamic character and open transformation, as well as the idea that the “individual” is never given in advance but is rather continually generated in the course of an ongoing process. Cf. G. Simondon, L’individu et sa genèse physico-biologique. Grenoble: Jérôme Millon, 1998.

5 ✛

History as Critical Philosophy

HISTORY OF PRESENT AS CRITIQUE OF THE PRESENT What kind of historical object is the “present” in which we live? And how could we benefit from treating the present at the same time as a philosophical matter? What could legitimize such a line of inquiry? What knowledge could we gain about ourselves, and about our world, if we were to frame these in terms of our “actuality”? Even though it is rare for Foucault to explicitly raise these questions, nevertheless, his work provides us with a coherent strategy for answering them. The primacy of the present is first of all the consequence of a philosophy which contends that the most important fact about the material and the human worlds is that they exist historically. When taken seriously, however, history is never merely an objective category but always also a reflexive one; that is, it takes into account even the way in which it itself is taken into account. Accordingly, a philosophical approach to history which is faithful to its own principles cannot merely abstractly or conceptually recognize its own historical involvement but must also concretely and actively trace the historical lines of force which have shaped, and continue to shape, that very involvement. In this sense, Foucault can say that the present constitutes a historical formation that both marks a range of actually existing modes of being and acting, and at the same time, opens up a perspective from which these modes of relation can be grasped as historical productions. This is why his philosophical stance, which engages with history while focusing on the present, garners the names “the history of the present” and “ontology of the present.” The present as such, however, 117

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is not merely the vantage point from which analyses can proceed but is itself also the very target of these analyses. In other words, through its own historical entanglement, it informs us that history—in all its multilayered, multifactored, and multivalued constitution—not only holds us in its grip but also provides us with a persistent stream of potentialities which preserve the capacity for social transformation.1 This observation gives new sense and relevance to the philosophical questions and answers embedded in the element of history: the present here emerges as a field of practical philosophy wherein it is the future of society, and not its past, which is at stake. Thus, although Foucault finds the flexible, liminal space between historiography and philosophy compelling, ultimately he adheres rigorously and decisively to his characterization of this method as a “critique of the present.” From this perspective, it is worth pointing out, even though it is almost a cliché at this point, that the project of a “diagnosis of the present”—with which term Foucault labels his own enterprise from the early 1960s all the way to the latest texts—represents a critical strategy that invests in two directions simultaneously, although not synchronically. Above all, the so-called “diagnosis” opens up the past with the intention of shedding light on the historical genesis of the present, but it does so by drawing on historical resources that are not directly located within the scope of the present. This duality is articulated in Foucault’s distinction between the present as “actuality” and the present as “difference.” This is why in interviews during the 1960, Foucault claims, at one and the same time, that “in trying to make a diagnosis of the present in which we live, we can isolate as already belonging to the past certain tendencies which are still considered to be contemporary” (RC, 91), and also that “to diagnose the present is to say what the present is, and how our present is absolutely different from all that is not it, that is to say, from our past” (FL, 52). This adherence to the actuality of the present, on the one hand, and to the absolute difference from the present, on the other, forms the perspective and inner force of the historical orientation of this philosophical diagnostic. However, in his later texts, and especially from the late 1970s onward, Foucault emphasizes, over and above the disclosive power of a historical diagnosis of the present, also its transformative power; that is to say, its capacity to influence or even transgress the present. This is why Foucault can claim, in a 1980 lecture, that a historical diagnosis of “who we are” is a theoretical analysis which has a clear “political dimension” (AB, 24). And again, a few years later, he stresses that a diagnosis of today “does not consist in a simple characterization of what we are,” but, in keeping with the “lines of fragility of the present,” this description “must always be made in accordance with these kinds of virtual fracture which open up the space of freedom understood as a space of concrete freedom, that is, of

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possible transformation” (EW2, 449–450). In the same way, Foucault also insists elsewhere that asking the question “what is happening now, and what do the facts and the world we live in mean?” not only establishes a common philosophical ground between Kant and Nietzsche but also, under the auspices of philosophy, provokes an interrogation that is both “historical and political, historical and actual” (QC, 100). What is particularly noteworthy in this context is that Foucault’s recurrent—albeit fluctuating—references to Nietzsche and Kant open up a force field wherein ideas of philosophical criticism and critical philosophy with differing constitutive motives and degrees of radicalism not only appear side by side but also indirectly reinforce one another. The appeals to Nietzsche in the early texts mainly highlight the critical motifs that emerged from the exploration of the historical lineages of the present. In this context, philosophical diagnostics mobilize a whole epistemological arsenal: from the critique of historical universals and the destruction of the idea of objective knowledge and truth to the radical problematization of the subject’s right to make history.2 Such a critique, then, provides the basis for showing why our present is not what it appears or claims to be under its own historical circumstances. However, the Kantian invocations in later texts reverse this trend. Instead of citing the “de-implication of knowledge and truth” (LW, 27) and the “destruction of the subject” (EW2, 388), Foucault’s diagnostic references to Kant emphasize the plasticity of present conditions in an attempt to reconceive the latter as a playing field for new “effects of truth” and new possibilities of subjectivation. Thus, these critical questions no longer focus solely on the historical blind spots and limits of the present in terms of a negative historical ontology; rather, their aim is to reveal its hidden historical potential, that is, to show how the present determines what we can orient ourselves toward, what we can become, and what as yet unimagined truths we can discover about ourselves. The essential point here, as Foucault notes in “What is Enlightenment?,” “is to transform the critique conducted in the form of necessary limitation into a practical critique that takes the form of a possible crossing-over (franchissement)” (EW1, 315). However, this by no means leads to the disconnection or isolation of critical philosophical diagnosis from descriptive historical analysis. On the contrary, Foucault stresses that “this work done at the limits of ourselves” must simultaneously “open up a realm of historical inquiry,” as well as put itself to “the test of reality, of contemporary reality, both to grasp the points where change is possible and desirable, and to determine the precise form this change should take” (EW1, 316). At this point, Nietzsche seems to join forces with Kant to lay claims for a critical philosophy that would use the power of history to reinvent the possibilities of new ways of collective existence.3

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This particular claim of critical philosophy is clearly integral to the dual structure of mediation between the present and the past—something which Foucault considers, using a combination of archaeological and genealogical methods, to be a fundamental element of his philosophical strategy. The bypassing of the present and its imminent past is in fact necessary in order to let that same present be re-apprehended from within a critical perspective by means of a purposeful unearthing of historical material. In other words, a break with the present on one side is counterbalanced by a critical return to it on the other. This also sheds new light on Foucault’s epistemologically charged, operational notions of discontinuity and continuity: for while the motif of discontinuity is indispensable for the underlying exploration of the past in terms of its positive content, its critical mobilization for the diagnosis of the present calls for a redeployment of the idea of continuity between the past and the present—but in reverse order. Just as our diagram used earlier illustrated, see figure 5.1. ​ In this respect, it is important to point out that Foucault, as early as 1963, states that “to do the history of the positivities is at the same time to do the critical history of limits, therefore bringing them back to life, confronting them with transgression.”4 This ambition guides the conception and execution of the archaeological project as a historical diagnostic, and so much so that, some ten years later, he goes as far as defining archaeology as a “historical-political experiment” whose “primary function is to discover the obscure continuities incorporated in us” (DE2, 644). To this extent, then, archaeology has a clear critical target “which is not based on relations of similarity between the past and the present, but rather on relations of continuity and on the possibility of defining the actual tactical objectives of the strategy of struggle” (DE2, 644). The feasibility and validity of the program of historical critique of “our time” thus rest entirely on its ability to conduct “retrospective analyses” (FL, 68) without uncritically assuming the evidences of the present or eliminating the historical contiguity and relevance necessary for their effective appraisal. Reintroducing continuity into the realm of historical critique, then, is not meant to diagnose the present as

Figure 5.1  The diagnostic relation between continuity and discontinuity in Foucault. Created by Adam Takács.

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a kind of legacy or deposit of the past—as if it were a simple collective artifact under the control of bygone things—but to problematize the present. As Foucault himself emphasizes at one point: “no one is more of a continuist than I am: to recognize a discontinuity is never anything more than to register a problem that needs to be solved” (EW3, 226). Problematization is thus represented here as a robust alternative to those analyses which portray the present either as a historical triviality—a kind of ephemeral or transitory phase of existence—or, on the other end of the spectrum, as a kind of historical fetter that immobilizes us: “I don’t construct my analyses in order to say, ‘This is the way things are, you are trapped.’ I say these things only insofar as I believe it enables us to transform them. Everything I do is done with the conviction that it may be of use” (EW3, 294–295). This analytical strategy, which may seem too cumbersome for some, is necessary, however, if we wish to unburden the Foucauldian enterprise of a legacy that has largely determined, or at least haunted, all social criticism with historical ambitions since the nineteenth century. For if we treat the events and processes of the past as merely a background or resource for a critical analysis of the present, we thereby necessarily re-legitimize a teleological conception of history. Carrying on the lineage of the idea of historia magistra vitae, such approaches represent an almost unbroken tradition which stretches from historicist conceptions through to various dialectical or revolutionary versions of the use of history.5 Foucault, on the other hand, insists that we need a conception of history which “protects us from historicism, from a historicism that calls on the past to resolve the questions of the present” (FL, 143) which means that “it is not at all a matter of coating the present in a form that is recognized in the past but still reckoned to be valid in the present” (BB, 130). By the same token, he explains that if we regard “the analysis of the present as being precisely, in history, a present of rupture, or of high point, or of completion or of a returning dawn,” this is a view that does more harm than good inasmuch as it distorts the historical perspective and dignifies it with a significance of which it may not be worthy (EW2, 449). Accordingly, far from holding to these teleological and consequently ideological assumptions, what is required here is a meticulous reconstruction of generative processes—one that does not seek to solve the problems of the present by mediating the past, but which rather mobilizes the critical knowledge of the past precisely in order to problematize the present. A historical critique of this kind does not admit any idea of historical progression; thus, it falls within the scope of counter-history. At the same time, and for this very reason, Foucault’s problematization of the present is grounded in concrete historical analyses and not in some normative valorization of history. If history is nevertheless privileged here, it is only because it instantiates and materializes that singular form

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of knowledge which allows us to create a distance from ourselves in the present. For such a distance is not only produced by contrasting the present as lived and the conceptualized past, or the lived present and the critically envisaged present; it also manifests itself when one outlines the historical and factual accidents which bring about the normative values and practices that define the present. This is why Foucault can claim, with a kind of provocative overconfidence, that “what reason perceives as its necessity or, rather, what different forms of rationality offer as their necessary being, can perfectly well be shown to have a history; and the network of contingencies from which it emerges can be traced” (EW2, 450). But what is really crucial to understand here is that the critique of the present thus necessarily relies entirely on the effectiveness of particular and therefore limited historical analyses. Consequently, such an approach has no recourse to the application of some prior knowledge, the assertion of normative principles, or the conversion of a certain accumulated ideas into empirical assets; instead, it can only pursue those significant historical situations which demonstrate, in a compelling and forceful way, how the knowledge about facts of the past can influence and transform our beliefs of the present, and thereby yield a kind of normative aura. As Foucault observes: [Of history] I make a rigorously instrumental use. It is from a precise question, that I meet in the actuality, that the possibility of a history takes shape for me. [. . .] The histories that I make are not explanatory, they never show the necessity of something, but rather the series of interlockings by which the impossible occurred, and reconducts its own scandal, its own paradox, up to now. (RF, 134–135)

In his retrospective reflections, and apparently not without reason, Foucault sees The History of Madness already as a work that stages a kind of historically composed version of social critique. For while this text seeks from the outset to “remove all chronology and historical succession from the perspective of a ‘progress’” (HM, 122), it explores a premodern phenomenon—the meaning and significance of which can only be appreciated in contrast to the present—“by cutting into the historical depth of an experience, to try to identify the movement through which a knowledge of madness finally became possible: a knowledge that is our own” (HM, 207). In this way, Foucault can rightly claim that this book was meant to create “an experience of what we are, not only our past but also our present, an experience of our modernity in such a way that we might come out of it transformed” (EW3, 242).6 This is especially true of The Order of Things, which subjected the evidential use of man as an anthropological constant to a subversive historical critique by means of a provocative

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choice of subject matter, at least in relation to contemporary debates on humanism. Foucault thus did not have to wonder whether his work contributed to a critical diagnosis of the present, since it was designed explicitly with this purpose in mind.7 This investigative course, however—at least in the range of published works—is undoubtedly consummated by Discipline and Punish, insofar as the inclusion of the problematic of power endows Foucault’s specifically elaborated historical analyses with a clearly critical, if not even overtly political character. It is no exaggeration, then, when Foucault claims that his book was designed to make it possible “to experience something that permits a change, a transformation of the relationship we have with ourselves and with the world where, up to then, we had seen ourselves as being without problems” (EW3, 244). Or, to put it more radically, while at the same time reversing the dynamic between politics and history: “the prison [. . .] is today a political place, that is to say a place where forces are born and manifested, a place where history is formed, and from which time emerges” (DE2, 401). From the beginning, then, the Foucauldian critique maps out, in the form of regional, historical diagnoses, those points of intensity that can address some topical questions of contemporary society. Foucault’s selection of historical research topics, especially those carried out from the standpoint of the fascination with power, is a convincing testimony to what the interviews consistently—and the lectures, occasionally—strongly emphasize; namely, that the critique of the present is constructed, and becomes effective, in the form of a historical problematization of the present.8 The themes of disciplinary power, normalization, sexuality, governmentality, biopolitics, subjectivity, and so on, all give rise to critical positions which, from ever newer historical perspectives, strikethrough, or at least place a question mark upon, the evidences of the present.9 With that being said, however, it may not be immediately obvious how a social critique thus articulated can properly distinguish itself from phenomenological, existential, Marxist, and Critical Theorist enterprises; in particular, it is not clear how such a critique could compete with the latter, so long as, as Foucault himself acknowledges, it is only ever able to bring its own normative goals and effectiveness into play through the cushioning mediation of concrete, empirical, and fragmented historical research. Put another way: if Foucault is ultimately only able to give form to his own philosophical ambitions within the framework of mediated historical research and of an “indirect ontology,” does it not follow therefrom that the social and political import of his work must necessarily assert itself only in the form of an “indirect critique”? To answer these questions, it is necessary to engage with the scope, object, and subject of Foucauldian sociohistorical critique.

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WHAT IS A DIAGNOSTIC HISTORICAL CRITIQUE? One of the most striking, perhaps even paradoxical, features of Foucault’s historical-philosophical enterprise—which, under designations like “diagnosis of the present,” “history of the present,” and “ontology of the present,” attempts to substantiate a critical approach to actual social conditions—is that it is only rarely and tangentially engaged with the question of the “present time” in the strict sense. In other words, contemporary phenomena fall almost entirely outside the scope of Foucault’s specific research.10 In fact, when such topics do arise in his discourse, it is mostly in the course of interviews or in conversations that ask about the present implications or analogies of his historical investigations. Evidently, then, Foucault’s critical project of the history of the present has nothing in common with initiatives, operating under the name of “contemporary history,” which seek to carve out a certain academic engagement along the lines of memory, heritage, testimony, and historical justice in the context of contentious present-day situations.11 On the other hand, it is also clear that if Foucault’s theoretical project has an explicit criticalpolitical ambition, it is not to be sought in the domain of current political aspirations and struggles. In fact, if for him, the critical engagement with the present must be forged in the work on the historical past, then this strategy would only allow for a kind of mediated confrontation with the problems of our actuality. In other words, Foucault’s historical method works for a critical understanding of the present only insofar as it first works against the evidential circumstances of the present, specifically, by means of an epistemologically and ontologically empowered immersion in the past—one which opens up that agentive space delineates, deploys, and legitimizes any criticism of actual social situations. As Deleuze points out, then—albeit somewhat speculatively—Foucault aims “to think the past against the present.”12 This formula also signifies, for Deleuze, the unfolding of the relation between the past and the present in terms of an essentially differentiating and future-oriented thinking: “thought thinks its own history (the past), but in order to free itself from what it thinks (the present) and be able finally to ‘think otherwise’ (the future).”13 Indeed, this idea was not far from Foucault’s mind, as his words of encouragement and hope testify: “we must begin by reinventing the future by immersing ourselves in a more creative present” (DE3, 678). Nevertheless, one might argue that this critical investment for the sake of the present, which simultaneously looks back on the past while reckoning with the future, still does not seem specific enough to justify the intellectual effort required. For how does this procedure differ from the well-known strategy of critically understanding the present by making an appeal to the past? Is not the historical past of use, at least since Hegel,

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to any philosophical effort that seeks to distance itself from the conditions of the present in order to flesh out a new truth claim or establish a future position? There is no doubt that history comprises a principal asset for any enterprise that considers social development or dynamics to be inseparable from scrutinizing norms of discourse or action; and, clearly, the maneuver of mobilizing the past to dissect the present can be found, in one way or another, in the toolbox of most twentieth-century philosophical thinking equipped with critical ambitions, whether it be of the phenomenological, dialectical, Marxist, or Critical Theoretical variety. However, once we comprehend certain idiosyncratic features of Foucault’s historical criticism, we can detect significant departures from such positions. Above all, it is worth noting that, apart from minor allusions, and despite a common affirmation of the importance of the compulsive oscillation between present and past, the Foucauldian enterprise does not appropriate the primary motifs of the hermeneutical procedure of “historical destruction” developed by the early Heidegger. With that being said, it is important to underline that, for Heidegger, the program of philosophical destruction anticipates the possibility of “becoming free from handed down possibilities and traditional types of determinations and classifications,” and is therefore also destined to make visible that which is genuinely sedimented in the historical past and so constitutes, through the line of history, the “vivacity of the present.”14 Therefore, destruction, too, seeks to open the way to some kind of “critique of the historical,” which culminates in some kind of a “critique of the present.”15 Nevertheless, such a method is ultimately incompatible with Foucault’s tendencies for two reasons: first, because Heidegger grounds the dynamism of history ontologically in subjective or the Dasein’s temporality; and second, because in Being and Time, he interprets the recourse to the past, and to the present that corresponds with it, using the concepts of “repetition” and “fatefulness.” This latter point is particularly important because it is on the ground of these concepts that Heidegger distinguishes between authentic and inauthentic historical relationships with the “present” and the “today.”16 This selective distinction is problematic for Foucault not only because of its untenable ontological and social features but also because it rests on an understanding of historical repetition according to which the privileged appropriation of historicity is the cornerstone of genuine historical critique. So even if Foucault would agree with Heidegger that the challenge of history consists precisely in letting “the knowledge of the past work on the experience of the present” (BB, 130), he would certainly not subscribe to the idea that returning to and retrieving an original past is the ontological guarantor of the authenticity of one’s critical position vis-à-vis the present. As he puts it in one of his lectures, “it is this transfer

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of the political effects of an historical analysis in the form of a simple repetition that is undoubtedly what is to be avoided at any cost” (BB, 131). Repetition or return is impossible because the diverse and multilayered social base of history—which is inherently rooted in the collective and volatile singularities of speech, action, and self-referential relations— precludes the articulation of any experimental or existential pattern that could legitimately serve as a point of reference for such a maneuver:17 “History, and the meticulous interest applied to history, is certainly one of the best defenses against this theme of the return,” says Foucault in an interview, in adding that “I think that history preserves us from that sort of ideology of the return” (BB, 131). If it can thus be said, for Foucault, that the present can be opened up to historical critique, this occurs not by recalibrating its missed potentials but by engaging those that are virtually unexplored or yet to be invented. Given that Heidegger’s conception of existential historicity thus apparently fails the Foucauldian test of a “critique of the present,” one might expect that an enterprise which presupposes a regime of historical determinacy in order to combine ontological questions with direct political stakes would not prove more capable. The latter happens to be an accurate description of Sartre’s The Critique of the Dialectical Reason, but this work is made worthy of note and comparison here—especially its stand-alone introduction The Search for a Method—because it is contemporary to Foucault and also because it exemplifies an admirable, thoughtprovoking, and ambitious genre of historical criticism. At the same time, some of Sartre’s theoretical tendencies—such as the fact that he comprehends the present, and the past conditions from which it emerges, in terms of a constellation of overarching social determinations and conditions—nonetheless, immediately reveal a discordance with any critical approach grounded in a body of always regionally construed historical research. For Sartre, history denotes the opening of a sociopolitical force field, whose rules and stakes are, however, always already delimited by that same history. The historical field is essentially defined by the concept of “dialectical totalization,” in terms of which human history is characterized as “an orientation towards the future and a totalising preservation of the past.”18 From this perspective, therefore, history both reconciles past and future, determination and freedom, and at the same time reveals an “originally and apodictically experienced” intelligibility which, independently of any order of empirical factuality, obeys solely its own laws.19 And even though Sartre’s goal is clearly to dynamize the notion of social existence and introduce historicity into the most primordial aspects of human experience, his analysis accomplishes critical transparency precisely by invoking this process of self-intelligible dialectical totalization: “intelligibility makes the new perfectly clear on the basis of the old; it enables

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us to witness the transparent practical production of the new on the basis of previously defined factors and in the light of totalization.”20 In accordance, therefore, with this dialectical movement, historical interpretation, following its progressive-regressive method, proceeds by fathoming “the presence of the future at the heart of the present.”21 This kind of historical totalization includes all factors relevant to history, for example, “acts, passions, work, and need as well as economic categories,” and by thus reinserting “the agent or the event back into the historical setting,” it allows one to “determine exactly the meaning of the present as such.”22 For, as Sartre argues, in every step of the historical development, “the present is explained by the future, particular movements by the overall operation, in short, the detail in terms of the totality.”23 It need not be stressed too much that Foucault’s own historical conception and field of orientation jointly oppose these theses at almost every point; indeed, The Archaeology of Knowledge alone demonstrates as much. Even still, it is worthwhile to grasp specifically how Foucault diverges from Sartre’s positions concerning the significance of the present and the critical interpretation of history since these are characteristic of dialectic or Marxist commitments in general. In this context, the notion of historical contingency is a category that imbues Foucault’s position with a different kind of dynamism, leverage, and efficacy. Admittedly, the category of contingency also appears in Sartre but only as a dialectical component of historical necessity. For example, in the course of demonstrating that contingent material or economic “scarcity” belongs, as such, to the essential structure of human nature and its material conditions, Sartre points out how, in this sense, contingency tends to function as a kind of necessity, without which the very concept of history itself would disappear. Accordingly, Sartre concludes that “today everyone must recognise this basic contingency as the necessity which, working both through thousands of years and also, quite directly, through the present, forces him to be exactly what he is.”24 In any case, it is obvious that for Sartre it is human reality, with all its inherent and constitutive negativity, that enables us to transform this kind of contingency into historical necessity, even though this very reality and its structure are not themselves seen as historical variables. Foucault argues to the contrary, however, that the scope of the historical contingency extends to all elements of being, including human reality: [The] recourse to history—one of the great facts in French philosophical thought for at least twenty years—is meaningful to the extent that history serves to show how that which is has not always been; that is, the things which seem most evident to us are always formed in the confluence of encounters and chances, during the course of a precarious and fragile history. (EW2, 450)

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It is for these very reasons that Foucault is able to take, as the guiding inquiry of his critical ontological project, the following question: “in what is given to us as universal, necessary, obligatory, what place is occupied by whatever is singular, contingent, and the product of arbitrary constraints?” (EW1, 315). In Foucault’s estimation, then, historical contingency is not merely descriptive or ontological, as it is for Sartre; for it has a fundamental critical role to play, inasmuch as it highlights that which, within our present or actuality, is ripe for change, or which demands to be conceived differently based on its inherent, but not imperative, historical development and conditions. To this extent, the critical notion of historical contingency derives fully its normative force from what appears as factually contingent, and not from a notion of an apparent or presumed necessity. In other words, facts, once immersed in the element of history and measured against that which presents itself as unassailable, take on a normative charge. This is why Foucault insists that “we have to dig deeply to show how things have been historically contingent, for such and such reason intelligible but not necessary. We must make the intelligible appear against a background of emptiness and deny its necessity” (EW1, 139–140). The structural significance which Foucault hereby accords to the opposition between rationality and contingency makes his historical approach and its consequences a matter of concern also for the field of Critical Theory. In this regard, Jürgen Habermas’s apprehensions about Foucault’s theory of power are familiar: in his view, Foucault’s failure to establish a normative grounding pushes the French philosopher to embrace subjectivism, relativism, and, ultimately, even irrationalism.25 Much ink has been spent discussing or critically contextualizing Habermas’s views,26 but what makes this confrontation particularly interesting for our purposes here is the fact that these debates concerning the nature of social criticism revolve precisely around the question of the critical potential of history or historical thinking. This is especially the case if we accept Axel Honneth’s view that the whole tradition of the Frankfurt School rests on the appropriate use of history, which is in turn dependent upon the ability to secure a proper distance from history. Thus, when Honneth claims that “Critical Theory [. . .] insists on a mediation of theory and history in a concept of socially effective rationality,” he thereby indicates the basic problem: “against the tendency to reduce social criticism to a project of normative, situational, or local opinion, one must clarify the context in which social criticism stands side by side with the demands of a historically evolved reason.”27 At the same time, it is quite obvious that Honneth doubts Foucault’s capacity to tackle such a task; and here, too, we find that the essential objection concerns his normative grounding or rather the lack thereof. Although his own position on this matter gradually evolved

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away from the straightforwardly Habermasian formulation—viz., that Foucault’s historical research “rests on moral convictions for which, to a certain extent, a universal validity must inevitably be claimed” but which it is unable to provide28—Honneth always remained equally critical: if it is in fact moral convictions of a specific sort that guide Foucault in his critical diagnosis of the times, then an appropriate place for these must be found not only within his metatheoretical reflections but also within the conceptual framework of his social analysis.29

In fact, it is precisely this concern that guides Honneth when, in a later text, he first acknowledges the legitimate social-critical ambition of Foucault’s undertaking but subsequently rebukes him, insisting that the procedure of genealogical exposure should always rely on an additional step of “normative justification.” In the end, Honneth’s assessment of the Foucauldian project appears decidedly negative: “genealogy is in a certain sense a parasitical critical procedure, since it lives by presupposing a normative justification that it does not itself try to give.”30 Now, it certainly can be argued that Foucault’s critical enterprise involves a certain parasitic strategy, but this parasitism attaches to the body of history itself. In other words, if Foucault possesses a “moral conviction” at all it is this: he believes that no mere moral conviction, including his own, could ever override the reality of those existing social practices which are forged in the forcefield of pervasive historical contingencies and the local social determinacies that emerge from them. One must not lose sight here of the fact that Foucault’s critique is primarily motivated by history, as opposed to pure reason or rationality, and that it abandons all universal ambitions in order to focus essentially on the locality of the present. In this respect, nothing could be more foreign to Foucault’s methodology than trying to “validate” his studies with some universal criterion of normative justification. Such an undertaking is highly questionable, if only because none of his largescale historical analyses—including those which thematize the power relations of disciplinary society, the idea of governmentality, or biopolitics—could ever be subsumed under the banner of a universal and supposedly immutable historical development.31 As Foucault repeatedly claims, for example, in his debate with historians about his research on prisons, it is impossible to think in terms of historical universals. Even the analysis of reason or rationality must be subjected to a precise and meticulous analysis of social practices: “I don’t believe one can speak of an intrinsic notion of ‘rationalization’ 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”

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(EW3, 229). If a challenge still manifests here, it thus consists instead in “examining how forms of rationality inscribe themselves in practices or systems of practices” (EW3, 230). These statements allow us to sketch a possible reply to Honneth: if the critical potential of the exploration of historical facts and their underlying models can be normatively contrasted with the social and power structures of the present, then this cannot and should not be subjected to an additional procedure of standardizing or justification; for the very idea of reason itself can only serve as a fundamental ground of justification if it is held to be independent of historical limitations—and this is just what Foucault contests. Of course, and as he acknowledges, Foucault thereby offers us both too much and too little: “there are too many diverse kinds of relations, too many lines of analysis, yet at the same time there is too little necessary unity. A plethora of intelligibilities, a deficit of necessities” (EW3, 228). Nonetheless, he adds—not without import—that “for me this is precisely the point at issue, both in historical analysis and in political critique. We aren’t, nor do we have to put ourselves, under the sign of a unitary necessity” (EW3, 228–229). All this is meant, not to ignore or bypass but to shed new light on the compelling question of the normativity of historical social critique. As we have seen, Foucault’s main point in this regard is that if one is to base such an analysis on historical models, then one must think in terms of critical engagements that are partial and local rather than comprehensive or final, radical or revolutionary. Likewise, this critique must be primarily diagnostic and noninterventionist, that is, it must raise problems, question evidence, and challenge social perceptual horizons. Accordingly, it should come as no surprise that Foucault does not consider the “present” to be a “unique or fundamental or irruptive point in history” (EW2, 449) and does not interpret the social sphere as a set of universal starting points for intentional collective actions based on historical assessment. In one of his Society Must Be Defended lectures, he observed that in contemporary struggles, localized forms of social criticism were beginning to take precedence over comprehensive and global theoretical solutions. With that being said, he cautions that this local engagement should not be understood to imply or advocate any kind of “soft eclecticism, opportunism, or openness to any old theoretical undertaking, nor does it mean a sort of deliberate asceticism that boils down to losing as much theoretical weight as possible” (SD, 6). What is at stake here—Foucault contends, with a claim that could almost be seen as a direct challenge to the Frankfurt School—is precisely “that the essentially local character of the critique in fact indicates something resembling a sort of autonomous and noncentralized theoretical production, or in other words a theoretical production that does not need a visa from some common regime to establish its validity” (SD, 6).

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Furthermore, this position does not suggest that a decentralized critical engagement ought to allow a kind of utterly positivist perspective to take hold in the force field of social matters. Normative standards for thought or action cannot be calculated directly and unerringly from historical facts; and on this point, Foucault, Habermas, and Honneth are certainly in agreement. But what can be derived from such facts are important questions, dilemmas, and interrogations challenging the status quo—especially if this is paired with an awareness of historical contingencies and necessities related to localized and purposive contextualization, which opens up a deliberation concerning alternative prescripts in a given social context. The domain of the question of historical normativity thus shifts to the conditions of local social contexts and their historical background, given in present situations, where locality itself appears as a historical variable. An endeavor like this draws its critical power precisely from the fact that, instead of appealing to general normative principles, it seeks instead to define the provenance of present-day social problems—for example, the status of psychiatry, the hospital, prison, sexual practices, and the possibilities of self-constitution—in the hope that, by highlighting their historical genealogies, one might discover other, different rules conveyed by the past and becoming possible in the present. The possibility of a certain normative appraisal is thus generated here by the contrast between the emergence of current social problems—as attested by social, institutional, or political experiences—and the historical relations that stand behind them. In this sense, the Foucauldian critical enterprise positions itself wholly within the field of historical problematization before, or rather instead of, pursuing any intellectual or subversive social intervention.32 To this extent, Foucault’s historical critique is at once limited, indirect, and factually conditioned, but as such, it is also fully in line with the parameters of the intended historical diagnosis of the present. And if this so-called “parasitic” and aloof authority does ultimately attempt to connect to social struggles that are “actually” taking place, it is precisely by providing assets gained from concrete historical knowledge—for these analyses give such movements intellectual guidance.33 In any case, it would be regrettable to underestimate the radicality and efficiency of such historical problematization: bringing attention to topical social troubles and exposing their origins and scope can have radical consequences for those involved. As Foucault explains, in a defiant tone, on one occasion: Critique doesn’t have to be the premise of a deduction that concludes, ‘this, then, is what needs to be done.’ It should be an instrument for those who fight, those who resist and refuse what is. Its use should be in processes of conflict and confrontation, essays in refusal. It doesn’t have to lay down the law for the law. It isn’t a stage in a programming. It is a challenge directed to what is (EW3, 236).

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Ultimately, then, we find that the Foucauldian notion of historical critique implicates two basic issues that will require further examination: on the one hand, the strategy of using historical knowledge for concrete sociocritical purposes, and on the other hand, the question of political subjectivation generated by such usage. THE OBJECT OF THE CRITIQUE: LIBERATING KNOWLEDGE In 1976, the French historian and political activist Jean Chesneaux came out with an unusually provocative book on historical theory, written almost entirely in the imperative mode, in which he took explicit aim at the premises of academic or professedly objectivist historical scholarship.34 Although a work published a few years earlier by the prominent French historian of the Roman period, Paul Veyne, expressed similar ambitions,35 Chesneaux’s approach was different in that it was more overtly political. Chesneaux argues that any historiography which takes itself seriously as such must guard against obscuring its own professional, institutional, and especially social conditioning—most notably, the fact that it always, seen or unseen, conveys the interests of the present. In order to gain an awareness of these influences, Chesneaux claims that an “active relationship to the past” must be formed through a reversal of the traditional understanding of the relationship between past and present, taken to such a radical extent that the problems of the present become the starting point for historical interpretation in general.36 Furthermore, he emphasizes that the problems of the present must derive directly from the current struggles in society and must not be confused or conflated with the up-to-date problems of historical-scientific research. It is this perspective which allows for the demystification of the underlying and politically charged premises of modern historical scholarship, including questions concerning historical rhetoric and the status and treatment of documents, as well as the delineation of temporal and spatial frames of research. In this way, Chesneaux commits himself to a Marxist-inspired conception of society and human science which regards popular social struggles as a real historical and theoretical formative force, and it is from within this frame of reference that he appraises alternative approaches. On his scale, most of the representatives of the classical historiographical tradition, and especially the objectivist model of the Annales school, are found to be lightweight—and even Althusser’s concept of history, which Chesneaux labels abstract and intellectualist, falls into this bracket. Interestingly enough, Foucault’s The Archaeology of Knowledge is also mentioned here disapprovingly as a work in which “the problem of discontinuity is

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studied in purely intellectual terms.”37 Chesneaux’s censure stems from the fact that, as he argues, the book spares “not a word about people’s struggles and the forces that bring about social change.”38 However, Chesneaux’s critical assessment may be somewhat hasty. For while it is true that The Archaeology of Knowledge—which, it should be noted in passing, was written before 1968—does not discuss the question of social struggles from a historical perspective, it does identify discourse as an “asset of political struggle” (AK, 136). What is more, a few years later, in a conversation with Gilles Deleuze, Foucault explicitly addresses the question of the relationship between social struggles and theory-making. During that talk, Foucault makes it quite clear, with specific reference to the events of 1968, that the function of the intellectual is not to provide theoretical knowledge or awareness to social struggles by somehow positioning themselves above such movements. On the contrary, he argues that theory itself must be conceived as a practice that plays its own part in the eventual struggle against the oppressive structures of power and is to this extent “an activity conducted alongside those who struggle for power, and not their illumination from a safe distance” (LC, 208). In this way, Foucault answers Chesneaux’s objection—before it was even formulated—and at the same time manages to shift the focus onto other relevant issues. The interpretation of theory as a particular form of social exercise also suggests, implicitly, that historical theorizing does not necessarily have to produce comprehensive explanations in order to reach its goals—that is, those surrounding class struggle or unequal economic development—but can instead employ concrete informative practices that relate immediately to social struggles on a given terrain. In this latter endeavor, therefore, locality is just as important as the ability to apply knowledge in a politically relevant way; indeed, a “theory” like this, Foucault argues, could never abandon its “local and regional” attachment, because in the final analysis, it is nothing else but a “regional system of this struggle” (LC, 208). This might explain why, from the mid-1970s onward, Foucault’s recurring queries about the critical potential of his own historical research appear to be oriented toward the concept of knowledge (savoir) and its locally or regionally construed forms in various social confrontations. This is particularly true in cases where the specific object of historical analysis concerns repressive and constructive forms of power, such as when Foucault turns to the eighteenth- to nineteenth-century European historical configurations of normalization, state power, and biopolitical interventions.39 For example, in The Birth of Biopolitics, he proposes a “political critique of knowledge” that anchors itself in the “history of the regime of veridiction,” which is to say, in the study of those historical processes wherein “the history of truth is coupled with the history of law” (BB, 35–36). This circuitous definition serves precisely to prevent his historical

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critique from becoming, without further ado, the political anatomy of the rationality inherent in forms of power and also from following in the footsteps of the Frankfurt School, so as to assume the type of power associated with the form of rationality. Instead, Foucault’s political critique aims to explore the historical conditions which give rise to practices of judgment that in turn allow certain forms of knowledge—whether these be psychiatric, medical, carceral, etc.—to avail themselves of authoritative agency, with all its attendant functions and effects. To this extent then, “it is not so much the history of the true or the history of the false as the history of veridiction which has a political significance” (BB, 36–37). But this also highlights, at least indirectly, that for a critical work grounded in the examination of specific historical material—one which is, in fact, constructed and modified precisely through an engagement with concrete documentary data—the most appropriate involvement cannot be direct political involvement in social struggle. What makes this political criticism successful is not its ability to decode scientific findings and turn them into assets of political activism, but rather its capacity to reveal, through historical analysis, those critical patterns of forms of knowledge and modes of knowledge production that can inform emancipatory political practices, precisely by showing the interrelations between certain historical precursors and their present consequences. In this sense, it can be argued that the project—which, starting in the early 1960s, Foucault introduces and promotes under the name “history of the present” or “critique of the present,” and whose premises are echoed in most of his historical research—is designed from the very outset to accommodate, economically yet without compromise, both the scholarly disposition of historical analysis and the sociopolitically motivated practices of historical critique. Therefore, to borrow a formula from The Birth of Biopolitics, this means that “the problem is to let knowledge of the past work on the experience of the present” (BB, 130). Thus, to the problem that Chesneaux tackles by trying to dissociate the professional and socially driven approach of history in order to politically activate the past, Foucault proposes a different answer. For the latter, the element of knowledge is what serves as the vehicle between the scholarly and critical uses of history, and the “history of present” is what provides the proper platform for this mediation. Analysis and critique are intertwined in the field of erudite historical knowledge that is produced and honed for the sake of problematizing the present. Now, by definition, this kind of undertaking cannot exempt itself from acts of rejection; however, what is repudiated here is not the allegedly objectivist scholarly apparatus to produce historical knowledge per se, but that which binds this knowledge to dominant power structures and thereby ensures that it can be propagated or even institutionalized in the form of authoritative

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beliefs and models. This is why Foucault defines critique, in its most general sense, as “an attempt to reveal as much as possible, that is to say as deeply and generally as possible, all the effects of dogmatism linked to knowledge, and all the effects of knowledge linked to dogmatism” (DE3, 815–816). But beyond the rhetorical value of this bon mot, it shows, importantly, that Foucault specifically identifies the domain of knowledge as the arena of struggle that defines the boundaries of a possible effective critical work and the scope of its effectiveness. Of course, all this apparently still succumbs to the charge of intellectualism, à la Chesneaux. But this is the case only if one ignores the fact that the critical application of historical knowledge is not here limited to the fabrication of large-scale argumentative models for the sake of making abstract explanations detached from social issues; for it can also be used to design prudent practices that invigorate concrete possibilities for thinking otherwise about the social fabric, chiefly through the rejection of certain elements of status quo and by highlighting its historical alternatives. Moreover, it is also surely this particular insight which compels Foucault, in The History of Sexuality, to declare philosophy itself a critical activity; for he characterizes it as a style of thinking whose effectiveness depends upon its power to produce knowledge beyond its scope—which is to say, within history: But, then, what is philosophy today—philosophical activity, I mean—if it is not the critical work that thought brings to bear on itself? In what does it consist, if not in the endeavor to know how and to what extent it might be possible to think differently, instead of legitimating what is already known? [.  .  .] it is entitled to explore what might be changed, in its own thought, through the practice of a knowledge that is foreign to it. (HS2, 8–9)

In a number of discussions concerning Discipline and Punish—his book about the emergence and proliferation of prison-based punitive practices and their underlying power structure in European modernity—Foucault gives us to understand, in a particularly concise and eloquent manner, the significance of a critical approach that routinely uses meticulously acquired historical knowledge to impact social agendas. In response to a question concerning the status of rationality in his historical analyses, Foucault introduces the term “eventalization”: “What do I mean by this term? [. . .] first of all, a breach of self-evidence. It means making visible a singularity at places where there is a temptation to invoke a historical constant, an immediate anthropological trait, or an obviousness that imposes itself uniformly on all” (EW3, 226).40 It is easy to see that the motif of the break with self-evidence is not only meant merely to mark an analytical step in the process of historical inquiry but also to emphasize a function of critical engagement that focuses on the present. As a marker of historical singularity, the notion of “event” offers a counterpoint to

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current concepts or patterns of social perception that tend to present themselves as definitive or inescapable.41 Therefore, the strength and legitimacy of this strategic move are not gleaned from general normative considerations but rather from the concrete historical research perspectives that are opened up by exposing the singularities of past processes. In the specific case of the sociopolitical evidence of punishment by imprisonment, then, it is precisely “a matter of shaking this false self-evidence, of demonstrating its precariousness, of making visible not its arbitrariness but its complex interconnection with a multiplicity of historical processes, many of them of recent date” (EW3, 225). In fact, with this claim, Foucault simply insists that the evidences of social perception must be tested against the counter-force of historical evidences. In other words, it is the historical material itself which accrues critical value through the confrontation between the complexity of past events and the hitherto unchallenged conjectures of the present. Hence, the fervor of a politically informed theoretical commitment to which Foucault gives expression thus: “a breach of self-evidence, of those self-evidences on which our knowledges, acquiescences, and practices rest: this is the first theoretico-political function of “‘eventalization’” (EW3, 228). Another crucial element of the Foucauldian historical-critical procedure is that, inasmuch as it attempts a genuine break with the evidences of the present, it is not satisfied by merely dwelling upon the negative contrast which emanates from between past events and present conjunctures but seeks also to endow this with an affirmative critical significance.42 Beyond any dialectical mediation or totalization, the idea is that the conflict with the evidences of the present opens up a new field for thinking and action. This is primarily because the subversive maneuver of engaging historical knowledge can allow for the emergence of a social relevance with a positive content. Foucault, in the context of his research on the modern European prison system, describes this inherent motif of critical articulation as follows: “the experience through which we grasp the intelligibility of certain mechanisms (for example, imprisonment, punishment, and so on) and the way in which we are enabled to detach ourselves from them by perceiving them differently will be, at best, one and the same thing” (EW3, 244). From this description, we see that Foucault is trying to motivate the transition to a more positive strain of critical intervention, which he frames within a kind of political-epistemological shift. For what he means, to put it somewhat abstractly, is that the mechanisms of knowledgeacquisition required by historical intelligibility tend, in a critically exposed situation, to convert themselves into socially conditioned dispositions of experience-making. In other words, the critical profit of concrete historical insights lies in their capacity to create, through individual or communal practices of self-positioning, new kinds of experience—in precisely that

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void which opens in place of the previously rejected social evidences. At one point, Foucault even speculates that what is in fact operative here is not the repudiation of false evidences; for what principally emerges in such concrete social situations is actually a specific type of uncertainty, and it is environments of this type that really stimulate motives for thinking and acting otherwise.43 Moreover, it is no accident that Foucault strongly emphasizes the importance of the concept of experience in this context.44 For as he points out, each of his own historical investigations is itself based on a particular motif of personal experience which, though idiosyncratic, is nevertheless capable of generating shared experiences in the form of “collective practices” and “ways of thinking” (EW3, 244). Again, it is no coincidence that it is precisely this line of thought which spurs Foucault to appeal to the experience of the anti-psychiatry or prison rights movements in France, in which he himself played an active role (EW3, 244). To summarize, we find that, for Foucault, the most significant way in which one can provide an analysis of the present with genuine critical perspectives and instruments is by transforming concrete historical knowledge into an asset for social experience. Such a critical transformation requires that it takes place concurrently in both the object and subject of knowledge and at the level where “erudite truth” becomes a resource for concrete practices of social engagement. As Foucault points out, in reference to his work on the prison: The book makes use of true documents, but in such a way that through them it is possible not only to arrive at an establishment of truth but also to experience something that permits a change, a transformation of the relationship we have with ourselves and with the world where, up to then, we had seen ourselves as being without problems—in short, a transformation of the relationship we have with our knowledge. (EW3, 244)

According to Foucault’s critical philosophy, before—and perhaps even instead of—getting to the issue of the emancipation of subjectivity from power relations, one must first pass through the purifying fire, which is to say, one must first pose the fundamental question of the liberation of knowledge. Critical knowledge is the medium that creates the interface between scholarly analysis and political experience. At the same time, it is what makes this relationship concrete, inasmuch as it provides a regional framework for knowledge and a local character for experience. In general, only this double-sided kind of critical knowledge can enable a particular historical research topic to provide the real perspectives needed to solve real problems in the arena of social struggles. It is quite indicative that when, in his programmatic lecture “What is the Enlightenment?” Foucault asks a far-reaching critical-philosophical question, namely, “how can the growth of capabilities (capacitiés) be

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disconnected from the intensification of power relations?” (EW1, 317)— and thereby articulates the basic stakes of his critical project—the prerequisite of such questioning is still the historical-critical investigation of “practical systems,” and especially the scrutiny of the “relations of control over things, relations of action upon others, relations with oneself” (EW1, 318). Despite their homogeneity and systematicity, however, the latter are not compelled to form the pillars of a comprehensive explanatory model or theory but are here allowed to retain their specificity “in the sense that they always bear upon a material, an epoch, a body of determined practices and discourses” (EW1, 318). In other words, it is on the basis of specific historical research themes that a theoretical and conceptual matrix is formed, which in turn opens certain pressing social questions for engagement and discussion. Manifestly, then, without an emancipatory drive inherent in the concrete procedures of historical knowledge, configurations of power or subjectivity would only ever be associated with events of liberation from the perspective of an abstract or arbitrary normativity. In this regard, it is particularly telling that Foucault, in his Collège de France lectures of the mid-1970s, relates the critical power of his genealogical approach to the motif of the liberation or “de-subjugation” of knowledge. For example, in the 1976 lecture series entitled Society Must Be Defended, Foucault introduces its yearly program not only by listing a sort of inventory of the sociocritical possibilities of the time and highlighting the multiplication and localization of critical practices in society—whereby he mentions, with particular reference to Marxism and psychoanalysis, both the anti-psychiatric and anti-prison movements, Marcuse, Deleuze, and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, as well as the collapse of comprehensive or totalizing critical models—but also by outlining a strategy, under the heading of “returns of knowledge,” that would make this local critique even more effective (SD, 5–6). With this name, which Foucault reinforces with the alternate phrase “insurrection of knowledge,” he explicitly takes stock of the actual and potential opportunities for the critical application of historical knowledge in present society. This nomenclature is far from contingent, however; indeed, it proves to be both concrete and theoretical inasmuch as, given the sociopolitical climate at the time, Foucault believed that “historical contents alone allow us to see the dividing lines in the confrontations and struggles that functional arrangements or systematic organizations are designed to mask” (SD, 7). The “return of knowledge” thus refers to the liberation and critical investment, by means of the “tools of scholarship,” of those “blocks of historical knowledge” (SD, 7) which certain systemic mechanisms seek to eliminate or disguise in contemporary society. Beyond this, Foucault admits another kind of “return of knowledge,” which occurs together with the emergence of local, popular genres of

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knowledge, and which differs from the previous kind in more than just situation. In this case, we are not only talking about marginalized forms of knowledge but also those that are inarticulate, naïve, improperly conceived—in a word, the “nonqualified” or “disqualified” (SD, 7). As an example, Foucault cites the knowledge that emerges in psychiatric institutions or hospitals out of the popular discourses of patients, internees, clients, and even doctors and nurses, which “derives its power solely from the fact that it is different from all the knowledges that surround it” (SD, 8). From here, however, Foucault’s main concern is not simply the relation between these two kinds of knowledge, namely, the “buried scholarly knowledge” on the one hand, and on the other, the “knowledges that were disqualified by the hierarchy of erudition and sciences” (SD, 8); rather, he is specifically preoccupied with describing the kind of critical knowledge which is produced from their strategic combination. The fact that in both cases it is a matter of “historical knowledge of struggles” already creates, according to Foucault, a common ground between the two kinds of knowledge of history. At the same time, their deliberate combination opens the way to the instauration of a historicalcritical position that would ultimately hold local subjects responsible for assessing the nature and meaning of social struggles. The result is nothing less than a reshaping of that “genealogical” procedure which consists in a “coupling together of scholarly erudition and local memories, which allows us to constitute a historical knowledge of struggles and to make use of that knowledge in contemporary tactics” (SD, 8).45 Through this reconfiguration, Foucault thus places the triple constellation of historical knowledge, critical ambition, and social experience in a new and—for him—wholly pervasive light, and at the same time provides a definition of his genealogical procedure which places it in overt opposition to the institutionalized and hierarchized production of historical knowledge. As he puts it, genealogy: is a way of playing local, discontinuous, disqualified, or non-legitimized knowledges off against the unitary theoretical instance that claims to be able to filter them, organize them into a hierarchy, organize them in the name of a true body of knowledge, in the name of the rights of a science that is in the hands of the few. (SD, 9)

Here, we find an unequivocal assertion that the critical use of historical knowledge, though endowed with scientific erudition, does not seek, or depend upon, the endorsement of institutional channels. On the contrary, genealogy is characterized as “antiscience,” or, more precisely, as a critical genre tasked with fighting “the power-effects characteristic of any discourse that is regarded as scientific” (SD, 9). The underlying strategic goal is nothing other than the elimination, as far as possible, of the

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disqualifying effects which scientific and other authoritative discourses, including those Marxist and psychoanalytic, enact upon marginalized or local knowledge. This, in turn, opens the way to “de-subjugate” these knowledges and thereby “enable them to oppose and struggle against the coercion of a unitary, formal, and scientific theoretical discourse” (SD, 10). On the other hand, the reactivation of local knowledge with a newfound critical edge also discloses the positions—to use Foucault’s terms—of those who, as “speaking subjects,” “discursive subjects,” and “subjects of experience” (SD, 10), populate the social space that is marked by their struggles and who form both the sources and targets of genealogical intervention. Therefore, by the same strategic gesture—and as a specific critical knowledge—such an intervention seeks to do justice to these experiences through pursuing its own scholarly aims. But this raises a few crucial questions. Principally, what is the relationship between the project of a genealogical liberation of knowledge that is conditioned by social experience and the subjects of that experience? And what relationship does Foucault envisage between socially informed historical criticism and political subjectivation? HISTORICAL CRITIQUE AND POLITICAL SUBJECTIVATION There are two typical ways in which the question of the “subject” can be brought to the forefront, or into the force field, of a philosophical enterprise with sociocritical ambitions. The first is to demonstrate the existence of an inclusive experiential or anthropological structure that allocates social actions and practices according to an arrangement of those basic human capacities and needs that are universally shared in a world or lifeworld configured by an invariant horizon of experience. The second is to adopt a model of societal development that allows actors to be recognized within a historically shaped structure of ubiquitously identifiable social roles. In the first case, it is a matter of theories that, starting from the common experiential base of a shared “lifeworld,” attempt therefrom to map out intersubjective relations; or, as in Habermas’ understanding, it involves communicative situations that enable a normative identification of interpersonal positions in terms of degrees of consensus and conflict.46 In the second case, which is generally associated with Marxist-oriented theories, we find ourselves confronted with conceptions which, in the context of social interactions primarily understood as “struggles,” gesture toward the prevalence of normative processes of subjectification that occur within a historically changing but uniformly stratified social environment, and which are organized along the conflicting lines of collective repression and emancipation.47

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Of course, even a cursory acquaintance with Foucault’s historical thinking suffices to show that, for him, neither theoretical option is viable. On the one hand, the first strategy is ruled out by the fact that, for historical reasons, Foucault does not accept the idea of a generic or unchanging dimension of experience that would be capable of homogenizing subjective or intersubjective relations; instead, he holds to a conception of social practice that admits diverse spatiotemporal features and modes of existence. On the other hand, he equally rejects the historical logic which represents relations of power as exclusive instances of social struggle. This is because class or group conflict does not constitute the essential ground of Foucault’s conception of power, and also because he rejects the monotonic or uniformly fluctuating model of historical development as an inadequate basis for the historical analysis of social practices.48 From the perspective of his genealogical critical approach, then, the issue of the subject or subjective experience thus shows itself instead to be an issue of social relations and their capacity to expose patterns of historically changing characteristics and distributions. However, this by no means marginalizes the question of political subjectivity such that this historical-critical theory could then simply pass it over. For if, according to Foucault, an essentially mutable theoretical-critical matrix is always set up by the conjuncture of concrete historical analyses and locally prevalent social valuations, this means that the critical outcomes of this project can never take the form of general or unspecified normative conclusions.49 The phenomena of madness, hospitals, prisons, sexuality, governmentality, and biopolitics all constitute concrete sites for historical construction and at the same time testify to the effects of contemporary problematization. Nevertheless, if all this is to do more than simply expand our historical knowledge—and thus perhaps, where appropriate, contribute also to what Foucault calls “the critical liberation of knowledge”—it is essential that the phenomena analyzed are reflected, somehow, within the sensibility and self-awareness of the society or group under consideration. In other words, the “desubjugation of knowledge” only possesses critical significance insofar as it is able to (1) reveal a problematic social situation; (2) implicate a particular affected group (such as the subjects of madness, disease, punishment, and sexuality); and (3) exhort them to think or act critically about their own situation. Accordingly, we see, not only that Foucault’s explicit critical claims are themselves time-bound and socially situated, but also that their effectiveness depends upon the direct involvement of the very people whom they concern. In other words, they are only valid so long as social actors can meaningfully reassert or generate their belief in the edifying power of historical change, as well as its capacity to transform their own values.

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Indeed, ever since the early 1970s, Foucault stressed his conviction that intellectual critical work, qua social practice, should focus mainly on creating concrete social situations that enable transformative thinking and action and refrain from proposing normative principles. As he argues in a conversation with Deleuze, Foucault thinks that “the intellectual’s role is no longer to place himself ‘somewhat ahead and to the side’ in order to express the stifled truth of the collectivity” (Fl, 75) because “all those on whom power is exercised to their detriment, all who find it intolerable, can begin the struggle on their own terrain and on the basis of their proper activity (or passivity)” (FL, 81).50 From this perspective, the intellectual is thus merely an accomplice of social transformation, not its leader; yet this does not mean that historically informed social criticism cannot still assume a certain guiding function. For, as Foucault explains in another interview, “since he works specifically in the realm of thought,” the task of the intellectual “is to see how far the liberation of thought can make those transformations urgent enough for people to want to carry them out and difficult enough to carry out for them to be profoundly rooted in reality” (PPC, 155). Stated differently, if this historical critique is supposed to challenge the existing social order and its power structure, it is only because its analytical terrain and apparatus are not calibrated as a pure theory in the first place. A critique that mobilizes historical knowledge affects particular actions and the particular subjects of those actions, namely, those actions that can reach beyond the status quo of any given social situation and those “subjects of actions through which the real is transformed” (EW3, 236). Thus, in order to ensure its own efficacy, the emancipatory practice of the historical liberation of knowledge must appeal to some extent to the experience of those who are involved in a particular sociohistorical situation; in other words, any critical intervention undertaken in the register of knowledge must maintain contact with the grid of political sensibility.51 Concretely, this means that subjects need to see themselves, not only as the subjects of their actions, but also as agencies within the broader, historical context of power that determines their actions: “there are a thousand things that can be done, invented, contrived by those who, recognizing the relations of power in which they are involved, have decided to resist them or escape them” (EW3, 294). The distinctive sensibility which is gained through such recognition, however, is not merely an expression of political commitment or social consciousness—it is an essentially genealogical asset. As Foucault notes, it constitutes a specific “form of knowledge,” rather than a general state of social awareness,52 because it necessarily indicates to what extent, and in what capacities, people in a given social or institutional situation are able to critically engage with the historically generated, prevailing processes that have shaped themselves and their situation. In terms of a specific

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institutional setting like the prison, it means that a “collision with each other and with themselves,” “dead ends, problems, and impossibilities,” as well as “conflicts and confrontations” all need to be pursued for the sake of a possible transformation (EW3, 236). Or, as Foucault formulates it in an interview, if it is “possible for the complexity of the problem to appear in its connection with people’s lives,” then “through concrete questions, difficult cases, movements of rebellion, reflections, and testimonies, the legitimacy of a common creative action can also appear” (EW3, 288). But this also suggests that the same process could be used to determine what subjects can do, and at what level, to slough off those limitations on their social existence and activity imposed by their particular historical circumstances and the power relations at work in them. Thus, at this point, it becomes apparent that Foucault’s emancipatory project has some powerful implications for the question of political subjectivity. In his lecture “The Subject and Power,” published in 1982, Foucault firmly states that the goal of his research during the previous twenty years was “to create a history of the different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects” (EW3, 326). While this retrospective self-assessment is surely somewhat exaggerated, it nicely illustrates that for him, the question of the subject acquires philosophical meaning only in a historical context of modes and models and against the backdrop of the findings of concrete historical research. This standpoint also gives him the opportunity, with respect to the problem of the sociohistorical embeddedness of the subject and its power relations, to distance himself carefully, yet decisively, from the theoretical tendency of the Frankfurt School to gather up the issues of subjectivity and power under the umbrella of the concept of “rationalization.” Against this, Foucault proposes an approach that “is more empirical, more directly related to our present situation, and one that implies more relations between theory and practice” (EW3, 329). To this end, he chooses an analytical lens that initially focuses on specific social practices and gradually widens its scope so as to comprehend the broader historical forces that shape them. For as Foucault speculates, “in order to understand what power relations are about, perhaps we should investigate the forms of resistance and attempts made to dissociate these relations” (EW3, 329). Eventually, this gives Foucault the opportunity to construct an initial typology which marks out, even if superficially, certain strategic points by articulating the ways in which— within the current arena of social struggles—individuals are politically affected, and how this helps or even forces them to acquire a social existence as political subjects. It is with this context in mind that he reconnects the question of social struggles in terms of forms of “individualization” to that of the historically given “regimes of knowledge” (EW3, 330–331). This is important, not only because Foucault here once again indicates the

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vital importance of a concrete historical approach for properly addressing fundamental philosophical questions but chiefly because he hereby emphasizes that political subjectivation, or the peculiar political modality of experiencing oneself as subjectivity, can only be seized in terms of formations pertaining to specific types of historical-social patterns. However, such an approach must also ask whether all social or political processes create or allocate processes of subjectivation, and if they do, whether this always takes place in the same way. With respect to these issues, we can note, first, that Foucault does not subscribe to Louis Althusser’s thesis, as expounded in his essay “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” that modern individuals are constituted as subjects by “ideological apparatuses” in the form of social practices. Althusser holds that subject-constitution may, historically, assume diverse patterns and qualities according to the “material existence” of ideologies, but what necessarily always remains the same is the fact that “all ideology hails or interpellates concrete individuals as concrete subjects, by the functioning of the category of the subject.”53 Ultimately, however, this means that “ideology has always already interpellated individuals as subject.”54 On the one hand, then, what Foucault certainly cannot embrace here is the reduction of those social practices and power relations which constitute the subject to the category of ideology; and on the other hand, he cannot accept that there is a unified function of subjectivity that comes into operation through the function of interpellation at the precise moment that the individual becomes a subject—a transformation, indeed, which is supposed to have “always already” taken place.55 Moreover, the fact that he goes to radical lengths in order to purge his own work of any reference to any “subject that is either transcendental in relation to the field of events or runs in its empty sameness throughout the course of history” (EW3, 118) also indicates why Foucault would oppose the idea that the social reproduction of subjectivity occurs uniformly over distinct historical situations. This applies more specifically still to the modern political dimension of the constitution of the subject, which, as Foucault demonstrates, cannot be historically derived from the economic or legal function of allocating subjects—for it comes into being, at the birth of the modern state, in a specific antagonism to these functions.56 All things considered, this suggests that the problem of the political dimension of subjectivity, or of the subjective experiential resources pertaining to the political sphere, must be weighed against the social constraints—and possibilities—imposed by particular historical situations; and the same goes for that specific form or modality of political subjectivation whose sociocritical aspects Foucault’s genealogical approach seeks to engage through a critique of the present. Within the context of political critique, Foucault marks out the playing field of subjectivity by his characteristic insistence that social actions

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against ostensibly oppressive forms of power, like the anti-psychiatry or anti-prison movements, cannot content themselves by simply countering violence or institutional coercion, but must also question their inherent rationale. In other words, if the major repressive axes of modern political rationality unfold along processes of “individualization and totalization,” while at the same time, Foucault argues that possible liberation “can come only from attacking not just one of these two effects but political rationality’s very roots” (EW3, 325) then there is no doubt that these roots implicate the subjective disposition of social actors. Political rationality, as a specific form of knowledge, cannot take place without a demarcation of the position and range of subjective capacities to which it specifically refers; hence, Foucault’s adherence to the idea that “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” (EW3, 326). This is only possible, however, insofar as the subject is not held to be an invariant and empty ontological function waiting to be invested or “interpelled” with social content but is rather understood as an agency of social practices whose scope of experience remains, in given situations, undetermined. By assuming the latter position, Foucault is thereby enabled to appeal to the “relations of different experiences to politics”—experiences of madness and derangement, crime and punishment, sexuality, etc.—which “pose a problem to politics” (EW1, 114) and even raise questions about the very nature of political rationality itself, precisely because they are simultaneously included and excluded from the political arena. From this perspective then, problematization shows itself to be one of the constitutive precursors to the experiential recasting of forms of subjectivity that emerges from struggles that seek to engage concrete political agendas. At the same time, however, and especially in the context of this emancipatory reshuffling of political experience, one might wonder which form of subjective agency Foucault is referring to when he makes occasional appeals to a certain collective “we”57 Who is this “we” that is supposed to take charge of the political reconfiguration of subjectivity? Foucault gives an illuminating answer to this question in an interview given near the end of his life. Taking up Richard Rorty’s complaint that he does not admit any “we” “whose consensus, whose values, whose traditions constitute the framework for a thought and define the conditions in which it can be validated” (EW1, 114) Foucault responds in the following manner: But the problem is, precisely, to decide if it is actually suitable to place oneself within a “we” in order to assert the principles one recognizes and the values one accepts; or if it is not, rather, necessary to make the future formation of a “we” possible by elaborating the question. Because it seems

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to me that the “we” must not be previous to the question; it can only be the result—and the necessarily temporary result—of the question as it is posed in the new terms in which one formulates it. (EW1, 114)58

The radical question of subjectivity in politics thus amounts, for Foucault, to the question of the creation of hitherto unseen possibilities for unleashing political subjectivity, whose standards would be produced by the operations of historical problematization, that is, the unleashing of knowledge. To put it differently, the emancipatory impact of the genealogical critique proves to be actual so long as it opens up new possibilities for individual or collective subjectivation through the concrete recognition of a social context’s historically designated limits and provisions. It is important to note, however, that the eventual encounter between the “historically objective” and the “politically subjective” does not take place by virtue of any commanding experiential structure of the lifeworld, dialectical mediation, or operative intervention of an a prior normative ideal; for this meeting is itself exposed to the historical conditions, margins, and stakes of a given social situation, the critical evaluation of which generates the possibility of a novel subjective disposition. On the other hand, this distributed character of the mediation between the theoretical and political realms also provides some clues as to why Foucault believes that the connection between the project of genealogical critique and the strategic aims of political struggles cannot be allowed to remain oblique and indirect. Critical historical knowledge, when applied to concrete situations, can only take advantage of emancipatory opportunities if it manages to displace subjects from their usual spectrum of experience and rationality into a confrontation with unprecedented possibilities, as these are defined in each specific case. In other words, it is supposed to drive them to transform or remake their own subjectivity—that is, their social sensitivity, their individual and collective self-awareness, their capacity to act—with an eye toward a particular common goal.59 Crucially, though, critical knowledge production is no substitute for critical self-recognition or radical action; it can only help bring these about. For after all, as Foucault points out, political action is always linked to “a problem of groups, of personal and physical commitment. One is not radical because one pronounces a few words; no, the essence of being radical is physical; the essence of being radical is the radicalness of existence itself” (FL, 262). In thus affirming the distance between the radicality of critique and the radicality of existence, however, Foucault does not intend to breathe new life into a lingering Gelassenheit of thinking. When framed in the right way, it neither trivializes historical analyses nor dilutes the effectiveness of critical intervention—nor does it undermine the socially acute relationship between the political dimension and subjectivity. Rather, the point is

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to rearrange these into a constellation of radicality of a different sort. By way of conclusion, it is here worthwhile to cite a series of remarks that Foucault makes at the beginning of a 1980 lecture delivered at the University of California, Berkeley; for they bring together, in exemplary fashion, all these concepts into one context and relate them also to the analysis of political techniques and practices of subjectivity. In particular, the notions of historical construction, political dimensions, critical approaches, and the “indefinite possibilities” of a transformation of the subject all feature here as common elements of one agenda of radical philosophizing— namely, the “diagnosis of what we are”: I think that it is here where we will find the real possibility of constructing a history of what we have done and, at the same time, a diagnosis of what we are. This would be a theoretical analysis which has, at the same time, a political dimension. By this word ‘political dimension’, I mean an analysis that relates to what we are willing to accept in our world, to accept, to refuse, and to change, both in ourselves and in our circumstances. In sum, it is a question of searching for another kind of critical philosophy. Not a critical philosophy that seeks to determine the conditions and the limits of our possible knowledge of the object, but a critical philosophy that seeks the conditions and the indefinite possibilities of transforming the subject, of transforming ourselves (AB, 24, italics are mine).

Significantly, we also find that Foucault hereby maintains an exemplary doctrinal coherence that, despite the apparent diffuseness of his theoretical activity, nevertheless kept his thinking fundamentally focused, from the 1960s to the 1980s, on unfolding the present within the framework of a critical philosophy of history. NOTES 1. Here is, as it were, the same play of “determination” and “freedom” that Judith Revel identifies as the main commonality between the historical thinking of Foucault and Merleau-Ponty. Cf. Revel, Foucault avec Merleau-Ponty: Ontologie politique, présentisme et histoire. 2. Cf., in this regard, especially LW and EW 2, 369–392. 3. On the close interplay between Kant’s and Nietzsche’s critique in Foucault, see Bregham Dalgliesh, Critique as Critical History. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, 219–223. 4. Foucault, Notebook 5, December 22, 1963. Quoted by Claude-Oliver Doron, Course Context. In Foucault, Sexuality. The 1964 Clermond-Ferrand & 1969 Vincennes Lectures, 316. 5. In one of his lectures, Foucault briefly describes the emergence of this historical tendency: “From the nineteenth century onward something new—and, I

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think, something fundamental—began to happen. History and philosophy began to ask the same question: What is it, in the present, that is the agent of the universal? What is it, in the present, that is the truth of the universal? That is the question asked by history. It is also the question asked by philosophy. The dialectic is born” (SD, 237). 6. Rudi Visker argues convincingly that when Foucault, in The History of Madness, poses the question of the origins of the science of psychology, he is in effect following what he has called the genealogical method since the 1970s, and thus that work, too, deserves the name “history of the present.” See Visker, Michel Foucault. Genealogy as Critique. London: Verso, 1995, 12–18. 7. Cf. FL, 52–53. 8. On the extent to which “problematization” is a key term in Foucault’s philosophical-critical orientation, see Colin Koopman’s seminal work, Genealogy as Critique. Foucault and the Problems of Modernity. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013. 9. See, in this respect, the stimulating work of Thomas Lemke, which provides a comprehensive reading of Foucault’s critical philosophy in terms of the problematics of “power” and, within that, “government.” Lemke, Foucault’s Analysis of Modern Governmentality: A Critique of Political Reason. London: Verso, 2019. 10. As noted by Olivier Dekens in Michel Foucault. « La vérité de mes livres est dans l’avenir.” Paris: Armand Colin, 2011, 47. 11. On this question and its implications for contemporary historiography, see Henry Rousso, The Latest Catastrophe: History, the Present, the Contemporary. Trans. Jean Marie Todd. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. 12. Deleuze, Foucault, 120. 13. Ibid. 14. Heidegger, Introduction to Phenomenological Research, 81. 15. In his university lectures given in 1923–1924, Heidegger’s tone is undoubtedly suggestive toward understanding the destruction as a genuine critique of the present: “The destruction is critical; the critique has a positive character by virtue of directing itself at the present within which the destruction is carried out, by virtue of living in the very research that accomplishes the destruction; living in it in such a way that the critique of the historical is nothing other than the critique of the present, a critique such that, through it, the situation of the interpretation itself becomes transparent and critically tilled.” Ibid., 88. 16. Cf. “In inauthentic historicity the primordial stretching along the fate is concealed [. . .] Lost in the making present of the today, it understands the ‘past’ in terms of the ‘present’. In contrast, the temporality of authentic historicity, as the Moment that anticipates and retrieves, undoes the making present of today and the habituation of the conventionalities of the they. Inauthentic historical existence, on the other hand, is burdened with the legacy of the ‘past’ that has become unrecognizable to it, looks for what is modern. Authentic historicity understands history as the ‘recurrence’ of what is possible and knows that a possibility recurs only when existence opens for it fatefully in the Moment, in resolute retrieval.” Heidegger, Being and Time, 357–358. 17. As Foucault explains more concretely, “for me, the history of madness or the studies of the prison . . . were done in that precise manner because I knew full

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well—this is in fact what aggravated many people—that I was carrying out an historical analysis in such a manner that people could criticize the present, but it was impossible for them to say, ‘Let’s go back to the good old days when madmen in the eighteenth century . . .’ or, ‘Let’s go back to the days when the prison was not one of the principal instruments . . .’ No; I think that history preserves us from that sort of ideology of the return” (FL, 343). 18. Sartre, The Critique of Dialectical Reason, 122. 19. Sartre expands upon this point thus: “If, however, dialectical Reason has to be grasped initially through human relations, then its fundamental characteristics imply that it appears as apodictic experience in its very intelligibility. It is not a matter of simply asserting its existence, but rather of directly experiencing its existence through its intelligibility, independent of any empirical discovery [. . .] if some real fact—a historical process, for example—develops dialectically, the law of its appearing and its becoming must be—from the stand-point of knowledge— the pure ground of its intelligibility.” Ibid., 44. 20. Ibid., 73. 21. Sartre, The Search for a Method, 159. 22. Ibid., 133. 23. Sartre, The Critique of Dialectical Reason, 102. 24. Ibid., 124. 25. Cf. Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, 276–281. 26. Cf., for example, Michael Kelly ed., Critique and Power: Recasting the Foucault/Habermas Debate. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994; Samantha Ashenden and David Owen, eds., Foucault Contra Habermas: Recasting the Dialogue between Genealogy and Critical Theory. London: SAGE Publications, 1999; Thomas Biebricher, Selbstkritik der Moderne. Foucault und Habermas im Vergleich. Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 2005; Amy Allen, Discourse, Power and Subjectivation. The Foucault/Habermas Debate Reconsidered. Philosophical Forum 40, no. 1 (2009): 1–28. 27. Axel Honneth, Pathologies of Reason. On the Legacy of Critical Theory. Trans. James Ingram et al. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009, 21. 28. He insists that “one does not find even a hint of these once the theory is systematically explicated.” Axel Honneth, The Critique of Power. Reflective Stages in a Critical Social Theory. Trans. Kenneth Baynes. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1993, xxxvii. 29. Ibid. 30. Honneth, Pathologies of Reason, 48. 31. The scope of these studies is empirically limited inasmuch as they usually examine the historical framework of power relations within advanced European societies between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. But they are also limited in the sense that they do not account for a unified movement of rationalization, or a course of pathological deformation, in the development within the field of power, but also recount competing processes; for example, by juxtaposing the eighteenth-century disciplinary social processes with the spread of biopolitical approaches. 32. In the relevant literature, Colin Koopman is the strongest advocate of the importance of “problematization” in Foucauldian genealogical criticism, showing, in response to the many criticisms of the proponents of critical theory, that in fact

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“Foucault did not use genealogy to establish any normative conclusions about the practices he was investigating” (90), even as his critical apparatus remained capable of detecting fundamental and historically evolving problems or “dangers” in modern society. Koopman, Genealogy as Critique. Foucault and the Question of Modernity. 33. It is known that Foucault took an active role in the prison reform qua abolition movement in France from the early 1970s, and his research on criminal and disciplinary power provided a framework for his activities. On this question see, François Boullant, Michel Foucault et les prisons. Paris: PUF, 2003. 34. Jean Chesneaux, Du passé faisons table rase? A propos de l’histoire et les historiens. Paris: Maspero, 1976. English translation, Pasts and Futures or What is History For? Trans. Schofield Coryell. London: Thames and Hudson, 1978. 35. Paul Veyne, Writing History. Essay on Epistemology. Trans. Mina MooreRinvolucri. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1984. 36. Chesneaux, Pasts and Futures or What Is History For? 37. 37. Ibid., 52. Foucault and Chesneaux were not closely related, but they certainly knew each other from their public political activities at the time, according to Daniel Hemery. Jean Chesneaux, Le Maitron. Dictionnaire biographique. Movement ouvrier, movement sociale. (2022 June 3) https://maitron​ .fr​/spip​.php​ ?article19807. 38. Ibid. 39. It is telling that Foucault’s reflections on historical analysis as a social or political critique appear predominantly in those Collège de France lectures, which account for the historical transition from disciplinary power to formations of governmentality and biopolitics. Cf., in particular, Society Must Be Defended and Security, as well as The Birth of Biopolitics. 40. He adds: it is “to show that things ‘weren’t as necessary as all that’; it wasn’t as a matter of course that mad people came to be regarded as mentally ill; it wasn’t self-evident that the only thing to be done with a criminal was to lock him up; it wasn’t self-evident that the causes of illness were to be sought through the individual examination of bodies; and so on” (EW3, 226). 41. It is worth noting that Foucault already refers to the notion of “event,” in The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Order of Discourse, as an instance that can be critically opposed to any conception of historical necessity. 42. As Foucault states in an interview, “A critique is not a matter of saying that things are not right as they are. It is a matter of pointing out on what kinds of assumptions, what kinds of familiar, unchallenged, unconsidered modes of thought the practices that we accept rest [.  .  .] Criticism is a matter of flushing out that thought and trying to change it: to show that things are not as self-evident as one believed, to see that what is accepted as self-evident will no longer be accepted as such. Practicing criticism is a matter of making facile gestures difficult” (PPC, 154–155). 43. As Foucault explains in a discussion with historians about his research on prison, “it’s true that certain people, such as those who work in the institutional setting of the prison—which is not quite the same as being in prison—are not likely to find advice or instructions in my books that tell them ‘what is to be done.’ But my project is precisely to bring it about that they ‘no longer know what to do,’

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so that the acts, gestures, discourses that up until then had seemed to go without saying become problematic, difficult, dangerous. This effect is intentional [. . .] If the social workers you are talking about don’t know which way to turn, this just goes to show that they’re looking and, hence, are not anesthetized or sterilized at all—on the contrary. And it’s because of the need not to tie them down or immobilize them that there can be no question of trying to dictate ‘What is to be done’” (EW3, 235–236). 44. In an exceptionally insightful paper, Thomas Lemke analyzes, from both a historical and a doctrinal perspective, the relation between the concepts of experience and critique in Foucault. Lemke, Critique and Experience in Foucault. Theory, Culture & Society 28, no. 4: 26–48. 45. It is quite remarkable that Foucault’s arguments here correspond almost verbatim to Chesneaux’s own analyses on the historical use of social struggles based on “local memories,” though with the not insignificant difference that Foucault does not situate the resultant critical strategy into any Marxist framework, and in fact turns this strategy against Marxism, whereas Chesneaux—who obviously does not think in terms of a genealogical project—criticizes Foucault’s archaeological method for its lack of social relevance. The relationships between the two thinkers and their positions are still to be clarified. The lecture under consideration here was delivered by Foucault on January 7, 1976, while Chesneaux’s book, Du passé faisons table rase?, was published in March 1976. 46. In Habermas, the lifeworld “takes care of co-ordinating actions by means of legitimately regulated interpersonal relations and stabilizes the identity of groups to an extent sufficient for everyday practice. The co-ordination of actions and the stabilization of group identities are measured by the solidarity among members. This can be seen in disturbances of social integration, which manifest themselves in anomie and corresponding conflicts.” Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action. Vol. 2, Trans. Thomas McCarthy. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987, 140. 47. For a contemporary version of this idea, consider Fredric Jameson’s comment: “Only Marxism can give us an adequate account of the essential mystery of the cultural past [. . .] This mystery can be reenacted only if the human adventure is one [. . .] These matters can recover their original urgency for us only if they are retold within the unity of a single great collective story; only if, in however disguised and symbolic a form, they are seen as sharing a single fundamental theme—for Marxism, the collective struggle to wrest a realm of Freedom from a realm of Necessity; only if they are grasped as vital episodes in a single vast unfinished plot.” Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious. Narrativity as Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981, 20–21. 48. On one occasion, Foucault remarks, somewhat mockingly: “What strikes me in the Marxist analyses is that they always contain the question of ‘class struggle’ but that they pay little attention to one word in the phrase, namely, ‘struggle’ [. . .] when they speak of the ‘class struggle’ as the mainspring of history, they focus mainly on defining class, its boundaries, its membership, but never concretely on the nature of the struggle” (PPC, 123). 49. Foucault reflects thus: “experience has taught me that the history of various forms of rationality is sometimes more effective in unsettling our certitudes and dogmatism than is abstract criticism” (EW3, 323).

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50. Foucault and Deleuze, Intellectuals and Power, 207–208, and 216. Foucault is also specific about which social groups he has in mind: “women, prisoners, conscripted soldiers, hospital patients, and homosexuals have now begun a specific struggle against the particularized power, the constraints and controls, that are exerted over them” (FL, 81). 51. I borrow the term “grid of sensibility” from Valerie Harwood, who uses it in a methodological sense when applying, within a narrativist framework, Foucault’s concept of “subjugated knowledge” to the analysis of the discourses of certain young people perceived as mentally disordered. V. Harwood, Foucault, Narrative and the Subjugated Subject: Doing Research with a Grid of Sensibility. The Australian Educational Researcher 28 (2001): 141–166. 52. During a discussion with Deleuze, Foucault states that “the masses have been aware for some time that consciousness is a form of knowledge; and consciousness as the basis of subjectivity is a prerogative of the bourgeoisie” (FL, 75–76). 53. Louis Althusser, On the Reproduction of Capitalism. Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses. Trans. G. M. Goshgarian. London: Verso, 2014, 264. 54. Ibid., 265. 55. For a comparative analysis of Althusser and Foucault’s ideas on these matters see Warren Montag, Althusser and His Contemporaries. Philosophy’s Perpetual War. Durham-London: Duke University Press, 2013, 142–170. 56. Cf. BB, 292–295. 57. As, for instance, in this passage: “I think it is we who make the future. The future is the way we react to what is taking place, the way we transform a movement, a doubt, into truth. If we wish to be masters of our future, we must pose fundamentally the question of today” (DE2, 434). 58. To which he adds, significantly: “for example, I'm not sure that at the time when I wrote the history of madness, there was a preexisting and receptive ‘we’ to which I would only have had to refer in order to write my book, and of which this book would have been the spontaneous expression. Laing, Cooper, Basaglia, and I had no community, nor any relationship; but the problem posed itself to those who had read us, as it also posed itself to some of us, of seeing if it were possible to establish a ‘we’ on the basis of the work that had been done, a ‘we’ that would also be likely to form a community of action” (EW1, 114–115). 59. However, Foucault hints at one point that such critical empowerment has its own limits concerning subjects: “in our society it is difficult for the insane who are confined or the sick who are hospitalized to make their own revolution; so we have to question these systems of exclusion of the sick and the insane from the outside, through a technique of critical demolition” (FL, 68–69).

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Rousso, Henry. The Latest Catastrophe: History, the Present, the Contemporary. Trans. Jean Marie Todd. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Sabot, Philippe. Foucault et Merleau-Ponty: un dialogue impossible?. Les Études philosophiques 3, n° 106 (2013): 317–332. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Jean-Paul Sartre répond. L’Arc 30 (October 1966): 87–96. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness. A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology. Trans. H. E. Barnes. New York: Pocket Book, 1978. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness. An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology. Trans. Hazel E. Barnes. London: Routledge, 1956. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Critique of Dialectical Reason, Volume 1: Theory of Practical Ensemble. Trans. A. Sheridan-Smith. London and New York: Verso, 1991. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Search for a Method. Trans. H.E. Barnes. New York: Alfred A. Kopp, 1963. Schwartz, Michael. Epistemes and History of Being. In A. Milchmann and A. Rosenber (eds.), Foucault and Heidegger. Critical Encounters. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2003. Simondon, Gilbert. L’individu et sa genèse physico-biologique. Grenoble: Jérôme Millon, 1998. Sluga, Hans. Foucault’s Encounter with Heidegger and Nietzsche. In Gary Gutting (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Foucault. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, 210–239. Steinbock, Anthony. Home and Beyond. Generative Phenomenology After Husserl. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1995. Takács, Adam. Heidegger, Dilthey et le problème d’une ontologie historique aujourd’hui. In Jean Grégory and Adam Takács (eds.), Traces de l’Etre. Heidegger en France et en Hongrie. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2014, 173–188. Talcot, Samuel. Episteme. In David Scott (ed.), Understanding Foucault, Understanding Modernism. London: Bloomsbury, 2017, 241–243. Veyne, Paul. Foucault Revolutionizing History. Trans. Catherine Porter. In Arnold I. Davidson (ed.), Foucault and his Interlocutors. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997, 146–182. Veyne, Paul. L’histoire conceptualisante. In Jacques Le Goff and Pierre Nora (eds.), Faire de l’histoire, Vol. I. Paris: Gallimard, 1974, 92–132. Veyne, Paul. Michel Foucault, sa pensée, sa personne. Paris: Albin Michel, 2008. Veyne, Paul. Writing History. Essay on Epistemology. Trans. Mina Moore-Rinvolucri. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1984. Visker, Rudi. Michel Foucault. Genealogy as Critique. London: Verso, 1995. Visker, Rudi. Truth and Singularity. Taking Foucault into Phenomenology. Dordrecht: Springer, 1999. Webb, David. Foucault’s Archeology. Science and Transformation. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013. White, Hayden. Foucault Decoded: Notes from Underground. In White: Tropics of Discourse. Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1978, 230–260.

Index

actuality, 18–19, 24, 33, 86, 116–17, 122 Allen, Amy, 149n26 Althusser, Louis, 41n46, 42n58, 100, 109n38, 126, 138, 146n55 Annales school, 1, 6, 14, 16, 17, 26, 30, 34, 46, 53, 58, 61–62, 66, 68, 71, 72, 75, 82n14, 106, 132 archaeology, 28, 35–39, 43nn64–65, 47–48, 55–58, 64n14, 66–69, 73, 89, 100–103, 120 The Archaeology of Knowledge, 25–28, 36, 47–49, 55, 60, 66–68, 73, 79, 97–104, 132 archive, 27, 36, 56, 69, 102 Ariès, Philippe, 15, 40n33 Aron, Raymond, 7n4, 13, 18 Bachelard, Gaston, 41n46, 81n2 Badiou, Alain, 115n51 Bataille, Georges, 114n30 being, 5, 15, 21, 34, 60, 85–92, 96, 98, 100–105, 107–11, 112n16, 113nn18– 19, 115n51, 117; mode of, 15, 55, 91, 96, 97, 100–103, 107 Benjamin, Walter, 42n58 Benoist, Jocelyn, 42n56

Biebricher, Thomas, 149n26 Bimbenet, Etienne, 112n7 Binswanger, Ludwig, 93 biopolitics, 22, 58, 69, 72, 123, 129, 141, 150n39 The Birth of Biopolitics, 133–34 The Birth of the Clinic, 21, 54 Blanchot, Maurice, 108n30 Bloch, Marc, 9, 14, 34, 42n60, 58, 62, 68, 78, 79 body, 21–22, 51, 52, 88, 95 Bonnefoy, Claude, 99 Boullant, François, 150n33 Bouton, Christophe, 7n4 Braudel, Fernand, 14, 17, 34, 41nn43‒50, 42n60, 61, 82n14 Butler, Judith, 6 Canguilhem, Georges, 2, 7n3, 41n46, 67, 81n4, 115n53 Cavaillès, Jean, 81n2 Certeau, Michel De, 63, 80 Chartier, Roger, 64n21, 66 Chaunu, Pierre, 34, 41n50, 68, 81n6, 82n14

161

162

Index

Chesneaux, Jean, 132–35, 150n37, 151n45 Comte, Auguste, 86 Coulanges, Fustel de, 10 critical theory, 4, 117, 123, 125, 128–31, 140 critique, 4, 34, 117–19, 123, 126–30, 132– 42, 145–47, 150n42; philosophical, 21, 38, 86, 121–24, 128, 141; political, 130, 133–34, 144, 150n39; social, 3, 5, 17, 121–23, 128–30, 142, 150n39 Croce, Benedetto, 11 Dalgliesh, Bregham, 147n3 Davis, Duane H., 112n10 Dekens, Olivier, 148n10 Deleuze, Gilles, 16, 29, 51, 59, 69, 76, 90, 108, 112nn16‒17, 114n35, 114n38, 124, 133, 138, 142, 152n52 Derrida, Jacques, 6 Desanti, Jean-Toussaint, 113n23 Descombes, Vincent, 40n37, 114n42 de-subjectivation, 97, 98, 114n30 diagnosis, 4, 5, 13, 18–19, 21, 23, 25, 27–30, 33, 37, 66, 118–23, 129, 131, 147 dialectics, 14, 16, 92, 105, 126–27 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 7n4, 11, 13, 105 Discipline and Punish, 22, 31, 37, 50, 80, 123, 135–37 discontinuity, 25–27, 29–31, 36, 71, 97, 122 discourse, 32, 54, 56, 69, 75, 76, 89, 91, 92, 97–104, 112n6, 125 discursive formations, 37, 56, 57, 60, 69, 100 dispersion, 23, 51, 56, 58, 97, 107 document, 42n60, 67–70, 78, 81n7, 139 Doron, Claude-Oliver, 64n12, 147n4 Dosse, François, 40n37 Dreyfus, Hubert, 42n61, 111n4 Droysen, Johan Gustav, 10, 11 Duby, Georges, 58, 83n32 Elden, Stuart, 63n3, 111n3 epistemology, 2, 6, 13, 25–26, 28, 34–36, 43n64, 47, 52, 55, 57, 67, 68, 89, 90, 119

event, 10, 12, 14, 30, 38, 47, 48, 50, 53, 56, 57, 70, 71, 73, 78, 86, 96, 99–101, 103–4, 114n37, 121, 135–36, 144, 150n41 eventalization, 135, 136 existence, 12, 14, 33, 34, 56, 69, 86, 89, 91, 93, 95–96, 98–111, 114nn37–38, 115n51, 115n53, 126, 143, 144, 146, 149n19; discursive, 5, 101–4, 106; historical, 27, 60, 69, 86, 88, 91, 96–97, 101–5, 108–10, 148n16; human, 12–14, 21, 96, 105, 107, 110, 143; social, 33, 101, 124, 126 existentialism, 13, 16, 25, 40n41, 93, 95, 99, 103, 114n37 experience, 15–17, 20, 21, 24, 28, 31, 33–34, 49, 53, 91, 94–95, 103, 104, 107, 109, 110, 111n1, 114nn29–30, 122, 123, 125, 134, 136–37, 140–41, 145, 151n44; historical, 13, 31, 33–34, 91, 92, 107, 110, 122, 137; lived, 33, 94–95, 103; political, 142, 145, 146 Febvre, Lucien, 14, 42n60, 62 Feron, Alexandre, 63n1 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 86 Flynn, Thomas R., 40n37, 114n33 Frankfurt school, 17, 41n42, 128–31 freedom, 65, 90, 108, 118, 126, 147n1, 151n47 Furet, François, 64n28 genealogy, 22, 28, 35–39, 68, 77, 85, 129, 139–40, 149nn32–33 governmentality, 22, 69, 72, 123, 129, 141, 148n9, 150n39 Gros, Frédéric, 63n7 Gros, Guillaume, 40n33 Guattari, Félix, 138 Gueroult, Martial, 41n46 Habermas, Jürgen, 6, 52, 128, 131, 140, 149n25, 151n46 Han, Béatrice, 98, 113n20, 114n31 Harcourt, Bernard, 41n44 Harwood, Valerie, 152n51 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 11, 16, 40n37, 76, 86, 105‒6, 124

Index Heidegger, Martin, 6, 11, 12, 34, 40n17, 88‒90, 92–94, 96, 98, 105, 107, 111nn1–4, 112n5, 113n19, 113n22, 114n37, 115n43, 115nn47–48, 115n52, 125‒26, 148nn14‒16 Hemery, Daniel, 150n37 Henry, Michel, 1116n23 hermeneutics, 35, 60, 66–68, 98, 125 heterogeneity, 25, 26, 34, 47, 49, 51, 52, 55–57, 59–62, 67, 91, 92, 98 historical a priori, 56, 60, 64n16, 69, 102 historical change, 18, 26, 30, 71, 73, 87, 108, 119, 141 historical construction, 62, 65–69, 72, 76–79, 82n14 historical materialism, 12 historical methodology, 17, 21, 29, 32–39, 43n65, 62, 65, 68, 77–80, 83n32, 110–11, 124, 125, 127, 148n6 historicism, 19, 33, 127 historiography, 1, 6, 9–10, 14–15, 20, 32–35, 45–47, 49, 53, 58, 61, 62, 65–66, 68, 71–72, 76–80, 82n18, 132 History of Madness, 20, 31, 48–49, 54, 55, 72, 79, 128 The History of Sexuality, 32, 51, 59, 73, 80 Honneth, Axel, 128–31, 149n28 Husserl, Edmund, 6, 12, 13, 34, 86, 93–95, 106, 113n19 Hyppolite, Jean, 108n37 identity, 23, 28, 30, 50, 54, 95, 108, 140, 151n46 ideology, 33, 50, 70, 126, 144 Jameson, Fredric, 151n47 Jensen, Anthony, 40n38 Kant, Immanuel, 6, 18, 24, 85‒86, 119, 147n3 Kelly, Michael, 149n26 knowledge, 13–14, 16, 21, 31, 33, 35, 37–38, 46, 49–56, 66, 70, 72, 73, 85, 86, 88–91, 95, 104, 105, 110, 112n6, 127–34; desubjugated, 43n65, 138, 140, 141, 152n51; historical, 10–18,

163

23, 25, 36, 75–81, 117, 119, 122, 131–32, 134–42, 146; liberation of, 137–42 Kojéve, Alexandre, 114n42 Koopman, Colin, 148n8, 149n32 Koselleck, Reinhart, 7n4 Langlois, Victor, 10 language, 19, 63n3, 78–80, 94, 97, 99–103, 114n29, 114n35 Lardreau, Guy, 64n23, 83n32 Lau, Kwok-Ying, 113n22 Lebrun, Gerard, 113n25 Le Goff, Jacques, 1, 6, 63n4, 67, 72, 82n14 Legrand, Stéphane, 113n20 Lemke, Thomas, 148n9, 151n44 Léonard, Jacques, 81n9 Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel, 41n50 Lévinas, Emmanuel, 113n23 Lorenzini, Daniele, 41n45 Lukács, Georg, 11‒13, 42n58, 106 Mandrou, Robert, 41n47 Marcuse, Herbert, 138 Marx, Karl, 16, 105 Marxism, 11–12, 16, 25, 42n58, 45, 99, 106, 127, 132, 138, 140, 144, 151n45, 151nn47–48 memory, 28, 34, 53, 67, 79, 101, 124, 139, 151n45 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 6, 16, 88, 89‒90, 92, 93‒94, 96, 114nn26‒29, 147n1 Michelet, Jules, 10, 11 Milo, Daniel, 74, 80, 82n18 modeling, 109–11, 115n51, 115n53 Montag, Warren, 152n55 monument, 67–70, 76 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 6, 16, 17, 18‒19, 26, 29, 36, 41n44, 63n3, 78, 86, 105–7, 114n30, 119, 147n3 Noiriel, Gérard, 63n5 nominalism, 5, 78–81, 83n32 normativity, 41n42, 110, 121–23, 128–31, 136, 140–42, 146, 149n32

164

Index

object, 15, 16, 19–21, 27, 37, 42n62, 50, 58, 60, 67, 68, 70, 78, 79, 88, 91, 94–96, 98, 100, 101, 103, 104, 107, 113n19, 137, 147; historical, 5, 27, 45–52, 57, 61, 62, 66, 68, 71, 72, 77, 78, 117 objectivity, 5, 11, 13, 17, 47, 49, 50, 97 O’Farrell, Clare, 7n5, 82n17 Oksala, Johanna, 113n20 ontology, 34, 85–92, 98–101, 105, 107–11, 111n4, 113n19, 114n29, 114n42, 115n43, 115n51, 115n53, 125–26, 128; historical, 5, 66, 69, 85–93, 96, 98–99, 101–11, 111n1, 114n38, 115n53, 117, 119, 123–25, 130; indirect, 85, 87, 90–91, 103, 109, 110, 123; of ourselves, 5, 38, 66, 85–87, 98, 103, 105, 111; regional, 5, 91, 98, 103, 109–10, 113n19 Order of Discourse, 25, 30, 36, 53, 57, 150n41 The Order of Things, 21, 24, 54, 55, 93, 95, 122 Owen, David, 149n26 Paltrinieri, Luca, 41n45, 81n4 past, 9–15, 19, 21–24, 27–34, 36, 39, 46–47, 52–54, 56, 58–60, 62, 65–67, 69, 72–80, 86, 92, 97, 111, 114n38, 118, 120–26, 132, 134, 136; historical, 5, 9, 11–12, 26–28, 46, 54, 57, 62, 65, 67, 72–80, 104, 124–26 periodization, 22, 70–75, 77, 82n15, 82nn17–20, 110 Perrot, Michelle, 63n5 phenomenology, 11–13, 16, 21, 25, 28, 33–34, 41n48, 53, 54, 63n3, 70, 88–90, 92–99, 103, 106–9, 113nn19–20, 114n42, 123, 125; Foucault’s critique of, 21, 33–34, 41n48, 55, 89, 90, 92–98 philosophy of history, 1–4, 7n4, 11–14, 16, 17, 19, 26, 42n58, 65–66, 76, 105–6, 147; critical, 3–5, 117–20, 137, 147 politics, 13, 37, 75, 118, 120, 123, 124, 126, 130, 133–47 positivity, 5, 36, 37, 47, 52–57, 60, 62, 64nn14–17, 65, 67, 68, 101, 111 power, 4, 20, 22, 31–33, 35, 37, 50–51, 57, 59–60, 63n5, 69, 70, 73, 76–78,

80, 85, 89, 91, 104–5, 108, 111n4, 118, 128, 129, 131, 133–35, 137–39, 141–45, 148n9, 149n31, 150n33, 150n39, 152n50 practices, 28, 33, 34, 38, 49–50, 57, 91, 102, 103, 107, 110, 122, 130, 134–38, 147; discursive, 28, 36, 37, 48, 73, 82n13, 97, 103, 104; historical, historiographical, 1, 4, 5, 35, 45, 62, 66, 70–80; of the self, 71, 74, 104, 107, 109; social, 33, 37, 45, 49, 50, 87, 101, 129, 137, 140–45 present, 4–5, 10–25, 27–34, 36–39, 41n51, 42n58, 45–47, 53–54, 65–66, 70, 86, 92, 105, 111, 117–26, 129–32, 134–37, 143, 147, 147n5, 148n15; critique of, 4, 5, 12, 38–39, 77, 86, 111, 117–19, 124–32, 134, 144, 148n15; diagnosis of, 4, 18–20, 24, 25, 29, 35, 37, 118–24; history of, 4, 5, 15–32, 40n40, 45–47, 52–54, 57, 92, 117–24, 134; lived, 29, 32, 36, 39, 47, 122; ontology of, 4, 85, 111, 117, 124; problem of, 6, 20, 22, 29, 65, 75, 78, 117, 121, 123, 134 problematization, 5, 17–18, 20–22, 35, 66, 77, 78, 80, 119, 121, 123, 131, 134, 141, 145, 146, 148n8, 149n32 Rabinow, Paul, 42n61 Rancière, Jacques, 75‒76, 81 Ranke, Leopold von, 10, 11 rationality, 21, 38, 56, 61, 122, 128–30, 134, 135, 145, 146 Rayner, Timothy, 111‒12n1 reality, 16, 21, 47, 54, 61, 65, 69–70, 76, 79–80, 86, 94, 111, 119, 127, 142; historical, 5, 26, 30, 46, 50, 52–54, 56–63, 66, 67, 69, 70, 76, 79, 80, 89, 91, 95, 98, 111; human, 14, 21, 127; social, 59, 61, 129 reason, 16, 20, 22, 29, 31, 34, 52, 79, 95, 122, 128–30 relations, 30, 34, 48–52, 57–63, 63n7, 69–70, 73, 76–80, 91, 105, 107–9, 120, 130, 141, 143; discursive, 47, 50, 51, 69, 73, 98; historical, 5, 37, 48–50, 52,

Index 57–63, 69, 70, 72–74, 131; power, 22, 31, 35, 37, 50–51, 57, 59, 69, 73, 85, 108, 129, 137, 138, 142–44, 149n31; social, 49, 73, 79, 89, 98, 99, 141 Resch, Robert Paul, 115n46 Revel, Jacques, 63n5, 73, 81n9, 82n20 Revel, Judith, 7‒8n5, 41n51, 90, 147n1 Rickert, Heinrich, 7n4 Ricoeur, Paul, 113n23 Rider, Jacques Le, 40n38 Rockhill, Gabriel, 8n6, 42n56, 113n18 Rorty, Richard, 145 Rousso, Henry, 148n11 Sabot, Philippe, 113n25 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 6, 13, 14, 16, 17, 25, 41n41, 76, 88, 93, 94, 96, 99, 106, 126‒28, 149n19 Saussure, Paul, 94 Seignobos, Charles, 10 self, 2, 20, 23, 51, 58–60, 71, 74, 86, 90, 91, 96, 103, 104, 107–11, 141, 146 series, serial history, 26, 30, 41n50, 53, 67, 68, 70, 72–73, 82n14, 100 Serres, Michel, 41n46, 81n2 Simmel, Georg, 7n4 Simondon, Gilbert, 115n53 Sluga, Hans, 113n22 society, 37, 61, 67, 75, 80, 103, 105, 132, 138, 141; contemporary, 22, 31, 75, 123, 129, 138; disciplinary, 50–51, 72, 129, 149n31

165

Society Must Be Defended, 43n65, 130, 138, 150n39 Steinbock, Anthony, 42n53 structuralism, 16, 21, 25, 48, 70, 99, 102, 103 subject, 19, 27, 28, 30, 31, 37, 38, 41n48, 47, 51, 53, 55, 60, 89, 94–98, 100, 103–11, 119, 140–41, 143–47 subjectivation, 59, 104, 108–9, 119, 132, 140–46 subjectivity, 4, 5, 20, 22, 33–37, 46, 50, 51, 57, 59, 66, 69, 70, 72, 77, 78, 92, 94–97, 104–11, 123, 137, 138, 140–47; political, 140–47 Takács, Ádám, 115n43 Talcot, Samuel, 82n13 time/temporality, 11, 15, 19, 24–28, 30, 32–34, 47, 53, 54, 69–75, 82n14, 96–97, 101, 107, 125 today, 18–19, 23–25, 33, 118, 125, 152n57 totalization, 14, 16, 18, 120–21 truth, 11, 19, 75–76, 79, 86–87, 106, 107, 110, 119, 133, 137 Veyne, Paul, 45, 54, 57, 77, 79, 132 Visker, Rudi, 107n20, 148n6 Webb, David, 81n2 Weber, Max, 7n4, 86 White, Hayden, 29

About the Author

Adam Takács is a senior lecturer at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest and a visiting professor at the University of Alberta. He received his PhD from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris and held visiting positions in the United States, France, Romania, and Hong Kong. He was a senior core fellow (2018) at the Institute for Advanced Study at the Central European University in Budapest. In his research, he focuses on questions of materiality, historicity, and sociality in various areas of contemporary continental philosophy and modern European intellectual history. He is also a specialist in the history and ideology of Eastern European state socialism. His principal publications include Le fondement selon Husserl (2014), L’actualité de la pensée de Georg Lukács (ed. 2013), Traces de l’Être. Heidegger en France et en Hongrie (ed. 2014), and, more recently, The Spell of History (2021, in Hungarian).

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