I am still trying to imagine Foucault’s response. I can’t quite do it. I would have so much liked for him to take it on himself.
—Jacques Derrida, “To Do Justice to Freud”
It is clear how far one is from an analysis in terms of deconstruction (any confusion between these two methods would be unwise.)
—Michel Foucault, “Polemics, Politics, and Problematization”
FOUCAULT’S SURVIVAL
A post-Foucauldian mood characterizes a number of ongoing and galvanizing engagements with Foucault’s legacy. In a wide range of disciplines, theorists including Giorgio Agamben, Didier Fassin, and Wendy Brown have continued to respond to elements in Foucault’s work awaiting correction1 or, as Roberto Esposito has formulated this, inevitabilities contained in his work but not articulated by Foucault himself.2 Fassin responds to the limitations of Foucault’s work on life by “enter[ing] it” so as to “get back to where [Foucault] left biopower.”3 Foucault’s resources have been profoundly transformed by post-Foucauldian biopolitical theory’s interest in inequality,4 in political legitimacy,5 in necropolitics,6 in states of disorder and insecurity, in the extremes of immune paradigms.7
These ongoing modes of contesting, correcting, repudiating, or reconfiguring could also be characterized as Foucault’s afterlife. Throughout, the very lexicon of challenge (the language, for example, of rectification, of reentering, or of inevitable consequences) has rarely been challenged. Except, a little spitefully, by Derrida. When Agamben finds the direction of his own argument to have been “logically implicit” in Foucault’s work, while remaining a Foucauldian “blindspot,” Derrida can’t help himself: “Poor Foucault! He never had such a cruel admirer.”8 Yet, renewing his own interrogations at ten-year intervals in essays and seminars, Derrida belonged to those who have not wished to take their leave, conclusively, from Foucault’s work.
While his well-known criticisms of Foucault’s work are extensive, my discussion of their exchange will be oriented by just one element, seemingly brief: the objections Derrida expressed to biopolitics. In fact, this response will allow us to revisit much in Foucault’s work: most broadly, his understandings of power, the status of life and death, and the present. The very meaning of Foucault’s present has become differently salient with the emergence of theory understood as “post-Foucault.” Derrida explored these questions with subtlety: what, for Foucault, would be “post?” In that sense, what, for Foucault, was the present?
This book opens with some of the elements that are most relevant to Derrida’s understanding of Foucault’s temporality and his survival. The encounter will then lead to a means of thinking about Foucault’s reserves, also characterized as his suspended capacities, mobilized in the subsequent chapters.
FOUCAULT’S RESERVES
What if we are sympathetic with the questions directed by Derrida at Foucault’s project, yet no less interested in Foucauldian resources for formulating a response? This need not mean claiming that Foucault’s texts anticipated Derrida’s posthumous questions, nor that they are more deconstructive than it seems. It is a common argument that philosophers deconstructed by Derrida, such as Edmund Husserl or Jean-Jacques Rousseau, had already elaborated the intervention attributed to Derrida. Instead, I propose an alternative means of developing the mutual capacities that emerge in such encounters. Formulated in this way, the encounter between Foucault and Derrida can provide a guiding model for further methodological provocations. For example, how can a productive capacity emerge from the intersection of theorists around the problems they occluded? How might the latter emerge from the analytic pressure each can exert on the other’s resources, from the terms of resistance of each to the other, and from the lines of critique stimulated by their more awkward proximities?
As we will see, Derrida interrogated, critically, the status of epoch and threshold in Foucault’s work. But I will argue that Foucault offers the resources for calling into question the self-identity of modernity, epoch, mode, tactics, power, apparatus, modernity, present, and gathering principles also queried by Derrida. To ask what, in Foucault’s work, is hospitable to such a line of questioning is to go beyond the recognizable limits of Foucault’s actual responses to Derrida. It is also to claim that Derrida misses an opportunity to rethink the presence, or principles, of Foucauldian power by means of Foucault’s own account of the dehiscence of power’s techniques, their perpetual ambiguity and self-differentiation,9 except insofar as the latter are identified by Derrida’s counter-reading. Derrida looks away from interpretative possibilities within Foucault most in affinity with the counter-reading. For example, when Foucault analyzed techniques of power as segmenting and reassembling in multiple temporalities, he offered an alternative to the references to epochs and ages dominating Derrida’s response.
This contributes to the complex status of Foucault’s “present,” whose methodological consequences will prove to be extensive. Working toward this argument, I will first reconstruct four elements presupposed in the more complex versions of Foucault’s present. These are, first, Foucault’s account of subjects and objects as transactional unities, an account to be conjoined with his accounts of contingent formations of life and death. Second, the dehiscence of the Foucauldian present. This is related to a third: the segmentation, and capacity for decomposition, of Foucauldian techniques of power. The fourth might be characterized as Foucault’s suspensions (to use an image from Derrida), his plasticity (to evoke the early development of this term by Catherine Malabou), or (as mobilized in the following chapters) the potential of his work to operate through a transformative proximity.
LIFE AND DEATH—AS TRANSACTIONAL UNITIES
One of Foucault’s many rejections of conventional history included a challenge to the status of objects understood as universals: “I start from the theoretical and methodological decision that consists in saying: Let’s suppose that universals do not exist. And then I put the question to history and historians: How can you write history if you do not accept a priori the existence of things like the state, society, the sovereign, and subjects?”10 For example, Foucault repudiated intellectual inquiries for which life or death was “outside discourse” in favor of analyzing the formation of transactional unities in which both subject and object take shape together.
A “critical history,”11 as Foucault understood the term, would devote itself to the formation of these transactional unities, offering an “analysis of the conditions under which certain relations of subject to object are formed or modified, insofar as those relations constitute a possible knowledge [savoir].”12 In early versions, The Birth of the Clinic described the conditions of possibility for the fields of visibility of objects,13 and The Order of Things described the epistemic conditions of a simultaneous emergence of new “knowable objects . . new concepts and new methods.”14 According to Foucault’s guiding methodological supposition, as new knowable objects take shape, so do their subjects. “The problem is to determine what the subject must be, to what condition [it] is subject, what status [it] must have, what position [it] must occupy in reality, or in the imaginary, in order to become a legitimate subject of this or that type of knowledge.”15 A corresponding approach to the study of formations of life and death is to be found in much of Foucault’s work: in The Birth of the Clinic, in The Order of Things, and in his work on sex, degeneracy, and biopolitics.16 He describes the conditions under which life and death differently, and contingently, become possible for correspondingly contingent subjects. In The Birth of the Clinic disease and mortality emerge as possible objects of knowledge insofar as their signs and symptoms manifest in organic bodies.17 The Order of Things gives a number of variants in formations of life and death. We find resonances of this analytic disposition at the outset of Butler’s Frames of War, when she evokes Foucault’s archaeological language and its account of the “space” of knowledge, experience, and perception with her reference to the “epistemological” and “interpretive frames” of life.18 The foundation for her analysis of the making of (differentially) grievable and precarious life is the methodological starting point that “there is no life and no death without a relation to some frame.”19
The different deaths considered by Foucault (repudiated as universals, described as formations) include death lurking within life, and within the physical bodies of the history of medicine, as a pathological principle whose signs and symptoms make their subjects hermeneutic inquirers.20 Compare to Foucault’s later interest in degeneracy as the preoccupation of those interested in psychiatric medicine, sexuality, early forms of eugenics, and a number of corresponding governmentalities.21 Again bodies, manifesting such disorders as alcoholism, dissipation, licentiousness and immorality, become symptomatic sites. But the depths in which the knowing subject seeks truth are different. The inquirer preoccupied with degeneration looks into the deep space of a patient’s genealogical history for symptoms and their hereditary antecedents understood as explanatory principles. Also the inquirer looks forward, anticipating impact on future generations. The associated conducts are different. The “deep” bodily spaces of The Birth of the Clinic are investigated by conducts of the anatomist, the physician, and the clinic. “Degeneracy” integrates with the aim of calculating and managing the threat of a reproduction perceived as destructive for peoples. Compare with Security, Territory, and Population’s interest in mortality distributed through populations.22 The according conducts are not hermeneutic, but those of risk management. Death becomes associated with tolerable thresholds. Its distribution in populations might be understood statistically, as when deaths or diseases are deemed disturbing only above certains rates or levels in the population. Here there is an emergence not only of the corresponding subjects and objects but also of the possibility of administering the “life” of a population, newly understood as an entity with its own patterns, needs, and predictabilities. Here, too, Foucault describes population, understood as a biological collectivity as follows: “a constant interplay between techniques of power and their object gradually carves out in reality, as a field of reality, population and its specific phenomena. A whole series of domains of objects were made visible for possible forms of knowledge on the basis of the constitution of the population as the correlate of techniques of power. In turn, because these forms of knowledge constantly carve out new objects, the population could be formed, continue, and remain as the privileged correlate of modern mechanisms of power” (STP 79 trans. mod.).
FOUCAULT’S PRESENT: THRESHOLDS, DECLINES, AND ADVENTS
Foucault sometimes referred to modes of power as historically consecutive. The anatomo-politics associated with disciplinary techniques are said to have emerged before (and then to have combined with) the biopolitical forms concerned with the management of populations which “formed [s’est formé] somewhat later” (HS I 139). He described the transition from the Roman and medieval variants of legal systems to the modern penal order. In Security, Territory, Population he describes having “apparently” given “the bare bones, if you like, of a kind of historical schema” (STP 6). But to confine oneself to such seemingly consecutive narratives would be to overlook much in his work resisting them. Commonly mentioned examples are also available in Security, Territory, Population,23 and in Society Must Be Defended,24 which see Foucault countering just as actively a linear understanding of these modes of power.
He can acknowledge that medieval contexts included elements of disciplinary techniques.25 But they would not be described as disciplinary societies because these isolated techniques did not belong to a broadly diffused network of interconnecting institutions, forms of knowledge, authority, sciences of efficiency and optimization; psychological individualization, correctability, and normalization; and associated formations of selfhood. There are a number of ways of understanding the point that disciplinary techniques are seen in societies Foucault would not consider disciplinary. For example, the fact that spatial organizations producing a permanent sense of observation and self-judgment manifest in many different contexts, including medieval cloisters, might lead us to ask if these are really the “same” techniques. And, since isolated disciplinary techniques have long and diverse histories, and can manifest without belonging to the capillary forms of power Foucault associates with modernity (the complex interconnection of panopticization, individuation, abnormalization, expert knowledges, institutions, proliferation of interest), this also means, to turn to Thomas Lemke’s commentary, that “there is no absolute break between disciplinary and post-disciplinary societies,” nor is there a definitive threshold between the disciplinary and the predisciplinary.26
Here are some further principles that can be derived from this conclusion. Of any formation or mode of power described by Foucault, one could conclude that its techniques and forms are in the process of transformation. The context of such techniques might be in the process of change, or the techniques themselves might mutate in the sense that they begin to play a role in new types of tactical formations, new modes of power, new types of governmentality, and form new correlations with other techniques.27
One can find an extensive metaphorics elaborated by Foucault to describe exactly this possibility. In Security, Territory, Population he describes mechanisms of security as having activated (activé) and propagated (fécondé) techniques of discipline (STP 7), in a “reactivation [réactivation] and transformation [transformation]” of them (STP 9). Legal, disciplinary, and security mechanisms, which otherwise might be supposed to replace each other, instead are said to come into new forms of “correlation” (corrélation) with each other (STP 8). As they do, the techniques in question are described as becoming more complex or as perfecting or as changing (STP 8).28 They might intensify each other, as Foucault suggests is the relationship between modern aims of security which rely on, rather than replace, disciplinary mechanisms. But their coincidence could also be unstable in a number of senses. For example, he also describes the possibility of violent reaction and conflict between the aims of discipline and security (and so an intensification of states of disorder; STP 9).
So it is with the relationship between modes of power elaborated in Foucault’s work. For the best-known example, consider the relationship between sovereignty and the biopolitical elaborated in The History of Sexuality (HS I). Generally considered to pertain to a progression of eras, sovereign power is presented by Foucault as the older and now anachronistic formation. In the final chapter of The History of Sexuality, we’re told that the ancient right to “take life or let live” (faire mourir ou de laisser vivre) was replaced by modernity’s power “to foster life or disallow it to the point of death” (faire vivre ou de rejeter dans la mort; HSI 138), or, as Fassin has proposed the translation, a “power to make live and reject into death.”29 Similarly, Society Must Be Defended proposes that “the power of sovereignty is increasingly on the retreat and … disciplinary or regulatory disciplinary power is on the advance” (SMBD 254).30 Foucault is certainly understood as describing deductive (HSI 136) sovereign forms of power as older,31 and the proliferating, expansive biopolitical modes as more recent—particularly given their emergence in association with new sciences, new technologies, new forms of knowledge (statistics, demography, physiocracy) not available in classical or medieval periods.
Foucault emphasizes that the institutions of the juridical monarchy, its traditions, institutions, forms, and representations are “characteristic but transitory” (bien particulière et malgré tout transitoire; HS I 89). They emerge with the feudal system that had inherited the Roman legal system and its modes of power, described in terms of deduction (prélèvement) centered around appropriation of land, wealth, taxes, liberty, and life. The death penalty expresses this traditional sovereign right over bodies and territories, the right to take, have, annex, deprive. By contrast, as he argues, death penalties are heterogeneous with the emergence of biopower associated with modernity, given that the latter, from the eighteenth century onwards, “took charge [pris en charge] of men’s existence, men as living bodies” (HS I 89) to optimize them.
But despite describing biopower as replacing sovereign modes of power, and the two as having different aims belonging to different ages, he does not deny that many of the legal and political mechanisms of juridical monarchies have also “persisted” (subsisté; HS I 89). So, in another formulation, Foucault proposes that such surviving sovereign institutional forms (sovereign state, right, law, logics of appropriation and punishment) have “gradually been penetrated [pénétrée] by quite new mechanisms of power that are quite probably irreducible to the representation of law.”32 Remarks in this vein have led a number of commentators to emphasize that sovereign power and biopolitics are not simply opposed.33 The more efficient and productive forms of biopower have not entirely eclipsed modes of sovereign power, just as they don’t belong to a clean historical progression.
SEGMENTATIONS, DECOMPOSITIONS
Opening his 1972–73 seminar “The Punitive Society,” Foucault argued that strategies and tactics of power could be distinguished, decomposed,34 segmented35— according to their different roles, their tactical functions, and the different economies of power to which they correspond.36 This is another occasion on which, after a discussion in these terms of a number of forms of punishment, Foucault turns to the example of the death penalty. A death penalty can, but does not necessarily, exclude the condemned from political communities. It can serve to demarcate some as lacking the right to have rights. Or it might involve the expulsion of humans into exposed conditions where the likely resulting deaths will count neither as execution nor as murder. But, in another economy of power, death penalties might be compensatory mechanisms for victims, their families, society, or a governing authority. Alternatively, an execution might be the spectacular declaration of a sovereign’s “right to impose justice.” Responding to crime, it could be symbolically retributive: understood as “the reply of the sovereign to those who attacked his will, his law, or his person” (HS I 137–38). It might serve to demonstrate what a sovereign “pouvait faire du corps d’un homme” (all that he could do with a man’s body),37 as in the grotesquely prolonged execution of Damiens in 1757. By contrast, some modern forms of capital punishment might operate as incarceration’s extreme limit, giving the spatial enclosure of the prison the alternative of an ultimate, temporal closure.
Insofar as they belong to different tactics, and to different modes of power, techniques of execution (like techniques of expulsion, fining, surveillance) can be distinguished. These are different techniques of death, as seen in differences in how deaths are effected (as when one compares the elaborate techniques maximally prolonging Damien’s expiration with the machinic design with which the guillotine aims at instantaneous and efficient execution). They may be functionally different deaths: operations of retribution or compensation, of desubjectivization or spectacularization. Death penalties are not always primarily punitive. The frenzy of executions during the French Revolution aimed less to punish than to purge the public space of its ever-expanding category of political enemies. Thus it might seem that all executions involve the deaths of individuals. But not all death penalties individualize. The difference between operations of individualization or deindividualization may characterize a death penalty’s specific techniques. An execution might aim to be self-canceling. Its technique might be to retroactively erase its own status as “execution” in its aim to render what is killed, less-than-human life. The difference between these techniques amounts to more than a difference between methods of death or between different aims of imposed death. At stake also is the different deaths of dehumanized individuals, or of political enemies, or of “masses,” and only sometimes (through corresponding techniques of individualization) of individuals.38 It becomes a decisive point for Foucault that the seemingly similar techniques that might otherwise be grouped together as “death penalties” can be tactically differentiated in such ways.
Consider Derrida’s comment that “Foucault declares that he could have … related the decline of the death penalty to the progress of biopolitics.”39 It is true that Foucault generally describes a decline in the dominance of spectacular, sovereign tactics.40 But in the passage mentioned by Derrida Foucault offers execution as a further example of how powers of death may be the counterside or underneath (l’envers) of biopower (HS I 136). Capital punishment can be consistent with biopolitical strategies that aim to optimize life. To reinforce that point he turns to a type of justification once provided for the death penalty: “by invoking less the enormity of the crime itself than the monstrosity of the criminal, his incorrigibility, and the safeguard of society. One had the right to kill those who represented a kind of biological danger to others” (HS I 138).
So how might the “deaths” ascribed by Foucault to the sovereign power to take life be distinguished from those ascribable to the biopolitical capacity to optimize life? In forms ranging from indirect murder, the rationalization of resources, or collateral damage to massacre, war, and genocide, Foucault argues that biopower has also allowed the formation of strategies of “vital” deaths. Characterizing specifically biopolitical powers of death, Foucault argued they could manifest in forms of war: “no longer waged in the name of a sovereign who must be defended; they are waged on behalf of the existence of everyone” (HS I 137). Such “vital” deaths might be surreptitious, meticulously recorded, or meticulously effacing. They might involve complex rationalities, as when some forms of death amount to the prudential disfavoring of certain groups. They might be pursued in the name of security, risk aversion, collective or national interest, or that of rising generations. They may presuppose tacit or overtly declared divisions between more and less valued groups, categories, or forms of life. As Jasbir Puar characterizes the characteristically “vital” aims of biopolitical powers of death: “death is never a primary focus; it is a negative translation of the imperative to live, occurring only through the transit of fostering life. Death becomes a form of collateral damage in the pursuit of life.”41
This means that the murderousness of biopolitics remains tactically different from the murderousness of sovereign power. But such forms of death can operate together. This is more generally true of Foucault’s accounts of the relations between modes of power—they may reinforce each other without becoming entirely indistinct. Foucault characterizes the Nazi state in such terms: as a combination of powers and techniques of discipline, security, sovereignty and biopolitics. The elaborate, mutually denouncing self-scrutiny of neighbors was a disciplinary and panopticized mode reinforcing the Nazi state’s sovereign power of death. Its genocides were pursued in a sovereign exercise of powers of death and also in a biopolitical project to optimize Aryan life. Foucault also refers to what he takes to be an extraordinary phenomenon, insofar as sovereign and biopolitical aims were pursued so extremely that they began to merge in their superimposition. As thoroughly biopolitical, the Nazi state was thoroughly murderous (SMBD 260). But, even at this point, Foucault is not describing a principle of power that has become self-identical. To the contrary, in a passage elaborated by Esposito (to whom we’ll return), what Foucault describes is a “paroxysm” of power in which there are both coinciding and conflicted interests, technologies, apparatuses, techniques and modes of power, tactics, aims.
More generally, Foucault argued that the techniques of different modes of power could have multiple valences yet operate in tandem. Life could be optimized in a social body through sovereign aims, anatomo-politics, and biopolitics that are able to articulate with each other. Their modes of power are differentiable technically and tactically, yet come into contact in a number of ways. One reason is that their techniques don’t always operate at the same level. From urban planning to the formations of sexuality, as matters of individual conduct and as a regulation of the population, different techniques of different modes of power may simultaneously stimulate bodies, habits, conducts, populations, milieus, trends in different ways, to different ends.
Security, Territory, Population offers a number of examples. Disciplinary mechanisms might also be security mechanisms, factoring in the “likelihood” of recidivism (STP 7). Urban planning is a disciplinary mechanism factoring self-realizing standards for bodily conduct, movement, and distribution of bodies (such as one or two individuals per room, one family per house, straight lines of houses forming the thoroughfares of streets, etc.). But it is also a regulatory, optimizing, biopolitical mechanism applied to populations and encouraging overall “patterns” of residential saving patterns, of “levels” of public hygiene, and so on. Sexuality is described by Foucault in disciplinary terms (involving the gridding, disclosure, and normalization of individual sexual behavior) and as allowing a governmentality of the life processes of a population (administration in terms of birth, health, death and disease rate, medical and insurance coverage, conducts of sex and reproduction deemed normal and abnormal, prediction and adjustment for their patterns and distributions in populations).42
Thus a “same” body (so to speak) is invested, or becomes possible, in a number of different ways at once: as such it is not the same body. Foucault offered a famous definition of the “polyvalence” of discourse: to be understood as “a series of discontinuous segments [une série de segments discontinus] whose tactical function is neither uniform nor stable” (HS I 100). The formulation can also be used to characterize the plasticity of bodies, conducts, and the tactical segments of modes and techniques of power. This phenomenon is particularly evident, in fact, in a bank of images and lexicon used by Foucault: such as imprinting and availability for penetration, superimposition, polyvalence, coalescing, becoming indistinct, segmentation, decomposition, paradox, transformation, and mutation. This will bring us back Derrida’s interrogation of the Foucauldian present. One way to characterize the plasticity of the segments of techniques, apparatuses, and modes of power described by Foucault would be to turn instead to the Derridean term survivance: a form of living on that takes place while calling into question what has survived. There is survival without continuity in what survives.43 In fact, the lexicon employed by Foucault (penetration, superimposition, coalescence, etc.) would lend itself particularly well to such an understanding. This lexicon offers a rich resource for reconsidering one of the problems dominating his ongoing, post-1980s reception: the present, the Foucauldian present, the actuality of Foucault. A good route for this exploration was opened up by the questions Derrida directed at Foucault.
THE FISSURED FOUCAULDIAN PRESENT
Derrida focused on figures that, in Foucault’s work, were emblematic of his intermittent tendency to characterize age and epochs in his accounts of epistemic conditions and formations of power. The best-known example concerns Foucault’s characterization of Descartes as emblematic of the classical age’s confinement of madness.44 But a number of similar figures emerged in his History of Madness. For example, Freud offers an iconic contrasting figure, characterizing a later era’s characterization of madness as available to be understood, treated, analyzed, and mastered. Derrida countered that such emblematic figures retained an ambivalent status in Foucault’s accounts. In drawing out that ambivalence, Derrida could be said to amplify different capacities of Foucault’s work, reworking the status of a Foucauldian present.45
For Foucault could describe figures emblematic of an age as also foreshadowing later transformations. He makes a number of references to Freud in these different veins. Freud is connected to an earlier lineage of aspirations to moral rehabilitation seen in eighteenth-century treatments of madness developed by Philippe Pinel and Samuel Tuke. Newly deemed an ailment amenable to therapeutic approaches, madness generated an accompanying surplus of enlightened psychiatric authority over it. But Freud also can be connected to entirely different characterizations of human finitude (including what Foucault called man’s “empirico-transcendental doublet”) associated with later developments in philosophy and the human sciences.46
Derrida responds that insofar as Foucauldian figures such as Descartes, Freud, and “psychoanalysis ‘itself’” characterize ages,47 and particularly when such figures or developments are given the status of prefigurations,48 they challenge Foucault’s “present.” They destabilize any of the “presents” and epochs Foucault also is prone to characterize. As the imminent advent of other possibilities and ages with different characteristics, they are the anticipatory disturbance of possible transformation (88–90). Thus, in a counter-reading of such figures in Foucault’s work, Derrida argues that they challenge the linear sequences and thresholds Foucault also establishes, such as the “partition between a classical and a postclassical age” (77).
[Foucault] says, in effect, that what is called contemporary had already begun in the classical age and with [Descartes’] Evil Genius, which clearly, to my eyes at least, cannot leave intact the historical categories of reference and the presumed identity of something like the “classical age” (for example).… One may imagine the effects that the category of the “perpetual threat” (Foucault’s term) can have on indications of presence, positive markings, the determinations made by means of signs or statements, in short, the whole criteriology and symptomatology that can give assurance to a historical knowledge concerning a figure, an episteme, an age, an epoch, a paradigm.
(87)
To return to the example, The History of Madness would really have established a psychoanalysis that is “consequently nonglobalizable,” “divided and multiple” (114), as are figures such as Diderot, Descartes, and Freud. And once this conclusion is generally broadened to all the figures, knowledges, techniques, and epistemic conditions one might attribute to an “age,” one would have to call into question the viability of Foucault’s demarcations (“classical,” “modern”) between them (77). Finally, Derrida claims that this broader expansion could not exempt the “we” who might belong to such ages, nor “time,” its “place,” its “itself,” nor, most generally, Foucault’s “present”:
Here is … according to Foucault, our age, our contemporareity.… The “we” who is saying “we think in that place” is evidently, tautologically, the “we” out of which the signatory of these lines, the author of The History of Madness and The Order of Things, speaks, writes, and thinks. But this “we” never stops dividing, and the places of its signature are displaced in being divided up. A certain untimeliness always disturbs the contemporary who reassures him or herself in a “we.” This “we,” our “we” is not its own contemporary. The self-identity of its age, or any age, appears as divided, and thus problematic, problematizable … as the age of madness or an age of psychoanalysis—as well as, in fact, all the historical or archaeological categories that promise us the determinable stability of a configurable whole.… The couple Freud/Nietzsche forms and then unforms, this decoupling fissures the identity of the epoch, of the age, of the episteme or the paradigm of which one or the other, or both together, might have been the signifiers or representatives. This is even more true when this decoupling comes to fissure the self-identity of some individual, or some presumed individuality, for example, of Freud. What allows one to presume the non-self-difference of Freud, for example? And of psychoanalysis? These decouplings and self-differences no doubt introduce a good deal of disorder into the unity of any configuration, whole, epoch, or historical age.49
(109–10)
On Derrida’s reading, Foucault would commit to (or declare) the delineation of ages and epochs, while describing phenomena simultaneously undermining such demarcations. In response, Derrida engages in a maximal expansion of the principles attributable to Foucault’s account of multiplicity, division, untimeliness, dispersion, extending them back to encompass his work. Thus Foucault would have “ceaselessly” reminded us of powers that were “essentially dispersed” (114; Derrida’s point of reference here is the first volume of The History of Sexuality). But, Derrida responds, what then allows the coalescence of an apparatus (to use Foucault’s term) or allows us to identify the assembling, heterogeneous techniques of a mode of power? Derrida claims that there is a countermovement between its dispersed heterogeneity and a Foucauldian principle of “gathering” (rassemblement) (117). Consider Colin Koopman’s account of the relations between the elements of an apparatus depicted in Foucault’s genealogies. He argues that they allow us “to grasp the coherence of a complex welter of practical material that is contingently interrelated … in a way that both encourages respect for the profound stability of this practical material as it functions and also enables acknowledgement of the sheer contingency of this stability.”50
Accordingly, Derrida directs his attention to a Foucauldian account of power that, finally, must sufficiently amount to a principle of “gathering” for a mode of power or an apparatus to be understood as such. In a Foucauldian apparatus, disparate, heterogeneous elements cohere and interconnect productively. But, as Robert Trumbull interprets Derrida’s response: “Once the axiomatic concept of power is put into question, the very project the genealogist undertakes is destabilized. Even if power is irreducibly dispersed, there must be a unity of the concept in order for a genealogy of power relations to get underway in the first place.”51
This brings me to the fourth guiding theme with which I mobilize aspects of Foucault operative in the following project, the idea of “suspension” suggested by Derrida in his essay on Foucault written after the latter’s death, “To Do Justice to Freud.” Another term we could propose is Foucault’s reserves.
FOUCAULT’S SUSPENDED RESERVES: SEX WITH DERRIDA AND FOUCAULT
Concluding his last published essay on Foucault, “To Do Justice to Freud,” Derrida proposed we might return to Foucault’s work “by means of a question that it carries within itself, that it keeps in reserve in its unlimited potential,” “in suspense, holding its breath.”52 But, in affirming this means of thinking of Foucault’s reserves, Derrida holds something back. In rethinking his relation to Foucault, how might he also have interrogated his own reserves? Shouldn’t an interrogation of Foucauldian suspensions have provided the context for a corresponding interrogation of the suspensions in Derrida’s response? Once amplified and pursued more reciprocally, they contain further possibilities for exploring the suspended dialogue.
When, in “To Do Justice,” Derrida imagined the further readings Foucault might have undertaken of the blurred, dual principles of life and death in Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, he returned to History of Madness and to a number of other texts including Foucault’s discussion of Freud and of confessional sex in The History of Sexuality.53 But this was to inhabit a discussion in which Foucault had evoked formations of death in life in a sense not mentioned by Derrida.
One of the most obvious ways in which Foucault described this death in life in The History of Sexuality was as a formation of sex. Consider the work’s masturbating children, described by Foucault in terms of a late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century preoccupation with death wreaked simultaneously on the child’s individual body (vitality sapped in youth and reducing its life by decades) and on the vitality of peoples.54 Sex in Foucault’s work, and its conjoined problems of population, reproduction and transmission deemed individually and collectively deadly, and the biopolitical managements of life and death (in all their extended meaning—futures of bodies, peoples, nations) was not considered by Derrida. Foucault and Derrida dialogued about other questions: about madness, silencing, reason, history, the pretensions of philosophy, their disputed interpretations of Descartes. Lynne Huffer describes Derrida’s inattention to the quality, detail, and material character of Foucault’s archival work: the latter’s minute attention to institutions, architecture, conducts, practices, diagnoses, records, bodies, confinements, timetables, treatments, and cures.55 Perhaps partly by virtue of this neglect of the details of Foucault’s archive, Derrida overlooked the point (recently developed in Huffer’s Mad for Foucault) that an extensive elaboration of a history of sex was also to be found in History of Madness.56 To recall Foucault’s protesting response in 1972 to Derrida’s critique of this work: “Derrida thinks that he can capture the meaning of my book [History of Madness] or its ‘project’ from … three pages that are given over to the analysis of a text that is recognized by the philosophical tradition.… Consequently, there is no point arguing about the 650 pages of a book, no point analyzing the historical material that is brought to bear therein, and no point criticizing the choice of this material, its distribution and its interpretation.”57 Amongst those 650 pages of historical material not considered by Derrida, we’ll find (consistent with Huffer’s argument) the problematized masturbation, cause of twenty-eight cases of madness,58 and later deemed one of madness’s common causes along with alcohol abuse, communicated viruses, blows, and falls.59
It doesn’t seem inappropriate to imagine Derrida somewhat averse to engaging the theme that would eventually dominate so many critical engagements with Foucault: the sex. The remark is applicable to Derrida’s first critical essay on History of Madness in 1963 given the intermittent overlaps between madness and sexual disorder discussed in that work. And in his later responses to Foucault Derrida would prove little more inclined to discuss the sex of The History of Sexuality.
For his part, Foucault was not better attuned to Derrida’s most specific elaborations. His delayed response to Derrida’s critique of History of Madness witheringly made Derridean text and textuality seem a preoccupation with language, narrowly defined. Of Grammatology had been published five years earlier, in 1967, and contained its now iconic declaration that there was nothing outside of the text (il n’y a pas de hors-texte).60 Foucault seems to have taken this as an indication that there was for Derrida nothing outside “language.” At a time when Foucault was diagnosing the conditions of inclusion and circulation of discourse, including the author and commentary functions,61 Foucault classified Derrida’s “text” as commentary—belonging to the phenomenon of commentary on commentary.62
The two could find little to say to each other on “text,” it was clear. But, by the time of Foucault’s sharp remarks in 1972, hadn’t Derridean text already become sex in a number of his publications? Think of the early appearance of his readings of Levinasian sexual difference in 1964,63 and of Rousseau’s maternal metonymies and deferred, disseminated desire in Of Grammatology in 1967. And what of Rousseau’s substitutive “supplements” (masturbation, desire, sex, women, the maternal, nature …), which had provided the very context for the Derridean “il n’y a pas de hors-texte”?64 One could even put the question this way: how did Derrida and Foucault miss the coincidence (and interesting divergences) of their idiosyncratic discussions of masturbation as mortal danger? Everything that was most characteristic about Derridean generalized “text” (allowing him to depart from the limited definition of language with which Foucault had confused his interests) was enveloped in the ambit of Rousseauist masturbation as elaborated in Of Grammatology’s analysis of the always already substitutive original object of desire. As the deferring and differing “dangerous supplement,” Rousseauist masturbation was reinterpreted as deconstructive différance.
Foucault would not return to the mortal dimensions of masturbating children until his Collège de France lectures of 1973–74 (Psychiatric Power) and then (very extensively) in 1974–75’s Abnormal. But they had already made their appearance in History of Madness. Perhaps everything constituting the philosophical, strategic, and technical gulf between Foucault and Derrida could be located in the different significance of the masturbatory for the methodological intuitions of each.65 Both extended—to sex, to masturbation—remarkably novel forms of philosophical analysis.66 Rousseau’s masturbation enabled Derrida’s first important elaboration of the text of sex and of the sex of text.67 And the abnormality with which masturbation was associated gave rise to Foucault’s discussion of metasomatization and the metabody,68 the body whose “present” (for example, a child’s masturbatory “present”) could simultaneously emerge as multiple forms of possible abnormality, connected to a complex, extended hereditary network, and to the collective futures it projected (enfolding potential for transmitting harm to those futures, including a population’s impaired vitality or “degeneracy”).
So one could conclude there were missed opportunities between the two men and some limitations in their characterizations of distinctive aspects of the other’s work. In 1972, neither observed the innovative methodologies available from the other for rethinking sex.69 Even when Derrida turned to The History of Sexuality, in much later writing (in “To Do Justice to Freud” and in his seminar “Beast and Sovereign”) he was still problematizing Foucault’s epistemes, thresholds, and ages. Interested in the intersections of sex and text, he could have considered Foucault’s references to an inscription of sex (HS I 69, 95, 96; SMBD 251). He might have interrogated The History of Sexuality’s account of a replacement of modes of alliance with sexuality and of sovereign forms of power with those of biopower, given Foucault’s description of the former as penetrated (pénétré) by the latter (HS I 89) and of the power to kill as the underside (l’envers) of the biopolitical (HS I 136).70 When compared to Derrida’s luxuriantly eroticized readings of Genet and Hegel in 1974, or even his exchange with Geoffrey Bennington in Circonfession,71 we could assume there was less pleasure available from the penetrations and undersides of The History of Sexuality.
Insofar as each missed the other’s sex, it is all too easy to sexualize the image of an avoided encounter between the men. But there is more to be said about their short-circuited potential encounter. The Foucauldian metaphors of penetration characterizing the transformation of modes of power in The History of Sexuality could have pulled Derrida’s attention to the Foucauldian “techniques” and segmentation providing alternatives to the thresholds, ages, and epistemic ruptures. Derrida missed the complex temporality of the bodies belonging to Foucault’s archive. The “metasomatization” of its childrens’ masturbatory metabodies alone interrupted the “present” Derrida attributed to Foucault’s epochs and figures so as to counter-read. In reverse, the textuality of Derrida’s “sex” could have alerted Foucault that Derrida’s “il n’y a pas de hors-texte” was not a claim that everything was language. Rather, what we think of as flesh, or matter, or life, or death, or reproduction, or desire, pleasure, bodies, or biography are no less rendered through differing and deferring than the phenomena more readily defined as “language,” and “writing.”
If we were to explore a possible intersection between Derrida’s deconstructive genealogy,72 and his deconstruction of sex, with Foucault’s genealogy of sex, where might this lead us?
SEX AND BIOPOLITICS
Of course, Derrida may have largely avoided Foucauldian sex, but he seems to have been all the more wary of the biopolitics, whose claims are reconsidered at the conclusion to The Beast and the Sovereign, volume 1. Distracted by his criticisms of Agamben, Derrida describes Foucault in conjunction with Agamben as succumbing to the “temptation” of “linear history.”73 Repeatedly, Derrida had returned Foucault to a problem of thresholds, now arguing that Foucault’s work ought to “forbi[d] our making this history into a properly successive and sequential history of events.”74 But there was more to be said about Foucault as a theorist of biopolitics—its populations and nations, administration of life, birthrates and deathrates, its biologically inflected hierarchies of peoples and state-inflected racisms.
Derrida saw the tendency to suppose a gathering of power as one of the poles of Foucault’s oscillations, resisted by the counterforce of the dispersal Foucault also depicted. But, in a sense not factored by Derrida, the biopolitical returned Foucault a number of times to the relation between the alliance model and sexuality in The History of Sexuality and more generally to the relation between sovereignty, discipline, and biopower whose elaboration by Foucault would actually interrupt, not reiterate, a linear history.
As it happens, at the time of Derrida’s comments about Foucault in his The Beast and the Sovereign seminar his archival interests had come into slightly closer proximity with those of Foucault. Derrida had just offered his Death Penalty seminar, with its consideration of capital punishment, the latter’s phantasmatic sovereign claims, the death penalty’s anesthetization, its abolitionism, progress narratives, the ideas and interests of that defense, the concepts of life and death mobilized in the latter. Derrida’s several mentions of Foucault in the first volume of his Death Penalty seminar took him back to Discipline and Punish, but not back to The History of Sexuality, nor biopower. Yet we can ask how the biopolitical line drawn by Foucault out of The History of Sexuality could bear on the deaths, abolitions, lives, and births of The Death Penalty.
With that possibility in mind, let’s give Foucault (whom one could imagine hoping to be exempted from the impending discussions of sexual difference) a temporary respite and turn briefly to Derrida’s discussions of Victor Hugo in his Death Penalty.
DERRIDA AND VICTOR HUGO: THE DEATH OF REPRODUCTIVE LIFE
The abolitionist writings discussed by Derrida include the analogically saturated images from Hugo whose ideals of fraternity Derrida had discussed in his 1988 seminar published as Politics of Friendship. There Derrida had presented Hugo’s image of a globally expanding fraternity through which Paris would be the embryo of Europe, the world, the future: “It is certain that the French Revolution is a beginning.… Take note of this word. Birth. It corresponds to the word Deliverance.” “O France, adieu! … One separates from one’s mother, who becomes a goddess … and you, France, become the world.”75 Hugo connects this image to that of the temporal and spatial expansions of colonialism: “Under the influence of this motive nation, the incommensurable fallow lands of America, Asia, Africa and Australia will give themselves up to civilizing emigration.… The central nation whence this movement will radiate over all continents will be to other societies what the model farm is among tenant farms. It will be more than a nation, it will be … better than a civilization, it will be a family.… The capital of this nation will be Paris.”76 As Derrida would observe, reading the related passages together, the same imagery is mobilized in Hugo’s strenuous opposition to the death penalty.
This form of opposition reaffirmed distinctions between barbarism and civilization that were just as much to hand when Hugo spoke of France’s potential as the embryo for globalist expansion. In this imagery, when the abolitionist movement was associated with the progress of civilization, it was also associated with the progress of life,77 with organic process, and a seed’s development. Derrida points out Hugo’s association of this lifelike “progress” with a “right to life,”78 as if progress has its own life, its own life claims on those who would impede it. The deaths effected by capital punishment were considered to impede the “life” of progress as well as those executed. These variants on life were given the metaphors of reproduction, maternity, the “profound ovary of a fertilized progress.”79
Hugo condemned all capital punishment on the grounds of the inviolability of human life. But it happens that he presented the execution of women—wives and mothers, principle of life—as foregrounding the death penalty’s egregious character. Why was executing women particularly emblematic of its horror? The putting to death of those associated with the production of life counted as a double infraction of the “right to life,” for the death penalty also conflicted with the potential life for which the executed woman would be considered responsible (her real or potential children). A third infraction was also attributed to the execution’s forestalling of future collective life with which women as reproductive principle were associated: national, territorial, populationist, colonial, expansionist.
Derrida’s elaboration of Hugo’s “women and children” is not far from the phenomenon described by Foucault, a body that could be at once considered the embryo of its own life and of the lives to which it could give rise, those of peoples, of populations, and of national futures. To use Foucault’s terminology (developed more specifically to discuss the networked multiplicities assumed by the phantasmatic logics of heredity associated with degeneracy), we could see Hugo’s objection to harming women and children as an objection to harming the metabody to which they belong, which they enfold, and of which they are the emblem.80
THE WOMEN AND THE CHILDREN: DISSEMINATED ANALOGY AND DISPERSED BIOPOLITICS
Could we bring this problem back to Foucault’s reserves, to the ends of a productive reading together of Derridean and Foucauldian resources?
Considered by Derrida, these are claims profiting from a concurrent, and very elaborate, literal, pseudoliteral, and analogical status become undecidable. Pursued by Foucault, these are forms of life emerging as relay points of power. In his account of the contingent formations of life, life is never stable or self-present. But, about some of the phenomena he discusses in this context, it could also be argued that there is a blurring between metaphor, figure, symbol, and the literal. To be sure, the instability of these particular distinctions isn’t the focus of Foucault’s accounts of life. Nonetheless, in Foucault’s consideration of the political and biopolitical administration of birthrate to the ends of defending health, peoples, populations, and futures, the reproductive is as much symbolic as it is administered conduct. These registers of maternity (its national meaning and its conduct as national, its meaning as governmentality, its being governed) are saturated with images and figurative significance, its materiality here indistinguishable from metaphor. In other words, the meaning of maternity, children, health, and birthrate intertwines with the way in which these take shape materially: how they are conducted, what forms of birth and upbringing take place, under what (legal, economic, political, policy, insurance, historical, social, technological, epistemological, medical, subjectivizing, dividing, including, discarding, differentiating, securitizing, colonizing …) conditions.
So when Hugo associates the “true birth” of expansionist-colonialist futurity with women’s reproductivity in multiple senses, the literal cancels itself as already figurative, and the analogical cancels itself as not “merely” analogical. Matter, flesh, and figure have already taken shape in a disseminating relation of the “meaning” and “matter” of life.
With some very recent exceptions, Foucault’s work is not generally assessed as a contribution to reproductive biopolitics.81 But there can be no question that, in Foucault’s references to the Polizeiwissenschaft and biopolitical interest in birthrate, wet nurses, breast-feeding, contraception, and similar “deadly secrets,” reproduction takes shape as the concurrent threshold of protection and destruction, as a redoubled and multiple formation of the oscillating techniques of security, life enhancement, and delivery of death. Foucault touches upon exactly these formations, even in his brief mention of these matters in The History of Sexuality. He does so by linking the “vital” role of the mother (her good mothering ensuring optimized life in the population) to the negative variant (the problematic, bad, or “hysterical” mother). When he describes the emergence of desirable parental conduct, the duty to maximize health in the family as a threshold of a population’s collective health, is juxtaposed with its alternative: the domestic hearth may deliver harm. Thus the new parental obligation is not just that the children be maximally healthy but also that their deaths be averted (AB 255; HS I 125). I have added a problem not discussed by Foucault. Despite his mention, for example in Abnormal, of maternal responsibility, disciplinary (and disciplined) conduct, and elsewhere of the problematization of a maternal conduct understood as vector of risk, he does not describe a thanatopoliticization of women emerging when collective futures are understood to be ensured by optimal reproductivity. But once optimal reproduction ensures the collective future, women also become figures of possible harm to those futures. Once they are the principle of population as national futurity, to execute or kill a woman is to kill those futures. Derrida discusses a number of historical arguments that they should, therefore, be exempt from death penalties. But exactly the same grounds (women-as-life-principle) have also been used to produce women as figures delivering death.82 And that formation has produced them as figures exposed to the kinds of penalties and new kinds of death penalties and to the modern abortion wars. Women have been attributed a pseudosovereign capacity to harm embryos, children, and futures. They have been targeted not just by biopolitical optimization but also (and with the precariousness of abortion access enmeshed in both) by sovereign legal measures. The latter have survived in strange new forms, new states of exception. It is Derrida, not Foucault, who astutely recognized that the death penalty is a scene of sexual difference. But it is Foucault, not Derrida, who developed the corresponding biopolitical meanings of optimized and administered life. Foucault returned a number of times to the phenomenon of biopolitical projects to take care of life that incorporated a conjoined taking of life.83 Certainly, we would turn to Derrida for his engagement with the special significance taken on by women in relation to death penalties. But, as I will argue, we can then turn to Foucault’s work to find further resources for analyzing the conjoining of a biopoliticized and thanatopoliticized reproduction.
THE RESERVES OF PROXIMITY: FOUCAULT AND DERRIDA
For his part, Derrida had identified the importance of “the woman, the mother, sexual difference,” and their role in the “true” birth of the nation, in their emblematic and exceptional status when confronted with the death penalty. Foucault analyzed the emergence of reproduction, birth, breast-feeding, child raising as biopolitical principles of life, such that we can better understand what principle women have become when they stand before a death penalty in the sense evoked by Victor Hugo in Derrida’s Death Penalty. Of the two, it is Derrida who made it a regular practice to consider the analytic necessities of factoring sexual difference. In chapter 3 I will draw attention to a number of moments when Foucault, averting sexual difference, habitually converts the life duties of the “mother” to those of the nondifferentiated “parent.” Uncharacteristically, given how attentive he was to the repeated occlusions of sexual difference in a great number of philosophers, Derrida missed the opportunity to consider this issue in Foucault’s work. At the conclusion of “To Do Justice,” he tried to imagine Foucault’s response to questions directed at him posthumously. Again sexual difference is far from this scene. But it’s appropriate that a missed meeting not be the encounter one might have anticipated.
An unexpected question, explored by neither in relation to the other, would be how sexual difference intertwines with the biopolitical. It can be dislodged by working with the suspended reserves of both Foucault and Derrida. This is not an intersection of the arguments each directed at the other. Rather it is an intersection in abeyance: of themes respectively explored by each (for Derrida, the regular occlusion of sexual difference, for Foucault, the biopolitical), but not explored by each in the other. Derrida averted an attention to Foucault’s interest in biopolitics; Foucault paid no attention to Derrida’s general interest in sexual difference, although that resource might have alerted Foucault that his own references to undifferentiated “parents” and “couples” were in error. In the working space opened up where Foucault and Derrida’s reserves held a suspended capacity to engage each other, a sovereign ability to deliver life and death was linked to a woman rendered principle of life. She had become the emblem of what was abhorrent in the death penalty, of the forces impeding progress. She, and the “the children,” had come to enfold the promise of, and the threat to, an expansionist (bio)political, territorial, national, and metasomatic future.
My suggestion is not that the deconstructibility of analogy would be particularly galvanizing for Foucault.84 Nor should we minimize the tension between the ways in which Foucault and Derrida referred to the biopolitical. Yet, at the point of contact between Derrida’s capacity to think the simultaneously literal and analogical and Foucault’s capacity to think together multiple corporeal spaces and times which enfold each other, a form of materiality can be articulated as a productive mutation engaging the capacities of each. Foucauldian reserves, and those of Derrida, allow us to consider (just where Derrida’s intriguing use of the term suspension stops short) something new emerging from the confrontation between their suspended reserves, reconceived as transformative capacities.
BEYOND FOUCAULT’S SUSPENSIONS
Foucault has been supplanted, discarded, rebutted, buffeted, repudiated, completed, or modified, living on in fields including contemporary Italian philosophy, thanato- and necropolitics, affect theory and race studies, queer and feminist theory, new queer Deleuzeanism, and some of the “beyonds” of Beyond Biopolitics.85 As a guiding methodological principle for the following chapters, the terminology of suspended reserves will be close to hand in a discussion of some of the more transfiguring engagements with Foucault’s work: Derrida’s survivance,86 Giorgio Agamben’s bare life, Roberto Esposito’s immune paradigm, Lauren Berlant’s slow death, Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics, Jasbir Puar’s terrorist assemblages, Wendy Brown’s waning sovereignties, Judith Butler’s precarious life, and Lee Edelman’s reproductive futurism.
The pursuit of Foucault’s children will take us to Foucault’s discussions of family spaces and child-raising manuals, elements which might have been given a place in La Croisade des Enfants (one of the never-realized volumes of The History of Sexuality as he first conceived it), the making of children as bodily spaces which were at risk but also posed risks, published as brief comments on the dangers delivered by masturbation, wet nursing, insufficient surveillance, irresponsible strangers and family members, the need for marsupial mothers, optimal child-rearing understood as defensive, neo-Malthusian responsibilization, reproduction made a matter of biopolitical optimization and security, the harm to a future seeming to threaten children (but which they were also understood as effecting), and the corresponding responsibilization of maternities and governmentalities. We’ll also consider less literal references to the making of children as futures: the phenomena described by Edelman as reproductive futurism, reproblematized by Puar as a biopolitical formation that comes to enfold a nationalism which is both hetero- and homonormative.
Problems not quite belonging to the theorists considered in the book will be reconfigured as transformative capacities. The proximities of Foucauldian and post-Foucauldian theorists will emerge, sometimes insofar as they miss each other on points which can be better articulated together and through the miss. In the following pages Foucault’s suspensions become productive insofar as they are considered alongside a repeating phenomenon: the liminal making of women’s (biopoliticized) reproductive life as principle of harm, death, or precariousness in the work of a number of post-Foucauldian theorists.