Foucault’s Early Reading of Marx and the Two Meanings of Humanism
Aner Barzilay
This chapter challenges recent interpretations of Michel Foucault’s 1978–1979 Collège de France lectures, The Birth of Biopolitics.1 According to a certain “political reading,” the Biopolitics lectures offer a rare glimpse into Foucault’s views on contemporary events. What is supposedly revealed by this interpretation of Foucault’s analysis of economic liberalism in the twentieth century is, first, a nefarious political liaison with neoliberalism that is unexpected from a member of the French left. A second component of this line of critique is the underlying assumption that Foucault experienced a serious intellectual crisis after 1976, which caused a fundamental departure from his earlier work and led to the pursuit of a new philosophical orientation during his “last decade.”
Such a reading, however, risks obfuscating the philosophical complexity of Foucault’s critique of his contemporary political horizon. Indeed, although a significant methodological shift did occur in Foucault’s thought after the publication of the first volume of the History of Sexuality, there was nonetheless a clear philosophical continuity with his earlier works. The Biopolitics lectures are no exception, as evidenced by several allusions to the argument of The Order of Things (1966). The short horizon of the “political” reading of Foucault therefore obscures an abiding interest in the use of Nietzsche’s philosophy for thinking beyond the anthropological limits of the modern episteme. As newly available documents within the Foucault archive make clear, this effort to historicize the problem of man in modern philosophy goes back to the early 1950s, when he was a young psychology lecturer at the University of Lille. Of particular importance is a course Foucault taught there on the origins of philosophical anthropology, the arguments of which reemerged in later strategic junctions of his career.
One of the main philosophical debates that stirred French philosophy after the Second World War was the humanism debate that ensued between Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre. Foucault responded to this debate and tried to blaze a new philosophical trail away from the “anthropological slumber” that haunted post-Kantian philosophy. “Anthropology,” for Foucault, was not the social science discipline we now know (which was in France widely known as ethnologie at the time). Instead for Foucault it referred in the 1950s to the emergence of philosophical anthropology as a response to Kant’s philosophy in the nineteenth century, which posed the risk of stripping philosophy from its transcendental premises and reducing it to human science. This problem troubled many philosophers in the beginning of the twentieth century and inspired the philosophical projects of eminent thinkers such as Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty. Their bugbear was the problem of “psychologism.” The young Foucault, who himself was educated within this phenomenological tradition, widened this critique to the entire matrix of nineteenth-century “anthropologisms.”
This argument for a philosophical continuity in Foucault’s thought draws on unpublished archival material from the early 1950s, and specifically on Foucault’s first documented critique of Marx.2 Whereas most of the recent contributions on this topic have tended to focus on the immediate political and historical context that surrounded the Biopolitics lectures, and consequently have ignored the possible connections between Foucault’s neoliberal interpretation and his earlier works from the 1960s, Michael Behrent’s account has the merit of attempting to tie the political dimension to Foucault’s general philosophical project. The rejection of political humanism, so Behrent argues, derived from a deeper, philosophical anti-humanism that Foucault addressed in the controversial final lines of The Order of Things, where he anticipated the coming “death of man.” This, Behrent suggests further was precisely the philosophical problem of anthropology Foucault had explored since the early 1950s.
A lot hangs on this single premise, however, as Behrent uses the so-called synonymy between the political and the philosophical instantiations of humanism to traverse between these two levels and to draw political conclusions from what, as I argue, are essentially philosophical arguments. For this purpose, I return to Foucault’s first documented critique of Marx in the manuscript of the 1952–1953 course (henceforth: the Lille Course) on the origins of anthropology in modern philosophy and compare it with Foucault’s analysis of Marx in the Biopolitics lectures, some twenty-five years later.3 It becomes clear that Foucault’s rejection of Marx and his supposed endorsement of the Chicago School occurred in relation to the problem of anthropology that, to use Etienne Balibar’s term, concerns the “meta-structure” of Foucault’s thought—that is, his philosophy of history.
In so doing, I suggest that framing Foucault’s position in the Biopolitics lectures solely in political terms, i.e., as “anti-humanist,” ignores the complexity of Foucault’s argument and the force of his historical analysis. I further offer a possible explanation for this confusion between two anti-humanisms that stems from the terminology used by one of Foucault’s mentors, Louis Althusser. It was in critical dialogue with Althusser that Foucault’s early reading of Marx in the Lille Course was first formulated. Rather than denying the possibility of a historicized and political reading of Foucault’s Biopolitics lectures, my intention then is to argue that any such reading must start from the primacy of Foucault’s philosophical project. In the last section, I return to the argument of The Order of Things and conclude by suggesting an alternative political reading. The upshot of this analysis is to situate the Biopolitics lectures in the larger arc of Foucault’s thought, rather than isolating the “governmentality” period within his intellectual biography.
Humanism and Anthropology: Reading Marx in the Lille Course
One of the central issues that dominated the philosophical and the political discourse in France during the postwar decade was the question of humanism.4 This debate was not only limited to existential circles and the famous philosophical dispute between Heidegger and Sartre about the relation, or lack thereof, between existentialism and humanism. The philosophical debate was also inherently tied to postwar Marxian politics. Nevertheless, even among the Marxists there were those who strove to drive a wedge between the philosophical and the political. The main force behind the attempt to purge humanism from Marx’s philosophy was Foucault’s young mentor and instructor at the École Normale Supérieure (ENS), Louis Althusser, whose later interpretation of Marx was grounded in a selective reading of Marx’s oeuvre in order to point to the “scientific” value of Marx’s later writings and primarily Das Kapital in contrast to his early humanist writings. This interpretation was mostly aimed against the humanist Marxist faction of the French Communist Party (PCF) and their mouthpiece, Roger Garaudy. In his memoir, Althusser admitted that Heidegger’s interpretation of Marx in the 1947 Letter on Humanism “influenced [his] arguments concerning theoretical antihumanism in Marx.”5
The “theoretical” stakes of Althusser’s interpretation transcended the politics of the PCF. It was an argument staking the claim for the significance of Marxism within the history of Western philosophy, a claim that Althusser couched in terms of “scientific validity.” As the philosophy instructor—the caïman—at the ENS, Althusser’s justification for his “scientific” binary division of Marx’s oeuvre hinged on an explicit philosophical motivation, one for which Spinoza’s metaphysics provided the main model.6 According to Althusser, Marx’s novelty could be understood only against the backdrop of the history of philosophy and science, and not only in relation to a political ideology such as humanism.
We can recognize something very similar in the early writings of Foucault, who joined the PCF at Althusser’s behest in 1951 before leaving the party in 1952. That same year Foucault received his first teaching position at the University of Lille. A course he taught there during his first year illustrates that his distinctive philosophical agenda was beginning to diverge from Althusser’s. Foucault was mostly concerned with the phenomenological problem of the division of labor between philosophy and the human sciences. The course he taught at Lille, entitled “Knowledge of Man and Transcendental Reflection,” set out to uncover the hidden link that was forged in modern philosophy between the human subject and truth. He thus provided an original and capacious rereading of the context for the “Humanism debate.”
The Lille Course was composed at a crucial moment in Foucault’s intellectual biography when he had severed his ties with the PCF and was distancing himself from phenomenology. In the course, Foucault attempted to redefine the relationship between phenomenology and science by delving into the “ontological conditions” of the contemporary philosophical predicament. The manuscript provides a glimpse into Foucault’s reading of Marx at this moment of transition.7
In the course, we find Foucault’s first documented reading of Marx set in the context of post-Kantian philosophical anthropology. Specifically, Foucault responded to Husserl’s The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (1936), which provided a historical analysis of the philosophical origins of modern science. In the book, Husserl justified the pivotal role of transcendental phenomenology in the history of the West and warned against the perils of reducing philosophy to positivist science. According to Foucault in the Lille Course, the reason Husserl was forced to introduce history in his defense of the transcendental status of phenomenology vis-à-vis psychology and philosophical anthropology was related to Husserl’s failure to properly reckon with Kant. Foucault adopted this key insight from Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant, which pointed to the constitutive role of human finitude in Kant’s first Critique.8 If, as Husserl had argued, the founding philosophical figure of the subjectivist transcendental theme in philosophy was Descartes and not Kant, Heidegger (and later Foucault) pointed out that with Descartes the divine was still present and could serve as an alibi for the idea of infinitude. For Foucault, following Heidegger, it was with Kant’s grounding of transcendental subjectivity in human finitude as the constitutive basis for knowledge that an “anthropological shadow” was introduced into the center of philosophy. This shadow continued to lurk behind the transcendental project. And thus, from this perspective, Husserl’s phenomenology became its unwitting victim.
The importance of the argument of the Lille Course cannot be overstated, as it was Foucault’s first attempt to embark on an archaeological excavation of the tacit foundations of modern philosophy. Foucault later presented a similar argument in both his complementary PhD dissertation on Kant’s Anthropology and as late as 1966, in the penultimate chapter of The Order of Things, “Man and His Doubles.”9 In effect, the Lille Course was Foucault’s first attempt to define what he would later term “episteme,” as a historical configuration on which knowledge hinges in a given period. Modernity, which for Foucault begins with Kant’s critical project, was to be understood through a new historical ontology, in which a new entity had arisen that served as both the subject and object of knowledge, its bedrock and boundary, that is, man. Humanism, while in part a corollary of this epistemological transformation, is by no means identical to it. We can easily conceive of humanism before the age of anthropology (Renaissance humanism), but also of an anthropology that is not humanist. An anthropology that is not humanist was Althusser’s position. One might similarly describe the early Heidegger’s focus on Dasein. Hence, there is no reason to assume any identity between the two terms, although the Lille Course makes clear that Foucault, like Heidegger in his Letter on Humanism, treated contemporary humanism as a symptom of the modern anthropological episteme.
The Lille Course manuscript illustrates not only the initial philosophical motive behind Foucault’s archaeological project. It also reveals the way in which the young Foucault honed his method in contradistinction to Althusser’s reading of Marx. Étienne Balibar has recently suggested that the development of Foucault’s thought can be interpreted as an ongoing attempt to reject Marx’s philosophy.10 Balibar locates three pivotal moments of confrontation with Marxism, the first of which coincides with Foucault’s departure from the PCF in 1952—the same moment he was working on his Lille course. Indeed, it would not be too much to say that Foucault’s analysis of Marx in the course manuscript shaped his philosophical development.
The manuscript begins with a long analysis of Kant, who was forced—Foucault tells us—to complement his philosophical critique with a parallel anthropological study (hence the status of the human subject as an empirico-transcendental doublet). Foucault then embarks on an account of the way in which post-Kantian philosophy tilted more and more toward anthropology. If in Kant the balance between the transcendental and the anthropological was maintained, after Hegel, Foucault argues, nineteenth-century philosophy forsook its transcendental underpinnings and replaced them with anthropological ones. The philosophical question—“What is truth?”—was replaced by the anthropological question: “What is the truth of man?” Foucault had already offered this formulation, which was so central to The Order of Things, in 1952. It was in the course of this transition from Kant to Hegel and beyond that history became a central component in the discourse of philosophy, and that the notion of alienation became a key concept in the attempt to restore the true, lost essence of man.
However, in distinction to Marx’s later usage of the term, in Hegel and Feuerbach, alienation still played a bona fide metaphysical role. In Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, alienation was stipulated as a precondition for history itself, as it enabled and propelled the master-slave dialectic, on the way to the objectification and completion of the spirit. Similarly, in Feuerbach alienation was presented in theological terms as the forgetting of human essence, which philosophical reflection would restore. Foucault’s analysis of Feuerbach refers to the opening sentence of the latter’s Principles for Future Philosophy (1843), according to which “the [philosophical] task of the modern era was the realization and humanization of God—the transformation and dissolution of theology into anthropology.”11 In both cases, alienation was not thought of as concrete historical alienation, but as a philosophical symptom that philosophy was able to restore.
It is precisely within this reading of the anthropologization of philosophy that Marx makes his first cameo appearance in Foucault’s manuscript alongside Hegel and Feuerbach in a section entitled “Real Man and Alienated Man.” In this section, Foucault argues that the concept of alienation, which had been originally understood as an internal philosophical symptom to be overcome by philosophical means, became for Marx “the real and immediate condition of human life.” Thereafter, the substitute for the loss of the divine origin was to be located in human history. History thus entered the discourse of philosophical anthropology in order to validate the truth of man by returning to its forgotten historical origin. In so doing, the human subject was called to account for her own condition of possibility. In other words, this involved explaining how the historical reflection on Man could have arisen in the first place: “Anthropology as a dis-alienation (désalienation) of human essence; [The] critical task is constitutive of history: founding the historical reality which becomes a repetition of anthropology. In other words, anthropology is the repetition of history.”12
The concept of alienation that originated in Hegel and was adopted and developed by Feuerbach was fundamentally transformed by Marx, who stripped it from its original philosophical significance. If Kant highlighted the transcendental primacy of the human subject against the anthropological, empirical “doublet,” in Marx all the metaphysical aspirations of philosophy were reduced to empirical anthropology. The constitutive transcendental grounding of truth in Man that necessitated the turn to human history was carelessly reversed. Marx turned to history in order to account for alienation, which was no longer seen as a philosophical concern but a historical phenomenon. In Marx, historical reflection would become the starting point from which his transcendental historical critique emerged. From then on alienation became the experience of “real man” (homme réel) pegged to a given society and to a specific period:
Hegel and Feuerbach could present philosophy as the way back from alienation, and try to surpass it in reality. […] Alienation could be overcome by the reflexive path [la voie reflexive] of philosophy. […] But Marxist alienation, as a real and immediate condition of human life could only be surpassed by a path of extraction [arrachement], by detachment, not by ideal interiorization but by actual exteriorization.13
What had only been a shadow in Kant became a reductive move in Marx. Alienation was now “in man instead of being in God, nature or the Object.”14
Foucault’s brief analysis of Marx concludes with a passage that unmistakably echoes Althusser’s terminology and that would later appear in the latter’s critique of the early Marx.15 It is precisely in this context that Foucault now turns to the concept of labor, which in Hegel still bore a metaphysical importance as a “divine task,” but which in Marx mirrored the labor conditions in the nineteenth century as “the demise and death of man” and that “man is the cause for alienation.” The issue is not that Marx lacked an emancipatory view of labor, which Foucault was fully aware of, but that he reduced the problem of alienation exclusively to history without reflecting on its prior philosophical significance.
This exegesis takes place in a subsection of the manuscript entitled “Alienation and the end of philosophy,” and throughout this section Foucault argues dramatically that Marx has done far more than simply reverse the Hegelian and Feuerbachian concept of alienation. Marx’s critique of labor had ushered in the “end of philosophy” as we know it, which is not necessarily a bad thing from an Althusserian standpoint. Foucault explicitly ponders: “But is not the end of alienation therefore the end of philosophy? [Isn’t] the revolution the reverse of philosophy?”
It is at this moment that Foucault concludes his analysis of Marx by tying it to his critique of humanism:
A Marxist philosophy, or a Marxist humanism could only take root within a concept of alienation which Marxism has disassociated and challenged. A Marxism that wants to think of itself as a philosophy cannot be taken seriously: Marxism is the end of its proper philosophical concepts; the seriousness of Marxism is the tomb of Marxist philosophy. But Marxism does not have a lesser philosophical sense because of it, for it liquidates bourgeois philosophy—at once humanism and anthropology—that believes that man and truth belong together. Marxism is the end of all the philosophies of man; it is philosophically the end to all humanisms.
This unmistakably Althusserian reading hints at a possible route out of the anthropological deadlock and the eventual “death of man,” as Foucault announced it at the end of The Order of Things. The substitution of history for philosophy is not necessarily a negative consequence; however, Foucault is explicit that the end of humanism is not the end of anthropology, but rather a pressing reminder to find a philosophical alternative:
Giving Marxism its proper weight is not to make it the heir to the blandness of humanism, to all the anthropological platitudes in which man and truth are found to be bound to one another […] Marxism should be taken as the first of these experiments that man has carried out for over a century, which is the end of philosophy, the end of an art, the end of truth […] it is the discovery that man and truth only belong to one another in the form of freedom. Marxism is neither a philosophy nor the end of philosophy; it is [a reminder for] the most urgent task: to philosophize differently.
Note the passage’s seeming ambiguity concerning Foucault’s reading of Marx. Foucault read Marx, with Althusser, as ushering in the end of Western metaphysics and heralding “the end of all humanisms.” But the passage’s allusion to the non-humanist reading of Marx à la Althusser still raises the question as to whether the Althusserian route could indeed potentially lead beyond the anthropological constraints of post-Kantian philosophy and explain how philosophical inquiry posited history as a philosophical problem. Will Althusser’s Marx become the model to philosophize differently?
The answer, for Foucault, is no. The ambiguity in Foucault’s concluding remarks on Marx is later resolved by the fact that something substantial immediately follows in the course’s argument. This crucial twist in the course’s narrative involves the discovery of Nietzsche’s critique of Western philosophy as offering an alternative post-anthropological model for philosophy. Foucault’s engagement with Nietzsche forms a separate section of the manuscript, and was presumably written at a later stage from the rest of the course, which takes up almost half of the entire manuscript. It constitutes Foucault’s first systematic reading of Nietzsche. Whereas Marx appeared under the heading “the End of Philosophy” (which we can understand in Heidegger’s terms as the end of metaphysics), the Nietzsche part of the course begins with the section “The End of Anthropology.” Nietzsche, with his idea of the “super-man” (Übermensch), will thus become Foucault’s model for post-anthropological critique and the inspiration for his own attempt to “philosophize differently.”
Foucault made no secret of this. He repeatedly acknowledged the impact of discovering Nietzsche’s thought in the early 1950s and frequently claimed to have modeled his own historical critique after him.16 However, the Lille course manuscript allows us to appreciate why Nietzsche was such a revelation for the young Foucault, who was still under the spell of Althusser. Nietzsche, like Marx, offered a non-metaphysical model for a historical critique, yet unlike Marx he pointed to an escape from the problem of anthropology. Althusser may have succeeded in giving Marx his “proper weight” by shedding all humanist traces, but he still stayed within the constraints of anthropology.
The fact that Nietzsche became the exclusive model for post-anthropological critique is further reaffirmed by the fact that when Foucault redelivered the Lille course at the ENS two years later, he simply removed the analysis of Marx from course! In 1964, at a conference dedicated to Nietzsche, Foucault presented a paper titled “Nietzsche, Freud, Marx” in which only Nietzsche offered a model of critique that can lead beyond the hermeneutical horizon of the nineteenth century and be used for contemporary purposes. Marx and Freud, by contrast, appear as mere representatives of a new mode of hermeneutics that arose in the nineteenth century. By 1966, in The Order of Things, Foucault’s ambiguity on Marx had entirely disappeared: “Marxism exists in nineteenth-century thought like a fish in water: that is, it is unable to breathe anywhere else.”17
To sum up, in the Lille course Foucault still took Marx in positive terms, as the “first of these experiments” to perform a post-metaphysical critique in which Althusserian anti-humanist critique was still held as a viable strategy. After the discovery and full digestion of Nietzsche, Foucault became convinced that Marx could not lead us beyond the anthropological horizon. Marx subsequently became fodder for Foucault’s radical historicization. The move to Nietzsche as the philosophical antidote to Kantian anthropologism provides the intellectual frame within which the various points of political interaction with Marxism should be located.
Back to Heidegger’s Letter on Humanism
Foucault’s early reading of Marx in the Lille course reveals three important arguments. First, when Foucault rejected humanism as an ideology that grounded moral value in an ahistorical universal view of the human subject, he did so not on merely political or moral grounds. Rather, he saw it as a symptom of the modern episteme, which at the time of the Lille course was strictly defined in philosophical terms—as the post-Kantian age of anthropology. Second, the Lille course demonstrated that Foucault’s interpretation of Marx had been far more charitable and ambiguous than later in The Order of Things. Third, this shift may be explained through Foucault’s adoption of Nietzsche as the escape route from the anthropological episteme, from which the problem of humanism derived. By opting for Nietzsche, Foucault could finally complete his break from Marxism, including Althusser’s anti-humanist Marx. Foucault justified his rejection of Althusser’s Marxian avatar in terms of a historical critique of western philosophy. This leads us back to the postwar humanism debate in France and specifically to Heidegger’s 1947 Letter on Humanism.
Althusser and Foucault exemplify two philosophical strategies for coping with Martin Heidegger’s 1947 Letter, which stirred up the humanism controversy in postwar France. Heidegger’s essay framed the problem of humanism as a central philosophical problem in the history of Western metaphysics and, similar to Foucault in the Lille course, Heidegger presented Marx and Nietzsche as the two final, unwitting victims of the metaphysical tradition they hoped to undo: “Absolute metaphysics, with its Marxian and Nietzschean inversions,” wrote Heidegger, “belongs to the history of the truth of Being.”18 In other words, unlike Foucault’s interpretation of Nietzsche in the Lille course, Heidegger did not recognize in Nietzsche a true alternative to metaphysics. Heidegger had a different philosophical role model in mind—his own philosophy.
Heidegger’s Letter responded to Sartre’s essay “Existentialism is a humanism,” in which Sartre drew a direct line from philosophy to politics, a connection Heidegger vehemently opposed. For Heidegger, humanism, in its modern guise, was above all a philosophical problem that stemmed from Marx’s invocation of the term. In the Letter, Heidegger therefore dismissed Sartre for having failed to account for the fundamental historicity that supported Marx’s project and Sartre’s consequent failure to situate Marx in the broader “History of Being.”
Foucault’s relation to Heidegger’s philosophy is a complex affair, to say the least, and it necessarily falls beyond the scope of this chapter. Still, it is worth mentioning that after the Lille course, from 1954 onward, Foucault delved deeper and deeper into his reading of Nietzsche, relying regularly on Heidegger’s interpretation of the German philosopher. Heidegger’s interpretation of Nietzsche is known for marking the turn (Kehre) in his thought from Dasein to the History of Being. Heidegger was pivotal in showing that Nietzsche was not merely a literary phenomenon or a cultural critic, but a true philosopher, indeed the culmination of Western metaphysics—a tradition that only Heidegger himself could surpass through his return to the ontological “origin” of Western philosophy.
Despite his initial reliance on Heidegger’s interpretation of Nietzsche, Foucault never accepted Heidegger’s dismissal of Nietzsche as the last metaphysician. Instead, Foucault developed a critique of the notion of “origin” that was so central to Husserl’s later philosophy, but also to Heidegger’s later project.19 In the Lille Course, Foucault already taxed Marx for not being able to account for the emergence of modern historicity as a philosophical problem and a historical phenomenon. The development of Foucault’s Nietzschean philosophical model to confront history did not occur overnight, however. After his initial discovery of Nietzsche’s philosophy, Foucault left France for three years. During his stay at Uppsala, Foucault continued to grapple with Nietzsche, focusing on the early writings that formed the basis for The Birth of the Tragedy.
In his only published article on Nietzsche from 1973, Foucault described the phenomenological/Heideggerian “origin” (Ursprung) as denoting an idealized moment of the eruption of truth that implies a metaphysical, supernatural beginning (Wunderursprung).20 Against it, Foucault posited the Nietzschean philological idea of “birth” that pointed to the actual emergence (Entstehung) of a singularity in history that concealed its normative premises. Unlike the phenomenological “origin,” “birth” is constituted not by an original act of forgetting, but rather by artifice (Kunststück) and deceit. It is an error that has later become truth; an invention (Erfindung) that arose in response to a preexisting field of contesting power relations that was later taken for granted. For Nietzsche, history did not have an origin, but a birthing moment that had long-lasting normative consequences. The unique modern awareness of history as temporal consciousness (Zeitbewusstsein) was itself connected to the problem of Kantian anthropologism and the “death of God” in metaphysics. Accordingly, it did not call for an account of the extraction of value in history, as Marx did, or the positing of an ideal origin that denied history. Rather, it necessitated a historical critique of the value of value, i.e., Nietzsche’s genealogy. Thus, even at this later stage of his career, as Foucault allegedly forsook any transcendental pretenses, he continued to posit Nietzsche as the preliminary philosophical model with which he could confront history.
Foucault returned to Nietzsche in key moments throughout his career when his historical methodology—the meta-structure of his thought—was on the line.21 Indeed, the move to genealogy I just described occurred in a later stage, in a confrontation with Marx that occurred after 1968. But for now, let us focus on the fact that both Heidegger in his Letter as well as Foucault in the Lille Course highlighted a fundamental incongruence between the philosophical and the political iterations of humanism. This aspect has tended to be misunderstood in recent interpretations of Foucault’s Biopolitics lectures.
The Humanist Double
From the Lille Course onward, Foucault divided the problem of humanism into two distinct parts: the philosophical question of humanism, better posed as a question of anthropology; and the political moral doctrine of humanism. Althusser’s Marx exemplified the need to maintain this distinction since, according to Foucault, Althusser evaded the latter but not the former. Although the word “humanism” does not appear once in the Biopolitics lectures, some have argued that they are motivated by Foucault’s political anti-humanism.22 Such renderings thus interpret Foucault’s post-anthropological utterances in the lectures as indicative of political anti-humanism. It is this supposed synonymy that enables these readers to traverse from the philosophical to the political and back. However, when we look closely at the passages that such a reading relies on, we see that such synonymy does not exist. Rather, as should be clear by now, the conflation of the anthropological “problem of man” and political humanism is unwarranted and relies on a false assumption. The result is to confound two different levels in Foucault’s thought.23
The slippage between the political and philosophical usages of “humanism” can be traced back to two confusing responses Foucault gave in two separate interviews after the publication of The Order of Things. Upon closer examination, we see that even in the interviews, Foucault remained consistent about his distinction between the two registers. In the first interview, Foucault was asked by the interviewer to clarify what he meant by “humanism,” to which Foucault provided an explicitly political, moral definition, again using Marx as an example: “Humanism was a manner of solving, in terms of morality, of values, of reconciliation, problems that could not be solved at all. Do you know the phrase of Marx? Humanity only poses for itself problems that it cannot solve.”24 And just in case it was not already clear that he was referring to political humanism, Foucault immediately clarified that his critique of Marxian humanism did not apply to “Althusser and his courageous companions” who fought against humanist “chardino-marxism.”25 Again, this was a reminder that there was a far better, non-humanist reading of Marx that was available. Foucault’s reply was clearly not addressed to philosophical humanism, since, as we have seen, as far as he was concerned even Althusser’s Marx was part of the anthropological predicament.
Now, consider the difference when, in another interview, Foucault refers to humanism as a philosophical problem of anthropology in response to Sartre’s harsh critique of The Order of Things:
This disappearance of man at the very moment when one searched for his roots does not mean that the human sciences will soon disappear. I have never said so, but only that the human sciences will be deployed against a horizon that is no longer constrained or defined by this humanism. Man disappears in philosophy, not as an object of knowledge but as a subject of freedom and existence. Now the subject man, the subject of his own consciousness and of his own freedom, is at bottom a sort of correlative image of God.26
This instantiation, in which Foucault refers to humanism in terms of the anthropological substitute for God within knowledge, pertains to the level of philosophical humanism.
Relying on these two instances in order to demonstrate that humanism and the death of man are synonymous, therefore replicates the Sartrean position that Foucault clearly negated in this last passage. Though this mix-up is understandable and might even appear marginal, it is problematic. In the end, one cannot rely on the idea of synonymy to crisscross from the philosophical to the political level of humanism and interpret Foucault’s pejorative references to “anthropology” in the Biopolitics lectures as an indication of his possible political endorsement (on philosophical grounds) of economic neoliberalism. The primacy of the economic over the political that exists in neoliberalism is, in this case, being projected onto Foucault’s thought.27 Such a perspective, in turn, leads to the sweeping conclusion that Foucault found no fault in the economic variety of liberalism once classical liberal thought was purged of its political humanist core:
Foucault’s brief, strategic, and contingent endorsement of liberalism was possible precisely because he saw no incompatibility between anti-humanism and liberalism—but only liberalism of the economic variety. Economic liberalism alone, and not its political iteration, was compatible with the philosophical anti-humanism that is the hallmark of Foucault’s thought.28
But concluding that Foucault endorsed economical liberalism is unwarranted given his clear distinction between the philosophical and the political. In fact, the analysis of neoliberalism in the Biopolitics lectures occurs on a philosophical level that we also encounter in his response to Sartre, in which the “disappearance of man in philosophy” is indicative of the historical transformation of the human sciences that was declared in the final chapter of The Order of Things. At this point, we need to revisit the argument Foucault presented in that chapter in order to comprehend his reprisal of the argument in the 1979 lectures.
A Tale of Three Quasi-Transcendentals
In a 1969 conference dedicated to his analysis of Georges Cuvier’s biology in The Order of Things, Foucault argued that biology was already on the right path toward surpassing the quasi-transcendental “life” and its grounding in man’s being. Invoking molecular biology’s discontinuous genetic vision, Foucault observed that we could already imagine “a biology without life.” The age of DNA in which man appears on the same footing as bacteria, and biology is reduced to chemistry, was a sign of the disappearance of “life,” and with it the dependence of the life sciences on “man.”
In the Cuvier conference—just as he had done in the Lille Course and The Order of Things—Foucault pledged his allegiance to Nietzsche and argued against “humanist philosophy” in a statement that anticipated his later work on sexuality:
I term ‘humanist philosophy’—any philosophy that pretends that death is the final and ultimate sense of life.
‘Humanist philosophy’, [is] any philosophy that thinks that sexuality is made for the sake of love and procreation.
‘Humanist philosophy’, [is] any philosophy that believes that history is tied to the continuity of consciousness.29
Ten years later Foucault would reprise this movement, but he would do so with regard to economics instead of biology. Whereas in the conference on Cuvier, Foucault celebrated the progress of biology beyond the anthropological horizon that hinged on the quasi-transcendental “life,” in the Biopolitics lectures at the Collège de France, Foucault pointed to a corollary development in the field of economics and quasi-transcendental “labor.”30
Let us turn to the key passages in those lectures in which Foucault analyzed the “post-anthropological” economics of the Chicago School. The motivation behind Foucault’s engagement with the notion of “human capital” in the March 14, 1979, lecture is clearly the familiar trajectory of the critique of anthropology from the The Order of Things, and it is pitched against Marx and quasi-transcendental “labor.”
Not only does Foucault harp on the fact that the Chicago School was the first to question the quasi-transcendental status of labor and tie it to the problem of anthropology in modern economics, but he reprises the history of how Marx’s notion of labor stemmed from the archaeological soil of anthropology:
Abstraction is not the result of the real mechanics of economic processes; it derives from the way in which these processes have been reflected in classical economics. And it is precisely because classical economics was not able to take on this analysis of labor in its concrete specification and qualitative modulations, it is because it left this blank page, gap or vacuum in its theory, that a whole philosophy, anthropology, and politics, of which Marx is precisely the representative, rushed in.31
To read the Biopolitics lectures exclusively in the terms of anthropology may seem puzzling. After all, in the same lecture series Foucault often mentions the growing importance of the homo œconomicus. But as Foucault duly stresses in the text, even this concept is taken to be post-anthropological.32 To relate this to the Cuvier colloquium ten years earlier, it is telling that shortly after introducing the term, Foucault qualifies it by connecting it to his post-anthropological interpretation of biology and raises the possibility of treating our genetic makeup as human capital. He then adds that: “The problems of inheritance, transmission, education, training and inequality are refocused no longer around an anthropology or an ethics or a politics of labor, but around an economics of capital.”33 “Labor,” as a quasi-transcendental of the anthropological episteme, was thus subsumed by a redefinition of the concept “capital.”
Another key moment comes in the following lecture in the context of Foucault’s references to Discipline and Punish, and the connection between modern disciplinary power and the problem of anthropology. After describing how Beccaria had “anthropologized crime,” Foucault examines Gary Becker’s approach to criminality. Foucault seems to be aware that his approving tone might raise some eyebrows, and he immediately clarifies this by putting it in context: “What conclusion can be drawn from this? First of all, there is an anthropological erasure of the criminal.”34 As we can see, the few instances in which the Chicago School is mentioned occur in the context of their supra-anthropological or sub-anthropological position, as effectively surpassing the quasi-transcendental anthropological framework within which modern economics operates. Foucault’s treatment of the neoliberalism of the Chicago School is therefore indicative of a historical transformation and is given a philosophical significance rather than any tangible political one. Like molecular biology, human capital theory provides an economical exit from the anthropological stasis that Foucault’s work had pointed to since the Lille Course in 1952.
What all these instances clearly share is an attempt to break from the unconscious anthropological constraints that contemporary knowledge presupposes. Moreover, they may not be read solely in terms of anti-humanism, from which one could infer Foucault’s political allegiance to neoliberalism. For such a reading reduces the complexity of Foucault’s understanding of anthropology as a historical ontological category, which characterizes modern thought, to a narrow political vision.
To those familiar with the argument of the final chapter of The Order of Things something will immediately appear strange in Foucault’s post-anthropological examples of labor and life. What has happened to language? After all, Foucault explicitly stated that the one quasi-transcendental capable of leading us beyond the limits of the anthropological horizon is language. And this surpassing will happen, Foucault predicted, not by the modern science of language—linguistics—but by the reconstitution of the relationship between subject and knowledge in modern literature and the transformation of the traditional boundaries of philosophical inquiry. Though a full demonstration of this important claim is beyond the scope of this article, I would nonetheless suggest that Foucault’s singling-out of language in the end of The Order of Things, and the significance he attributed to modern literature, was his way of redefining the task of philosophy after the end of metaphysics by providing a critical totalizing view of the present. Nietzsche, who exemplified this character of the philosopher, who operated on the fringes of the discipline, between philosophy and literature, was thus Foucault’s model for the totalizing reflection on the present. The question Foucault posed in 1970—“What Is an Author?”—and the genealogical approach that he adopted during the same period, which understood the truth as an invention and strived to uncover the “chimeras of the origin” that continued to haunt the present, were intimately related.35 Accordingly, we need to address what was the illusion, the invention hiding behind the birth of Biopolitics that Foucault tried to dispel. In the next section I will suggest that what was at stake was the liberal idea of right (droit) that even neoliberalism continued to maintain. Indeed, Foucault’s analysis of neoliberalism was meant to flesh out and diagnose the present historical moment, which for Foucault precisely meant cutting through accepted political distinctions.
Conclusion: The “Birth” of Biopolitics
This essay began by acknowledging a crucial rupture at the heart of Foucault’s thought after the publication of the first volume of the History of Sexuality in 1976. And there is no doubt that his Collège de France lectures after this point were a direct response to a methodological problem that arose in that book. How was subjectivity to be conceived in light of the rejection of the “repressive hypothesis,” if power not only limits but also incites, articulates, and produces resistance?36 Hence I would like to suggest that Foucault’s methodological reorientation in this period has much more to do with his philosophical concerns than the immediate historical and political context. This does not prevent the possibility of such political contextualization, but it does make the philosophical angle indispensable. By ignoring the philosophical bedrock from which Foucault’s political engagement stemmed, we are left with a very partial picture.
The Biopolitics lectures are sandwiched, as it were, between two significant modifications in Foucault’s method during this period. The first occurred in relation to the question of actuality and critique in relation to Kant’s essay “What Is Enlightenment?” (a theme Foucault first addressed in the spring of 1978); the second is Foucault’s return to antiquity in order to trace the emergence of Western subjectivity as an interplay of power and truth (Foucault pursued this in the following lecture series, The Government of the Living). Common to both projects is precisely the question of governmentality—the interlocking of power, self, and truth. But what exactly was the relationship between biopolitics and the role of the intellectual as a critical diagnostician of the present? I believe that the term Foucault chose for the title of his lectures—“birth”—was deliberate in that it encapsulated an essential element in Foucault’s philosophy of history and represented his central debt to Nietzsche.37 Starting from this Nietzschean impulse holds out the possibility of a critique of the present, providing a historical totalizing view that neither economics nor biology could provide. If biopolitics was precisely the domain in which the quasi-transcendentals “life” and “labor” were fused together, then Foucault, the contemporary bearer of Nietzsche’s critical torch, was now trying to uncover the contingent invention (Erfindung), the genealogical mistake that “birthed” contemporary political discourse, the lie that had become a truth. By “birth” Foucault was referring to a fundamental error that undergirded the present discourse, which Foucault addressed in the first volume of the History of Sexuality—The Will to Know.38
The term “Biopolitics” first appears in The History of Sexuality in the context of the abolition of the death penalty, which Foucault understood as a corollary of the transformation of the eighteenth-century idea of civil right (droit civil). If eighteenth-century sovereign power relied on the right to administer death, then in the nineteenth century life became the main concern for disciplinary power. The growing preoccupation with sexuality exemplified this transformation of power from the administration of death to the administration of life. Foucault’s characterization of this transformation in terms of rights is important. For his earlier work on the prison and criminality demonstrated the fundamental incongruity between the correctional facility—the prison—and the act of delinquency as an infringement of penal right (droit penal).
It was in his 1972–1973 lecture series The Punitive Society that Foucault first suggested that the birth of the modern prison was founded on such an invention: The origins of the prison were not located in juridical discourse, but rather in the history of capitalism and post-Reformation religious movements.39 The modern prison was therefore a recent invention of concealed origins. Crucial to Foucault’s reading was the emergence of a new historical entity—“society”—against whom the criminal offense was committed and in whose name punishment should be administered.40 What was then the original error hiding behind the birth of biopolitics, and how did it relate to the history of liberalism? The answer was that the political discourse after 1968, both on the right and the left, falsely clung to the idea of right (droit) as essential for classical liberalism.
In the first volume of the History of Sexuality, in a chapter dedicated to the abolition of the death penalty, Foucault tackled the disappearance of rights from the realm of politics and their replacement by life as the motor behind the sexual revolution:
It was life more than the law (droit) that became the issue of political struggles, even if the latter were formulated through affirmations concerning rights (droits). The “right” to life, to one’s body, to health, to happiness, to the satisfaction of needs, and beyond all the oppressions or “alienations,” the “right” to rediscover what one is and all that one can be, this “right”—which the classical juridical system was utterly incapable of comprehending was the political response to all these new procedures of power which did not derive, either, from the traditional right of sovereignty.41
The sexual revolution of the twentieth century and the new rights it brought about did not arise from some emancipatory liberal history of rights but from the discourse of sexuality. The battles of the sexual revolution were not waged thanks to a liberal juridical discourse but precisely because of its failure to respond to the emergence of this new dimension of power. Foucault’s reading of neoliberal economic theory against the backdrop of the contemporary political shifts in the 1978–1979 lectures similarly highlighted that classical liberalism was an anachronism. Undoubtedly, Foucault emphasized that this twentieth-century offshoot of liberalism was fundamentally different from classical liberalism, since there was nothing liberal in American neoliberalism insofar as the latter was not grounded in the idea of rights.
Foucault’s challenge was exactly the reverse. His point was not to recommend neoliberalism because it denied the concept of natural right. Instead, the challenge was to formulate a new demand for political rights independently of a universalist discourse of humanism and the conceptual grounds of anthropologized philosophy. The discussion of the neoliberal policy of Negative Income Tax in the March 7 lecture was perhaps one of the best examples of such an approach, but it hardly offered a philosophical justification underlying Foucault’s supposed endorsement of this policy. Attempting to read Foucault’s politics based on his analysis seems even more puzzling given his claim that he finds American neoliberalism interesting since it currently has a “global claim and foothold in both the right and the left” and because it raises the “problem of freedoms” as a “type of relation between governors and the governed,” which is foreign to the French political tradition.42 Furthermore, neoliberals were actually much closer to contemporary supporters of the welfare state than they realized, he suggested, since the former understood labor as human capital while the latter understood life in those same terms.43
This is where the term “birth” regains its significance. By invoking the idea of birth, Foucault not only signified the anachronism of rights that haunted contemporary political discourse; he also restated the Nietzschean imperative to direct his critique to rattle the present so as to uncover its tacit value judgments. The concept of “governmentality” was one such attempt, as Foucault used the term to force his audience to rethink the very foundations of modern subjectivity as the arena for resistance to power, of which the modern intellectual was one example. Similarly, the return to antiquity to explain how Western subjectivity could have developed into a domain of resistance from ancient “technologies of the self” was connected to his earlier philosophical motivation:
What I have studied are the three traditional problems: (1) What are the relations we have to truth through scientific knowledge, to those “truth games” which are so important in civilization and in which we are both subject and object? (2) What are the relationships we have to others through those strange strategies and power relationships? And (3) what are the relationships between truth, power, and self?44
To uncover Foucault’s “true” politics in isolation from the philosophical core of his thought is therefore bound to mislead. While Foucault’s philosophy and his rejection of humanism could not be further away from Sartre’s, the latter nevertheless did serve as a model for his own political engagement as a public intellectual.45 Foucault cultivated a public persona that flowed from his philosophy; it entailed a performative political activism in which his political critique was aimed against the entire political spectrum and as a self-proclaimed man of the left he was particularly sensitive to anachronisms afflicting the left. The investigation of governmentality in an age of biopolitics exemplified that both the left and the right were unable to grasp the present moment. There was nothing inherently wrong in political humanism, but it was philosophically invalid since it relied on an ahistorical universal monolithic premise that Foucault found unacceptable:
What I am afraid of about humanism is that it presents a certain form of our ethics as a universal model for any kind of freedom. I think that there are more secrets, more possible freedoms, and more inventions in our future than we can imagine in humanism as it is dogmatically represented on every side of the political rainbow: the Left, the Center, the Right.46
To those concerned with what was left of Foucault’s gauchiste politics, we can reply that two things remained in place in his thought from 1952; the first was the idea that truth and freedom were fundamentally bound to one another, as Foucault first mentioned in his analysis of Marx; the second was the idea of historical plurality. Just as truth had a history of its own, and appeared and reappeared throughout history in multiple guises, so there were multiple forms in which freedom could appear. Neither humanism nor liberalism had a monopoly over it. The secrets of the future were, and are, waiting to be discovered, as long as we manage to reckon with the historical foundations of our present.
NOTES
1. In particular, I seek to challenge what I consider to be a reductively politicized and historicist interpretation most clearly present in Daniel Zamora and Michael Behrent’s Foucault and Neoliberalism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016).
2. My purpose is to engage in part with Michel Behrent’s thought-provoking analysis of Foucault’s alleged endorsement of the Chicago School’s economic liberalism in the Biopolitics lectures. See Michael Behrent, “Liberalism without Humanism: Michel Foucault and the Free-Market Creed, 1976–1979” in Modern Intellectual History, 6, 3, (2009), 539–68.
3. Lille Cours 1952–1953. Connaissance de l’homme et réflexion transcendentale, Fonds Michel Foucault, Bibliothèque nationale de France, cote NAF 28730. Henceforth: Lille Course.
4. Stefanos Geroulanos, An Atheism That Is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought (Berk Stanford University Press, 2009).
5. “I had read Heidegger’s Letter to Jean Beaufret on Humanism, which influenced my arguments concerning theoretical anti-humanism in Marx” (italics in original) in Louis Althusser, The Future Lasts Forever: A Memoir, trans. by Richard Veasy (New York: The New Press, 1992), 176.
6. Knox Peden, Spinoza contra Phenomenology (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014).
7. As a lecturer of theoretical psychology, Foucault was especially interested in the writings of Ludwig Binswanger whose Daseinsanalyse (as the term suggests, a method inspired by Heidegger’s philosophy) offered an ontological approach to psychological pathologies. During his Lille period, Foucault worked on his elaborate introduction to Binswanger’s article “Traum und Existenz,” which was published in French in 1954, while working on another book, Maladie mentale et personalité, which was Foucault’s Marxian swan song before attempting to articulate his own non-Marxian philosophy of history. This book, which was written at Althusser’s suggestion, offered a Marxian interpretation to contemporary psychology and relied heavily on the works of George Pulitzer and Ivan Pavlov. Foucault later revoked this book and republished it in 1961 as a revised version under the title Maladie mentale et psychologie.
8. Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, trans. by Richard Taft, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997).
9. Beatrice Han-Pile, “The Death of Man: Foucault’s Anti-Humanism,” in Timothy O’Leary and Christopher Falzon, eds., Foucault and Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2010), chapter 6. Han-Pile’s argument begins with Foucault’s 1961 complementary PhD thesis on Kant, as she did not have access to Foucault’s early manuscripts. It is clear, though, that the Lille course served as the basis for the complementary dissertation.
10. Étienne Balibar, “L’anti-Marx de Michel Foucault” in Christian Laval et al., eds. Marx & Foucault: Lectures, Usages, Confrontations (Paris: La Découverte, 2015), 84–102.
11. Lille Course.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid. The term arrachement also appears in Althusser’s analysis of the young Marx, see Pierre Macherey, “Althusser et le Jeune Marx” in Actuel Marx, 2002/1, 3, 175.
14. Ibid. In the reprisal of the course argument in chapter 9 of The Order of Things, Marx would be dubbed for this reason a positivist, i.e., for having ignored the necessity of a preliminary constitutive transcendental act before accessing history.
15. I do not mean to imply that Althusser responded to Foucault’s Lille reading. Althusser’s reading of Marx was well known to his ENS students since the 1950s, but it was only published much later, beginning with Pour Marx (1965).
16. See “Truth, Power, Self: An Interview with Rux Martin,” in L. H. Martin et al., eds., Technologies of the Self (Amherst: UMass Press, 1988), 13.
17. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 285.
18. Martin Heidegger, “The Letter on Humanism” in David Farrell Krell, ed., Martin Heidegger’s Basic Writings (San-Francisco: Harper Collins, 1993), 239.
19. See Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in David Farrel Krell, ed., Martin Heidegger’s Basic Writings (San Francisco, CA: Harper Collins, 1993), 139–212.
20. Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Paul Rabinow, ed., The Foucault Reader (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 77–81.
21. Ibid., 80.
22. The interpretation of Foucault as an anti-humanist goes back to the reception of the Order of Things in the 1960s. Behrent applies it to the 1978–1979 lectures.
23. Behrent, “Liberalism without Humanism…,” 539.
24. “Entretien avec Madeleine Chapsal,” in Dits et écrits, vol. 1, 1954–1969, eds. D. Defert, F. Ewald, and J. Lagrange (Paris, 1994), 516.
25. Foucault uses this term to refer to the Marxist humanism espoused by Roger Garaudy (1913–2012) who attempted in his book From Anathema to Dialogue: The Challenge of Marxist-Christian Cooperation (1965) to tie Marxism to the humanistic Christian theology of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Garaudy was an influential member of the PCF and a personal nemesis of Foucault when both taught at the philosophy department of the University of Clermont-Ferrand in the early 1960s. Foucault was instrumental in the dismissal of Garaudy from the university.
26. “Foucault répond à Sartre” (interview with J. P. Elkabbach), in Dits et écrits, vol. 1., 664.
27. Behrent distinguishes between political and economical liberalisms, and he is entirely justified in making this analytical distinction. Yet the assumption that Foucault could possibly adopt the neoliberal belief that the economical invariably secures the political is unlikely given the fact that it is the cornerstone of Foucault’s critique of ideology.
28. “The problem of ‘man’ (which [Foucault] held to be synonymous with ‘humanism’).” Behrent, “Liberalism without Humanism…,” 542–43.
29. “La situation de Cuvier dans l’histoire de la Biologie,” in Dits et Écrits, vol. 2, 1970–1975, eds., D. Defert, F. Ewald, and J. Lagrange (Paris, 1994), 65.
30. Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France, 1978–1979, eds., Michel Senellart et al. (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008), 220–21.
31. Ibid., 221–22.
32. Ibid., 252–53.
33. Ibid., 223 (postscript).
34. Ibid., 258. In another article, Behrent relies on this specific passage to argue that Foucault politically endorsed the Chicago School. See Michael Behrent, “Foucault and France’s Liberal Moment” in Stephen Sawyer and Iain Stewart, eds., In Search of the Liberal Moment (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 160.
35. “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 81: “The genealogist needs history to dispel the chimeras of the origin, somewhat in the manner of the pious philosopher who needs a doctor to exorcise the shadow of his soul.”
36. On this point Gilles Deleuze’s juxtaposition of Foucault’s understanding of power in terms of “pleasure” with his own notion of “desire” is especially illuminating. Gilles Deleuze, “Desire and Pleasure,” in Arnold Davidson, ed., Foucault and His Interlocutors (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 184–94.
37. Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in D. F. Bouchard, ed., Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977).
38. The “will to know” is a key Nietzschean term that Foucault used for his later critique of western philosophy. Foucault dealt extensively with the term in his first lecture series in the Collège de France in 1970–1971.
39. The clearest formulation of this point occurs in the postscript to the January 14 lecture in Michel Foucault, The Punitive Society: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1972–1973, eds., Bernard H. Harcourt et al. (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2015), 135.
40. Ibid., January 10 lecture, 33.
41. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction (New York: Pantheon books, 1978), 145.
42. Ibid., 218.
43. The Birth of Biopolitics, 218; Francois Ewald, who was Foucault’s assistant in the Collège de France during this period, addressed precisely this issue in his book L’État providence (1986): “The problematic of social rights supposes a universal objectification of life (vivant) as wealth (richesse) that society should extract, develop, multiply for the benefit of everyone: the most important capital—life,” 23–26.
44. “Truth, Power, Self, an Interview with Rux Martin,” in L. H. Martin et al., eds., Technologies of the Self (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 15.
45. In the 1970s, Foucault and Sartre were able to bury the philosophical hatchet and collaborate for various political causes. On the point of Sartre being Foucault’s role model, see Deleuze’s 1985–1986 course on Foucault: http://www2.univ-paris8.fr/deleuze/article.php3?id_article=438.
46. “Truth, Power, Self: An Interview with Rux Martin,” 15.