Alan D. Schrift
Following his discussion of Nietzsche’s account of knowledge in a lecture at McGill University in April 1971, Michel Foucault (1926–84) remarked that such an analysis makes it possible:
This comment all but acknowledges that the analysis of Nietzsche’s account of knowledge made it possible for Foucault to become Foucault, as it outlines the basic themes that dominated Foucault’s work in the 1960s into the 1970s. More generally, however, it was through Nietzsche that those thinkers in France whose work initiated the movement called poststructuralism first distinguished themselves from the structuralists who preceded them.
Poststructuralism emerged in France in the 1960s, setting into motion a philosophical revolution that would change the course of French philosophy for the remainder of the twentieth century: in 1966, Michel Foucault published The Order of Things; that same year, in October, Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) presented “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” at the critically important conference on “Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man” at Johns Hopkins University, and the following year saw the publication of Of Grammatology, Writing and Difference, and Speech and Phenomena; and the two theses for his Doctorat d’État by Gilles Deleuze (1925–95)—Difference and Repetition and Spinoza and the Problem of Expression—were published in 1968, while his groundbreaking book on Nietzsche—Nietzsche and Philosophy—first appeared in 1962. What these works present is a distinctly philosophical response to the challenge posed to philosophical thinking by the emergence of structuralism as the dominant intellectual paradigm in the late 1950s. And central to this renewed interest in philosophy is the emergence of interest in Nietzsche’s work among philosophers in France. In fact, returning to these foundational events in the emergence of poststructuralist French philosophy, Nietzsche’s singular philosophical importance for this emergence becomes apparent when one recalls that Foucault plays off Nietzsche against Kant in The Order of Things, Derrida plays off Nietzsche against Lévi‐Strauss in “Structure, Sign, and Play,” and Deleuze plays off Nietzsche against Hegel in Nietzsche and Philosophy and several other works. Like their structuralist predecessors, the poststructuralists drew heavily upon the ideas of Marx and Freud; but unlike the structuralists, they drew at least as much from Nietzsche, the third so‐called “master of suspicion.” Nietzsche’s critique of truth, his emphasis on interpretation and differential relations of power, and his attention to questions of style in philosophical discourse became central motifs within the work of the poststructuralists as they turned their attention away from the human sciences and toward a philosophical‐critical analysis of relations of power, discourse, and the construction of the subject (Foucault); desire and language (Deleuze); questions of aesthetic and political judgment (Lyotard); writing and textuality (Derrida); and questions of sexual difference and gender construction (Irigaray, Kristeva, Cixous).
In what follows, I discuss several of the themes that appear in much of the theoretical work referred to as poststructuralist, highlighting how these themes distinguish poststructuralist thinkers from their structuralist predecessors. But a few prior comments are in order. First, it must be acknowledged that “poststructuralism” is not a term used in France. It is rather the name bestowed in the English‐speaking philosophical and literary communities on the ideas of several French philosophers whose work is seen as a response to the privileging of the human sciences that characterized structuralism. Second, under the name “poststructuralism” are brought together a number of theorists and theoretical positions that, in France, are often positioned quite far apart. Third, in many anglophone contexts, the labels “poststructuralist,” “deconstructionist,” and “postmodernist” are often used interchangeably to group together Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, and Jean‐François Lyotard (1924–98), while in the French context, only Derrida would be associated with deconstruction, and only Lyotard with postmodernism. Fourth and finally, although their work would certainly fall under the domain of “poststructuralism,” insofar as they are treated in detail elsewhere in this volume, Derrida and French feminist theorists Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, and Hélène Cixous are only mentioned in passing.
While their American reception in particular has tended to overlook the important differences between these thinkers grouped together under the banner of poststructuralism, there are nevertheless certain themes and trends that emerge in various ways in the work of many of the French philosophers and theorists who follow structuralism. In some cases, these should be seen as correctives to the excesses of structuralism, in others as various ways in which thinkers coming into prominence in the late 1960s and early 1970s were to give expression to the Nietzschean‐Freudian‐Marxian spirit of the times, and in still other cases as a way of retrieving themes from some of the French traditions that had fallen out of favor during the scientistic orientation of the 1950s and early 1960s (the return of certain ethical, spiritual, and religious themes, along with some positions associated with phenomenology and existentialism). What should not be underestimated, however, is the way in which those thinkers associated with poststructuralism reaffirmed the value of philosophical thinking. Where the structuralist theorists had turned away from philosophy (the anthropologist Claude Lévi‐Strauss (1908–2009) being perhaps the best example), theorists following structuralism readily identify themselves as philosophers.1 But unlike most philosophical thinkers in France who preceded the rise of structuralism and the hegemony of social scientific discourse in the late 1950s and early 1960s, French philosophers after structuralism engage in philosophical reflection and analysis while taking account of the institutional forces that inform philosophical thinking itself. Situating these philosophical thinkers after structuralism, four themes in particular must be highlighted: 1) the return to thinking historically; 2) the return of thinking about the subject; 3) the emphasis on difference; and 4) the return to thinking philosophically about ethics.
Poststructuralism can be viewed as a corrective to the overemphasis on synchrony that one finds in structuralist writing. There is no single reason behind this, nor a single form in which French philosophy after structuralism seeks to think time, temporality, or history. But where the structuralists sought to understand the extra‐temporal functioning of systems (whether social, psychic, economic, or literary), thinkers like Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, or Lyotard attend to the historical unfolding of the phenomena they choose to examine. In part, the attention to time, temporality, and history can be viewed as a consequence of the intellectual resources to which these thinkers appeal, resources that were not necessarily central to the work of their structuralist predecessors. Foucault, for example, draws upon the study of the history of science and scientific change in the work of Georges Canguilhem (1904–95) and Gaston Bachelard (1884–1962), while Deleuze returns to Henri Bergson’s theories of time and durée (duration). For many of these thinkers, the move in Heidegger’s thought from the thinking of Being (Sein) to the thinking of Ereignis—the event of appropriation— can be seen to inspire, whether directly or indirectly, their respective attempts to develop a philosophy of the event, just as the attention to Nietzsche in the late 1960s and 1970s, and in particular to his notion of the eternal recurrence, led many to rethink traditional notions of temporality and history.
To begin with the most obvious example, we find Foucault’s entire philosophical oeuvre deeply inflected with an attention to history. The guiding thesis of his early work was that there exists, at any given time, an order of things that makes the social functioning of the time possible. This order operates within the fundamental codes of a culture: those governing its language, its schemes of perception, its techniques, exchanges, values, and so on. Unlike Kant’s transcendental project, for Foucault this order is a historical a priori: neither transcendental nor universal, this order is a historically specific constellation that exists prior to experience. But it is at the same time prior to reason insofar as the standards of rationality at work at any particular historical moment are themselves determined on its basis. This order also establishes the basis on which knowledge and theory become possible, as Foucault argued in The Order of Things and, based on this order, certain ideas can be thought, certain perceptions, values, and distinctions become possible.
For many, this idea of a historical a priori is simply a contradiction in terms. For Foucault, however, experience is thoroughly historicized: one’s experience is “constructed” from the a priori— one might even say “structural”—rules that govern experience and social practices at a particular point in history. At other times, there were other a priori rules that governed social practices, and people’s experiences were, as a consequence, constructed differently. So, to take an example from Foucault’s first major work, The History of Madness (1961), what Foucault charts is how the a priori rules governing the discourse and treatment of the mad as individuals manifesting conditions requiring confinement in separate dwellings along with other social deviants (criminals, paupers, etc.) changed from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries to the point where the “mad” came to be experienced under a different historical a priori order as “sick,” as suffering from a disease (“mental illness”) that required treatment rather than internment. This historical a priori is ultimately what determines what, in the English title of one of Foucault’s most famous works, he called the “order of things,” by which Foucault’s French title —Les mots et les choses—meant the relation between words (conceptual understandings) and things (reality as experienced).
While Foucault eventually gave up this language, he never renounced the importance of grounding thought historically, a fact that he obviously wanted brought to the fore insofar as he requested that his Chair at the Collège de France, the Chair associated since its creation in 1932 with the history of philosophy, be renamed the “Chair in the History of Systems of Thought” when he assumed it in 1970. In a 1983 interview, Foucault responds to a question concerning the structure of his “genealogy project,” by focusing on its historical dimension:
Three domains of genealogy are possible. First, a historical ontology of ourselves in relation to truth through which we constitute ourselves as subjects of knowledge; second, a historical ontology of ourselves in relation to a field of power through which we constitute ourselves as subjects acting on others; third, a historical ontology in relation to ethics through which we constitute ourselves as moral agents.
(Foucault 2003a: 110)
Foucault goes on to add that while all three domains “were present, albeit in a somewhat confused fashion, in Madness and Civilization,” in later works, particular domains were emphasized: “The truth axis was studied in The Birth of the Clinic and The Order of Things. The power axis was studied in Discipline and Punish, and the ethical axis in The History of Sexuality” (Foucault 2003a: 110). In the end, the goal of Foucault’s genealogical project is to unite these three analytic dimensions (truth, power, ethics) in an attempt to produce a “critical ontology of ourselves … conceived as an attitude, an ethos, a philosophical life in which the critique of what we are is at one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them” (Foucault 2003b: 56, my emphasis).
Foucault’s attention to time and history is not exceptional, however, for it characterizes much of the important work done by the major figures in French philosophy after structuralism. For example, Pierre Bourdieu, in his early work critical of objectivist accounts of gift exchange, also focused his account of gifts on the theme of time, specifically the time‐lag between gift and counter‐gift that stands as the condition for the possibility of the gift.2 Because objectivist accounts like that of Lévi‐Strauss failed to understand the societally motivated individual and collective misrecognition (méconnaissance) of the rules governing the exchange of gifts, they were led to focus their analyses almost entirely on the relation of reciprocal equivalence between gift and counter‐gift. For Bourdieu, this objectivist, economistic focus on reciprocity collapses the time‐lag between gift and counter‐gift, and turns the gift exchange into a straightforward return to the giver of what she is owed from the gift’s original recipient. As such, the objectivist account is unable to distinguish gift exchange from either “swapping, which … telescopes gift and counter‐gift into the same instant,” or “lending, in which the return of the loan is explicitly guaranteed by a juridical act and is thus already accomplished at the very moment of the drawing up of a contract capable of ensuring that the acts it prescribes are predictable and calculable” (Bourdieu 1977: 5).
For Gilles Deleuze, on the other hand, time is a constant theme, running through his reflections on Bergsonian duration, Nietzsche’s eternal return, and his theory of cinema (the second volume of which is The Time‐Image [1985]). In fact, one could argue that in his two major texts, Difference and Repetition (1968) and The Logic of Sense (1969), Deleuze offers us a new way to think about time in order to think the logic of events. One could here cite as well Jean‐François Lyotard’s postmodernism and the thinking of the event of the post, as well as his reflections on the arrive‐t‐il?—the is‐it‐happening?— of the différend. What these examples make clear is that poststructuralism is marked by a renewed concern with thinking historically.
Where the rhetoric of the “death of the subject” was characteristic of the structuralists, this was never really the case with most of the philosophers labeled poststructuralist. To be sure, thinkers like Foucault or Deleuze were never comfortable with the subject‐centered thinking of the existentialists or phenomenologists. But they were equally uncomfortable with the straightforwardly anti‐humanist rhetoric of structuralist thinkers like Althusser or Lévi‐Strauss.
Even Foucault, who can arguably be associated with the rhetoric of the “death of the subject” in his works of the early 1960s, can at the same time be shown to have been thinking about the question of the construction of the modern subject throughout his oeuvre. That is to say, a distinction can and should be drawn between the “end of man” and the “death of the subject.” It may well be the case that Foucault’s early work, most notably The Order of Things, engages in thinking the end of man, as we can see, for example, in the closing pages of The Order of Things when he draws this conclusion concerning Nietzsche:
Rather than the death of God— or, rather, in the wake of that death and in profound correlation with it—what Nietzsche’s thought heralds is the end of his murderer; it is the explosion of man’s face in laughter, and the return of masks; it is the scattering of the profound stream of time by which he felt himself carried along and whose pressure he suspected in the very being of things; it is the identity of the Return of the Same with the absolute dispersion of man.
(Foucault 1970: 385)
But it is a mistake to equate the referent of “man” in these early contexts with what Foucault means by “subject.” There is no question that the subject named “man” in philosophical discourse, from Descartes’s Archimedean cogito to Kant’s autonomous rational moral agent, is a concept toward which Foucault has little sympathy. But even in the 1960s, in the essay “What Is an Author?” which is often seen as an anti‐humanist work, Foucault’s desire to deflate the subject as epistemically and discursively privileged is not conjoined with an attempt to eliminate the subject entirely. Instead, he seeks to analyze the subject as a variable and complex function of discourse and power, which means not to ask, as an existentialist might, “How can a free subject penetrate the substance of things and give it meaning?” but “How, under what conditions and in what forms can something like a subject appear in the order of discourse? What place can it occupy in each type of discourse, what functions can it assume, and by obeying what rules?” (Foucault 2003d: 390).
What this means, and what has been misunderstood by many of Foucault’s critics, is that his so‐called “anti‐humanism” was not a rejection of the human per se; it was instead an assault on the philosophically modern idea that sought to remove man from the natural world and place him in a position of epistemic, metaphysical, and moral privilege that earlier thought had set aside for God, which is why Foucault ends The Order of Things by associating the “death of God” with the “end of man,” as the citation above suggests. Thinking about where the subject comes from, and how it functions, is perhaps the unifying feature of Foucault’s thought, underlying the transitions between his archeological, genealogical, and ethical periods. Foucault himself seemed to realize this by the end of his career, as his attention turned specifically to sexuality and the construction of the ethical subject, when he noted that the question of assujettissement or subjectivation—the transformation of human beings into subjects of knowledge, subjects of power, and subjects to themselves—had been “the general theme of [his] research” (Foucault 2003e: 127). This is reflected as well in the titles Foucault gave to two of his late courses at the Collège de France: “Subjectivity and Truth” (1980–81) and “The Hermeneutics of the Subject” (1981–82). As we saw in the remark concerning his genealogy project, Foucault conceives genealogy as a historical ontology of how human beings constitute themselves as subjects of knowledge, as subjects acting on other subjects, and as ethical subjects. His work is less an anti‐humanism than an attempt to think humanism and the subject after the end of (modern) man. Far from being a thinker of the “death of the subject,” Foucault simply refuses to accept the subject as a given, as the foundation for ethical or rational thinking. The subject is, instead, something that has been historically created and Foucault’s work, in its entirety, is engaged in analyzing the various ways that human beings are transformed into subjects, whether subjects of knowledge, of power, of sexuality, or of ethics (Foucault 2003e: 126–7).
One of the essential themes of Saussurean linguistics was that “in language there are only differences without positive terms.” By this, Saussure meant that language functions as a system of interdependent units in which the value of each constituent unit results solely from the simultaneous presence of other units and the ways each unit differs from the others. While the structuralists all took note of this theme, the emphasis on difference became truly dominant in the 1960s.
The attention to difference—rather than a focus on identity or the Same—is particularly central to the philosophical projects of Jean‐François Lyotard and Gilles Deleuze. For Deleuze, difference has been a constant focus of his thinking. His Nietzsche and Philosophy appeals to the concept of difference to show how Nietzsche departs from the Hegelian tradition, to explicate Nietzsche’s will to power, and to interpret Nietzsche’s thought of the eternal recurrence. In place of Hegel’s “speculative element of negation, opposition or contradiction, Nietzsche substitutes the practical element of difference, the object of affirmation and enjoyment.” Where the dialectic is engaged in the “labor of the negative,” according to Deleuze, Nietzsche offers a theory of forces in which active force does not negate or deny the other but “affirms its own difference and enjoys this difference” (Deleuze 1983: 9). Nietzsche’s notion of will to power is, for Deleuze, a theory of forces in which forces are distinguished in terms of both their qualitative and quantitative differences. In fact, what Nietzsche names with the “will to power” is “the genealogical element of force, both differential and genetic. The will to power is the element from which derive both the quantitative difference of related forces and the quality that devolves into each force in this relation” (Deleuze 1983: 50; italics in the original). And, given the importance that difference plays in Deleuze’s reading, it is not at all surprising to find him concluding that what returns eternally is not the same or the identical; rather, what returns is the repetition of difference: “It is not the ‘same’ or the ‘one’ which comes back in the eternal return but return is itself the one which ought to belong to diversity and to that which differs” (Deleuze 1983: 46).
Deleuze develops these themes further in Difference and Repetition (1968) as he attempts to think the concept of difference itself. Deleuze sees this work reflecting the “generalized anti‐Hegelianism” of the time in which “difference and repetition have taken the place of the identical and the negative, of identity and contradiction” (Deleuze 1994: xix). Hegel is not the only culprit, however; rather, he is simply the culmination of a metaphysical tradition that associates difference with opposition and the negative, while privileging identity and the Same as primary. Treating difference as derivative begins with Plato, who Deleuze claims first introduced the concept of difference not in terms of the difference between the Form and its physical copies but in terms of the tertiary relation between the copy and its simulacra.
Indeed, it is in this sense that difference comes only in third place, behind identity and resemblance, and can be understood only in terms of the comparative play of two similitudes: the exemplary similitude of an identical original and the imitative similitude of a more or less accurate copy.... More profoundly, however, the true Platonic distinction lies elsewhere: it is of another nature, not between the original and the image but between two kinds of images, of which copies are the first kind, the other being simulacra.
(Deleuze 1994: 127)
From Plato to Hegel, the metaphysical tradition sees the different in opposition to and derivative upon the one, while Deleuze sets out to develop an ontology of difference in which “it is not difference which presupposes opposition, but opposition which presupposes difference” and treats it as the negation of identity (Deleuze 1994: 51). Deleuze’s project in this work is nothing short of reversing the tradition that privileges identity by showing identity to be an optical effect produced “by the more profound game of difference and repetition.” While “the primacy of identity, however conceived, defines the world of representation,” his goal, on the other hand, is to “think difference in itself independently of the forms of representation which reduce it to the Same, and the relation of different to different independently of those forms which make them pass through the negative” (Deleuze 1994: xix).
For Lyotard, whose work is more closely tied to postmodernism than the other poststructuralists, what characterizes the postmodern, as he puts it in the introduction to The Postmodern Condition, is an “incredulity toward metanarratives” (Lyotard 1984: xxiv). Rather than naming a specific epoch, the postmodern names, instead, an antifoundationalist attitude that exceeds the legitimating orthodoxy of the moment. Postmodernity, then, does not follow modernity but resides constantly at the heart of the modern, challenging those totalizing and comprehensive master narratives (like the Enlightenment narrative of the emancipation of the rational subject or the Marxist narrative of the emancipation of the working class) that serve to legitimate its practices. In place of these grand meta‐ and master narratives, Lyotard suggests we look instead to less ambitious, “little narratives” that refrain from totalizing claims in favor of recognizing the specificity and singularity of events. To refuse to sanction the move to a metanarrative in the ethical, political, aesthetic, and metaphysical domains commits one to a philosophy of difference in that it accepts that oppositions will not be resolved in some higher unity and concludes that multiple and discordant voices are not only inevitable but desirable.
Reflecting on difference operates at the core of both Lyotard’s pagan project and what he considered his most important work, The Différend (1983), which is itself an attempt to account for radical and incommensurable differences in discourse, ethics, and politics. For the pagan, what is forbidden is the acceptance of a totalizing or dominating master narrative; no single language game can present itself as the game, the only game. Paganism, for Lyotard, is not the absence of prescriptives; rather, a prescriptive utterance cannot be derived from a description. Prescriptives are ungrounded, they are “left hanging” in the sense that they cannot be derived logically or necessarily from what is the case, from ontology (as Plato thought when he presumed that if one knew the good, one would do the good). The pagan prescriptive, then, is to maximize multiplicity, to multiply narratives and to play different language games. To be pagan is to accept that one must play several games, be inventive and imaginative in the playing of these different games, and challenge any attempt to prohibit the playing of different games (Lyotard and Thébaud 1985: 59–61).
Where paganism advocated the multiplication of differences, in The Différend Lyotard sought to think the insurmountably different, that is, those incommensurable differences that simply do not admit of any shared standard to which one could appeal in making judgments concerning what is different. The différend is thus defined as “a case of conflict, between (at least) two parties, that cannot be equitably resolved for lack of a rule of judgment applicable to both arguments” (Lyotard 1988: ix). For Lyotard, once one has given up on master narratives, one must also give up on a master narrative of justice or the good to which all parties will agree. While such a master narrative is presupposed for a democratic politics based on consensus and agreement, the political question for Lyotard is ultimately the question of how to make decisions in the case of a différend in which, by definition, no consensus is possible. The choice, it would seem, is either violence or a new kind of political thinking that can accommodate différends in a shared social space where norms work to minimize evil rather than maximize good, and where evil is itself defined in terms of the continued interdiction of different possibilities.
One sees in poststructuralism, in marked contrast to the philosophizing that preceded it in France, a return of philosophical thinking about ethics. While philosophizing about politics never waned in France, with the exceptions of Emmanuel Levinas (1906–95) and Vladimir Jankélévitch (1903–85), ethical issues were largely absent from French philosophy in the years dominated first by existentialism3 and then by structuralism. As structuralism began to lose its hegemonic position, however, one finds ethics re‐emerging in poststructuralist philosophy in a number of ways. It is important to note, however, that this turn toward ethics is predicated on a sharp distinction poststructuralism draws between an ethics and a morality. A recurrent theme throughout Deleuze’s works is the desire to remain within the plane of immanence and refuse any move to a transcendent or theological plane. On several occasions, he addresses this point by noting a distinction between ethics and morality. In a 1986 interview, Deleuze put the distinction this way:
Morality presents us with a set of constraining rules of a special sort, ones that judge actions and intentions by considering them in relation to transcendent values (this is good, that’s evil …); ethics is a set of optional rules that assess what we do, what we say, in relation to the ways of existing involved.
(Deleuze, 1995: 100, translation modified)
Deleuze highlights this distinction in his readings of Nietzsche and Spinoza. Nietzsche and Philosophy opens by addressing the difference between “Good and Evil” and “Good and Bad”—the topic of the First Essay of Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality. For Nietzsche, the distinction between “Good and Bad” remains grounded in the natural, while the “Good and Evil” distinction is grounded in the divine: where the originators of determinations of “Good and Bad” had sufficient confidence in their own natural instincts to establish these normative categories on their own, the originators of judgments of “Good and Evil” lacked this confidence and they sought a transcendent justification for their judgments in the will of God. Deleuze reframes Nietzsche’s distinction between the natural and the divine by distinguishing between the immanent, ethical difference between noble and base that grounds evaluative judgments on one’s “way of being or style of life,” and the transcendent moral opposition between good and evil that grounds evaluative judgment on an absolute and otherworldly ideal (Deleuze 1983: 121–22). Deleuze returns to this point later in the text, distinguishing “good and bad” from “good and evil” again in terms of the distinction between the ethical and the moral: “This is how good and evil are born: ethical determination, that of good and bad, gives way to moral judgment. The good of ethics becomes the evil of morality, the bad has become the good of morality” (Deleuze, 1983: 122).
This is also a central feature in Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza, especially in his second, shorter book Spinoza: Practical Philosophy (1970). There Deleuze discusses the scandal of “Spinoza the immoralist” in terms of Spinoza’s rejection of transcendent values, particularly of “evil,” in favor of “good and bad,” and he again marks a sharp distinction between ethics in general and morality. Spinoza, he tells us, shows us how ethics, which “is a typology of immanent modes of existence, replaces Morality, which always refers existence to transcendent values” (Deleuze 1988: 23). In contrast to the fictitious moral ideas of good and evil, Spinoza claims we should consider good and bad naturalistically as concepts with an objective meaning: good is what agrees with our nature (and thereby increases our vitality, our power to act) and bad is what disagrees with our nature (and thus diminishes our vitality and power to act). Spinoza’s theory of the affects thus turns us away from seeking a transcendent moral standard for judging what is good or evil, and returns us to the immanent question concerning modes of existence and what we are capable of doing. This is why, for Spinoza, psychology leads to ethics, as both give rise to the same vital question: has our power to act in the world been increased or decreased? This is also why, in the final chapter, Deleuze suggests that Spinoza tells us that what ultimately mattered was not the metaphysics or epistemology, but the ethics and the politics, specifically, the intervention into the political so as to increase the amount of joy and decrease the sadness. Like Nietzsche and Spinoza, Deleuze is a thinker of practices. And his practical goal, also like Nietzsche’s and Spinoza’s, is to increase the joyful passions—those that increase our power to act—and decrease the sad passions that diminish our power to act. Perhaps this why Foucault, in his preface to the English translation of Anti‐Oedipus, remarked somewhat provocatively: “I would say that Anti‐Oedipus (may its authors forgive me) is a book of ethics, the first book of ethics to be written in France in quite a long time” (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: xiii).
Foucault’s own work, in his final years, also makes a distinctive turn toward the ethical and away from the focus on power that dominated Discipline and Punish and the first volume of The History of Sexuality. Now, Foucault frames his interest in sex in terms of “the kind of relationship you ought to have with yourself, rapport à soi, which [he calls] ethics, and which determines how the individual is supposed to constitute himself as a moral subject of his own actions” (Foucault, 2003a: 111). In The History of Sexuality, volumes 2 and 3 (1984) and several important interviews that he gave in 1983–84, Foucault describes this relationship to self that constituted ethics in terms of four major aspects: the “ethical substance,” “the mode of subjectivation [mode d’assujettissement],” “the forms of ethical work one performs on oneself,” and “the telos of the ethical subject.” By “ethical substance,” Foucault refers to that part of the individual which he or she constitutes as the prime material of his or her moral conduct. For the Greeks, according to Foucault, this was the acts linked to pleasure and desire, while for Christianity, it was the flesh. Modes of subjectivation are the ways in which “the individual establishes his relation to the rule and recognized himself as obliged to put it into practice,” the ways, in other words, “in which people are invited or incited to recognize their moral obligations.” The forms of ethical work are the ways in which “we change ourselves in order to become ethical subjects,” the self‐forming activities and ascetic practices through which we transform ourselves into moral agents who comply with ethical rules. And the telos of the ethical subject is not just the immediate end to which our actions are directed, but “the kind of being to which we aspire when we behave” morally (Foucault 1985: 26–28; 2003a: 111–12). These four aspects of ethics are part of the care of the self which Foucault comes to understand ultimately as a practice of freedom: “Freedom is the ontological condition of ethics.... what is ethics, if not the practice of freedom, the conscious [réfléchie] practice of freedom” (Foucault 2003c: 28).
The impact of the philosophical revolution that began in France in the 1960s can be seen throughout the humanities and social sciences, and few developments in the past half‐century in aesthetics, literary studies, film studies, gender and queer theory as well as social theory cannot be traced back, directly or indirectly, to the work of poststructuralist thinkers. Moreover, this impact has not yet run its course: with the publication of Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France now complete, and the transcription and publication of Deleuze’s and Derrida’s seminars just beginning, there is still much important poststructuralist work that has yet to reach a wide audience. As such, one can imagine poststructuralism’s influence on the humanities and social sciences extending well into the future.