6

FOUCAULT

The Return of the Centaur and the Death of Man

THE CRITIQUE OF MODERNITY as a nihilistic and openly antihumanist phenomenon that we delineated in the previous chapter enjoyed widespread currency until quite recently. It gave rise to representations of this phenomenon that, while undoubtedly interesting, are couched in such radically demonizing terms that by comparison the anti-Enlightenment clichés of the late Romantic era sound like mild reprimand.

Among the great European authors of the second half of the twentieth century, Michel Foucault was without a doubt the most original in reformulating the very bases of the philosophical issue of the Enlightenment, within the radical strategy of unmasking and denunciation that we have been describing here. Foucault’s attack was directed at the very heart of the problem and moved from a deliberate rereading of Hegel’s Centaur (i.e., from the fusion of philosophy and history), making no concessions, however, to his dialectic and phenomenology of spirit.1 To that end, Foucault developed his own concept of history on groundwork laid by Nietzsche, who was his true mentor. This concept aimed at doing away with the subject, i.e., with Kant’s “I think,” and at refuting the very idea of truth (the pursuit of which had still been a priority for Adorno and Horkheimer), most especially the idea of the (presumed) scientific truth of the traditional human sciences. This is at the root of Foucault’s disconcerting advocacy of the “death of man,” that is to say the extinction of a rational platform of knowledge along the lines developed by Kant and the Enlightenment at the end of the eighteenth century, which still undergirded the modern episteme.² It was to this task of conceptual deconstruction that Foucault devoted his formidable intellectual energy. Thus, he called into question the idea of a necessary and defining connection between knowledge and virtue, which had been the core identity of the Enlightenment. He also described the perverse and inextricable way in which power and knowledge were perpetually intertwined—“[t]he exercise of power perpetually creates knowledge and, conversely, knowledge constantly induces effects of power”3—and denounced the inexorable rise of disciplinary violence in the history of the Western world, and the way in which that violence was perpetually cloaked in a rhetoric of emancipation and appeals to truth that obscured the original will to power. This posed for both historians and philosophers a challenge that, whether we like it or not, is still unresolved to this day.

Foucault found himself in disagreement with the tradition of the Annales school, which was informed by a teleological and causal model and was considered still to be excessively influenced by a positivistic stance and by the single-mindedness of anthropological thought; but he also rejected the historicist brand of idealistic historiography that was ruled by the “I think,” i.e., by a hermeneutical position that was programmatically opposed to the thesis that meaning is always derived from context, from something exterior, and that we do not produce thought but rather are the product of thought. Against these positions, Foucault developed his genealogical historiography, a new and original tool for the analysis of history. The boundaries and objectives of this new discipline were described thus by their author:

One has to dispense with the constituent subject, to get rid of the subject itself, that’s to say, to arrive at an analysis which can account for the constitution of the subject within a historical framework. And this is what I would call genealogy, that is, a form of history which can account for the constitution of knowledges, discourses, domains of objects etc., without having to make reference to a subject which is either transcendental in relation to the field of events or runs in its empty sameness throughout the course of history.⁴

Beginning with his first important work, Folie et déraison: histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (Paris, 1961),⁵ Foucault applied his extraordinary heuristic and narrative creativity to a critique of the hidden negative consequences of rationality, in particular those produced by the much-touted humanitarianism of the Enlightenment, in the history of the Western world. Foucault denounced the dark and inhuman side of so-called scientific progress by taking as his subject the transformation of madness into a disease and the rise of modern psychiatry at the end of the eighteenth century, which led to the invention of lunatic asylums. These developments had brought to an end an entire historical phase in which madness had been considered as either evidence of sainthood or, as was the case during the Renaissance (for instance in Erasmus, Shakespeare, and Cervantes), as a heightened form of ironic reason. Although meant as instruments for the treatment and reeducation of patients, the sharp differentiation between reason and nonreason and the wholesale internment of the insane (internment on a scale not seen in Europe since the time of the medieval leper hospitals) in fact signaled the abrupt end of the ancient dialogue between rationality and irrationality and heralded an era of segregation of the mentally ill. Ultimately, the birth of psychiatry had far more disturbing consequences than the mere confinement of bodies within purpose-built structures: the authoritarian monologue on madness delivered by the scientific reason of psychiatrists was answered now by the distressing and poignant silence imposed forever on mental patients. The result was a kind of monstrous mental segregation that matched the physical confinement. Reason’s despotism was not content with locking up bodies: it claimed absolute control over the subject through the device of mental rehabilitation and reeducation.

Later works by Foucault are modeled on this same pattern, through which the author denounces the less commonly understood historical consequences of the power exercised by rationality and knowledge. These works include Naissance de la clinique (Paris, 1963)6 and Les Mots et les choses (1966), an ambitious attempt at reconstructing the cultural codes, generative grammars, and “epistemes” that have emerged in Europe over the centuries as part of the processes of organizing knowledge. In the latter case too, Foucault’s ultimate objective was to destroy delusory knowledge by calling into question the truth claims of the modern episteme, which was founded at the end of the eighteenth century on the “discovery of man” and the objectivity claimed by human sciences.

In 1975, Foucault published Surveiller et punir. Naissance de la prison, which he would call his “first book,” perhaps not without cause, given its importance and the epistemological maturity he achieved with it.⁷ For it was only with this work that he began to use the theme of the Enlightenment as a direct polemical instrument, on account of its role as historical background and point of reference for the modern technologies used to exercise power over the human body. The book focused on real, i.e., genealogical, history, specifically on the history of the enigmatic “gentle way” and of the ostensibly humanitarian character of the punishments advocated as part of the reformed penal code by Enlightenment figures such as Beccaria, Dupaty, and Pastoret. Here Foucault deliberately challenged established views by attempting to demonstrate a connection between the new human sciences, the emancipation ideals that supported the individual’s assertion of his rights, and the rise of modern disciplinary society with its total institutions, such as prisons, mental asylums, factories, and military barracks. Foucault explores that society’s growing need to rationalize, classify, measure, and train bodies, and to educate, treat, and punish them in light of new scientific notions, a need that had been felt with special urgency from the end of the eighteenth century on. He shows also how this need coincided with the discovery of the human body as object and target for the exercise of power, and with the natural development of domination technologies aimed at subjugating human bodies, so as to make them both docile and useful.

Foucault’s analysis in Surveiller et punir points out that “[t]he ‘Enlightenment,’ which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines” and the coercion mechanisms of modern disciplinary society.8 He attempts to outline the power effects of Beccaria’s humanitarian philosophy from a historical point of view, and points to the birth of prisons as a prime example of the way in which the new power to punish ratified by the Enlightenment had metamorphosed within a few decades into the power to discipline and reeducate. Adorno and Horkheimer had already denounced the brutal symptoms of technological society’s totalitarian project as offspring of the Enlightenment’s utopian thought and philosophical deployment of instrumental reason. Foucault went further, claiming to furnish historical evidence of that process, a claim that sparked angry reactions among many specialists in the field,⁹ and asserting also that he had documented the birth of the great total institutions that are still in operation today.

Foucault returned explicitly to the theme of the Enlightenment in a seminar that he gave at the Sorbonne in 1978 under the title “Qu’est-ce que la critique? (Critique et Aufklärung)” (What is Critique?—Critique and the Enlightenment), in a lucid and definitive reckoning that reopened the entire question, two centuries after Kant’s famous formulation, in terms that were entirely original and that we would now perhaps call “postmodern.” In 1983, just a few months before his death, Foucault continued the discussion in a lecture given at the Collège de France, this time explicitly entitled “Qu’est-ce que les Lumières? Qu’est-ce la Révolution?” (What is the Enlightenment? What is Revolution?). These were the crucial years of Foucault’s last great historical and analytical effort, which was devoted to the history of sexuality and attempted to trace a genealogy at last of this modern subject, through the study of the technologies of the self. His research focused on the dawning self-awareness of the individual as the subject of a model of sexuality.

Thus, after writing on power per se, on the relationship between knowledge and techniques of domination, on mental institutions and on prisons, Foucault discovered the centrality of Christian man in the history of Western sexuality. The practice of confession de facto resulted in the birth also of the modern scientia sexualis, which was more interested in personalized control and in the surveillance of passion than in the pleasure techniques and ars erotica of the ancients. An essential aspect of that historical reconstruction was the recognition of the fundamental importance of the invention of truth as a Christian’s precise duty. The denunciation of one’s errors in the light of religious faith and the requirement to pursue the truth about oneself through the practice of confession had now replaced the pagans’ art of living, thanks to an anxiety-inducing technique of the self aimed at achieving salvation on the basis of a form of introspective censorship. Foucault devoted much space to this revolutionary Christian politics of truth. He looked for traces of it in the ancient world, especially in ancient Greece. By “problematizing” more generally the thorny question of the genealogy of truth, he highlighted how one actually had to go back to Greece in order to trace the roots of both the analytics of truth as a rational activity aimed at establishing whether a proposition is true or false, and of Parrhesia, i.e., “truth-telling as an activity,” as the active and concrete act of bearing witness. As Foucault points out, “With the question of the importance of telling the truth, and knowing who is able to tell the truth, and knowing why we should tell the truth, we have the roots of what we could call the ‘critical’ tradition in the West.”10

All these themes concerning the subject, power, and truth were already present in the seminar Foucault had given at the Sorbonne. The aim was to separate a centuries-old history of critique from its generally accepted identification with Enlightenment rationalism,¹¹ and with related developments that had taken place in the course of the eighteenth century; namely, the rise of anthropology and man’s installation on the throne of knowledge. Through those developments, critique had come to be identified with the subject’s ability to distinguish between true and false, and with the role of critical reason in pursuing truth along the terms established by “Kant’s great undertaking” in the development of modern rationalism. In putting forward his genealogy of critique, Foucault once again took as his starting point the decisive invention of truth by the Church, which “developed this idea—singular and […] quite foreign to ancient culture—that each individual, whatever his age or status, from the beginning to the end of his life and in his every action, had to be governed and had to let himself be governed” in order to achieve salvation.¹²

St. Paul’s directive that one believe in the truth revealed by Jesus Christ and in his teachings if one wishes to be saved, which was at the core of the Christian pastoral, had become in the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries one of the necessary points of reference in a large process of “governmentalization” that still awaits proper study from a historical point of view. How to govern families, cities, States, armies, individuals, and consciences was the fundamental problem faced by ecclesiastical and secular authorities alike, as well as by that period’s thinkers. Discipline and governmentalization had gone hand in hand. Historically, critique was born as “the art of not being governed quite so much,”13 that is to say as an ethos of freedom, a specific attitude on the part of the subject that calls into question his relationships with truth and power. It had started as religious critique of the Biblical model of God-derived power, had moved on to political critique of the most archaic and violent modalities of the art of government by natural law, and finally launched a frontal attack on the effects of modern scientific truth as a locus of power.

Foucault had no qualms in asserting that, in the final analysis, “critique is the movement by which the subject gives himself the right to question truth on its exercise of power, and to question power on its discourses of truth. […] critique will be the art of voluntary insubordination, that of reflected intractability.”¹⁴ This was, then, nothing to do with the model of rationality embodied by modernity, or with the primacy of knowledge as the antechamber of virtue. In Kant’s answer to the question Was ist Aufklärung? this concept of critique coincided precisely with the first part of the reply, i.e., with the uncompromising definition of the Aufklärung as man’s release from “tutelage” or minority through his rejection of any form of authority principle. On this, Foucault noted: “What Kant was describing as the Aufklärung is very much what I was trying before to describe as critique, this critical attitude which appears as a specific attitude in the Western world starting with what was historically […] the great process of society’s governmentalization.”¹⁵ Where Foucault diverged from Kant was in relation to the thesis that is constantly in the background in the German philosopher’s 1784 text, and that identified the Aufklärung with a false idea of knowledge, and a precise model of rationality. Foucault openly disputed that thesis: “I am not attempting to show the opposition there may be between Kant’s analysis of the Aufklärung and his critical project.”¹⁶ That opposition derived from a different concept of identity and of the function of critique as separate from any reference to Kant’s reason.

And yet, it was precisely this explanation, based on separating the Aufklärung from “the critical undertaking” that was rationalism, that effectively opened the way to a kind of postmodern redefinition of the whole question. Foucault took the opportunity to draw up final conclusions from all his previous research, which had sometimes been quite alien to the thought of Parisian circles. He did so by distancing himself from the positions expressed by French historians of the Enlightenment, which he saw as epistemologically petrified, part and parcel of the traditional “block constituted by the Enlightenment and the Revolution,”¹⁷ to the point of appearing now sterile, informed solely by ideology and aiming mostly at defending the values and legacy of the eighteenth century. As he would sarcastically say in his lecture at the Collège de France: “Let us leave to their pious meditations those who want to keep the heritage of the Aufklärung alive and intact. This piety, of course, is the most touching of all treasons.”¹⁸ The correct approach had been followed only in Germany, beginning at the end of the eighteenth century, and consisted in focusing on the peculiar issue of the Aufklärung in its historical character as the great “problem of modern philosophy”:19 there “the Aufklärung was certainly understood, for better or worse […] as an important episode, a sort of brilliant manifestation of the profound destination of Western reason” (52). Foucault further wrote, “[I]t is not because we privilege the 18th century […] that we encounter the problem of the Aufklärung. I would say instead that it is because we fundamentally want to ask the question, Was ist Aufklärung? that we encounter the historical scheme of our modernity” (57).

A large number of German historians, as well as the European historians who followed their lead, had addressed the issue on the basis of precisely those premises. Foucault felt that he belonged to a tradition that went from Mendelssohn to Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche, down to Husserl and the Frankfurt School in tackling the question of the Aufklärung from a historical and philosophical point of view. That philosophical tradition was particularly close to his own, especially from Nietzsche onwards. Breaking free from the spell of an apologetic history of the Enlightenment and of the Revolution seen as its fulfillment, it had long since focused on the power dynamics underlying rationalist emancipation discourse, and had denounced the presumptuousness of that reason and its pursuit of domination. The final challenge to the old image of the Enlightenment as a historical era and ideology informed by progress must now come from a new genealogy of the Aufklärung that, regardless of the specific historical contexts, could throw light in the first instance on the complex manifestations of the intersection between power, truth, and the subject. In order to do that, it was necessary to go back to the origins and revive the old German-derived paradigm of the Centaur. But to do so required clarifying the character of the new “historical-philosophical practice” (56) that must now move away as completely from Kant’s reason as from Hegel’s dialectic or Husserl’s phenomenology.

In Foucault’s view, the main characteristic of that “practice” was “to desubjectify the philosophical question by way of historical contents, to liberate historical contents by examining the effects of power whose truth affects them and from which they supposedly derive” (56–57). The objective, therefore, was to think the Centaur in postmodern terms by disenthroning man, getting rid both of the subject and of a rationalism that hid the pursuit of power behind the veil of scientific truth: that is to say, by certifying, once and for all, the death of the old Enlightenment. Only then would it be possible to uncover how the Aufklärung had been subsumed into the field of rationalistic critique and, above all, how completely the other possible reading of the Enlightenment had been lost; namely, the reading that identified it with critique, which was seen as the perpetual ethos of liberty and of the art of not being governed “too much.” At the end of the day, both of these interpretations were already present in the answer that Kant had given to his own question. Foucault’s main concern in his last works was how exactly to move away from that project, in which the modern world configured itself on a critical and rationalistic basis, so as to return instead to a Kant who was now seen from this perspective, and to the eighteenth-century origins of the Enlightenment question.

In the lecture read at the Collège de France in January 1983, Foucault’s enquiry moved precisely in this direction. Two specific questions had been asked in 1784 and 1794, respectively: What was Enlightenment, and what was Revolution? For Foucault, these two questions constituted Kant’s interrogation of his own present. What emerged from the question on the Enlightenment in particular was “the question of today, the question about the present, about what is our actuality: what is happening today? What is happening right now? And what is this right now we all are in which defines the moment at which I am writing?”20 Before Kant, philosophy’s discussion of history had drawn its coordinates from the ancient-modern opposition. With the reply given by the German philosopher a new and entirely original approach was born, seen as “the problematization of an actuality” and its exploration on the part of the philosopher, who belongs to and “has to position himself” in relation to it. Philosophy “as a discourse of and about modernity” (85), then, was not entirely identified with the rationalistic project of Kant’s critiques. It was first and foremost a philosophy that offered plausible answers to the most burning questions: “What is my actuality? What is the meaning of this actuality? And what am I doing when I speak about this actuality? I believe that this is what this new examination of modernity is all about” (86). It was from this that Foucault’s final thesis derived, according to which Kant was not only the revered father of the modern “analytics of truth,” that is to say of a rationalism that originated in “the question of the conditions under which true knowledge is possible” (94); he was also the proponent of “what we could call an ontology of ourselves, an ontology of the present”:

It seems to me that the philosophical choice with which we are confronted at present is this: we can opt for a critical philosophy which will present itself as an analytic philosophy of truth in general, or we can opt for a form of critical thought which will be an ontology of ourselves, an ontology of the actuality. It is this form of philosophy that, from Hegel to the Frankfurt School, through Nietzsche and Max Weber, has founded the form of reflection within which I have attempted to work (95).

We have thus reached the current state of the art with regard to the philosophical question of the Enlightenment. On the one side we have those who continue to pursue Kant’s Enlightenment tradition and his rationalistic project of modernity, those like Habermas, Rawls or Putnam, to mention only the most famous, who albeit with different nuances and interpretations, claim that “the problems generated by the Enlightenment are still our problems,” from an epistemological point of view, as well as in relation to their historical and political foundation.21 On the other side there is a vast and vociferous army of theoreticians of the postmodern, who for a while now have missed no opportunity to pronounce the death of the Enlightenment and the end of the modern world in the name and on behalf of relativism, nihilism, and the need for new beginnings and new philosophical dawns—the details of which are, of course, invariably yet to be revealed.²²

However, this scenario is as yet missing a third, important protagonist: Catholic thought in the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council. More on this in our next chapter.