“It is the subject who introduces division into the individual.”
Lacan, Écrits
The twentieth-century history of Hegelianism in France can be understood in terms of two constitutive moments: (1) the specification of the subject in terms of finitude, corporeal boundaries, and temporality and (2) the “splitting” (Lacan), “displacement” (Derrida), and eventual death (Foucault, Deleuze) of the Hegelian subject.1 In the course of this history, the Hegelian traveler in pursuit of a global place which he always already occupies loses his sense of time and location, his directionality and, hence, self-identity. Indeed, this subject is revealed as the trope it always was, and one comes to see the hyperbolic aspirations of philosophy now clearly inscribed in the very logos of desire. But Hegel is not so easily dismissed, even by those who claim to be beyond him. The contemporary opposition to Hegel rarely evidences signs of indifference. The difference from Hegel is a vital and absorbing one, and the act of repudiation more often than not requires the continued life of that which is to be repudiated, thus paradoxically sustaining the “rejected Hegel” in order to reconstitute contemporary identity in and through the act of repudiation again and again. It is as if Hegel becomes a convenient rubric for a variety of positions that defend the self-sufficient subject, even those positions that defend a Cartesian view of consciousness which Hegel himself clearly rejects. Hegel’s popularity among the early twentieth-century French interpreters was followed by a rebellion of the second generation, the students of both Hyppolite and Kojève, who were also simultaneously reading Nietzsche, Freud, Marx, structuralist linguistics and anthropology, and developing postphenomenological positions from the late works of both Husserl and Heidegger. Hegel was never approached purely scholastically in France, and in some respects we might understand the French reception of Hegel as a movement against scholasticism. Even Jean Wahl’s 1929 work, Le Malheur de la conscience dans la philosophie de Hegel, attempted to show that Hegel was not primarily a “systematic” philosopher, but one who anticipated both his religious and existential critics. And yet this early reading of Hegel which found resonances in the lectures and writings of Kojève, Hyppolite, Henri Noël, and Mikel Dufrenne, was already an effort to move away from a metaphysics of closure and a theory of the autonomous subject with a firm metaphysical place in history. Already in those early works, the Hegelian subject is paradoxical, and metaphysics itself is understood as a terrain of dislocation. Hence, it is curious to watch the generation that follows Hyppolite, a generation largely spawned from his own seminar, which repudiates Hegel for being all the things that both Kojève and Hyppolite argued he never really was. In other words, the immanent critique of the self-identical subject is in many ways overlooked by Derrida, Deleuze, and others who proceed to view Hegel as championing the “subject,” a metaphysics of closure or presence, that excludes difference and is, according to his Nietzschean critics, also anti-life.
And yet, the critique of Hegelianism retains its ambivalence. It is unclear whether the break with Hegel is as severe as it is sometimes said to be. What constitutes the latest stage of post-Hegelianism as a stage definitively beyond the dialectic? Are these positions still haunted by the dialectic, even as they claim to be in utter opposition to it? What is the nature of this “opposition,” and is it perchance a form that Hegel himself has prefigured?
Although Foucault’s work is usually traced to Nietzsche, Marx, and Merleau-Ponty as its intellectual predecessors, his reflections on history, power, and sexuality take their bearings within a radically revised dialectical framework. Included first in an anthology in honor of Hyppolite, Foucault’s “Nietzsche, Genealogy, and History” is at once a critique of a dialectical philosophy of history and a reworking of the Hegelian relation of lordship and bondage.2 Similarly, Derrida is usually considered to be indebted to Husserl, structuralism, and semiology, but his significant relationship to Hegel is evident in Writing and Difference, Glas and, for our purpose, an essay originally presented in Hyppolite’s seminar, “The Pit and the Pyramid: An Introduction to Hegel’s Semiology.”3
Both Foucault’s and Derrida’s essays take up Hegelian themes in order to suggest radically different philosophical points of departure. Derrida’s essay considers Hegel’s comments on language, and effects a rhetorical analysis to show that Hegel’s theory of the sign implicates him in a metaphysics of presence, the very opposite of the theory of negativity and dynamism Hegel explicitly defends. Foucault’s essay summarizes a few central tendencies of historical explanation and challenges what he takes to be the prevailing assumption that historical change and development can be adequately described in unilinear terms; Foucault asks whether historical experience ought to be understood in terms of rupture, discontinuity, arbitrary shifts and confluences, and further questions the implicit cosmogonic assumption in historiography that the origin of an historical state of affairs can be found and, if found, could shed any light on the meaning of that state of affairs. The implicit philosophy of history that he criticizes can be understood as obliquely Hegelian inasmuch as the dialectical explanation of historical experience assumes that history manifests an implicit and progressive rationality. Foucault argues that the presumption of immanent rationality is a theoretical fiction historians and philosophers of history employ to defend against the arbitrary and multiplicitous (non)foundations of historical experience which resist conceptual categorization. Given that both Derrida’s and Foucault’s essays are rather strong criticisms of certain aspects of Hegelianism, the question arises, how are we to understand these essays as intended for Hyppolite?
It seems fair to assume that these essays are efforts to pay homage to Hyppolite, and that the critical tenor of both pieces of work might be understood to be a continuation and revitalization of a critical attitude embodied by Hyppolite himself. And yet these criticisms can no longer be understood to be revisionist in their purposes or to constitute an “immanent” critique of Hegelianism in the sense that Kojève’s “reading” and Hyppolite’s “commentary” remain within Hegel’s essential framework. In effect, it appears that Derrida accepts the Hegelian project to think difference itself, but wants to argue that Hegel’s own method for achieving that goal effectively precludes its realization. Hegel argues that philosophical thinking must turn away from the Understanding, that mode of cognition that tends to fix and master its object, and that philosophy must now engage the Concept, the mode that Hyppolite understands to be “thinking of the being of life.” According to Derrida, however, it appears that Hegel has simply instituted the project of mastery at the conceptual level, and that “difference” and “the negative” are always finally thought within the confines of a philosophical language that pretends to be that to which it refers, a pretense that seeks to instate plentitude, the principle of identity, a metaphysics of closure and presence. This makes itself clear, according to Derrida, in Hegel’s theory of the sign—or, rather, the rhetoric that formulates that theory—which tends to preempt the signified, to be an act of symbolic enclosure and constitution, and so to forbid reference to anything that is not always already itself. Against the symbolic relation of sign to signified, Derrida suggests that reference to the signified is always displaced, indeed, that such “reference” is internally paradoxical. Hence, Derrida concludes that the limits of signification, i.e., the “difference” of the sign from what it signifies, emerges time and again wherever language purports to cross the ontological rift between itself and a pure referent. The impossibility of referring to the pure referent makes such linguistic acts into paradoxical enterprises, whereby referring becomes a kind of display of linguistic inadequacy.
The rupture between sign and signified becomes the occasion for Derrida’s own form of Hegelian irony, and might well be understood as the domain in which he reformulates Hyppolite’s ironic project in terms of his own theory of signification. Just as Hyppolite everywhere revealed the ironic consequences of the non-self-identical subject who presumes his own adequacy to self, so Derrida exposes the hubris of the philosophical sign’s presumption to refer. In both cases, the critique of the principle of identity exposes the limits of human instrumentality, and constitutes a challenge to Hegel’s anthropocentric presumptions. For Derrida, the failure of the sign reveals the absolute subject as full of metaphysical ambition and utterly helpless to achieve that ambition through language and that the “subject” is itself the fiction of a linguistic practice that seeks to deny the absolute difference between sign and signified. Hence, the theory of the efficacious sign, one that is allegedly defended by Hegel in his own theory of language, creates the conditions of necessary self-deception. For Derrida, then, this Hegelian practice requires a more radical commentary, indeed, a kind of commentary that exposes the linguistic ruse that produces and sustains the subject in its fictive efficacy.
Derrida and Hyppolite both pursue the moment of ironic reversal, and yet Derrida wants to show that the true pursuit of this moment necessitates playing a final joke on Hegel. Although both Hyppolite and Derrida reveal the limits of the autonomous subject, Hyppolite wants to retain the subject as an internally contradictory being, while Derrida argues that the subject no longer makes conceptual sense if referentiality is impossible. Indeed, the ironic reversal that the autonomous subject suffers, according to Derrida, reveals the necessity for a critique of the subject itself and of the conceit of referentiality: the subject only exists as a user of the referential sign, and the critique of referentiality implies that the subject, as a figure of autonomy, is itself no longer possible. In effect, the subject becomes that conceit of referentiality which language bears, but which is dissolved or, rather, deconstructed through a rhetorical analysis that reveals the ironic reversals intrinsic to any pursuit of referentiality. The subject is a subject to the extent that it effects a relationship to exteriority, but once that nonrelationship becomes recognized as the constitutive “difference” of all signification, then the subject is revealed as a fiction language gives itself in an effort to conceal its own ineradicable structure: it is the myth of reference itself.
The turn from Hegel to semiology thus casts the discourse on difference permanently outside the framework of internal relations; the exteriority of the signified can never be reappropriated, and language itself becomes the negative proof of this finally inaccessible exteriority.
Foucault’s essay, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, and History,” takes up Hegelian themes in a much more oblique fashion, and yet it is clear that an implicit critique of Hegel’s postulation of reason in history is underway, that Foucault is reformulating the master-slave relationship in a framework that at once preserves the relationship of inversion but displaces this relationship from its dialectical framework. Hence, like Derrida, Foucault is paying homage to Hyppolite, but in such a way that a proper elucidation of Hegelian themes requires a turn away from Hegel. In the case of Foucault, as for Deleuze, that turn is at once a turn toward Nietzsche. Foucault’s essay takes issue with narratives of historical experience that presume that the multiplicity of present historical phenomena can be derived from a single origin, and that the complexity of modern historical experience can be traced back through a single cause. Reversing this historiographical trope of the Fall, Foucault suggests that in the beginning was multiplicity, a radical heteronomy of events, forces, and relations which historiographers have concealed and rationalized through the imposition of orderly theoretical fictions.4 Clearly, we can understand the narrative development of the Phenomenology of Spirit as precisely such an orderly theoretical fiction, an account of an increasingly complex historical experience through a metaphysics of dialectical unities which is ever-accommodating. Like Derrida’s suggestion that the contradictions of the subject cannot be contained, Foucault’s point regarding the multiplicitous character of historical experience is that it cannot be appropriated and tamed through a unifying dialectic. Indeed, Foucault’s analysis of modernity attempts to show how the terms of dialectical opposition do not resolve into more synthetic and inclusive terms but tend instead to splinter off into a multiplicity of terms which expose the dialectic itself as a limited methodological tool for historians.
Foucault’s references to domination in this essay underscore both his appropriation and refusal of dialectical strategies. Clearly, the references to master and slave are based on Nietzsche’s analysis in On the Genealogy of Morals, but it is illuminating to read Foucault’s comments as a Nietzschean reworking of the Hegelian scene. Foucault tends in this essay, as elsewhere, to understand historical experience as a struggle of “forces” that results not in an ultimate reconciliation, but in a proliferation and variegation of force itself. Force is to be understood as the directional impulse of life, a movement, as it were, that is constantly embroiled in conflict and scenes of domination; force is thus the nexus of life and power, the movement of their intersection. These forces, what Nietzsche would have referred to as “instincts,” constitute value in and through the conflictual scenes in which stronger forces dominate weaker ones. Value emerges as the “show” of strength or superior force and also comes to conceal the force relations that constitute it; hence, value is constituted through the success of a strategy of domination; it is also that which tends to conceal the genesis of its constitution. In Foucault’s terms, “what Nietzsche calls the Entstehungsherd of the concept of goodness is not specifically the energy of the strong or the reaction of the weak, but precisely this scene where they are displayed superimposed or face-to-face. It is nothing but the space that divides them, the void through which they exchange their threatening gestures and speeches” (p. 150). Significantly, the strong and the weak, the master and slave, do not share a common ground; they are not to be understood as part of a common “humanity” or system of cultural norms. Indeed, the radical difference between them, conceived by Foucault as a qualitative difference in ontological modes, is the generative moment of history itself, the invariant conflictual scene in which power is produced, diverted, redeployed, and in which values come into being. The moment of “emergence” in which the conflict of forces produces some new historical configuration of forces can be variously understood in terms of proliferation, multiplication, reversal, substitution. For Foucault, “emergence designates a place of confrontation, but not as a closed field offering the spectacle of a struggle among equals… it is a ‘non-place,’ a pure distance, which indicates that the adversaries do not belong to a common space. Consequently, no one is responsible for an emergence; no one can glory in it, since it always occurs in the interstice” (p. 150).
For Hegel, and for most readers of Hegel in France, the confrontation between an agency of domination and a subordinate agency always takes place on the presumption of a shared social reality. Indeed, it is the recognition of this common social ground that constitutes each agency as a social agency and so becomes the basis of the constitution of historical experience. Kojève is perhaps most clear about the role of mutual recognition in the constitution of historical experience, and claims that without this insight into consciousness as an agent of recognition, it would be impossible to conceive of historical experience as shared. Foucault appears, then, to be reversing the Hegelian claim altogether, arguing that historical experience “emerges” precisely at that point where common ground cannot be ascertained, i.e., in a confrontation between differentially empowered agencies whose difference is not mediated by some more fundamental commonality. Indeed, for Foucault, domination is not a single stage in an historical narrative whose ultimate destination is decidedly beyond domination. Domination is, rather, the ultimate scene of history, the repeated scene, one that does not engender a dialectical inversion but continues to impose itself in various ways. It is not a self-identical scene, but one that is elaborated with great detail and historical variation. In effect, domination becomes for Foucault the scene that engenders history itself, the moment in which values are created and new configurations of force relations produced. Domination becomes the curious modus vivendi of historical innovation. In Foucault’s words:
Only a single drama is ever staged in this “non-place,” the endlessly repeated play of dominations. The domination of certain men over others leads to the differentiation of values; class domination generates the idea of liberty and the forceful appropriation of things necessary to survival and the imposition of a duration not intrinsic to them account for the origin of logic. This relationship of domination is no more a “relationship” than the place where it occurs is a place; and, precisely for this reason, it is fixed, throughout its history, in rituals, in meticulous procedures that impose rights and obligations.… Following traditional beliefs, it would be false to think that total war exhausts itself in its own contradictions and ends by renouncing violence and submitting to civil laws. On the contrary, the law is a calculated and relentless pleasure, delight in the promised blood, which permits the instigation of new dominations and the staging of meticulously repeated scenes of violence, (p. 150)
For Foucault, domination is not, as it is for Hegel, an impossible or self-contradictory enterprise. On the contrary, the prohibitive or regulative law must find ways to implement itself, and the various strategies of that law’s self-implementation become the occasions for new historical configurations of force. Regulative or prohibitive laws, what Foucault will come to call “juridical” laws, are curiously generative. They create the phenomena they are meant to control; they delimit some range of phenomena as subordinate and thereby give potential identity and mobility to what they intend to subdue. They create inadvertent consequences, unintended results, a proliferation of repercussions precisely because there is no prior dialectical prefiguration of what form historical experience must take. Without the assumption of prior ontological harmony, conflict can be seen to produce effects that exceed the bounds of dialectical unity and result in a multiplication of consequences. From this perspective, conflict does not result in the restoration of metaphysical order, but becomes the condition for a complication and proliferation of historical experience, a creation of new historical forms.
This “non-place” of emergence, this conflictual moment which produces historical innovation, must be understood as a nondialectical version of difference, not unlike the “difference” which, for Derrida, permanently ruptures the relation between sign and signified. For both Derrida and Foucault, the Hegelian theme of relational opposition is radically challenged through a formulation of difference as a primary and irrefutable linguistic/historical constant. This inversion of Hegel’s prioritization of identity over difference is achieved through the postulation of certain kinds of “difference” as historically invariant and insuperable. In effect, the differences whereof Foucault and Derrida speak are differences that cannot be aufgehoben into more inclusive identities. Any effort to posit an identity, whether the identity of the linguistic signified or the identity of some historical epoch, is necessarily undermined by the difference that conditions any such positing. Indeed, where identity is posited, difference is not aufgehoben, but concealed. In fact, it appears safe to conclude that for both Derrida and Foucault, Aufhebung is nothing other than a strategy of concealment, not the incorporation of difference into identity, but the denial of difference for the sake of positing a fictive identity. We shall see that for Lacan the role of difference functions similarly. For both Derrida and Foucault, difference displaces the metaphysical impulse from its totalizing goal. The Derridean moment of linguistic misfire where the conceit of referentiality debunks itself, undermines the Hegelian effort to establish sign and signified as internally related features of a unified reality. Similarly, the Foucaultian moment of conflict seems capable of producing only ever greater complexity in its wake, proliferating opposition beyond its binary configurations into multiple and diffuse forms, thus undermining the possibility of an Hegelian synthesis of binary opposites.
It is clear that both Derrida and Foucault theorize from within the tradition of a dialectic deprived of the power of synthesis. The question that emerges in a consideration of these post-Hegelians is whether the “post-” is a relationship that differentiates or binds or possibly does both at once. On the one hand, references to a “break” with Hegel are almost always impossible, if only because Hegel has made the very notion of “breaking with” into the central tenet of his dialectic. To break with Hegel and yet to escape being cast into his all-encompassing net of interrelations requires finding a way to be different from Hegel that he himself cannot account for. On the other hand, it becomes necessary to distinguish between kinds of difference, some of which are dialectical and always reinstate identity subsequent to any appearance of ontological difference, and others of which are nondialectical and resist assimilation into any kind of synthetic unity. To find the latter sort of difference is to change the very meaning of the “labor of the negative,” for this “labor” consists of building relations where there seemed to be none, in the “magic power that converts the negative into being.” Nondialectical difference would convert the negative only and always into further negativity or reveal difference itself, not as the negative, but as a qualitative permutation of Being; in effect, nondialectical difference, despite its various forms, is the labor of the negative which has lost its “magic,” a labor that does not construct a higher-order being but either deconstructs the illusions of a restorative ontological immanence and posits nondialectical difference as irreducible, or rejects the primacy of difference of any kind and offers a theory of primary metaphysical plenitude which eludes Hegelian categories and entails a defense of affirmation on nondialectical grounds.
It would, of course, be ill-advised to speak of “post-Hegelian thought” or “contemporary French philosophy” as if it were a univocal signifier and true universal. Clearly, the philosophers of difference have differences among them, and for some, the very notion of difference is a matter of indifference. And yet my narrative continues with Lacan, Deleuze, and Foucault in that they all concern themselves with a theme that, however indirectly, connects them with the Hegelian tradition: the subject of desire. The problem of ontological difference and the notion of the human subject, their interrelatedness in the Hegelian tradition, are given a radical reformulation, especially when desire is no longer understood to denote the metaphysical projects of a self-identical subject. Although Derrida is clearly influenced by Hegel, he nevertheless excludes himself from the discourse on desire. Indeed, in Glas, he argues that desire is a theme that is restricted to an anthropocentric discourse on presence, although he does not elaborate on this suggestion.5 The “anthropocentrism” of the discourse on desire, however, will be taken up in my final considerations of Foucault.
In the above discussion of Kojève, Hyppolite, and Sartre, we saw the growing instability of the subject, its placelessness, its imaginary solutions, its various strategies for escaping its own inevitable insubstantiality. The desire to create a metaphysically pleasurable fictive world, fully present and devoid of negativity, reveals the human subject in its metaphysical aspirations as a maker of false presences, constructed unities, merely imagined satisfactions. Sartre’s biographical studies in particular construe the subject itself as a fictive unity projected in words. While the subject in Hegel is projected and then recovered, in Sartre it is projected endlessly without recovery, but nevertheless knows itself in its estrangement and so remains a unitary consciousness, reflexively self-identical. In the psychoanalytic structuralism of Lacan and in the Nietzschean writings of Deleuze and Foucault, the subject is once again understood as a projected unity, but this projection disguises and falsifies the multiplicitous disunity constitutive of experience, whether conceived as libidinal forces, the will-to-power, or the various strategies of power/discourse.
The difference between Sartre’s Hegelianism and the post-Hegelianism of structuralism and post-structuralism becomes clear in the reformulation of desire and “projection.” For the Sartre of The Family Idiot, human desire always implicitly serves the project of self-knowledge; it dramatizes the self, the specific history of negativity that characterizes any individual, and this projection provides the condition for self-recognition. Hence, the fictive projection of the self is always an informative or transparent fiction, an occasion for recuperative knowledge, a fiction immanently philosophical. For Sartre, the Hegelian project of desire is evident in the rhetorical dramatization of desire in which a fiction (unreality) is articulated (realized), the negative magically transformed into being. Hence, for Sartre, the externalization of desire is always potentially the dramatic revelation of identity, the unitary agency of choice which serves as the unifying principle of any given life. In very different ways for Lacan, Deleuze, and Foucault, the projected self is a false construct imposed upon an experience that eludes the category of identity altogether. At its most general level, the subject is postulated in an effort to impose a fabricated unity on desire, where desire is now understood as the multiplicity and discontinuity of affective experience which challenges the integrity of the subject itself.
In the considerations that follow, I will trace the effect of the broken dialectic on the fate of the subject, the reconceptualization of desire, pleasure, and the body outside of dialectical terms, and, lastly, I will consider the status of this “outside.” Why, it seems we must ask, do these post-Hegelians return to the scenes of the Phenomenology in order to make their anti-Hegelian points? What peculiar form of philosophical fidelity implicitly structures these rebellions against Hegel? Or is rebellion successful, and what kinds of analyses does this deposing of Hegel permit?
Psychoanalysis alone recognizes this knot of imaginary servitude that love must always undo again, or sever.—Lacan, Écrits
The work of Jacques Lacan not only appropriates the Hegelian discourse on desire, but radically limits the scope and meaning of desire through the transposition of certain themes from the Phenomenology onto a psychoanalytic and structuralist framework. For Lacan, desire can no longer be equated with the fundamental structure of human rationality; Eros and Logos resist an Hegelian conflation. Desire can no longer be said to reveal, express, or thematize the reflexive structure of consciousness, but is, rather, the precise moment of consciousness’ opacity. Desire is that which consciousness in its reflexivity seeks to conceal. Indeed, desire is the moment of longing that consciousness may be said to suffer, but which is only “revealed” through the displacements, ruptures, and fissures of consciousness itself. Hence, desire is only indicated by the discontinuities in consciousness, and so is to be understood as the internal incoherence of consciousness itself.
For Lacan, then, desire comes to signify the impossibility of a coherent subject, where the “subject” is understood to be a conscious and self-determining agency. This agency is always already signified by a prior and more efficacious signifier, the unconscious. The subject is thus split off from an original libidinal unity with the maternal body; in psychoanalytic terms, this split is the primary repression that effects individuation. Desire is, then, the expression of a longing for the return to the origin that, if recoverable, would necessitate the dissolution of the subject itself. Hence, desire is destined for an imaginary life in which it remains haunted and governed by a libidinal memory it cannot possibly recollect. For Lacan, this impossible longing affirms the subject as the limit to satisfaction. And the ideal of satisfaction necessitates the imagined dissolution of the subject itself. The subject can no longer be understood as the agency of its desire, or as the very structure of desire itself; the subject of desire has emerged as an internal contradiction. Founded as a necessary defense against the libidinal fusion with the maternal body, the subject is understood as the product of a prohibition. Desire is the residue of that early union, the affective memory of a pleasure prior to individuation. Desire is thus both an effort to dissolve the subject that bars the way to that pleasure and the contemporary evidence of that pleasure’s irrecoverability.
The internal contradiction of the subject cannot be resolved through the creation of a dialectical synthesis, and neither can it be understood in terms of an insoluble paradox. The bar or prohibition that separates the subject from the unconscious is a negative relation which fails to mediate what it separates. In other words, the negativity of repression cannot be understood on the model of Hegelian Aufhebung, and the difference that is posited between the unconscious and the subject is not an “internal” difference characterizing a more inclusive unity. Indeed, the splitting of the subject that occurs must be conceptualized as the positing of a difference between unity (the founding pretense of the subject) and disunity (the irrecoverability of the unconscious). This difference, then, is constitutive of the subject as a necessarily split phenomenon.
Lacan’s quarrel with the Hegelian notion of Aufhebung becomes clear in a dialogue with Hyppolite, recorded in the French edition of Écrits, in which the meaning of Verneinung or denial is disputed.6 For Hyppolite, the negation that characterizes the action of denial is a double-negation and, hence, productive of a synthetic structure. The denial of any given event or desire is simultaneously a way of giving existence to that which is being denied. In other words, denial is a positive act which seeks to negate a given thing, but culminates in an inversion of intention whereby that which is denied gains a new significance. Denial is thus understood as a determinate negation, a peculiar modality in which a given thing is posited. Moreover, that which is denied (negated) is itself some form of negativity, some form of longing or desire, some event or scene that is already forgotten, some content of the unconscious, so that denial itself becomes a double-negation, a paradoxical way in which a negativity is brought into language. Hyppolite understands this action of double-negation as the very structure of Eros,7 the constructive or creative movement of rendering negativity positive. The positing of the negation is understood to be its thematization, the way in which it becomes designated in and through the modality of negation.
Lacan takes issue with the dialectical grace of Hyppolite’s explanation. For Lacan, the “lack” characteristic of an unconscious content can never be properly thematized, and the denial in which it is embodied does not act as a positive relation internally related to that which is denied. Indeed, denial operates through the mechanism of displacement and substitution with the consequence that what is posited through the act of denial has no necessary relation to what is being denied, but is only associatively related to what is being denied. For Hyppolite, what is negated is taken up by that which is posited and remains an intrinsic feature of that position; as a result, the negative is always indicated and revealed through what is posited; indeed, the negative is subordinated to the position and necessarily becomes positive through any act of positive representation. The Hegelian conceit which structures Hyppolite’s position requires that language is able to represent the negative, transforming negativity into positive being, and that language itself is medium of positivity which allows for that wholesale transformation.
Lacan, however, argues that signifying the negative only happens through a displacement of the signified, and that the language that is intended to represent or indicate the negative can only succeed in a further deflection and concealment of the negative. In other words, the positivity of language is part of the strategem of denial itself, and representation generally is understood to be founded in a necessary repression of the unconscious. What is posited, the sign, is only arbitrarily related to what is negated, the signified, and there is no logical way to discover the signified through an examination of the sign. Indeed, for Lacan, denial is not a double-negation that obliquely reveals what it is designed to conceal, but, rather, a negation that gives rise to a set of substitutions, a proliferation of positives, a chain of metonymic associations. The associative links between these substitute representations reiterate the negation at their origin, revealing the rupture between language and the unconscious again and again without that revelation effecting a reparation of any kind. Language is no longer understood to be internally related to the negative, but is conceived as that which not only rests upon the splitting off of the subject from the unconscious, but continuously effects this splitting off through the mechanism of displacement and substitution. This is a “difference” that cannot be superseded, but only reiterated—endlessly. Indeed, it is fundamental to signification itself as the constitutive difference between sign and signified.
Lacan explicitly criticizes Hegel for restricting his analysis of desire to an analysis of self-consciousness or, in psychoanalytic terms, to consciousness. As a result, the unconscious is disregarded as the signifier of conscious activity, and conscious agency is privileged as the false locus of the signifier. The split between consciousness and the unconscious has consequences for the fundamental opacity of desire. Thus, Lacan criticizes Hegel for disregarding the opacity of the unconscious and for extending the Cartesian presumption of transparent consciousness:
The promotion of consciousness as being essential to the subject in the historical after-effects of the Cartesian cogito is for me the deceptive accentuation of the transparency of the “I” in action at the expense of the opacity of the signifier that determines the “I”; and the sliding movement [glissement] by which the Bewusstsein serves to cover up the confusion of the Selbst eventually reveals, with all Hegel’s own rigour, the reason for his error in The Phenomenology of Spirit. (Écrits 307)
For Lacan, the “opacity of the signifier that determines the ‘I’” is not Sartre’s pre-reflective dimension of the “I”, nor Hegel’s unrealized but immanently realizable experience of self-consciousness as mediated reflexivity, but the unconscious as a chain of signifiers that interferes repeatedly with the coherent, seamless self-presentation of the conscious subject. The unconscious is not conceived topographically by Lacan, but as the various negativities—gaps, holes, fissures—that mark the speech of the “I.” Structured as a series of metonymic significations, the unconscious is manifest in speech “at that point, where, between cause and that which it affects, there is always something wrong” (FFCP 22). This opacity which emerges in the midst of a broken causal chain designates a prohibition, that which has been precluded from realization. The conscious subject cannot account for this discontinuity through recourse to itself, because it is subjected to this discontinuity, signified by the unconscious which is the absent signifier.
The unconscious first appears as a phenomenon in the form of discontinuity and vacillation (Écrits 299). It is a metonymic system of signification to the extent that it makes itself known through substitute representations internally unrelated to the unconscious itself. The unconscious as signifier is only arbitrarily related to consciousness, or the subject, as signified, and the ontological discrepancy between them indicates the irrecoverable opacity of the unconscious. And yet the subject can be understood both as a product of the signifier, and as a defense against its recovery.
The unconscious is the unrealized (FFCP 30) which only becomes present in speech as a “vacillation” in displacement, condensation, negation (Verneinung) and other metonymic significations. In Lacan’s words, “the gap of the unconscious may be said to be pre-ontological” in the sense that it precedes the ontology of the subject, and constitutes a universal beyond dispute. In effect, the unconscious delimits the context in which any discourse on ontology can take place. The function of the unconscious in any individual indicates this universal function, although in no case does the breach between signifier and signified become resolved in an overarching Hegelian synthesis (Écrits 29).
As Lacan explains;
If there still remains something prophetic in Hegel’s insistence on the fundamental identity of the particular and the universal, an insistence that reveals the measure of his genius, it is certainly psychoanalysis that provides it with its paradigm by revealing the structure in which that identity is realized as disjunctive of the subject, and without any appeal to tomorrow. (Écrits 80)
The disjointed individual, better described as the signifier and the subject, maintains a kind of split or alienation which cannot be overcome through a progressive journey of any kind. There is “no appeal to tomorrow” precisely because this disjunction is constitutive of human experience and human culture universally. An appeal to “tomorrow” would be an appeal beyond culture itself; hence, an impossibility. The unconscious is a kind of negativity which achieves being through a substitute conscious representation, but this expression is arbitrary, and the difference between signifier and signified irretraversible. The positing of the Lacanian unconscious thus implicitly raises a philosophical question of how we are to know the unconscious if the only means of its representation are in consciousness, and consciousness has no mimetic or structurally isomorphic relationship to the unconscious.
When the analysand speaks in a psychoanalytic session, Lacan suggests that it is necessary to bracket the subject who seems to speak and to ask, “‘Who is speaking?’ when it is the voice of the unconscious that is at issue. For this reply cannot come from the subject if he does not know what he is saying, or even if he is speaking, as the entire experience of analysis has taught us” (Écrits 299). The speech of the analysand is said to reverberate with the significations of the unconscious: “The relation of the subject to the signifier—a relation that is embodied in the enunciation (enonciation) whose being trembles with the vacillation that comes back to it from its own statement (énoncé)” (Écrits 300). Hence, the unconscious can be heard in the meanings a statement creates that are unintended by the speaker. The associations that a given statement evokes in the language in which it is spoken are metonymic significations which structure the unconscious itself. The unconscious is the Other, for Lacan, and the chain of signifiers, the link of metonymic associations in language is itself the unconscious. Hence, to be in language is to be presented with an ineradicable Other, the otherness of signification itself, its constant escape from subjective intentions. Hence, it is not the subject that is estranged from itself, in which case a principle of identity would still tacitly hold, but the subject from the signifier itself.
Lacan accounts for this split in terms of the repression of oedipal desires, a founding prohibition, which survives in desire as the Law of the Signifier and conditions the individuation of the subject. This primary repression also constitutes desire as a lack, a response to an originary separation which is less the separation of birth than the result of prohibited incestuous union. For Lacan, desire is a “want-to-be,” a manque-à-être (FFCP 29), which is perpetually frustrated because of its subjection to the Law of the Signifier, i.e., because it is in language but, therefore, only obliquely present; hence, desire appears together with its prohibition, and so takes the form of a necessary ambivalence.
Elaborating upon Freud’s distinction between the object and the aim of the drive,8 Lacan understands the tacit project of desire to be the recovery of the past through a future which, of necessity, prohibits it; desire is the pathos of the cultural being, the postoedipal subject: “Desire… is a lack engendered from the previous time that serves to reply to the lack raised by the following time” (FFCP 215). The prohibition that constitutes desire is precisely what precludes its final satisfaction; hence, desire is constantly running up against a limit which, paradoxically, is what sustains it as desire. Desire is the restless activity of human beings, that which maintains its disquiet in relation to a necessary limit: “Desire, more than any other point in the range of human possibility, meets its limit somewhere” (Écrits 31).
Like Kojève, Lacan accepts a distinction between animal and human desire, although “animal desire” is now termed “need,” while desire is exclusively human. Also like Kojève, desire for Lacan is distinguished in and through its manifestation in speech. For Kojève, the speaking of desire precipitates the “I” as an inadvertent consequence; the first-person singular retrospectively emerges as a necessary precondition of the articulation of desire. Lacan accepts the verbalization of desire as its necessary precondition, but maintains that the metonymic chain of associations which desire be-speaks is the locus of its intractable opacity. Following Hyppolite, Lacan agrees that desire is always desire for the Other, but he maintains that this desire can never be satisfied inasmuch as the Other, the unconscious, remains at least partially opaque. Moreover, desire is not to be identified with the rational project of the subject, something Hegel and Kojève seem readily to accept, but exists as the discrepancy between need (biological drive) and demand (which is always the demand for love, for thorough recognition through the recovery of preoedipal union). “Thus desire is neither appetite for satisfaction, nor the demand for love, but the difference which arises from the subtraction of the first from the second, the phenomenon of their splitting (Spaltung)” (Écrits 287).
Here we begin to see the very different relation between desire and language that Lacan maintains over and against his Hegelian precursors. Clearly, for Kojève, the speaking of desire is internally related to desire itself; speaking is desire’s rhetorical enactment, its necessary complement and expression. Indeed, for Sartre as well, expression is always an inadvertent affirmation of desire; and rhetoric generally, from Hegel through Sartre, effects a unification of phenomena even when a negation or distinction is being spoken. The implicit view of language as a set of internal relations, a web that binds discrepancies together, is maintained by all of the Hegelian thinkers considered here. Lacan differs dramatically in accepting Saussure’s position that the signifier determines the signified but is not directly manifest in it; hence, it is the breakage between signifier and signified that generates significance, not the revelation of their previously hidden unity. Lacan is clear about the transposition: “If linguistics enables us to see the signifier as the determinant of the signified, analysis reveals the truth of this relation by making ‘holes’ in the meaning of the determinants of [the subject’s] discourse” (Écrits 299). Desire, then, appears as a gap, a discrepancy, an absent signifier and thus only appears as that which cannot appear. The speaking of desire does not resolve this negation. Hence, desire is never materialized or concretized through language, but is indicated through the interstices of language, that is, what language cannot represent: “In the interval intersecting the signifiers, which forms part of the very structure of the signifier, is the locus of what… I have called metonymy. It is there that what we call desire crawls, slips, escapes, like the ferret” (FFCP 214).
For Lacan, then, desire is always linked with a project of impossible recovery, where what is to be recovered is both the repressed libidinal field constitutive of the unconscious, and the “lost object,” the preoedipal mother. This project of recovery is impossible precisely because the subject desires to be identical with the signifier, and yet such an identification is precluded by language itself. Indeed, the subject is what replaces the lost object and can be understood to be the incorporation of that loss. Hence, the subject is, according to Lacan, “the introduction of a loss into reality”9 and the speech of such a loss-ridden subject is itself riddled with absences. Moreover, that speech at once indicates the “loss” it represents, and also bespeaks the desire to overcome that loss; hence, that speech is governed by the pursuit of the phantasm of the Other that is lost.
For Lacan, then, the speech of the subject is of necessity a speech of displaced desire, one that constantly analogizes the lost object with the present object, and constructs false certainties on the basis of partial similarities. The subject who speaks is a “fading” subject, one who is constantly fading into the unconscious that the subject represents, i.e., the loss that the subject represents, that which the subject desires; the subject is constantly vacillating between its own particularity and the lost Other who, in effect, is also represented by it.
Lacan thus understands desire to be a principle of linguistic displacement, and to be present in the metonymic function of all signification. In “Of Structure as an Inmixing of an Otherness Prerequisite to Any Subject Whatever,” Lacan explains:
The question of desire is that the fading subject yearns to find itself again by means of some sort of encounter with this miraculous thing defined by the phantasm. In its endeavour it is sustained by that which I call the lost object… which is such a terrible thing for the imagination. That which is produced and maintained here, and which in my vocabulary I call the object, lower-case, a, is well known by all psychoanalysts as all psychoanalysis is founded on the existence of this peculiar object. But the relation between this barred subject with this object (a) is the structure which is always found in the phantasm which supports desire, in as much as desire is only that which I have called the metonymy of all signification, (p. 194)
The effect of desire’s articulation is the perpetual displacement of the signified. Inasmuch as the demand for love present in desire is a demand for the proof or evidence of love, desire is coordinated not with the object that would satisfy it, but with an originally lost object. This object, conceived psychoanalytically as the preoedipal mother, is, of course, prohibited through the Law of the Father, in Lacan’s terms, which is consonant with the Law of the Signifier. When Lacan states that “Man’s desire is the desire of the Other,” this is his version of the Absolute, for the desire of the Other is both the origin and final aim of the demand for love. This Absolute, this “being” that is lacked, is also termed jouissance, the fullness of pleasure which, in Lacanian terms, is always frustrated by the oedipally conditioned pain of individuation. Because it is “castration which governs desire” (Écrits p. 323), “desire is a defence (défense) and a prohibition (défense) against going beyond a certain limit in jouissance” (Écrits p. 322). It is the world of desire before the subject becomes discrete that is the nostalgic ideal of desire:
What am “I”? “I” am in the place from which a voice is heard clamouring, “the universe is a defect in the purity of Non-Being.” And not without reason, for by protecting itself this place makes Being itself languish. This place is called jouissance, and it is the absence of this that makes the universe vain. (Écrits. p. 317)
Inasmuch as desire implicitly seeks an impossible recovery of jouissance through an Other who is not the original object of desire, the process of desire becomes a necessary series of méconnaissances which are never wholly illuminated. Insofar as repression founds desire, deception is desire’s necessary counterpart. The desire of the Other’s desire is thus only possible through listening to what is not said, what is denied, omitted, displaced: “The desire of the Other is apprehended by the subject in that which does not work, in the lacks of the discourse of the Other” (FFCP p. 214). This is not a kind of listening that belongs to the rarefied domain of the psychoanalytic listener, but is evidenced in and through the child’s desire: “A lack is encountered by the subject in the Other, in the very intimation that the Other makes to him by his discourse. In the intervals of the discourse of the Other, there emerges in the experience of the child something that is radically mappable, namely, He is saying this to me, but what does he mean?” (FFCP p. 214).
The “meaning” that the child asks after is more than the subject’s intention, but is something akin to the metonymic interminability of the Other. Lacan asks,
is there not, reproduced here, the element of alienation that I designated for you in the foundation of the subject as such? If it is merely at the level of desire of the Other that man can recognize his desire, as desire of the Other, is there not something here that must appear as an obstacle to his fading, which is a point at which his desire can never be recognized? This obstacle is never lifted, nor ever to be lifted, for analytic experience shows us that it is in seeing a whole chain come into play at the level of the Other that the subject’s desire is constituted. (FFCP p. 235)
This chain of metonymic significations, associations, and substitutions, which re-present the desire of the Other, is simultaneously a displacement of that desire, so that the effort to know desire is always deflected from its course.
Lacan takes issue with Hegel precisely on this point. According to Lacan, Hegel conflates eros and logos, linking all desire to the desire for self-knowledge. In this sense, desire is subjected to the overriding project of knowledge, evidenced by the early supersession of desire in the Phenomenology.10 Assuming that the Hegelian subject is self-transparent, Lacan credits psychoanalysis with introducing the notion of opacity into the Hegelian doctrine of desire:
For in Hegel it is desire (Begierde) that is given the responsibility for that minimum connection with ancient knowledge (connaissance) that the subject must retain if truth is to be immanent in the realization of knowledge (savoir). Hegel’s “cunning of reason” means that, from beginning to end, the subject knows what it wants. It is here that Freud reopens the juncture between truth and knowledge to the mobility out of which revolutions come. In this respect: that desire becomes bound up with the desire of the Other, but that in this loop lies the desire to know. (Écrits 301)
Lacan’s criticism assumes that Hegel’s subject, in fact, “knows what it wants,” when we have seen that this subject systematically misidentifies the object of desire; indeed, Lacan’s own term, méconnaissance, might well serve to describe the misadventures of Hegel’s traveling subject. And yet it is clear that the “cunning of reason” can operate as a metaphysical finesse in effecting the transitions between chapters in the Phenomenology, and it makes sense to ask whether some relentless logos does not direct the Hegelian show from the start. The subject itself, however, does not know what it wants from the start, although it may implicitly be all that it does come to know about itself in the course of the Phenomenology. Hence, this subject constantly misidentifies the Absolute in much the same way that the Lacanian subject of desire remains lured by an ever-elusive jouissance. In disregarding the comedy of errors that mark the Hegelian subject’s travels, Lacan unjustifiably attributes Cartesian self-transparency to the Hegelian subject. The fact remains that the very meaning of the Absolute changes for the subject of the Phenomenology, and as that notion of the Absolute changes, so, too, does the scope and structure of the subject.
Lacan’s argument that the philosophical impulse, the desire to know (the love of wisdom), emerges from within the circle of the desire of the desire of the Other, is, indeed, a striking departure from the Hegelian program. Lacan’s position seems to be that knowledge only becomes a relevant pursuit for human beings inasmuch as they desire the desire of the Other. In seeking to know what is meant behind what is said, in listening to the negativities of the speaker in order to hear his desire, human beings become pursuers of knowledge, but this pursuit is always conditioned and contextualized by the chain of signifiers, the interminable metonymy of the Other. Hence, Lacan offers here a sketch of what a psychoanalytic understanding of the philosophical impulse might be like. Desire would be less the consummation of philosophical truths than its disavowed condition, the truth it defends against. Inasmuch as philosophy savors the postulation of a self-adequate subject, philosophical discourse purports to say all that it means, and never to mean more than it actually says. The psychoanalytic deconstruction of philosophy would, then, consist in listening to the lacks and gaps in philosophical discourse, and theorizing on that basis what kind of defense against desire the philosophical project seems to be.
And yet, for Lacan, Hegel’s formulation is not wholly wrong, for as demand, desire is a project of knowledge. Although desire cannot be assimilated to demand, existing as the differential between demand and need, it nevertheless maintains something of the transcendental pursuit of presence which we have seen in the Hegelian thinkers. Lacan explains, “Demand in itself bears on something other than the satisfactions it calls for. It is demand of a presence or of an absence—which is manifested in the primordial relationship to the mother.… Demand constitutes the Other as already possessing the ‘privilege’ of satisfying needs, that is to say, the power of depriving them of that alone by which they are satisfied” (Écrits 286). Demand seeks proof of love rather than satisfaction, and thus wants to know that the Other can offer an unconditional love. Thus, the offerings of this Other are not measured by the satisfaction they accord, the pleasure or the fulfillment of needs, but only as signs of unconditional love, Lacan’s psychoanalytic reformulation of Hegelian recognition. The transcendental feature of demand manifests its utter disregard for particular shows of affection, or, rather, it reads each and every particular show for the unconditional proof of love it may represent. In fact, demand can result in the utter renunciation of needs, for the satisfaction of needs appears as the presence of so many false particulars, random and insignificant shows of attention of no use to the unconditional demand for love. In this context, desire emerges as a sacrificial mediator, one for which the accomplishment of mediation is impossible. Desire enacts the paradox of need and demand and, like Kierkegaardian passion, can never effect a harmonious unity between particular needs and universal demands, but can only elaborate the contradiction, pursuing the impossible in the mundane without promise.
Lacan can be seen to reformulate his Hegelian precursors. Desire emerges for Lacan as a necessarily paradoxical activity, and in this regard we can see his version of desire as a psychoanalytic transposition of Hyppolite’s notion of paradoxical desire. In showing how need continues to reside in the exercise of desire, Lacan reveals Kojève’s strict distinction between desire and need as phenomenologically naive. Moreover, the articulation of desire in speech reveals the problem with the essentially romantic symbolism that governs the theories of language and expression in Hegel, Kojève, Hyppolite, and Sartre. In these cases, language is always understood as an object’s further life, its necessary externalization, its most explicit form, the dialectical conclusion of its development. For Lacan, language always signifies a rupture between signifier and signified, an irretraversible externality, with the further consequence that linguistic signification is a series of substitutions that can never reclaim an original meaning. In effect, to be in language means to be infinitely displaced from original meaning. And because desire is constituted within this linguistic field, it is constantly after what it does not really want, and is always wanting what it cannot finally have. Desire thus signifies a domain of irreparable contradiction.
Although Lacan further breaks down Hegel’s doctrine of internal relations, he nevertheless remains within Hegelian discourse to the extent that demand retains the Hegelian ideal, and desire remains the bearer of this ontological bad news. In fact, Lacan finds in Hegel’s dialectic of desire a preferable discourse to the physiological discourse on “instinct” that predominates in some psychoanalytic circles. Fully aware of the false promises of progression and unity that Hegel’s phenomenological explanations offer, Lacan nevertheless remains convinced that Hegel’s dialectic contains features of universal value, features that are indirectly confirmed by the findings of both structural linguistics and psychoanalysis. Lacan objects to the standard English translation of Trieb as instinct, and argues that the Hegelian notion of desire contains the ambiguity that Freud originally intended the drive (Trieb: literally, push or drive) to have.11 Countering the naturalistic reading of drives as physiologically based and constituted, Lacan argues that, for Freud, the natural is always tempered by the unnatural, indeed, that naturalness is a paradoxical signification inasmuch as it is always expressed in a linguistic discourse which intrinsically denies the “natural” as an isolable domain:
What psychoanalysis shows us about desire in what might be called its most natural function, since on it depends the propagation of the species, is not only that it is subjected, in its agency, its appropriation, its normality, in short, to the accidents of the subject’s history (the notion of trauma as contingency), but also that all this requires the co-operation of structural elements, which, in order to intervene, can do very well without these accidents, whose effects, so unharmonious, so unexpected, so difficult to reduce, certainly seem to leave to experience a remainder that drove Freud to admit that sexuality must bear the mark of some unnatural slip (fêlure), (Écrits 310)
The demand for love under which desire labors, that is, in the shadow of which it always exists, is not itself reducible to physiological need. The specifically human desire for unconditional recognition cannot be further reduced to a crude materialism of affective life. Lacan views Hegel as a crucial corrective to the reductive materialism of a physiologically based psychoanalytic theory:
Need I now say that if one understands what sort of support we have sought in Hegel to criticize a degradation of psychoanalysis so inept that it can find no other claim to interest than being the psychoanalysis of today, it is inadmissible that I should be thought of as having been lured by a dialectical exhaustion of being. (Écrits 302)
Because desire is the differential between demand and need, it exists, as it were, midway between silence and speech. Need is always evident as a subjective opacity, but it is always diversified and reduced (Écrits 309) through language, although never adequately expressed therein. Between the intractable silence of need and the logocentric clamor of demand, desire is the moment in which the limits to language are incessantly problematized. Lacan’s firm conviction that no logical or linguistic form could reconcile this difference marks his break with Hegel’s ontological optimism: “Far from ceding to a logicizing reduction where it is a question of desire, I find in its irreducibility to demand the very source of that which also prevents it from being reduced to need. To put it elliptically: it is precisely because desire is articulated that it is not articulate” (Écrits 302).
Lacan thus defends Hegel when he opposes the naturalization of psychoanalytic theory, and criticizes Hegel—and Sartre—when he argues against the postulation of an autonomous subject. In effect, both the physiological and philosophical positions misunderstand desire as the differential between demand and need. In Hegelian terms, they are false solutions to a paradox; in anti-Hegelian terms, the paradox is intrinsically insoluble. In criticizing the psychoanalytic appropriation of “instinct,” Lacan makes use of both Hegel and Sartre, but insists upon a psychoanalytic criticism of the self-grounding of consciousness. The notion of negativity appears as that which must be superseded from its Hegelian and Sartrian context; the negative must be transposed from the domain of the subject to that of the signifier, and only then will Hegelianism be able to survive on psychoanalytic grounds. This becomes clear in Lacan’s assessment of “the death instinct,” that source of aggression in the face of an Other which parallels the opening paragraphs of Hegel’s rendition of lordship and bondage. In trying to explain “the evident connection between the narcissistic libido and the alienating function of the ‘I’ [and] the aggression it releases in any relation to the other,” Lacan notes that “the first analysts… invoked destructive and, indeed, death instincts” (Écrits 6). Lacan suggests that these analysts might have benefited from a psychoanalytic appropriation of the philosophical notion of negativity:
In fact, they were encountering the existential negativity whose reality is so vigorously proclaimed by the contemporary philosophy of being and nothingness. But unfortunately that philosophy grasps negativity only within the limits of a self-sufficiency of consciousness, which, as one of its premises, links to the méconnaissances that constitute the ego, the illusion of autonomy to which it entrusts itself. This flight of fancy, for all that it draws, to an unusual extent, on borrowings from psychoanalytic experience, culminates in the pretension of providing an existential psychoanalysis. (Écrits 6)
The task of the psychoanalyst is thus to grasp negativity within the relation of signifier and subject. Lacan suggests that such a transposition is to be found in the notion of Verneinung12 or denial that we considered earlier: “if the Verneinung represents the patent form of that function, its effects will, for the most part, remain latent, so long as they are not illuminated by some light reflected onto the level of fatality, which is where the id manifests itself” (Écrits 6–7). This “level of fatality” is understood as the repressed oedipal conflict which, for Lacan, is described as a life and death struggle. Repression occurs under the imaginary threat of “murder,” the punishment for incestuous desires, which leads Lacan to question “whether murder is the absolute Master” (Écrits 308). The repression of incestuous impulses punishable by death eventually gives rise to a speech riddled with Verneinung, disavowal, denial. Similarly, the desire for the death of the prohibitive father constitutes another sphere of primary repression, which in turn is manifest as a pronounced negativity in speech. The psychoanalytic appropriation of negativity is thus to be understood within the double-negation of repression and disavowal (Verneinung), an escape from an imaginary death which itself must be denied. The prohibitive law enacted through repression creates the double-negation of neurosis, and the “aggression” discerned in relation to Others gains its significance in the context of the oedipally conditioned life and death struggle. The aggression against the Other is the aggression against the prohibitive law, the nom du père, the limit to desire. This aggression can be understood as existential negativity, a negativity that, through its own negation, constructs a subject, in the sense that repression grounds the ego itself. In effect, the fear of death grounds individuation, and this is as true of the oedipally conditioned ego as it is for the trembling bondsman of the Phenomenology of Spirit. For Lacan, this is made clear by Lévi-Strauss’ argument that the incest taboo conditions all acculturation. Hence, for Lacan, the threat of death emerges as a consequence of the law, and because the law is itself an intractable and universal feature of culture, all identity finds itself grounded in the fear, not simply of death, but of murder.
But it becomes necessary to ask, who is afraid in this scene and of whom? In psychoanalytic terms, it is the young boy who suffers the murderous injunctions of the incest taboo, and the paternal law that is understood to be that which is capable of inflicting punishment. Although Lacan’s writings on sexual difference are highly indebted to Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, he explains the effect of the oedipal complex in radically different terms. For Lacan, the oedipal complex does not designate an event or primary scene that could be empirically verified, but indicates instead a set of linguistic laws that are foundational to gender and individuation.13 The incest taboo is not a law pronounced at a crucial moment of early sexual confusion and thereafter retained as a burning memory; rather, this taboo makes itself known in a variety of gradual and subtle ways. Indeed, the paternally enforced prohibition against union with the mother is coextensive with language itself, and makes itself understood in the elementary structures of reference and differentiation, particularly in the structures of pronominal reference. Just as Lévi-Strauss was to claim that the incest taboo is foundational to all kinship, so Lacan argues that the paternally enforced taboo against incest is foundational to language itself. It is operative in the primary forms of differentiation that separate the child from the mother, and that locate the child within a network of kinship relations. The prohibition against incest not only regulates and forbids certain kinds of behavior, but also generates and sanctions other kinds of behavior, and thus becomes instrumental in giving a socially sanctioned form to desire. This system of linguistic differentiation is understood to be based upon the differentiated relations of kinship, and differentiation itself is said to characterize language in its inception. Indeed, the process of differentiation itself is a consequence of the prohibition against incest. This language based on principle of differentiation is understood as the Symbolic and is considered by Lacan to be a language governed by the Phallus or, more appropriately, governed by the fear of the Phallus, the effects of paternal law.14 The Phallus is thus understood to be the organizing principle of all kinship and all language. We never confront this law in an immediate or direct way, but the law makes itself known in the mundane operations of signification. The Phallus is not one symbolic order among others, but designates the symbolic order that conditions all signification and, hence, all meaning (as Foucault says of the Lacanian position, “we are always-already trapped” (HS 54)). Hence, the infant’s entrance into language is coincident with the emergence of the Law of the Father, the phallocentric system of meaning. In yet other words, the human subject only becomes a discrete “I” within the matrix of gender rules. Hence, to exist as a subject is to exist as a gendered being, “subjected” to the Law of the Father which requires that sexual desire remain within the rules of gender; in fact, the subject’s sexual desire is dictated, sanctioned, and punished by the rules of gender.
The constitution of the subject is initiated by the paternal law and is itself based on the splitting off of the male subject from its maternal attachment and identification. The male subject not only renounces its pre-linguistic libidinal attachment to the mother, but posits the feminine itself as the locus of a “lack.”15 Because the male subject retains its longing for the pre-linguistic fusion with the maternal body, he constructs the feminine as the imaginary site of satisfaction. Defined in terms of this gender-specific scenario, desire appears to be sanctioned as a male prerogative. Female desire follows the course of a “double-alienation”—a renunciation of the mother and a shift of libidinal attachment to the father that is then prohibited and displaced. Although the mother is renounced as an object of desire for the girl, she nevertheless remains an object of identification. As a result, the task of female sexual development is to signify the mother both for herself (the appropriation of the object through incorporation and identification) and for the male subject (who requires a substitute representation of the prohibited mother). For Lacan, then, female desire is resolved through the full appropriation of femininity, that is, in becoming a pure reflector for male desire, the imaginary site of an absolute satisfaction. The “double-alienation” of the woman is thus a double-alienation from desire itself; the woman learns to embody the promise of a return to a preoedipal pleasure, and to limit her own desire to those gestures that effectively mirror his desire as absolute. For Lacan, the differentiation of genders must be understood as a difference between those with the privilege to desire, and those who are without it. Hence, it is not possible to refer to a female desire inasmuch as this desire consists in a double-renunciation of desire itself. To desire at all means to participate in the right to desire, a right that the male still retains; although he cannot desire the original object, he can nevertheless still desire, if only a substitute object. The particular fate of the female, however, is to deflect from satisfaction twice, and in the course of the second deflection (becoming that which is desired for a man who is deflecting from his mother), she is obliged to become a sign or a token of the forbidden maternal, an ideal or fantasy which can never be fully appropriated, by only “believed in.”16
For Lacan, it seems, desire is still in search of the Absolute, but this desire has become specified as a male desire, and this Absolute is understood to be the fantasy of maternal fulfillment that women are obliged to represent. Lacan’s position poses the question of the psychoanalytic constitution of the Absolute, that is, the constitution of a belief in an ultimate satisfaction which is at once a memory of lost infantile jouissance and a fantasy of its recovery. Indeed, it is unclear that this primary, undifferentiated pleasure can really be said to have existed, considering that our only access to this pleasure is through a language that is predicated on its denial. The Absolute, then, might just as well be a fantasy of lost and forbidden pleasure rather than a memory or actual stage of infantile development. It makes sense, then, to ask whether Lacan has not rediscovered a religious dream of plentitude in a fantasy of lost pleasure that he himself has constructed. Although Lacan understands himself to have refuted the possibility of a dialectical pursuit of plentitude, a seamless web of internal relations, the belief in such a state is evident in the nostalgia that, according to Lacan, characterizes all human desire.
There are a number of reasons to reject Lacan’s psychoanalytic account of desire, of sexual difference, his assumptions regarding the cross-cultural prevalence and function of the incest taboo, but such a discussion would take us into a wholly different inquiry. And yet, there is one kind of objection that appears to concern Lacan’s feminist critics as well as his philosophical successors: the prohibitive law, the Law of the Father, appears to act in a universal fashion and is considered to be foundational to all language and culture. An original experience of pleasure is understood to be prohibited and repressed, and desire emerges as a “lack,” an ambivalent longing that embodies that prohibition even as it seeks to transgress it. Is it necessarily the case that desire is not only founded by prohibition, but structured in terms of it? Is the law so rigid? And is satisfaction always so phantasmatic?
The postulation of an Urverdrängung, or primary repression, which constitutes the subject, and the consequent formulation of desire as a lack, requires that we accept this juridical model of the law as the fundamental political and cultural relation informing the structure of desire. In the works of Deleuze and Foucault, it is precisely this structuralist assumption of the primacy of juridical law and the formulation of desire in terms of the binary opposites of lack and plentitude that come into question. Both Deleuze and Foucault accept Lacan’s decentering of the Hegelian subject, and his postulation of the cultural construction of desire, but they view his psychoanalytic program as exemplifying the illness it is meant to cure; they argue that the reification of the prohibitive law is an ideological means of confirming that law’s hegemony. In different but related ways, Deleuze and Foucault challenged the formulation of desire in terms of negativity, arguing that not negation, but affirmation characterizes primary human longings, and that recognition of this fact will depose the Hegelian subject once and for all. Indeed, in their respective views, the negativity of desire is its cultural illness, one that is sustained by both dialectics and psychoanalysis. Thus it remains to be seen whether desire can be disjoined from negation, and whether the theory of affirmative desire that follows is really as free of Hegelianism as it purports to be.
The true visionary is Spinoza in the garb of a Neapolitan Revolutionary.—Deleuze/Guatarri, Anti-Oedipus
In a variety of works, Gilles Deleuze has attempted to reconstruct the genealogy of desires that turn against themselves, and to provide an alternative conception of desire as a productive and generative activity. In his view, the discourse that conceptualizes desire as a lack has failed to account for the genealogy of this lack, treating the negativity of desire as a universal and necessary ontological truth. In fact, according to Deleuze, desire has become a lack in virtue of a contingent set of sociohistorical conditions which require and reinforce the self-negation of desire. In Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962), “slave morality” characterizes the Judeo-Christian cultural ideology responsible for the turning of desire against itself, and in Anti-Oedipus (1972), that cultural ideology is specified in contemporary terms in the joint effects of psychoanalysis and the self-justificatory practices of advanced capitalism. In this last work, Deleuze maintains: “Lack (manque) is created, planned and organized through social production.”17 The ontological condition of a “lack” is revealed as the reification of the economic concept of scarcity, appearing as a necessary condition of material life, impervious to social transformation. Deleuze thus subjects the entire discourse on desire and negativity to an ideology-critique which exposes the ostensibly privative character of desire as the effects of concrete material deprivation. Whether rationalized in terms of “slave morality,” psychoanalytic necessity, or the iron laws of capitalism, Deleuze considers this ideology reactive and anti-life. In asserting as much, Deleuze lets us know that emancipated desire is of another order, beyond “lack” and “negativity,” a function of a productive and generative affirmation of life. Hence, his theory proceeds in two complementary ways: (1) as a critique of desire as negativity and (2) as the promotion of a normative ideal for desire as affirmation. The former project involves ideology-critique, and the latter entails a reconstruction of Nietzsche’s will-to-power and Spinoza’s conatus in the service of a theory of affective emancipation.
Like his Hegelian precursors, Deleuze is more than willing to understand desire as the privileged locus of human ontology: “there is only desire and the social, and nothing else.”18 Such a statement is not qualified through reference to given social or historical conditions, but serves as an invariant feature of Deleuze’s own ontology. Indeed, the life-affirming desire which he comes to oppose to Hegelian negativity also emerges as a universal ontological truth, long suppressed, essential to human emancipation. Only in Foucault’s The History of Sexuality does the historical question of why desire has become so central to speculations on human ontology get asked, but we can see the groundwork for such a question already established in Deleuze’s selective genealogy of desire.
To the degree that Deleuze historicizes the negative formulation of desire, he effects a break with Hegel that cannot be accounted for within Hegel’s own system. If there were a genealogy to negativity within Hegel’s philosophy, it would be a developmental account which would retrospectively confirm that negativity was “always already” there. On the other hand, Deleuze argues that negativity, the lack characteristic of desire, is instituted through ideological means in order to rationalize a social situation of hierarchy or domination. Like Lacan, Deleuze traces the repression of an original desire characterized by plenitude and excess which culminates in the derivative form of desire as lacking and deprived. The negativity of desire is, thus, symptomatic of a forgotten history of repression, and the deconstruction of that negativity (at least in the case of Deleuze) promises a liberation of that more original, bounteous desire. For Lacan, the prohibitive law that institutes lack is the law of the symbolic father, the grounding prohibition against incest which universally initiates the process of acculturation. Deleuze rejects the universal relevance of the oedipal construction, and turns instead to Nietzsche where the prohibitive law is specified as the Judeo-Christian “slave morality,” that turning of desire against itself which, for Deleuze, finds contemporary expression in the psychoanalytic law of primary repression and the capitalist assumption of necessary scarcity. Deleuze’s notion of slave morality has no historical necessity, and so can be overthrown by the forces of the will-to-power, the life-affirming desire free of the constraints of the prohibitive law. In other words, Deleuze claims that the will-to-power has access to that jouissance or Being which Lacan viewed as beyond the limits of desire, i.e., the limits of the constituting law of culture. For Deleuze, no matter the hegemony of that law, it not only can be broken, but ought to be.
Nietzsche and Philosophy sustains a critique of Hegelianism as a slave morality, exposing both lord and bondsman as culminating in the selfsame denial of life. In the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche characterizes slave morality as ressentiment and envy, resulting from the turning of the will against itself. For Deleuze, the Hegelian subject is precisely such a negative power which has, in effect, become negative through a crippling of its own powers. The Hegelian “subject,” like the Lacanian “ego,” is not an autonomous self-generating agency, but a manufactured construct generated through the slave’s self-denial. Hegel’s notion of a subject potentially adequate to its world is criticized for disguising a truer and deeper resource of generative power—the play of forces of the will-to-power. Hence, the ostensibly autonomous Hegelian subject is enslaved by his own refusal of the non-dialectical multiplicity of impulses that undergird his apparent negativity. As in Lacan, the subject is once again understood as a defense against a primary configuration of desire, and the “labor of the negative” which characterizes Hegelian desire is understood as a deprived desire which disguises the genealogy of its deprivation.
For Deleuze as for Nietzsche, the Hegelian subject is the false appearance of autonomy; as a manifestation of slave morality, this subject is reactive rather than self-generating. Nietzsche finds the ideal of autonomy better satisfied in the will-to-power or what, in the Genealogy of Morals, is understood as aristocratic values of life-affirming physical strength, the moral position beyond envy. Nietzsche appears to target Hegel as the philosophical exemplar of reaction. In section ten of the first essay of the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche argues that “the slave revolt in morality begins when ressentiment itself becomes creative and gives birth to values: the ressentiment of natures that are denied the true reaction, that of deeds, and compensate themselves with an imaginary revenge.”19 The “true deed” is a source of self-affirmation from which the slave is precluded. Like Sartre’s Genet, this agency unable to act becomes powerful only through its dreams of revenge. Nietzsche continues the exposition by suggesting that Hegel’s subject is precisely such an impotent slave filled with ressentiment, incapable of self-generated action and restricted to reactive self-subversion:
While every noble morality develops from a triumphant affirmation of itself, slave morality from the outset says No to what is “outside,” what is “different,” what is “not itself;” and this No is its creative deed. The inversion of the value-positing eye—this need to direct one’s view outward instead of back to oneself—is of the essence of ressentiment: in order to exist, slave morality always first needs a hostile external world; it needs, physiologically speaking, external stimuli in order to act at all—its action is fundamentally reaction.20
According to Deleuze, Nietzsche’s noble morality consists in an affirmation of difference which resists the dialectical tendency to assimilate difference into a more encompassing identity. What is different from the self-affirming agent does not threaten his project of identity, but works instead to enhance that agent’s power and efficacy. This is made clear for Deleuze in Nietzsche’s theory of forces, which Deleuze interprets as “the cutting edge” of Nietzsche’s anti-Hegelianism. In Deleuze’s view:
In Nietzsche the essential relation of one force to another is never conceived of as a negative element in the essence. In its relation with the other the force which makes itself obeyed does not deny the other or that which it is not, it affirms its own difference and enjoys this difference.21
The Nietzschean will is itself a multiplicitous play of forces which consequently cannot be contained by a dialectical unity; these forces represent currents of life, interests, desires, pleasures, and thoughts, which co-exist without the necessity of a repressive and/or unifying law. Hence, identity is a misnomer in Deleuze’s terms, one which misapprehends the essential multiplicity of this subject. Because the Deleuzian subject is not defined by a single law or unifying concept, it can be said to maintain opposition without unity, unlike the Hegelian subject which requires that opposition be assimilated to identity. Indeed, this requirement is understood by both Nietzsche and Deleuze as a sign of weakness and decadence; if the subject only exists through the assimilation of an external opposition, it therefore is dependent upon this negative relation for its own identity; hence, it lacks the power of self-assertion and self-affirmation characteristic of the ‘strong’ person, the übermensch, whose relations with Others transcend radical dependency. The Nietzschean will, on the other hand, does not affirm itself apart from a context of alterity, but differs from Hegelian desire in its fundamental approach to alterity. Because distinction is no longer understood as a prerequisite for identity, otherness no longer presents itself as that to be “labored upon,” superseded or conceptualized; rather, difference is the condition for enjoyment, an enhanced sense of pleasure, the acceleration and intensification of the play of forces which constitute what we might well call Nietzsche’s version of jouissance. Once the requirement of discrete identity no longer governs the subject, difference is less a source of danger than it is a condition of self-enhancement and pleasure. Deleuze describes this difference between Nietzsche and Hegel: “Nietzsche’s ‘yes’ is opposed to the dialectical ‘no’; affirmation to dialectical negation; difference to dialectical contradiction; joy, enjoyment, to dialectical labor; lightness, dance, to dialectical responsibilities” (p. 9).
Although Deleuze views the Hegelian dialectic as weighed down by the “spirit of gravity,” we might justifiably wonder how the bachanallian revel Hegel mentions in the preface to the Phenomenology could get under way if it were, in fact, governed by such a spirit. The bachanallian revel is intended to characterize the speculative thought of the Absolute as an incessant and all-encompassing dialectic, the achievement of the “labor of the negative,” the “lightness” at the end of Hegel’s admittedly arduous journey. Deleuze does not take into account this celebratory conclusion to the Phenomenology, and we can surmise that he does not think it possible within Hegel’s own terms. If the Phenomenology is a Bildungsroman which narrates a journey that turns out to lead to where the journeyer has always been, then the Phenomenology is like Dorothy’s dream in the Wizard of Oz which not only takes her back home, but which is exclusively composed of the transvaluated elements of her home. If immanence is the final truth of the Phenomenology, then it would seem that Hegel’s revelers are dancing in place, fixed within a single frame, like the frozen joy on Keats’ Grecian urn.
The Phenomenology treats the theme of enjoyment explicitly in the context of the lord who enjoys the fruits of the bondsman’s labor (im Genusse sich zu befriedigen). Enjoyment is here achieved without labor or, more precisely, is made possible through the labor of others. Enjoyment is modeled on consumption, and the lord turns out to be dissatisfied by his life of satisfaction; his dependency on the bondsman ruins his sense of self-sufficiency, his experience of his own negativity is restricted to consumption, and he misses a sense of his own efficacy. Enjoyment becomes intolerable precisely because it undermines the project of autonomy that the lord wants to pursue. The hierarchical relation between lord and bondsman also becomes intolerable because it thwarts the realization of autonomy or, in the case of the bondsman, because the unexpected realization of autonomy provides a greater satisfaction. Clearly, satisfaction (Befriedigung) is not the same as enjoyment (Genuss) for Hegel; the former signifies that the law of identity has been reasserted and thus provides a conceptual kind of gratification, while the latter is a decidedly more sensuous affair, more immediate and, hence, less philosophical.
Deleuze takes issue with at least two of the central Hegelian postulates mentioned above: the formulation of enjoyment as an ultimately dissatisfying mode of consumption and the rejection of hierarchical social relations in favor of a notion of autonomy based on the law of identity. In both cases, a notion of a self-identical subject determines the parameters of satisfaction, and this version of autonomous identity is symptomatic of slave morality in which difference is only suffered and never enjoyed. The postulation of self-identity as the ontological condition of satisfaction precludes the greater pleasures of affirming difference as difference and the derivative pleasures of hierarchical interchange. The dialectic is “slave” morality not in the sense of Hegel’s “slave” who initiates the transition out of Lordship and Bondage into the Unhappy Consciousness, i.e., who carries the emancipatory principle of the Phenomenology in and through his “labor,” but in the sense of the “slave” of Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals who lacks the power of the nobility and, through a feat of envious transvaluation, comes to extoll his own limitations as evidence of moral superiority. The slave rationalizes incapacity as moral strength and, for both Nietzsche and Deleuze, Hegel’s traveling subject is precisely such a slave. According to Nietzsche in “The Problem of Socrates”, “It is the slave that triumphs in the dialectic.… The dialectic can only serve as a defensive weapon” (ff. 1:4). The will of Hegel’s bondsman is a self-restricted will, even in the achievement of its ostensible emancipation. As long as emancipation is modeled on autonomy and self-realization, the emancipated bondsman will be restricted by the constraints of self-identity and will know neither pleasure nor creativity—essential features of the will-to-power. This emancipated bondsman will be shackled in a way that cannot be superseded within the terms of the Phenomenology; he will always fear difference, and will never know how to act to affirm difference without having to assimilate that difference into himself. The Hegelian subject refuses the world outside itself, while its very “self” is enslaved to that world, constantly reacting against the externalities it encounters, never freely affirming that world as different, and deriving enjoyment from that affirmation; the Hegelian subject can only fear or appropriate the features of an external world, but because its fundamental project and deepest desire is to attain the self-identity of reflexive self-consciousness, it cannot enter into that world of alterity fearlessly, joyfully, creatively.
According to Deleuze, Nietzsche proposes fundamentally new meanings for the activities of affirmation and negation which invert and surpass the meaning and relation of these terms in Hegel’s philosophy. Affirmation no longer carries the burden of effecting an ontological unity between that which affirms and that which is affirmed, for there is no being outside of the will-to-power: “Being and nothingness are merely the abstract expression of affirmation and negation as qualities (qualia) of the will-to-power” (p. 186). And yet the will-to-power is not an exclusively human capacity, but the internally differentiated dynamism of life. To affirm is not an anthropomorphizing projection, but a generative activity that, in and through its very activity, affirms the generativity of life itself. The subject does not need to struggle to become adequate to a countervailing world, but must give itself up to what is greater than itself—the will-to-power, creative life. As Deleuze emphasizes in his own exposition, “to affirm is not to take responsibility for, to take on the burden of what is, but to release, to set free, what lives” (p. 185).
Hegel’s dialectic is considered anti-life inasmuch as it refuses the categories of affirmation and life for the categories of negativity or, according to Nietzsche, death. The philosophical expectations that the world can be analyzed in terms of truth and falsity, being and non-being, the real and the apparent are, according to Nietzsche, symptomatic of a pervasive hatred of life which rationalizes itself through the imposition of false conceptual constructs. These philosophical oppositions are meant to detain life, control and bury it, and safeguard the dialectical philosopher in a position of death-in-life. The postulation of identity, whether as the relation between subject and subject, between discrepant aspects of the world, or between the being of the world and its truth, is a strategy of containment motivated by the slave’s fear and hatred of the will-to-power as the principle of life. In Deleuze’s words, “Nietzsche has no more belief in the self-sufficiency of the real than he has in that of the true: he thinks of them as the manifestations of a will, a will to depreciate life, to oppose life to life” (p. 184).
Clearly, we cannot explore in detail Nietzsche’s various philosophical centerpieces—the will-to-power, the eternal return, the Dionysian, the musical Socrates—but our sketch of his position can reveal the challenge of a post-Hegelian formulation of the subject of desire. For Deleuze, Nietzsche provides a way to disjoin desire from negativity, and to account for the genealogy of the Hegelian position in terms of slave morality. The will-to-power provides an alternative model of desire which is based on the plenitude of life, its incessant fertility, rather than the negativity of self-consciousness. Nietzsche’s critique of identity also has the consequence of decentering further the self-sufficient subject as the implicit agent and explicit aim of desire. As in Lacan, we see in Deleuze the genesis of this subject as a defense against a more primary, less philosophically tame, desire. In Anti-Oedipus, it is the coercive force of capitalism and the ideology of psychoanalysis that repress life-affirming desire, and in Nietzsche and Philosophy, it is the slave morality, but it is clear that capitalism and psychoanalysis are both slave moralities, and that life-affirming desire is, in both contexts, the Deleuzian telos of emancipation. This repressed desire is modeled on the will-to-power, but Nietzsche’s notion is attributed by Deleuze to Spinoza’s conatus which, placed within a modern political and cultural context, becomes for Deleuze the affective source of revolutionary change.
For Deleuze, the will-to-power is like Spinoza’s primary desire to persist in one’s being: both desires are empowered and enhanced through being affected by external phenomena. Desire is not that which aims for a thorough authorship of the world (Kojève, Sartre), but is that which is itself strengthened through its capacity to respond to what is inevitably external. Indeed, Deleuze understands Nietzsche’s will-to-power as a developed sensibility. He quotes Nietzsche: “The will-to-power is not a being or becoming, but a pathos” (p. 62). Deleuze further argues that “it is difficult to deny a Spinozistic inspiration here. Spinoza, in an extremely profound theory, wanted a capacity for being affected to correspond to every quantity of force. The more ways a body could be affected the more force it had. This capacity measures the force of a body or expresses its power” (p. 62). In Anti-Oedipus Deleuze understands desire and the body to have been deprived of their capacity for response, and calls for a renewal of the body in terms of forces of “attraction and the production of intensities.”22 Spinoza thus offers Deleuze a way to understand the response to externality as an intensification of desire which resists the dialectical demand to appropriate this externality to a law of identity.
Interestingly enough, although Hegel criticized Spinoza for failing to understand the negativity that motors self-consciousness, Deleuze appears to applaud Spinoza for this very exclusion of the negative. Desire is thus understood by Deleuze as a productive response to life in which the force and intensity of desire multiplies and intensifies in the course of an exchange with alterity. Deleuze’s “will” is not “willful,” but responsive and malleable, assuming new and more complicated forms of organization through the exchange of force constitutive of desire. Because the field of force is abundant with energy and power, desire is less a struggle to monopolize power than an exchange that intensifies and proliferates energy and power into a state of excess. Beneath the contrived scarcity conditions which have produced desire as a modality of deprivation resides a ready abundance of life-affirming desire, and for Deleuze the political and personal task of a post-Hegelian erotics is to retrieve this Spinozistic persistence and to recast it in terms of the will-to-power. From this point of view, the Hegelian subject can be understood as a product of slave morality, a consequence of cultural malaise, the result as well as the agency of a life-negating desire.
Deleuze’s theory prescribes a move from negative to productive desire which requires that we accept an emancipatory model of desire. In this sense he has politicized the Lacanian theory, arguing that productive desire, jouissance, is accessible to human experience, and that the prohibitive laws governing this desire can and must be broken. Marcuse’s dialectical solution to politically repressed desire in Eros and Civilization is clearly unacceptable to a Deleuzian position inasmuch as Marcuse accepts the binary restrictions on desire and reconciles them in an Hegelian synthesis, i.e., the polarity of the sexes is overcome through a synthetic appropriation of bisexuality. Nietzsche’s insistence on the nondialectical multiplicity of affects challenges the possibility of a self-identical subject and suggests that the will-to-power cannot be reduced to the internally complicated structure of Hegelian desire. Although Nietzsche himself occasionally refers to a single dominating drive in terms of which various affects and forces are organized, Deleuze clearly prefers a reading of the will-to-power which resists such a unification of affects. For Deleuze, there is a significant difference between an internally multiplicitous desire in which the internality of various desires suggests a unifying structure of containment, and a fundamentally multiplicitous set of desires which can only be falsified by any effort to describe them as a unity.
Although a multiplicitous eros challenges the unitary directionality of desire, and even the dialectical “double object” of desire that we considered in the Phenomenology, it is less clear what kind of reality this ostensibly repressed desire(s) is supposed to have. If Deleuze accepts the Spinozistic elaboration of the will-to-power as a natural eros which has subsequently been denied by a restrictive culture, then he seems compelled to explain how we might gain insight into this natural multiplicity from within a cultural perspective. On the one hand, Deleuze criticizes the Lacanian reification of the juridical law as foundational to all culture and appears to offer, via Nietzsche, a strategy for the subversion and displacement of that juridical law. On the other hand, the strategy Deleuze promotes appeals to a different kind of reification, namely, the reification of multiplicitous affect as the invariant, although largely repressed, ontological structure of desire. If the inquiry into the structure of desire takes place within a culturally constructed perspective, then the analysis of desire is always implicated in the cultural situation it seeks to explain. The postulation of a natural multiplicity appears, then, as an insupportable metaphysical speculation on the part of Deleuze. Moreover, inasmuch as the critique of the cultural reification of desire as lack engages its own form of reification through an appeal to an ontologically invariant multiplicitous affectivity, it discards the benefits of the Lacanian position along with its disadvantages; in other words, the appeal to a precultural eros ignores the Lacanian insight that all desire is linguistically and culturally constructed. The Deleuzian critique of the prohibitive law, and the subsequent reification of desire as that which is always already repressed, requires a political strategy that explicitly takes account of the cultural construction of desire, that is, a political strategy that resists the appeal to a “natural” desire as a normative ideal.
Although Deleuze’s critique of the Hegelian subject places him within the postmodern effort to describe a decentered affectivity, his appeal to Nietzsche’s theory of forces suggests that he understands this decentered experience as an ontological rather than a culturally conditioned historical experience. In effect, his appeal to a naturally multiplicitous affectivity is not unlike the Enlightenment appeal to natural desires that we find in Rousseau or Montesquieu. Ironically, Deleuze’s ostensibly anti-capitalist position shares a number of philosophical assumptions with classical liberalism. Just as individuals are said to possess certain desires for pleasure (Bentham) or property (Locke) which are subsequently inhibited by the constraints of a social contract, so Deleuze’s conception of an originally unrepressed libidinal diversity is subject to the prohibitive laws of culture. In both cases, desire is the locus of a precultural ideal, the essence of the individual, which is subsequently distorted or repressed through the imposition of anti-erotic political structures. Here Deleuze appears to undermine his original project to historicize desire, for his arcadian vision of precultural libidinal chaos poses as an ahistorical absolute.
Lacan argues, on the other hand, that the prohibitive law is precisely what engenders the culturally accessible experience of desire and precludes any appeal to a desire freed from all prohibition, and so questions whether desire can be conceptualized apart from the law. If Lacan is right in this respect, Deleuze’s concern to displace the hegemony of the prohibitive law must be taken up by a position that subverts and proliferates this law from within the terms of culture itself. As we shall see, the theory of Michel Foucault appears to achieve precisely this: (1) the acknowledgment of the cultural construction of desire which does not entail an acceptance of the cultural reification of desire as lack and (2) a political strategy to displace the hegemony of the prohibitive law through the accentuation of that law’s self-subverting and self-proliferating possibilities. Foucault thus offers a normative framework which entails a subversive struggle with existing prohibitions, a thoroughly cultural program which disavows any appeal to a desire that has a natural or metaphysical structure said to exist either prior or posterior to linguistic and cultural laws.
Despite his reification of the prohibitive law, Lacan nevertheless offers a critique of the kinds of experiences of desire that are possible within existing culture, and thereby begins the project elaborated by Foucault to wrest desire from the grips of the dialectical imagination. The limitation on the possibilities of that cultural experience may be unduly restrictive, but he does establish a limit to unrestrained metaphysical speculation on the structure and meaning of desire. This is not to claim that Lacan is free of metaphysical aspirations for desire, but that he realizes the necessary limit that culture establishes for such aspirations. This Kantian limitation on the experience of desire has a two-fold consequence; desire is always more than what we experience, although we cannot use language to describe this “more.” Hence, desire is experienced as a kind of limit, the limits to language itself, the fate of a metaphysical aspiration which necessarily founders upon the limits set by linguistic prohibitions.
And yet, neither Deleuze nor Lacan are thoroughly freed of metaphysical aspirations for desire, and the metaphysical longings operative in their theories can be understood as so much residual Hegelianism. For both Deleuze and Lacan, there remains an elusive and tantalizing “beyond” to culturally instituted desire, the promise of a liberation, even if, in the case of Lacan, that promise can never be fulfilled. In each case, a version of absolute presence, albeit internally differentiated, is the final aim or telos of desire. For Lacan, this “Being” is barred from the human subject in much the same way as the synthesis of the real and rational remains a nostalgic ideal for Hyppolite. For Deleuze, the eradication of negativity from productive desire23 culminates in an internally differentiated Eros in which the “differences” are understood as positive differentials of force rather than externally related moments of desire. In other words, for Deleuze, the theory of forces replaces Hegel’s doctrine of internal relations as the guarantor of the principle of plenitude.
Although Deleuze and Lacan differ dramatically on the question of whether desire can be emancipated from the shackles of the prohibitive law, both theorists maintain that desire has an ontological status apart from this law; for Lacan, jouissance is the noumenal being of desire, that which structures the culturally concrete experience of desire but which is never fully known or experienced within the terms of culture. For Deleuze, the erotics of multiplicity is revealed as an always already existing possibility once life itself is freed from the constraints of slave morality. Whether as jouissance or life itself, this postulation of affirmation and plenitude is said to characterize desire internally as its essential structure and telos, although for Lacan this telos cannot be achieved. In this respect, it appears that both Lacan and Deleuze remain entranced by the metaphysical promise of desire as an immanent experience of the Absolute. Whether satisfaction is conceived as a state prior to ontological difference (Lacan), or as the ultimate incorporation of differences as so many attributes of a life-affirming will-to-power (Deleuze), it remains a postulated presence and unity which denies the externality of difference. In this sense, then, neither position is freed of the Hegelian dream that the satisfaction of desire would establish the primacy of plenitude, the presumption of ontological integrity and immanent metaphysical place.
The interpretation of Lacan and Deleuze as subservient to the principle of identity and the pursuit of absolute presence casts serious doubt on the self-styled distinction between philosophers of identity and philosophers of difference. For both Lacan and Deleuze, ontological unity is primary and only becomes interrupted through the advent of cultural law which, consonant with most theories of the Fall, results in desire as an experience of relentless dissatisfaction. This unity or absolute presence then becomes the tacit but fundamental project of desire—the cause of love, according to Lacan—which is either imagined (Sartre, Lacan) or pursued through a revolutionary return to natural Eros (Deleuze). The Hegelian effort to transvaluate or supersede all negativity into an all-encompassing Being remains the constitutive desire of these ostensible post-Hegelian positions. The inexorable necessity of the Phenomenology seems no longer to serve as a persuasive narrative, and the psychoanalytic and Nietzschean routes engage fewer illusions about the autonomy of the subject and the dialectical structure of reason and experience. But the dream of reconstituting that lost unity of Being still structures these theories, whether through the notion of jouissance or the theory of forces, and no matter whether the dream can be realized.
There is no single locus of great refusal, no soul of revolt, source of all rebellions.—Foucault, The History of Sexuality
Foucault’s first volume of The History of Sexuality questions whether the history of Western desire can be adequately explained within a dialectical framework which relies on binary oppositions. Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents tended to explain desire as an instinct whose sublimation is the necessary consequence of a generally restrictive “civilization.” Civilization is here understood to be a juridical and prohibitive set of institutions which both represses original instincts and is itself the sublimated form of those instincts. Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization examines this notion of sublimation in light of a theory of Eros and suggests that sublimation constitutes the creative and erotic organization of all positive cultural formations. Eros is thus understood by Marcuse to be a nonrepressive and nonjuridical organizing principle of cultural production. In a sense, Foucault can be seen as emerging from this particular psychoanalytic and Hegelian heritage. Indeed, Freud identifies the juridical model of power, and Marcuse reveals the inadvertent generativity of that ostensibly repressive power through a speculative consideration of sublimation; for Foucault, however, this tension becomes reformulated as that between juridical and productive power, and the postulation of an “instinct” or an ahistorical form of Eros is denied. As a consequence, desire is not repressed by the juridical law, and neither is it a derivative or sublimated form of that originally repressed instinct. Desire is created by the repressive law itself, and has no other meaning than that which an historically specific form of juridical power inadvertently produces. The law that we expect to repress some set of desires which could be said to exist prior to the law succeeds, rather, in naming, delimiting and, thereby, giving social meaning and possibility to precisely those desires it intended to eradicate.
The “law,” however, is encoded and produced through certain discursive practices, and so has its own historically specific linguistic modality. Medicine, psychiatry, and criminology become discursive domains in which desire is both regulated and produced, indeed, in which the regulation of desire is the mode of its cultural production. If the repressive law constitutes the desire it is meant to control, then it makes no sense to appeal to that constituted desire as the emancipatory opposite of repression. Indeed, for Foucault, desire is the inadvertent consequence of the law. And insofar as the law is reproduced through given discursive practices, these latter participate in the cultural production of desire. In a political elaboration of structuralist premises, Foucault argues that (a) language is always structured in a specific historical form and is, therefore, always a kind of discourse, and (b) that this discourse invariably recapitulates and produces given historical relations of power, and (c) these power-laden discourses produce desire through their regulatory practices.
Hence, for Foucault, there is no desire outside of discourse, and no discourse freed of power-relations. Foucault’s notion of discourse includes functions that surpass those of conventional emancipatory models. Discourse is neither an epiphenomenal reflection of material relations, nor an instrument of domination, nor a conventional system of signs that embodies universalistic principles of communication. In his words, “discourse [is] a series of discontinuous segments whose tactical function is neither uniform nor stable… we must not imagine a world of discourse divided between accepted discourse and excluded discourse, or between the dominant discourse and the dominated one; but as a multiplicity of discursive elements that can come into play in various strategies” (HS 100). Emancipation cannot consist in ascending to a power-free discourse because, for Foucault, power and discourse have become coextensive. If there is to be an emancipatory potential in discourse, it must consist of the transformation rather than the transcendence of power. For Foucault, “discourse can be both an instrument and effect of power, but also a hindrance, a stumbling-block, a point of resistance and a starting point for an opposing strategy. Discourse transmits and produces power; it reinforces it, but also undermines and exposes it, renders it fragile and makes it possible to thwart it” (HS 101).
The binary configuration of power in terms of repression/emancipation reduces the multiplicity of power-relations into two univocal alternatives which mask the variegated texture of power. These constructs, even when intended as emancipatory, result in a restriction of the political imagination and, hence, the possibilities of political transformation inasmuch as “power is everywhere; not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere” (HS 93). The emancipatory model of power remains restricted to juridical forms which have become hegemonic, but are for that reason neither universal nor necessary. Like Deleuze, Foucault appeals to productive forms of power which have for the most part gone unnoticed in modern theories of political emancipation. Unlike Deleuze, however, he rejects any precultural notion of “true desire,” and conceives of political transformation as a function of the proliferation of configurations of power and sexuality. The Nietzschean theory of forces which, for Deleuze, characterize the precultural ontology of desire becomes for Foucault a theory of discursive power, historically constituted and conditioned by the breakdown of monarchical forms of government and the ubiquity of modern war. Because discourse is fundamentally determined by the situation of modern power dynamics, and because desire is only articulated and implemented in terms of this discourse, desire and power are coextensive, and any theory that postulates desire as a “beyond” to power is, in modern terms, a cultural and political impossibility, or, worse, a reactionary deployment of power which conceals itself through an open denial of its own constitutive power-relations.
The hegemony of juridical power, regulatory and prohibitive laws, infiltrates civil society, cultural forms of life, and theories of psychic organization and development. Foucault identifies psychoanalysis as the cultural derivative of monarchical power-relations, that is, as the discursive sphere in which juridical law comes to govern affective life. Psychoanalytic discourse not only interprets the working of repression and desire, but creates or produces a new set of power-relations for desire. The understanding of desire within the framework of sexuality and repression necessitates confession as the emancipatory moment of desire. The “talking cure” does not relieve a patient of his desire, but becomes desire’s new life: confession itself becomes eroticized. Because there is no desire relieved of power, confession becomes its own form of productive power, and desire becomes transmuted into confessional speech. Hence, the psychoanalytic treatment of desire results not in catharsis, but in the proliferation of desire as confessional speech; there is no “original” desire that one speaks “of,” but the “speaking of” becomes desire’s new historical form; desire is verbalized, and verbalization becomes the occasion for desire.
Foucault purports to be revealing an inadvertent consequence of psychoanalytic discourse, namely, that the juridical power of repression is transformed into the productive power of discourse, and that nowhere is an original or prelinguistic desire brought to light. Because psychoanalysis has established sexuality as the discursive domain of desire, Foucault concludes that sexuality and power, in its various forms, are coextensive. Overcoming repression does not entail the transcendence of power-relations; the discourse of emancipation proceeds to produce desire in its own terms. Foucault argues, “we must not think that by saying yes to sex, one says no to power” (HS 157).
Foucault sharpens Deleuze’s political challenge to psychoanalysis by questioning the origins and hegemony of juridical law. He recognizes that Lacanian psychoanalytic theory is an improvement upon theories that impute an ontological status to prelinguistic drives and instincts, but he underscores the failure of Lacan’s structuralist interpretation to consider power outside of its juridical or prohibitive form: “What distinguishes the analysis made in terms of the repression of instincts from that made in terms of the law of desire is clearly the way in which they each conceive of the nature and dynamics of drives, not the way in which they conceive of power” (HS 82–83). Although Lacan has dismissed the notion of desire as “a rebellious energy that must be throttled… a primitive, natural, and living energy welling up from below,” he has still retained a belief in a true desire prior to repression, a phenomenon that would, according to Foucault, announce an “outside” to discourse. According to Foucault, the repressive law is the discursive moment of desire’s production rather than its negation:
One should not think that desire is repressed, for the simple reason that the law is what constitutes desire and the lack on which it is predicated. Where there is desire, the power-relation is already present: an illusion, then, to denounce this relation for a repression exerted after the event; but vanity as well, to go questing after a desire that is beyond the reach of power. (HS 81)
The juridical model of desire permits of only two kinds of tactics: the “promise of liberation” (Deleuze, Marcuse) or “the affirmation: you are always-already trapped” (Lacan). In either case, the binary restrictions on desire imposed by the juridical model of power remain intact. Hence, Foucault concludes that the genealogy of juridical power must be reconstructed and exposed, and that the possibilities of a response to that model which eludes its binary restrictions must be pursued. In effect, Foucault is arguing that both the psychoanalytic and liberationist views of desire are caught within a dialectical impasse conditioned by a false premise. Only by overcoming the juridical model of power will the modalities of desire become freed from the binary alternatives of repression and emancipation:
Whether desire is this or that, in any case one continues to conceive of it in relation to a power that is always juridical and discursive, a power that has its central point in the enunciation of the law. One remains attached to a certain image of power-law, of power-sovereignty, which was traced out by the theoreticians of right and the monarchic institution. It is this image that we must break free of, that is, of the theoretical privilege of law and sovereignty. (HS 89)
What Lacan understood as the culturally universal prohibition against incest, and what Deleuze referred to as the slave morality inculcated by capitalism and psychoanalysis, is reformulated by Foucault as the rule of monarchy which, it seems, has produced “subjects” whose desires are unavoidably linked with negativity. The presence of the negative is understood culturally as the effect of the juridical law, transcribed in psychoanalytic discourse as the repressive mechanism, and manifest in philosophical texts as the ontological negativity of human life—the “lack” that is the human subject. For Foucault, the move from negativity to plenitude is understood, then, as a problem of shifting political paradigms. This shift cannot be a dialectical inversion and, hence, an inadvertent affirmation of the self-identity of juridical power—that was the mistake of positions that impute an intrinsic emancipatory potential to desire. The problem for Foucault is to contrive a tactic of nondialectical subversion, a position beyond subjection and rebellion which alters fundamentally the form of the cultural nexus of power and desire. Foucault’s notion of productive power clearly draws from the theory of forces promoted by Deleuze and Nietzsche. In The History of Sexuality, however, we can understand Foucault’s appropriation of the theory of forces in the context of an Hegelian dialectic in ruins. Foucault radicalizes the critique of Hegelian autonomy as well as the progressive presumptions of Hegel’s notion of historical change. The consequence is that the dialectic is unmoored from both the subject and its teleological conclusion. In what follows, I will show how this dialectic gone awry evolves into a principle of identity, and how Foucault prescribes the shift from a juridical to a productive model of desire in terms of such a change. Finally, I will consider whether Foucault’s tactic of subversion is as nondialectical as he professes, and whether, in particular, Hegel’s Life and Death Struggle returns in the work of Foucault as the contemporary situation of desire.
In my brief consideration of the unexpected consequences of the juridical model of power in psychoanalytic practice, we saw an instance of the shift from juridical to productive power. In that case, the postulation of repression necessitated the talking cure as a model of (limited) emancipation, but this very cure turned out to be an elaboration rather than a catharsis of desire. Instead of returning to the repressed desire, we encountered a desire produced through the law of repression which inadvertently gives rise to confessional speech as the new historical locus of sexuality and desire. The erotic possibilities of confession become, in Foucault’s terms, exemplary of productive desire, itself produced by the juridical model, but essentially exceeding that model. For the juridical model to work, desire would be repressed, then recovered, and a return to an original meaning of desire would be facilitated. In Hegelian terms, the ostensible alienation of the subject from itself would be recovered through the work of psychoanalytic practice. Foucault’s point is that psychoanalytic practice determines desire even as it interprets it, and because desire is its discursive function, and psychoanalysis its contemporary discursive context, psychoanalysis does not recover but, rather, produces desire.
The juridical model of power asserts an external relation between desire and power, such that power is exerted on desire, and desire is either silenced and censored in virtue of this power or resurfaces in a substitute form which appropriately cloaks its offensive aims. In either case, the juridical model maintains the assumption of an original and primary desire to which one can return, and must return if the estrangement characteristic of neurosis is to be overcome. In the case of Lacan, this return to original desire may not be possible, but its inaccessibility does not preclude the insistence on its ontological integrity. Foucault’s theory of productive discourse suggests that the very notion of an original desire is manufactured by the juridical model in an attempt to consolidate and entrench its own power. Indeed, both the subject and its hidden desire are constructs deployed by a juridical discourse in the interests of its own self-amplification. But the juridical model always contains the possibility of subverting itself inasmuch as its confessional mechanisms of controlling desire become inadvertent loci for the production of desire, i.e., when the psychoanalytic confession is itself eroticized, the scene of guilt is confused with the scene of pleasure, and new possibilities of pleasure within discursive practices are created. Indeed, wherever there exists a discursive regulation of pleasure, there follows an eroticization of regulation, and a transformation of a scene of repression into an occasion for erotic play. As a result, the law is diverted from its repressive aim through its redeployment as a source of pleasure. In dialectical fashion, the ostensible opposition between desire and the law is subverted through an ironic reversal, and yet we will see that this reversal resists accommodation within a dialectical unity.
In the Phenomenology we considered the self-subverting dialectic of domination and oppression in the context of lordship and bondage. There the dialectical opposition between lord and bondsman becomes reconciled through the emergence of an enhanced notion of the subject. Foucault lacks any such subject, and so binary opposites fail to fall under any such law of immanence. Instead, binary oppositions, including those of juridical models of power, tend to create effects that are thoroughly unforeseen, to multiply and proliferate into new forms of power that cannot be adequately explained within the terms of binary opposition. For Hegel, the unanticipated consequences of binary opposition are eventually revealed as the unclaimed, unrecovered dimensions of the subject itself. For Foucault, the inadvertent consequences of binary oppositions neither enlighten the subject involved nor restore the subject to an enhanced conception of its ontological place. Because the power-relations produced by discourse do not belong to a preestablished unified system of relations, they are indications of the incessant dispersal of the subject—the impossibility of a return to a dialectical unity.
While the Hegelian subject resolves the binary oppositions it encounters through the recovery of an expanded conception of identity, Foucault’s subject becomes schooled in its ever-expanding lack of agency and, concomitantly, in the ever-growing power of discourse. Indeed, discourse appears to covet the power of agency, “deploying,” “producing,” “intending,” and “selecting” its means. In an interview, Foucault is asked what sense can be made of a strategy that is not initiated by a subject. He responds that one can understand a “coherent, rational strategy, but one for which it is no longer possible to identify a person who conceived it.” And though there is no subject, he argues, there is “an effect of finalisation relative to an objective.”24 The subject is not wholly epiphenomenal, although it is determined almost entirely by prior strategies. These strategies are understood as permutations of power, and human subjects and their desires are understood as instruments of that power’s self-implementation. Foucault understands the problems associated with such a personification of discourse and power, and qualifies his theory as follows: “one needs to be nominalistic, no doubt: power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society” (HS 93). In another context, he writes: “power in the substantive sense, le pouvoir, doesn’t exist… power means relations, a more-or-less organized, hierarchical coordinated cluster of relations.”25
It would be as misguided to assign an original meaning to power as it would be to postulate an original meaning for desire. Foucault insists on the polyvalence of power; it is a dominant and more or less systematic movement which changes through the force of internal divisions and multiplications. It is not a self-identical substance that manifests itself in the tributaries of everyday life, but a relation that is continuously transformed in virtue of passing through the nodal points of everyday life. Lacking a discrete and unified origin, power is a kind of malleable purposiveness permanently uprooted in the world; the history of power is not a reconstruction of a unilinear or dialectical progression, but a series of innovations that elude the explanations of cosmogony, anthropogenesis, or teleology. Because power does not exist apart from the various relations by which it is transmitted and transformed, it is the very process of transmission and transformation, a history of these processes, with none of the narrative coherence and closure characteristic of the Phenomenology. Foucault thus remains a tenuous dialectician, but his is a dialectic without a subject and without teleology, a dialectic unanchored in which the constant inversion of opposites leads not to a reconciliation in unity, but to a proliferation of oppositions which come to undermine the hegemony of binary opposition itself.
Although Foucault occasionally refers to the shift from juridical to productive models of power as if it were an inevitability in a world no longer structured in Hegelian terms, he also makes clear that this shift is not a purely logical necessity, but, rather, a condition of historical circumstances. In a surprising turn of argumentation, Foucault attributes the emergence of productive power in modern times to the growing cultural and political influence of war:
It is a question of reorienting ourselves to a conception of power which replaces the privilege of prohibition with the viewpoint of tactical efficacy… the strategic model rather than the model based on law. And this not out of speculative choice or theoretical preference, but because in fact it is one of the essential traits of Western societies that the force relationships which for a long time had found expression in war, in every form of warfare, gradually became invested in the order of political power. (HS 102)
According to Foucault, war has become the contemporary experience of power, and civil society is structured as an occupied zone. In a peculiar kind of materialist vocabulary, Foucault appears to understand war as a determining base of experience which produces various forms of rationality and sexuality in its wake. Although Foucault prescribes a shift from juridical models of power to models predicated upon a war experience, he does not appear to be condoning war itself as a good way of life. He seems, rather, to be acknowledging power-relations as they are structured in contemporary terms, and to suggest that whatever modes of political and cultural transformation are available are, of necessity, available within the terms of war. Hence, if contemporary power-relations are, at least implicitly, war relations, we must look to “tactics,” “strategies,” “deployments” and “instrumentalities” to find our way out or, at least, through.
The question that concerns us is how desire is to be conceived as part of the experience of war. His answer appears to be that even sexuality has taken on the terms of “a struggle for life,” and that the inadvertent consequence of warlike opposition is the intensification of life’s value. The wholesale challenge to life that wars have threatened have inadvertently created a renewed desire for life, the intensification and multiplication of bodily pleasures, the promotion of sexual vitalism. Hence, the will-to-power, understood as the affirmation of life, becomes, for Foucault, the inadvertent consequence of the attempted negation of life, manifest culturally as the experience of sexuality as vital struggle, an experience determined by the pervasive presence of war relations throughout civil society. For Foucault, then, Nietzsche’s life-affirming desire thus becomes a cultural possibility within the last century:
Since the last century, the great struggles that have challenged the general system of power were not guided by the belief in a return to former rights, or by the age-old dream of a cycle of time or a Golden Age. One no longer aspired toward the coming of the emperor of the poor, or the kingdom of the latter days, or even the restoration of our imagined ancestral rights; what was demanded and what served as an objective was life, understood as the basic needs, man’s concrete essence, the realization of his potential, a plentitude of the possible. Whether or not it was Utopia that was wanted was of little importance; what we have seen has been a very real process of struggle; life as a political object was in a sense taken at face value and turned back against the system that was bent on controlling it. It was life rather than the law that became the issue of political struggles. (HS 144–45)
For Foucault, it is “life rather than the law,” productive power rather than juridical power, that characterizes “political struggles,” but because we know that sexuality and power are coextensive (HS 157), life characterizes the struggle of sexuality as well. Further, it is clear that for Foucault the major opponents in wars have become the forces of life and anti-life, and because war relations determine power-relations, and power-relations, sexual relations, it makes sense to conclude that, for Foucault, desire has become a Life and Death struggle.
We have seen Foucault return himself to an essentially Hegelian preoccupation with Life and Death, and a Nietzschean concern to see the forces of affirmation triumph over those of negation. Considered from this perspective, it becomes unclear whether Foucault, like Deleuze, is arguing for an ontology of desire that approximates the Nietzschean will-to-power, i.e., a Nietzschean rereading of Hegel’s Life and Death struggle, or whether he is adequately depicting an historically conditioned, unprecedented form of desire. We may accept Foucault’s assessment of modern warfare as essentially about survival, especially considering the effects of the nuclear threat, but the question remains whether his claim that vitalism is constitutive of all contemporary political struggles is an historically contingent claim or a claim of universal ontology, that is, a Nietzschean premise about the will-to-power which is in some sense prior to any of the historical observations that Foucault is making. Earlier in The History of Sexuality, Foucault calls for the overthrowing of juridical models of power because they are, in his words, “anti-energy” (HS 83). Although Foucault is generally critical of theories that attribute natural features to desire prior to acculturation and discourse, he seems in this instance to be doing precisely that. He argues against Freud that “sexuality must not be described as a stubborn drive, by nature alien and of necessity disobedient to a power which exhausts itself trying to subdue it” (HS 103). It seems, however, that the will-to-live, the will-to-power, is precisely such a “drive” in Foucault’s own accepted discourse.
Moreover, in prescribing the overthrow of juridical models of power, Foucault faults such models for subduing the life-affirming energy characteristic of productive power. It seems, then, that juridical power acts “juridically” over productive power which, like Marcuse’s Eros or Deleuze’s internally differentiated will-to-power, is a long-repressed desire clamoring for emancipation. Either as pure energy, the will-to-power, or life itself, productive desire seems less an historically determined than an historically occasioned desire which, in its origins, is an ontological invariant of human life. Foucault affirms as much when he defines the affirmation of “life” as “man’s concrete essence, the realization of his potential, a plenitude of the possible” (HS 145).
Foucault attributes binary thinking to the domain of juridical power, but it seems that even his distinction between juridical and productive power is itself a juridical and binary distinction, the opposition between life and anti-life, affirmation and negation. Further, it seems that productive power relies on its opposite, juridical power, for its own existence; life gains its vitality, its essential productivity, in the course of struggle and resistance. Hence, affirmation seems conditioned by the threat of negation, just as the Hegelian subject who, risking his life, suffers the threat of death and resolves then to value and sustain life throughout the rest of his journey.
Foucault’s understanding of desire as that which is awakened in the course of struggle and resistance assumes that domination always effects a generative consequence. On the one hand, it appears that Foucault minimizes the effects of domination, and sexual domination in particular, as an institution that might effectively preclude any response at all. After all, what is to distinguish generative domination and an effectively oppressive form of domination which immobilizes its object altogether? On the other hand, Foucault is perhaps suggesting only that there is a sense in which domination can be generative, not that all domination is, in fact, generative. I take it that in this second version of his theory, domination must be understood as a dynamic relation whose outcome is never fixed in the sense that effective domination immobilizes or destroys its object. Foucault seems to suggest that sexual domination, when it is not coerced, resembles an open game. Indeed, his political opposition to coercion is clear. In discussing the homosexual movement in an interview, he maintains that “there is the question of freedom of sexual choice that must be faced. I say freedom of sexual choice and not freedom of sexual acts because there are sexual acts like rape that should not be permitted whether they involve a man and a woman or two men.”26
In discussing sadomasochism in the same interview, Foucault describes a scene of sexual conflict which is designed to sustain rather than resolve sexual tension. This is a version of desire that seeks its own reproduction and proliferation through the sustained struggle and conflict of the forces involved:
S&M is not a relationship between he (or she) who suffers and he (or she) who inflicts suffering, but between the master and the one on whom he exercises his mastery. What interests the practitioners of S&M is that the relationship is at the same time regulated and open. It resembles a chess game in the sense that one can win and the other lose. The master can lose in the S&M game if he finds he is unable to respond to the needs and trials of his victim. Conversely, the servant can lose if he fails to meet or can’t stand meeting the challenge thrown at him by the master. This mixture of rules and openness has the effect of intensifying sexual relations by introducing a perpetual novelty, a perpetual tension and a perpetual uncertainty which the simple consummation of the act lacks. The idea is also to make use of every part of the body as a sexual instrument.27
In the above description, Foucault appears to defend the desirability of dissatisfaction, suggesting that the failure to achieve an erotic resolution of opposites is itself an eroticizing experience. Similar to the Deleuzian defense of an affirmative erotic multiplicity, Foucault’s erotics of perpetual reversal is a generative activity which resists the possibility of closure. In this sense, dissatisfaction is no longer lamented, as it is in Sartre and Lacan, but celebrated as a sign of perpetual erotic possibility. The failure to achieve a final satisfaction for desire is, in Foucaultian terms, a significant achievement, the triumph of eros over an immobilizing law or, equivalently, the erotic mobilization of the law. Indeed, for Foucault, what from an Hegelian perspective would be understood as “futile” is now reappropriated as productive, generative, life-affirming. It is less the resolution of opposition than its erotic celebration that becomes the normative model for desire. Foucault further understands this generative opposition and subversive play as characteristic of sexuality in a post-dialectical age: “Perhaps the emergence of sexuality in our culture is an ‘event’ of multiple values: it is tied to the death of God and to the ontological void which his death fixed at the limit of our thought; it is also tied to the still silent and groping apparition of a form of thought in which the interrogation of the limit replaces the search for totality and the act of transgression replaces the movement of contradictions.”28
If Kojève halts the Phenomenology’s progress at the struggle between lord and bondsman, and Hyppolite emphasizes the temporal flux of Life as the central moment of the text, and Sartre rewrites the dialectic of desire and recognition, it should not surprise us that Foucault, like Lacan, reformulates the Life and Death Struggle in contemporary terms. Both the French reception and the French criticism of Hegel appear, then, to take their bearings within the Phenomenology’s Chapter 4. Indeed, it is striking to find how regularly even the most tenacious of post-Hegelians appear to remain faithful to the founding struggles of Hegel’s desiring subject.
Foucault’s break with the Phenomenology appears only partial. In the Phenomenology, the simple affirmation of life is inadequate because life must be repeatedly maintained. This necessitates the emergence of the bondsman who labors on life, and through that labor, learns the parameters of self-reflection, a capacity that eventually leads to his own revolt. Clearly, for Foucault, the discourse on life is not concerned with the development of the autonomous laborer, for that would posit a telos to life that is other than life, and that normative ideal, qua ideal, would prove to be anti-life. In a Nietzschean transvaluation of Hegel, Foucault appears to value the affirmation of life as the highest ideal, an ideal that works in the service of life and, therefore, cannot be part of any slave morality. Life, however, is not affirmed in a simple self-generated act; it requires resistance and struggle, and so requires a domain of Others, and a form of struggle. In conceding as much, Foucault seems to be acknowledging that the very promotion of life requires a way of life, and that this way of life is a certain kind of struggle. For Foucault, sexuality has become precisely such a way of life, a contemporary locus of struggle, because of the juridical management of reproduction in the interests of the politics of population control.29 The colonization of reproductive technology, the medical isolation of homosexuality, the hysterization of women’s bodies, the psychiatrization of perversions, have been medico-legal strategies for deploying sexuality in the interests of juridical discourses. The category of “sex” as a univocal signifier is precisely such a politically motivated construct, as is the category of “desire” which, according to Foucault, misses the point of sexuality as a complex discourse.
Sexuality is a domain of conflict for Foucault, one in which life-affirming desires are produced in the course of struggle and opposition. Eroticizing the master-slave relation, Foucault seems to envision the thorough eroticization of the body as a consequence of sadomasochistic jouissance, an eroticization of domination and submission which produces inadvertent intensities and pleasures, which proliferates kinds of pleasures and, hence, the entire field of sexual forces, working against the juridical reduction and localization of erotic pleasure. In such a struggle, domination does not result in oppression—that would be the consequence of a juridical power-relation. Rather, domination engenders creative and unexpected response. Productive power in the sexual domain thus becomes understood as a kind of erotic improvisation, the sexual version of Nietzsche’s life-affirming creation of values.
Like Deleuze, Foucault appears to value life as a domain of pure possibility in which restriction and prohibition belong to the forces of anti-life. Struggle and resistance take the place of the law or, we might say, they are the law which has lost its rigidity and become malleable—the plasticity of the law. The law in its rigidity creates desire as a lack, but the law in its plasticity creates “the plenitude of the possible,” desire as a creative act, a locus of innovation, the production of new cultural meanings. As in Hegel, desire reaches its limit nowhere, that is to say, it is an “absolute impulse” that only attains its satisfaction in the experience of the infinite back and forth of dialectical play. This notion of jouissance, what Sartre calls the imaginary and Lacan terms “Being,” what Deleuze and Foucault understand as the affirmation of the will-to-power, seems to be what Hegel had in mind when he wrote not only that the infinite is self-consciousness, but that “self-consciousness is desire.”
And yet it would clearly be wrong to conclude that these very efforts to overcome Hegel’s Phenomenology can simply be reassimilated back into Hegel’s framework. That is not the argument here. Hegel’s subject can no longer be entertained, even in an imaginary domain, apart from the thesis of its very impossibility. With Foucault, it becomes more difficult to refer to “desire” without first asking after the specific historical discourse productive of the phenomenon. Both the “subject” and its “desire” have come to suffer the process of historicization, and the presumed universality of the Hegelian discourse becomes increasingly suspect. Indeed, it becomes crucial to ask just how this subject is constituted, under what conditions, and by what means. Moreover, are there concrete individuals whose desire approximates the desire of Hegel’s subject? What gender are they, and to what extent is dialectical opposition considered to be characteristic of binary relations between the sexes?
Among French readers of Hegel, Julia Kristeva stands out as the one most concerned with a critique of Hegel from the point of view of an embodied, gendered individual. In her Revolution in Poetic Language (1974), she criticizes Hegel’s subject as a “paranoid” psychological figure, one who denies the materiality of his body and the psychosomatic origins of affective life. “Desire” is the name given to the rationalist appropriation of drives, the logocentric resistance to the body that precedes conventional signification. Moreover, Kristeva aligns herself with the Feuerbachian critique of Hegel which, she maintains, “makes explicit the real basis of [Hegel’s subject’s] totalizing and unifying aspect. It reveals that certain social relations—the family, civil society, and the State—founded on this unitary subject and his desire, are the truth of Hegelian speculation in its positivistic aspect” (p. 136). Like Deleuze, Kristeva sees in the subject’s initially hostile relation to the Other evidence of a slave morality of sorts, and argues that capitalism requires that each individual be pitted against every other in the competition for scarcely available goods. Distancing herself from a Marxist conclusion to the dilemma, she appears to agree with Foucault that the binary division of social agents into classes is an extension rather than a critique of the notion of the subject. In her view, capitalism induces a widespread schizoid disorder in which the disassociation from the body is central. The identification with a desiring subject whose main aim is the suppression of alterity is characteristic of a highly rationalistic and paranoid personality, one that is fostered and maintained by capitalist social relations. Hence, Kristeva concludes that “in the State and in religion, capitalism requires and consolidates the paranoid moment of the subject: a unity foreclosing the other and taking its place” (p. 139).
Kristeva’s purpose is to explode this monadic structure of the subject through a return to the body as a heterogeneous assemblage of drives and needs. Although Lacan argued that there could be no return to this primary heterogeneity without the breaking of the incest taboo, Kristeva argues that such a return is possible through the medium of poetic language. The rhythms and sounds of poetic language, its plurivocity of meanings, recall and reformulate an infantile relation to the maternal body. This language has its own set of meanings, but these meanings are not included by Lacan’s theory of signification or, for that matter, by most theories of linguistic meaning. They constitute the semiotic for Kristeva, a notion explained in Desire in Language (1977). Briefly summarized, the semiotic designates the somatic aspects of language, which includes the rhythms, pacing of breath, apparent non sequiturs, and polyvalences of speech. According to Kristeva, the semiotic designates the ‘workings of drives’ which are irreducibly heterogeneous. The emergence of the symbolic function of language, as in Lacan, requires the internalization of the incest taboo which, according to Kristeva, effects a transition from semiotic to symbolic speech. Although poetry is said to recapture the semiotic, it does so only within the terms of the symbolic; the unconstrained return to the semiotic would result in a leave-taking of cultural systems of communication and an entrance into psychosis.
Throughout her speculations in Desire in Language, Kristeva suggests that women sustain a different relation to the semiotic in virtue of the psychoanalytic necessity that some identification with the mother is necessary for female sexual development. Following Lacan, Kristeva argues that the symbolic constitutes the rule of the Phallus, and that the entire system of symbolic language is predicated not only upon the denial of dependency upon the maternal body but, as a consequence, implies the repudiation of femininity. The “subject” who emerges as a result of this internalized repression is necessarily dissociated from his own body as well, a subject whose unity is purchased at the expense of his own drives, and whose denial is renamed as desire.
Not far from this view is Simone de Beauvoir’s claim in The Second Sex that it is mainly men who constitute the domain of subjects, and that women, in this regard, are the Other. Kristeva’s contribution to this formulation is to suggest, not an equality among subjects, but the critical deconstruction of the subject to its psychosomatic origins. Although Kristeva adheres to a psychoanalytic account of primary drives which may well be questionable, she nevertheless presents a significant departure from the Hegelian program, a turn from a discourse on desires and subjects, to one which examines first the bodies from which, or against which, desires emerge.
In this sense, Kristeva’s methodological procedure bears similarities to Foucault’s, despite the latter’s critique of psychoanalytic assumptions regarding drives and repression. For Foucault, the examination of bodies would require a reflection upon the history of bodies, the institutional conditions of their emergence in given forms and relations, the historical production of their signification. For Kristeva, this reflection would attend to the psychosomatic origins of identity, where one would presumably discover a primary heterogeneity of impulse and drive subsequently rendered uniform through the internalization of the incest taboo. In a sense, repression is, for Kristeva, an invariant historical scene, the mechanism through which nature is transformed into history, a universal truth or, at least, a highly generalized truth of Western culture. Although Foucault would doubtless take issue with the presumed primacy of the incest taboo, and would argue that regulative mechanisms are more varied and historicized than Kristeva admits, his position is similarly concerned with the construction of the subject via the denial of the body and the heterogeneity of its impulses.
Like Kristeva, Foucault suggests a departure from the Hegelian discourse on desire and a turn, instead, to a discourse on bodies. On a general level, this project would tenuously align him with some feminist inquiries that understand the historical situation of the body to be centrally concerned with gender, and which tend to claim that inquiries into the structure and aim of desire require a prior inquiry into the complex interrelations of desire and gender. If gender is, as Beauvoir claims, the body in situation, then the “history of bodies” that Foucault suggests ought theoretically to include a history of gender as well. In The History of Sexuality, however, and in his short introduction to the journals of Herculine Barbin,30 Foucault takes issue with the category of sex as a peculiar product of the discourse on sexuality: “the notion of ‘sex’ made it possible to group together, in an artificial unity, anatomical elements, biological functions, conducts, sensations, and pleasures, and it enabled one to make use of this fictitious unity as a causal principle, an omnipresent meaning, a secret to be discovered everywhere: sex was thus able to function as a unique signifier and as a universal signified” (HS 154). That the body is figured as belonging to one of two sexes is evidence of a regulative discourse whose categories have become constitutive of experience itself, and which now appear, in their sedimented form, to be fully naturalized phenomena. As a result, Foucault is less interested in feminist inquiry that he is in a general displacement of the regulatory discourses on sexuality such as those that create the category of sex. Moreover, Foucault remarks that the opposition to juridical forms of sexuality ought not to operate within the terms of the discourse on desire: “the rallying point for the counterattack against the deployment of sexuality ought not to be sex-desire, but bodies and pleasure” (HS 157).
This critique of “the desiring subject,”31 and the proposal to write a history of bodies32 in its place constitutes a major conceptual reorientation which, if successful, would signal the definitive closure of Hegel’s narrative of desire. In the introduction to the second volume of The History of Sexuality, Foucault describes the specific historical context in which the subject of desire has played its central role:
When I came to study the modes according to which individuals are given to recognize themselves as sexual subjects… at the time the notion of desire, or of the desiring subject, constituted if not a theory, then at least a generally accepted theoretical frame. This very acceptance was odd: it was this same theme, in fact, or variations thereof, that was found not only at the very center of the traditional theory, but also in the conceptions that sought to detach themselves from it.33
Foucault explains that this conception was inherited by the nineteenth and twentieth centuries “from a long Christian tradition” whose own references to “the flesh” as both limit and temptation produce human beings as fundamentally characterized by dissatisfied desire. Foucault cautions against simply accepting this conceptual framework in the historical investigation of sexuality, but proposes, rather, a genealogical investigation of how the desiring subject was historically produced. He explains, “this does not mean that I propose to write a history of the successive conceptions of desire, of concupisence, or of libido, but rather to analyze the practices by which individuals were led to focus their attention on themselves, to decipher, recognize, and acknowledge themselves as subjects of desire, bringing into play between themselves a certain relationship that allows them to discover, in desire, the truth of their being, be it natural or fallen.”34
Foucault’s method of genealogical inquiry consists of giving an account of how a given “truth” is produced from a set of power relations as a strategic moment in the self-amplification of power. The “truth” of the relation between desire and the subject, the “truth” that is ostensibly latent in every desire and which constitutes the secret, the essence, of the subject itself, is a fiction which a given discourse, indeed, an entire history of Western discourses, has required. If desire can be said to reveal the truth of the human subject, then self-investigation promises the truth of the subject. And with this posture so sanctified, both the “self” and its “truth” are admitted to be immanently locatable within the reflexive circle of thinking. What if Foucault were right, that the conceit of an immanently philosophical desire grounded the further conceits of the subject and its truth? Then Hegel’s narrative would have entered fully the domain of the fantastic, and the phenomenology would require a genealogical account of the hidden historical conditions of its own structure.
But what justifies Foucault’s turn to a history of bodies, and what are the implications of forfeiting the inquiry into desire for an inquiry that takes the body as its primary theme? Foucault would argue that juridical discourses have been mainly concerned with the regulation of bodies and that history has left its legacy, as it were, on the bodies of contemporaries. In Foucault’s terms, “the body is the inscribed surface of events (traced by language and dissolved by ideas), the locus of a dissociated Self (adopting the illusion of a substantial unity), and a volume in perpetual disintegration.” The task of genealogy, he maintains, is “to expose a body totally imprinted by history and the process of history’s destruction of the body.”35
The “dissociated Self” is understood to be a sublimated creation of the juridically repressed body, which suggests that the Subject itself is a fiction based upon the regulation of the body (here Foucault’s theory clearly draws on Nietzsche’s Will to Power in which the ego is understood to conceal the multiplicitous affectivity of the body and of instinctual life in general). Hence, for Foucault, the subject is dissociated from the body and the multivalent force relations of which it is constituted; this suggests that a history of the subject requires an account of the regulatory and repressive mechanisms, those strategies of subjection that gave rise to the “subject.” Foucault’s discussion of the body occasionally relies upon a naturalistic vocabulary (e.g., “the strength or weakness of an instinct”) which is fairly questionable, and it also suggests, as I noted earlier, that the body is always the occasion for a play of dominations and regulations: “In a sense, only a single drama is ever staged in this ‘non-place,’ the endlessly repeated play of dominations. The domination of certain men over others leads to the differentiation of values; class domination generates the idea of liberty.”36
The “destruction” of the body is, thus, the occasion for the manufacturing of values, the moment of the “disassociation” which gives rise to abstraction and to the subject itself as an abstraction. Inasmuch as this is a single scene repeated endlessly throughout the course of history, Foucault appears to subscribe to a single locus of historical change, a single tension between the body and strategies of domination which give rise to events and values alike. Here we can see that Foucault has elevated the scene of bodily conflict to an invariant feature of historical change, and it makes sense to ask whether war itself has not become romanticized and reified through this theoretical move.
There may be another sense in which the body can be understood as the “inscribed surface of events” that does not assume that the body is always subjected to domination, and that this “subjection” is the juridical generator of values. Rather than assume that all culture is predicated upon the denial of the body, and that inscription is both a moment of regulation and of signification, it seems that a more thoroughly historicized consideration of various bodies in concrete social contexts might illuminate “inscription” as a more internally complicated notion. How, for instance, are we to understand the body as the inscribed surface of the history of gender relations, race relations, and ethnicity? How does the aging body evince a history of aging, and how do various bodies signify social positions and even social histories? And to what extent can the body exhibit an innovative relation to the past which constitutes it? How do we conceive of the body as a concrete scene of cultural struggle?
Foucault appears to accept that the various regulatory mechanisms which govern the body are invariably negative and assist in the production of the dissociated self, the “subject” of desire. Why does Foucault appear to eschew the analysis of concrete bodies in complex historical situations in favor of a single history in which all culture requires the subjection of the body, a subjection which produces a “subject” in its wake?
Foucault’s account in “Nietzsche, Genealogy, and History” is illuminated when we understand the tension between the dissociated Self and the “subjected body” as a reworking of the lordship-bondage dialectic. For Hegel, the bondsman is the body without consciousness, and the lord is the figure of pure abstraction which disavows its own corporeality. Foucault’s genealogical account conflates these two figures into a relation of inversion which is not attributable to subjects of any kind. Indeed, for itself. If we want to ask the question of who occupies these roles in a concrete social context, that is, for whom is dissociated cruelty a characteristic practice, and whose bodies are regularly subjected to this subjection, then it appears that Foucault’s genealogical analysis must be supplemented by an account of the genesis and distribution of social roles. In fact, it is Hegel’s account of lordship and bondage that accounts for this relationship in both reflexive and intersubjective terms, and so appears a more promising framework within which to answer such a question. Foucault may well give us an account of how the “subject” is generated, but he cannot tell us which subjects are generated in the way that he describes, and at whose expense.
Foucault’s analysis of historical Entstehung appears essentially indebted to Hegel’s lordship-bondage dialectic. But other problems remain: if there is a single drama to history, and if it consists in the conflictual scene in which the subjection or inscription of the body gives rise to significations, then either we must accept a personified notion of History as a signifier, or we must ask more specific questions about the production and distribution of power through the field of bodies and desires. If a history of bodies can be written that would not reduce all culture to this imposition of the law upon the body, then perhaps a truly specific account of bodies will be forthcoming, and desire will be understood in the context of the interrelationship between historically specific bodies.
Foucault’s critique of the discourse on desire, on the figure of the “subject of desire,” does well to remind us that desire is a name that not only accounts for an experience, but determines that experience as well, that the subject of desire may well be a fiction useful to a variety of regulative strategies, and that the “truth” of desire may well lie in a history of bodies as yet unwritten. Foucault challenges us to make fun of ourselves in our search for truth, in the relentless pursuit of the essence of our selves in the various flashes of impulse that lure us with their metaphysical promise. If the history of desire must be told in terms of a history of bodies, then it becomes necessary to understand how that history encodes itself in these most immediate phenomena; and if it is not a hermeneutics of the self that is required, then perhaps it is the narrative of a certain philosophically instructive comedy of errors. From Hegel through Foucault, it appears that desire makes us into strangely fictive beings. And the laugh of recognition appears to be the occasion of insight.