Understanding Foucault, Understanding Modernism

David Scott

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781628927719
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria francese

Michel Foucault continues to be regarded as one of the most essential thinkers of the twentieth century. A brilliantly evocative writer and conceptual creator, his influence is clearly discernible today across nearly every discipline-philosophy and history, certainly, as well as literary and critical theory, religious and social studies, and the arts. This volume exploits Foucault's insistent blurring of the self-imposed limits formed by the disciplines, with each author in this volume discovering in Foucault's work a model useful for challenging not only these divisions but developing a more fundamental interrogation of modernism. Foucault himself saw the calling into question of modernism to be the permanent task of his life's work, thereby opening a path for rethinking the social. Understanding Foucault, Understanding Modernism shows, on the one hand, that literature and the arts play a fundamental structural role in Foucault's works, while, on the other hand, it shifts to the foreground what it presumes to be motivating Foucault: the interrogation of the problem of modernism. To that end, even his most explicitly historical or strictly epistemological and methodological enquiries directly engage the problem of modernism through the works of writers and artists from de Sade, Mallarmé, Baudelaire to Artaud, Manet, Borges, Roussel, and Bataille. This volume, therefore, adopts a transdisciplinary approach, as a way to establish connections between Foucault's thought and the aesthetic problems that emerge out of those specific literary and artistic works, methods, and styles designated "modern." The aim of this volume is to provide a resource for students and scholars not only in the fields of literature and philosophy, but as well those interested in the intersections of art and intellectual history, religious studies, and critical theory.

Part One

Conceptualizing Foucault

1

The Origin of Parrēsia in Foucault’s Thinking: Truth and Freedom in the History of Madness

Leonard Lawlor and Daniel J. Palumbo

Published in 1961, the History of Madness is a monumental study of madness in the “Classical Age” (that is, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, primarily in France). In its original form, the History of Madness displays a debt to phenomenology as it was interpreted in France after the Second World War. This debt is most apparent in Foucault’s use of the word “experience,” a use that Foucault later will call “enigmatic” (FHF, 16) and “floating” (EFR, 336). It is perhaps the vestiges of phenomenological thinking in the History of Madness that leads to Derrida’s 1963 criticism of Foucault, a criticism that makes Foucault remove the book’s original title (“Folie et déraison”; “Madness and Unreason”) and its original preface for the History of Madness’ 1972 reissue.¹ In his 1973 course at the Collège de France, Psychiatric Power, Foucault himself states that the History of Madness made use of three notions that were not very helpful for the investigation of madness: violence; institution; and the family. All of these notions, Foucault says, should be replaced with notions of power (ECF-PP, 14–15).² Self-criticisms such as these found in Psychiatric Power have led commentators to speak of periods in Foucault’s thinking, indicating thereby that one must understand the trajectory of Foucault’s thinking as discontinuous.

Despite the debt to phenomenology, the History of Madness displays a remarkable level of innovation. In the History of Madness, we find a restructuring of the relation of theory and practice, a restructuring that anticipates Foucault’s idea of an apparatus (dispositif).³ Similarly, Foucault’s analysis of the gaze in the birth of asylum (EHM, 437–443) anticipates his famous analysis of light in Bentham’s panopticon prison in Discipline and Punish (EDP, 200–202). Moreover, the History of Madness presents the three axes by which Foucault himself defines his thinking at the end of his life: knowledge; power; and ethics. The History of Madness concerns the formation of domains of knowledge which constitute themselves as specific knowledge of “mental illness”; the organization of a normative system built on a whole technical, administrative, juridical, and medical apparatus whose purpose was to isolate and take custody of the insane; and the definition of a relation to oneself and to others as possible subjects of madness (EFR, 336). Finally, and most importantly, as its original title indicates, the History of Madness provides a history of the relation between unreason and madness. Even though Foucault removed Folie et déraison from the book’s cover, this relationship is the book’s core theme. The 1961 analysis of madness and unreason anticipates Foucault’s description of his work in 1984 as a “history of thought” (EFR, 334).

Thus, one is able to juxtapose, to the discontinuity thesis, a continuity thesis: Foucault’s thinking follows an unbroken path from unreason to parrēsia, his last great concept.

In what follows, we intend to follow this path from unreason to parrēsia (an ancient Greek term that is rendered in French as “franc-parler” and in English as “speaking freely” or “speaking frankly”). We intend to show that the three characteristics by means of which Foucault defines speaking frankly in his 1983 lecture course, The Government of Self and Others, can be traced back to his analysis of delirium in the central chapter of the History of Madness called “The Transcendence of Delirium” (EHM, 208–250). As we shall see, both the discourse of delirium and the speaking that speaks the truth frankly are intensifications of freedom. In order to be able to demonstrate the connection of parrēsia back to unreason or delirium, we must return to Foucault’s secondary thesis, the one that accompanied the submission of the History of Madness as his primary thesis in 1961: Foucault’s Introduction to Kant’s Anthropology.⁴ In addition to our continuity thesis (from parrēsia to unreason), we are also arguing that it is impossible to understand the History of Madness without understanding Foucault’s Introduction. Here, we see Foucault reconstruct the structure of Kant’s thought, going from the level of the a priori of knowledge, as it is presented in The Critique of Pure Reason, to the level of what Foucault calls “a priori of existence,” presented in Kant’s Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, and finally to the “fundamental level” of what Kant himself calls “transcendental philosophy” in his Opus Postumum.⁵ It is only by following Foucault’s reconstruction of the fundamental level that we are able to see that, for Foucault, the central concern of his thinking is the relation between truth and freedom. When we are able to see that the fundamental level, for Foucault, concerns the relation of truth and freedom, then we are able to see unreason or delirium as an act of freedom in relation to truth; and then we are able to see the act of unreason as the origin of parrēsia in Foucault’s thinking. Parrēsia as “the highest exercise of freedom” (ECF-GSO, 67) originates from the “absolute freedom” of unreason (EHM, 157). In order to approach the origin of parrēsia in Foucault’s thinking, let us first set up the context for seeing it.

An entire readjustment of the ethical world: Summary of the History of Madness

What we intend to do now is chart the most crucial moments in Foucault’s “archeology” of unreason in the History of Madness (EHM, xxviii). “Archeology” is a technical term in Foucault’s thought. It designates, as Foucault says in the 1969 Archeology of Knowledge, “a description that questions the already-said at the level of existence” (EAK, 131). Archeology therefore, in The Archeology of Knowledge, investigates the background of linguistic or theoretical acts such as the statement of the truth of madness as well as practices such as the confinement of the mad. In the History of Madness, in 1961, its use seems to be less rigorous and more indeterminate. As with his use of “experience,” his use of the term “archeology” looks to be closer to its use in phenomenology where it means a “dismantling” of constructed forms in order to reveal the original act that constituted the forms. This act would be a combination of immanence (subjective and internal) and transcendent (objective and external). Therefore, we are able to view Foucault’s history of madness through these phenomenological terms; Foucault is recounting a history that moves from transcendence to immanence. Moving from a transcendent god to immanent human experience, the movement is, as Foucault says, one of “desacralization” (EHM, 90).

The History of Madness is divided into three parts, the first of which begins with madness in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. In this opening epoch, madness was a great peril, the mad man a tragic figure of the end of the world that constantly threatened, haunted, and fascinated man’s imagination. But it was also a figure of irony and derision, the error and folly of man in the world (EHM, 13). This liminal ambiguity of the characters of madness and the mad man is played out in the paintings of Brueghel and Bosch, especially Bosch’s the “Ship of Fools,” on one hand, and the literature of Brant’s Narrenschiff and Erasmus’s The Praise of Folly, on the other. Figural art and language, image and word, which for a long time were complementary, begin to come apart and take different directions. In particular, rather than portraying in a dark flash the tragic end of the world that threatens man, the discourses of Brant and Erasmus take hold of man and show him his moral truth. Madness is no longer tied to the truth of the world, “but rather about man and the truth about himself that he can perceive” (EHM, 23). Madness becomes the object of a moral discourse in which it is tied to all of man’s various errors, faults, and defects. Madness’s truth is grasped and criticized in this objectifying discourse. The derisory surface of irony covers over the profound threat of apocalypse.

The division between the tragic vision of the world and the critical consciousness of madness marks the beginning of a separation that will only continue to widen in the Classical Age. The experience of madness that felt the imminent threat of an apocalyptic end recedes into the shadows, while the experience of madness captured in the language that criticized the conduct proper to man’s nature is put under a brighter and more clarifying light (EHM, 27). It is with the great confinement of the Classical Age, instituted by Louis XIV’s 1656 edict of Nantes that established the Hôpital Général in Paris, that this division takes on a concrete institutional form.

For Foucault, confinement is a “decisive event” in the history of unreason (EHM, 77). It is the event in which madness comes to be perceived against the same social and moral horizon as poverty, idleness, and libertinage. It is the event in which madness came to be seen as one type of unreason among others with which it had a shared kinship. Now, against this moral horizon, madness would take on new meanings, meanings distinct from those it had in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Madness was now part of the ethical decision of the Classical Age: it was the decision within which certain groups, all of which could be classified under the title “unreason,” were divided from other groups, those placed under “reason.” Confinement was the practice that concretely accomplished the ethical decision that animated the moral perception of the Classical Age.

Confinement was not a medical establishment. It was “a semi-juridical structure, ... an instrument of order, of the new bourgeois and monarchical order that was beginning to take shape in the France of that time” (EHM, 49). The shift in meaning of libertinage in the first and second halves of the seventeenth century is a good example of this. (We should not overlook the fact that, for Foucault, eighteenth century “free thinking” echoes Greek parrēsia.) The shift of meaning manifests a “certain kinship of immorality and error” (EHM, 97). Libertinage was a kind of skepticism that demonstrated the constant threat of madness in the search for a reasonable ordering of the heart’s passions. But by the second half of the seventeenth century, the libertine’s free thinking comes to be seen as a consequence “of a licentious life” (EHM, 98). In order to bring him back to the truth, one must limit his freedom by curbing his unreasonable passions and desires. And so the libertines were confined. Confinement then served the purpose of moral reform. It brought “one back to the truth through moral constraints” (EHM, 96).

Confinement is the concrete manifestation of an entire readjustment of the ethical world. It is the immanent space of the movement of desacralization, the gesture that divides reason from unreason. Through this readjustment the figures of unreason—those who have transgressed the ethical limits of bourgeois society—appear and can be grasped by objective knowledge. What the example of the libertine shows us is that an ethical perception and moral condemnation is at the foundation of the objective knowledge of madness that begins to develop in the Classical Age. The observation and study of the nature of madness is now possible because it is understood as the alienation of man’s reason from itself. Man’s natural passions and desires turn his reason against itself, against what is otherwise understood as his truth. Libertinage shows us that what the medical knowledge of madness identifies as the nature of man is in fact the result of a reorganization of social space along the lines of an ethical perception. All of the figures who appear in confinement are those who challenged, in one way or another, the sovereignty of reason. As such, they can all be classified under the term “unreason.”

For the Classical Age, reason ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Contents
• Series Preface
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: Foucault’s Modernisms
• Part One Conceptualizing Foucault
• Part Two Foucault and Aesthetics
• Part Three Glossary Essays
• Notes on Contributors
• Index
• Name Index
• Copyright Page