Lacan Contra Foucault

Subjectivity, Sex, and Politics

Nadia Bou Ali, Rohit Goel, Nadia Bou Ali, Rohit Goel

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781350036895
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

Lacan Contra Foucault seeks to ground the divergences and confluences between these two key thinkers in relation to contemporary philosophy and criticism. Specifically the topics of sexuality, the theory of the subject, history and historicism, scientific formalization, and ultimately politics. In doing so, the authors in this volume open up new connections between Lacan and Foucault and shine a light on their contemporary relevance to politics and critical theory.

1

Cutting Off the King’s Head

Mladen Dolar

In a famous interview in 1977, Michel Foucault stated: ‘We need to cut off the King’s head: in political theory that has still to be done.’¹ This slogan-like pronouncement is perhaps best suited to summarize Foucault’s endeavours, which took a tortuous road through a number of different areas, his oeuvre stretching over decades and often changing positions, expanding in rich and detailed accounts, engaging in great theoretical breakthroughs and in political struggles, spelling out vast patterns and ramifications that cannot but inspire awe and admiration. In relation to this, my starting point might appear meagre, yet it addresses one of Foucault’s central points.

If we try to spell out the assumptions on which Foucault’s slogan is premised, we could say this: one could cut off the king’s head in the revolutionary enthusiasm of two hundred years ago, but the inveterate assumption which saw in the king’s head the bearer and the centre of power survived the guillotine. What did not lose its head by cutting off the king’s head was the general view that understood power in terms of sovereignty, law, prohibition and repression. As Foucault said in the same interview:

The sovereign, law, prohibition, all this formed a system of representation of power which was promoted in the next period by legal theories: political theory never ceased to be obsessed with the person of the sovereign. Such theories even today continue to deal with the problem of sovereignty. But what we need is a political theory that wouldn’t be built on the problem of sovereignty and therefore not around problems of law and prohibition. […] If the effects of power are defined as repression, we assume an entirely legal concept of power; power is identified with a law that says no; we regard it in the first place as a force of prohibition. This is in my view an entirely negative, narrow, rough concept of power, but which is incredibly widespread. If power was merely repressive, if it didn’t do anything else except say no, do you believe that anyone would obey it? The reason that power is doing well and that it is accepted is the simple fact that it doesn’t weigh on us with the simple force of no, but that it traverses bodies, produces things, arouses pleasure, informs knowledge, produces discourse. Rather than a negative instance whose function is repression it should be envisaged as a productive network which runs through the entire social body.²

There are many similar passages in Foucault’s work and they are all set in harsh opposition to the predominant dogmas of political theories, especially left-wing dogmas of the time, which could not abandon ways of seeing power as repressive, as a function of the sovereign, the ruling class, the law, the state. Foucault’s enormous effort was to present power as a new object of thought, something that has been obfuscated in virtually all political theories. First of all, power is not a place, a definable location, a locus in the social that can be limited to a particular site. This was the classical and the most common illusion: to see power situated in a particular person – the sovereign, in a particular group of people – a social class, or in a privileged institution – the state. For power could then be seen as emanating from these points downwards – it would display a pyramidal structure, against which the natural counter-strategy would be to get hold of the particular locus at the top in order to exercise power in turn, or eventually to try to eliminate it (cut off the king’s head, abolish the state along with class domination, etc.). In this seemingly self-evident view, power is something that can be possessed by somebody and exercised from a privileged point.

At an even more rudimentary level, Foucault argues that power is irreducible to either violence or law. The two entities are both opposed – the rule of law supposedly being the end of the rule of violence – and imbricated – the law takes support in violence by assigning a monopoly over it to certain institutions, violence is exercised within the limits of the law. For Foucault, power presents a problem insofar as it cannot be reduced to physical coercion or simple repression. ‘Power is exercised only over free subjects and only insofar as they are free. […] Slavery is not a power relation when man is in chains. (In this case it is a question of a physical relationship of constraint.)’³ Power can be reduced neither to the Law as the foundation of society – the basic contract that holds society together and provides legitimacy for its distribution of power – nor to particular forms of legality brought about by procedures of consensus and participation. The legal or juridical may be important, but it is far from the whole story.

Power also cannot be reduced to something more fundamental lying behind it, of which it would be but a mask (e.g. the economic sphere, productive forces and relations of production). It is not an epiphenomenon or a superstructure whose base would be somewhere else. There is no hidden depth of power; it is all on the surface and what is on the surface is all there is to it. Neither can power be reduced to an origin, transcendent or ‘natural’, from which it would derive and which would endow it with authority. There is nothing behind power; it is always already there, supported only by itself.

With this argument (and I apologize for this rough simplification), Foucault gradually discarded virtually all classical and common approaches to power and the bulk of the standard political theories for failing to account for a number of diverse effects and mechanisms of power. Furthermore, their key concepts (sovereignty, legitimacy, state, etc.) are not the foundations that they claim to be; they are involved, as important parts and regions, in strategies of power that do not stem from these concepts but enclose, comprehend and incorporate them.⁴ One could say that the monarch, the sovereign, the state, the law and so on do have an existence whereas power does not. Power permeates and constantly displaces them. Hence Foucault’s famous proclamation that ‘power doesn’t exist’ (‘Le pouvoir, ça n’existe pas’).⁵

But Foucault’s discarded entities had one thing in common: they all made a totality out of the social, they made it into a whole. Taking those entities as a starting point, one could delimit the social and consider it as a totality as well as discern its underlying power structure. Whereas for Foucault, and this is the first important consequence, power does not form a totality or totalize the social, it rather makes it a non-whole, not-all, something that cannot be delimited. If those entities formed a totality, it was always by a certain logic of exclusion or external division – one excluded the monarch from the social as a transcending point; one excluded the Law as a symbolic foundation and authority, opposed to the social texture it founded; one divided the social into opposing spheres, for example, state and civil society, the state being the agency of totalizing the social. Foucault’s step, on the other hand, is based on a logic of inclusion: there is no outside of power and if it operates by constant divisions, those divisions are internal to it – or more precisely, the division into internal and external is thereby made superfluous and non-pertinent. So power has no exteriority and it is therefore by its nature ‘non-totalizable’. Nor does it have an essence or an interiority, and this is why the ‘what’ question has to be replaced by a ‘how’ question – not ‘what is power?’ but ‘how does power work?’ Power is neither a substance nor a subject (in Hegelian terms), neither an agency nor a place, and it is ultimately not a concept at all, insofar as a concept presupposes an ordered totality. As non-totalizable, it is also non-conceptualizable – not in any traditional sense. Power emerges in a paradoxical status of a non-concept (and I perhaps need to add that this is not meant as a critique). Power is not One. This produces a side effect of Foucault having to constantly multiply power’s attributes: proliferation, multiplicity, dispersion, prolixity, inciting, enhancement, diversification, production, fermentation, heterogeneity, innumerable and so on (attributes that very often appear in the plural). But this is an external mark and consequence of the radical stance that power is a non-concept. It has many names because it is, strictly speaking, unnamable. Another way to see this is as the process of immanentization: any transcendent entity has become a moment of inner deployment.

To be sure, power can have totalizing effects, but those are to be seen as divergent processes of totalization as opposed to totality, that is, as processes that cannot reach their end or stabilize themselves, processes of permanently shifting borders, always partial, unstable and constantly undermined. As Deleuze put it in a succinct slogan: ‘One, Totality, Truth, object, subject are not universals, but singular processes of unification, totalization, verification, objectification, subjectification, processes which are immanent to certain dispositives.’⁶

A further consequence of political theories that assume the pure exteriority of power is that Foucault discards another line of thinking which was common in many approaches to power, the one that envisions power in terms of ‘ideology and consciousness’. The problems of the type of consciousness that makes possible the power relations, its inherent illusions, its essential blinding, the false consciousness which enraptures the individuals and turns them into subjects, the intertwining of recognition and miscognition – these problems do not arise for Foucault at all, for they would entail – in the widest sense – a space of interiority and a mechanism of repression, the entities he is trying to do away with. To be specific, there is a constant problem of how a disciplinary programme is to be translated into a subjective conduct, but the problem has to be solved without recurring to the ideological representations and the traditional themes of consciousness, its interiority and self-comprehension. This is why the problem of the subject, once it explicitly arises in Foucault’s later work, is posed in entirely different terms: the terms of practices of self-relation, the practical self-production of the self rather than a universality of subjectivity or its self-reflection. ‘Care for the self,’ figuring in the title of his last book, is not a type of consciousness, but a type of practice. And most importantly, it is not something external to power, opposing some realm of interiority or the psychic to the power relations, but rather a relation of power to itself, a power bending on itself, as it were, an internal loop of power. An internal loop to be conceived in opposition to the self-reflective turn of the classical self-consciousness, it is a self-referentiality devoid of self-reflexivity, and thus of any notion of recognition or mirroring.⁷

This is why the Foucauldian subject cannot be accounted for either in its imaginary form, for it doesn’t emerge in the dialectics of recognition/miscognition, nor in its symbolic form, for it is in no way reducible to the function of a lack and negativity implied by the symbolic. Neither the ego nor the barred subject. This is also why Foucault avoids the notion of desire and proposes to replace it by an analysis based on ‘bodies and pleasures’ (Foucault 1976: 209). Desire, for Foucault, implies a ‘negative ontology’ of a lack and of an object supposedly detained by the Other, an object which would be able to fill the lack – pleasure instead of desire, body instead of castration, the positivity of event instead of the lack, the multiplicity of power relations instead of sovereignty.

But this nature of power is tightly linked to the advent of modernity and could only become apparent with it. There is an essential discontinuity, a rupture that has shaped the fate of power and which inaugurated our era. This is what Foucault tries to pinpoint on different levels throughout his work: the exclusion of the mad with le grand renfermement as opposed to their liberation framed by the new disciplinary techniques; the spectacle of public punishment as opposed to incarceration; power that displays itself as opposed to power that controls; the dispositive of alliance as opposed to the dispositive of sexuality; power which takes – the goods, ultimately one’s life – as opposed to power which produces and enhances, the bio-power that promulgates life. In each of those instances, there is a shift from a negative functioning of the law to the positive and immanent deployment of a norm, from the law as a restriction to the norm as a progressive incorporation and constant proliferation, from exclusion to inclusion. The norm is now seen to be immanent to, and constitutive of, the field of its application; its supposed restrictiveness ultimately constitutes what it is supposed to repress. It does not negate or repress something external to it, but it presents the moment of its inner ‘condition of possibility’; it does not restrict something which was already there before, but rather brings it about.⁸

The whole issue of ‘governmentality’, the subject of Foucault’s scrupulous reflection in his later period, aims precisely at this point of dissociation between sovereignty and legality on the one hand and the pervasive power mechanisms on the other. What is at stake is a power aiming at disposition of things, a multiform tactics which has a finality of its own beyond issues of law and sovereignty – the new techniques of governing, enhancing and controlling populations, statistical methods, calculations of risk and so on.⁹ The emergence of the ‘reason of state’, la raison d’État, and its curious new logic, along with the emergence of the new entity, the police (in the seventeenth-century sense of the word), are the two most marked signals of a modality of power which has moved well beyond the framework of sovereignty and law into an area of immanent enhancement and deployment. So the paradoxical non-totalizable nature of power only becomes fully deployed with the disciplinary society (although the different breaks that Foucault studies are not simply homologous and cannot be reduced to a simple common denominator – they have been brought about by multiple and heterogeneous ways). Most political theory remained stuck with the notions of sovereignty, legality, state and so on, so the novelty of disciplinary mechanisms could not be fully understood, and thus it was unable to account for the most important ways in which modern power is exercised. As Foucault put it: ‘Maybe what is really important for our modernity […] is not so much the étatisation of society, as the “governmentalization” of the state.’¹⁰ Here lies Foucault’s enormous endeavour to invent power as a new phenomenon and to think its specificity beyond its antiquated models – an object that has never been thought before.

If there is a negative aspect to Foucault’s theory of power, establishing what power is not, then this side has to be seen as a preliminary step towards establishing power in its positivity. Indeed, the point of rejecting the traditional approaches was precisely an attempt to think power in its pure positivity, since to posit power in terms of sovereignty or law was to take it basically as a ‘power which says no’, an agency of repression. The point of Foucault’s famous critique of the ‘repressive hypothesis’ was to reverse the perspective and to envision power as production, a proliferation, an inducement, an enhancement, an increase and so on, rather than negation, exclusion, prohibition or limitation. So the negative side of Foucault’s theory ultimately aimed precisely...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Measure Against Measure: Why Lacan Contra Foucault?
• 1. Cutting Off the King’s Head
• 2. Author, Subject, Structure: Lacan Contra Foucault
• 3. Better Failures: Science and Psychoanalysis
• 4. Merely Analogical: Structuralism and the Critique of Political Economy
• 5. Battle Fatigue: Kiarostami and Capitalism
• 6. Foucault’s Neoliberal Post-Marxism
• Author Index
• Subject Index
• Imprint