Freud, Foucault and The Dialogue With Unreason': Joel Whitebook

Joel Whitebook
Freud, Foucault and the dialogue with unreason
Abstract The standard interpretations of Foucaults intellectual biography usually present Sartre as his major adversary. Though it would be difcult to underestimate the importance of Sartre for Foucaults development, this paper argues that Foucault was involved in an even more intense and deeper contest with Freud. Indeed, Freud was Foucaults principal adversary and, throughout his career, Foucault was trying to formulate a counter-project to psychoanalysis. The author attempts to demonstrate this claim by examining Foucaults early psychological writings, Madness and Civilization, his encounter with Kant in The Order of Things and The History of Sexuality. He argues, moreover, that Foucault had articulated a project, namely, the dialogue with unreason, which not only could have provided a meeting point for his project and Freuds but can still provide a way of getting beyond the exhausted debate between the advocates of the Enlightenment and the Anti-Enlightenment. Because he could never give up the temptation to valorize transgression, however, Foucault was unable to pursue the dialogue with unreason in a systematic way. Key words Foucault Freud psychoanalysis reason
And how comfortless is the thought that the sickness of the normal does not necessarily imply as its opposite the health of the sick. (Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia)
I Introduction: I had been mad enough to study reason; I was reasonable enough to study madness1
In his biography of Michel Foucault, James Miller reports the following scene: while following Sartres cofn through the streets of the Left Bank
PHILOSOPHY & SOCIAL CRITICISM vol 25 no 6 pp. 2966
Copyright 1999 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) [0191-4537(199911)25:6;2966;010112]
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30 Philosophy & Social Criticism 25 (6)

towards the Montparnasse cemetery, Foucault is reported to have turned to a former student who was accompanying him in the cortge and declared that, as a young man, it was [Sartre], and all that he represented . . . that I wished to renounce.2 And it would be difcult indeed to overestimate the animosity that Foucault and his generational cohort directed towards Sartre and existentialism. Nevertheless, I would maintain that Foucault had an even more intense and prolonged, if less apparent, rivalry with another intellectual giant Sigmund Freud a gure with whom he dueled his entire career. I would go further still and say that Foucaults attacks on existentialist humanism, which is to say, on meaning and the subject, are themselves in no small part derivative from his hostility towards Freud and psychoanalysis. After all, without meaning or the subject there is no (Freudian) psychoanalysis. It must be admitted that, as things stand now, Foucault appears to seem to be winning his contest with Freud at least with regard to the so-called marketplace of ideas. Colin Gordon is correct to use Audens overworked but nonetheless absolutely juste phrase to refer to Foucault. For Foucault has indeed come to represent a whole climate of opinion, namely, the one that has superceded the climate of opinion formerly represented by Freud.3 What, then, are the assumptions that underpin Foucaults attack on Freud, which are, at the same time, the ideas that lie behind so much of the current anti-psychoanalytic mood? This is the question I will address in what follows. While a number of commentators, including Jacques Derrida and John Forrester,4 have meticulously charted the erratic swings that marked Foucaults attitude toward Freud throughout his career,5 no one has provided a satisfying explanation of them. It must be stressed that what we are speaking about is not ordinary ambivalence. When it comes to Freud, the presence of ambivalence is to be expected in all of us, sympathizers and opponents alike. How could it be otherwise with a gure who, among other things, documented the existence of psychic reality a realm of indeterminable but extensive scope, which lies largely beyond our control and which violates some of our most cherished idealizations about the goodness and rationality of human beings? And, despite the outward changes that have occurred in our culture, that discovery remains as disturbing today as it was a hundred years ago. Rather, with Foucault, what we are talking about exceeds the limits of expectable ambivalence and, because of its compulsive and repetitious character, has something symptom-like, which is to say, something unmastered about it. Indeed, as Derrida has suggested, Foucaults interminable and inexhaustible6 oscillations with respect to Freud amount to a virtual fort/da game.7 And I am claiming that those oscillations are manifestations of Foucaults unspoken contest with Freud that spanned his entire career.
31 Whitebook: Freud, Foucault and the dialogue with unreason

Thus, in his Introduction to Ludwig Binswangers Dream and Existence, Foucault began his career with a direct assault on the central depth-hermeneutical thesis of The Interpretation of Dreams, namely, that dreams have a meaning which consists in concealed wishes. He sought to replace it with a theory that located the meaning of dreams in their formal aspects. As Foucault, who was then immersed in the study of psychology, well knew, by attacking the theory of dreams, he was attacking the cornerstone of Freuds entire project.8 And with his repudiation of the repressive hypothesis in the rst volume of The History of Sexuality, he entered the nal phase of his career with an attempt to expunge the signicance of Freuds contribution entirely.9 In between these two markers, we nd Foucault vacillating between enthusiastic praise for Freud as the founder of a critical counter-science and scornful criticism of him as a major contributor to the ideology and technology of normalization. In this paper, then, I will attempt to elucidate the nature of the challenge Freud posed for Foucault, a challenge which he could neither fully master nor let go of, and to which he had, therefore, repeatedly to return. It is easy to see that psychoanalysis and Foucauldian theory do indeed lay competing claims to the very same areas:10 sexuality, madness, genealogy, the imaginary, the modern subject, the normal and the pathological, and the limits of reason. And in each of these topics, Foucault sought to displace Freuds account with his own. Moreover, his later interest in cultivating new technologies of the self can be viewed as an attempt to formulate an alternative to psychoanalysis as a practice of self-formation as well. As his biographers make abundantly clear,11 Foucault was initially motivated to study psychology, psychiatry and psychoanalysis by the desire to make sense of his own suffering. It must be immediately stressed, however, that because this can be said of practically everyone drawn to the clinically oriented psychological disciplines and Freud is certainly no exception it can in no way be used to discredit Foucaults theory. It is simply a given. The pertinent question in these matters is not whether specic biographical material motivated an individual to pursue a particular endeavor, but whether that material has been successfully transformed into works that transcend ones motives and preoccupations and assume public signicance and validity. Didier Eribon, Foucaults friend and sympathetic biographer who makes short shrift of the attempts to reduce the philosophers studies of madness and rationality to his homosexuality or psychopathology addressed the question directly. Referring to Foucaults profound personal crisis while a student at the Ecole Normal Suprieure, which resulted in a suicide attempt and psychiatric evaluation, Eribon observes: It is possible to see how an intellectual project is born in an experience

that should perhaps be described as primary . . . how an intellectual adventure is created in the struggles of individual and social life. Indeed, I would go further and maintain that it is hard to imagine where the passion necessary to sustain serious creative work can originate except from such primary personal experiences and struggles. The important point, as Eribon stresses, is not to remain stuck in them, but to think them through, to go beyond them. And the salient question concerns the extent to which an individual, in this case Foucault, has succeeded in going beyond them. In general, the same methodological principles apply to the consideration of these difculties in Foucaults work as apply to all such cases. Namely, every attempt must be made to understand a theory internally, on its own grounds, and to account for any difculties it may possess with its own inner resources before external factors can be introduced. Once the internalist approach has been exhausted, however, it is legitimate to turn to external considerations biographical, sociological, economic or what have you to clarify the still unresolved difculties within the position. This means that while external factors cannot per se be adduced to discredit a theory in a reductionist fashion, it is valid to bring them in to elucidate internal difculties that cannot be resolved on other grounds. For example, Eribon argues that Foucaults productive response to the trauma of having had the psychiatric gaze directed at him was to turn his own critical gaze back initially on psychiatry, and then on the medical profession and the established human sciences as a whole: Do you really know who you are? Are you sure of your reason? of your scientic concepts, of your categories of perception?12 And the fruitfulness of this procedure can hardly be questioned. It produced some of the most penetrating and innovative critiques of the instrumentalist dimension of the human sciences we possess and opened vast areas for new empirical research. At the same time, however, one has to admit that, when one considers the theory solely on its own internal merits, glaring inconsistencies and lacunae appear. And, in the nal analysis, these inconsistencies cannot simply be nessed with the rhetoric of the masked philosopher. In this context, Eribon tells us that at the same time that Foucault was absorbed in the critical study of the psychological sciences, he was also fascinated with the avant-garde writers who dealt with transgression, the limit experience of excess and expenditure.13 This fascination most likely represented an attempt not only to comprehend his own experience of madness but also to identify a normative tradition with which to counter the accusative gaze of the psychiatric profession. My thesis, then, is the following: despite several well-known attempts to repudiate it, Foucault remained tempted throughout his career to valorize the transgressive counter-tradition, and that temptation not only determined his vacillations towards Freud, but also

generated some of the more glaring lacunae in his theory. To this extent, then, Foucault did not succeed in going beyond his original formative experiences, as Eribon suggests, but only in idealizing it. Let me elaborate my position in four points. (1) In Madness and Civilization, Foucault identied a theoretical and practical program the dialogue with unreason which is sound in its own right and which could have provided a basis for a common ground with psychoanalysis.14 Indeed, Foucaults estimation of Freud was at its highest when he praised him for having been the rst to re-establish that dialogue after the Great Connement. (2) Foucault could not, however, maintain that program because it conicted with the temptation to valorize transgression. Thus, in the very same book, he condemned psychoanalysis as a normalizing science and dismissed its founder as a gure of bourgeois authority. (3) However, Foucault was at the same time too sophisticated to stick with a program in which the transgressive experience was unequivocally idealized. Theoretically, he recognized it would require direct access to an extra-discursive referent which, after Kant and in the structuralist milieu of his day, was indefensible. And politically, he came to realize that such a program always carries with it the threat of ultragauchiste terror. The tension between the continual temptation to valorize transgression, and the fact that he knew better, produced some of the well-known inconsistencies in the development of Foucaults theory as well as his stubborn refusal to address them. (4) His rejection of the repressive hypothesis in The History of Sexuality, Volume I, represents an attempt to rid himself of the entire problematic. He believed that if he could refute the juridical-discursive concept of power which pictures the opposition of a repressive law and a repressed substrate he could free himself of the very framework in which the question of transgression arises and replace it with a project of aesthetic self-creation. As we will see, however, this refutation is more apparent than real. Because he remained stuck at the abstract opposition between normalization and transgression, Foucault could not recognize the next point which was so clearly perceived by Adorno: once the conceits of healthy common sense have been unmasked and the pathology of the so-called normal revealed, the temptation understandably arises as it does in the tradition of the pote maudit to take the putatively sick as normative. Adorno observes, however, that the so-called sick . . . usually only repeat, in a different way, the same disastrous pattern of the normals.15 To get beyond the unproductive opposition of normalization versus transgression, it is necessary to subject the conceits of both reason and unreason to rigorous scrutiny. Foucault, however, while he expressed support for such a program, was unable to sustain it because of the constant temptation globally to condemn reason in favor of an idealized unreason. Against his attempts to dismiss psychoanalysis as a

normalizing science, I will argue that, at its best that is, understood as an exercise in the dialogue with unreason and as a methodical limit practice psychoanalysis presents a third alternative to both the normalizers and the transgressors.
II Madness and Civilization

Far from representing a piece of curious juvenilia or an artifact of the apocalyptic 1960s, Madness and Civilization remains, as Gary Gutting has suggested, foundational16 for Foucaults career. It constitutes a template in which the major themes, value orientations and patterns of his latter works are already inscribed. Prominent among these is, of course, the thematic of power and exclusion, which, as Dreyfus and Rabinow have observed, permeates Foucaults project.17 And with respect to Freud, both poles of the oscillation that would characterize the rest of Foucaults oeuvre are clearly articulated in this seminal work, without any attempt at resolution indeed, without any indication that he recognized the inconsistency. Before turning to the discussion of Freud, however, it is necessary to recall the books basic argument. Already in the Preface, the great Kantian theme is sounded, which would come to preoccupy Foucault perhaps to an even larger extent than the Freudian problematic with which it is intimately and systematically connected. I am referring to the motif of limits which, for Foucault, are as often physical as conceptual their constitution and transgression. Foucault tells us that he wants to return to the zero point18 before the boundary between reason and madness had been established by the constitution of modern scientic rationality. His aim is to recapture something like an uncontaminated experience of madness in-itself before it was reconstituted into mental illness by modern science. Foucault argues that in the aftermath of the plague, there existed in Western Europe an appreciation of the transcendent truth-content of madness and that this recognition continued into the Renaissance, with Brueghel, Drer and Shakespeare, albeit in a progressively attenuated form. He points to the existence of a physical and conceptual no mans land, as it were, on the periphery of integrated society that out of some sort of structural necessity had to be lled. This liminal space served as a container for the intolerable and disowned parts of so-called normal civic and psychic life which had to be projected outside the walls of the town and of the psyche. And there was in fact a signicant degree of continuity between the literal and gurative space occupied by the plague victim and the madman. The houses on the boundaries of the medieval town that were vacated by the cast-out plague sufferers often

came to be inhabited by the mad. Foucault maintains, moreover, that even after the Black Death had receded from the European landscape, the madman retained an awareness of the folly of all human endeavors and the ultimate groundlessness of all our beliefs. In one of his most chilling phrases, Foucault writes that the madman knew that the head that will become the skull is already empty.19 This was his tragic wisdom. The rst dramatic event in Foucaults narrative occurred in 1657 with the Great Connement. In this act not only the mad, but the eccentric of every kind,20 as Habermas has put it vagrants, criminals, libertines, prostitutes, etc. were rounded up and incarcerated in the hpitaux gnraux. For Foucault, the Great Connement became the prototype for the numerous acts of physical and conceptual exclusion that were to follow in modernity. Indeed, this act of exclusion came to symbolize a concept that Foucault would call the repressive hypothesis and that he would later repudiate. Foucaults thesis is that with the Great Connement which had more to do with the police than with the medical profession the madman ceased to be considered an eschatological gure . . . at the limits of the world,21 and the classical experience of madness is born in which madness is taken as the radical other of an enlightened reason that has purged itself of all nocturnal residue.22 This effectively put to a halt the dramatic dialogue between reason and madness. The other decisive event in Foucaults narrative occurs in 1794, the date when the inmates at Bictre were emancipated from their chains. Whereas Pinels unshackling of the inmates is traditionally applauded as a major advance in the humane treatment of the insane and taken to mark the birth of the modern asylum and humanistic psychiatry, Foucault nds in it something deeply disturbing, indeed even ominous. What passed for philanthropic liberation and claimed to be based on positive science, he argues, amounts to moralizing sadism.23 Far from liberating the insane, Foucault maintains that the act replaced external constraints with the internalized shackles of conscience: The absence of constraints in the nineteenth-century asylum is not unreason liberated, but madness long since mastered.24 He argues at times, moreover, that this form of internalized constraint is more insidious than actual shackles because it is more camouaged, more effective, and perhaps most objectionable of all something that is self-imposed. Indeed, just as the suggestion exists in Discipline and Punish that overt torture, because it revealed the true nature of power, was, in some sense, preferable to the ubiquitous surveillance of the Panopticon, so here the external manacles of the asylum almost appear preferable to the inescapable gaze of the superego.25 Foucault also nds difculties with the persona of the psychiatrist.

Despite the trappings of positivist science, the psychiatrist gains his therapeutic efcacy, not as a scientist, but in his more specialized role as a homo medicus, which is to say, as a wise, moral and paternal gure thought to possess esoteric knowledge and magical powers. Foucault claims that the therapeutic successes achieved by 19th-century psychiatry if we are prepared to call them that resulted not from the application of scientically validated technique, but, to put in psychoanalytic terms, from the manipulation of the paternal transference to the gure of the omnipotent doctor. As we shall see, moreover, in his negative mode, he extends this critique to Freud. And while the psychiatric technique was basically thaumaturgical rather than scientic, the aim of the treatment was moral rather than medical. Not only was the psychiatrist the psychic stand-in for the bourgeois father-doctor, the goal of the treatment was to adjust the patient to the norms and behavior of respectable bourgeois life. The asylum denounces everything that opposes the essential virtues of society . . . [and] sets itself the task of the homogeneous rule of morality, its rigorous extension to all those who tend to escape from it.26 Bourgeois normality, in short, is equated with psychic health. Once the great debate between reason and madness was silenced, and normalizing rationality which is a monologue of reason about madness has established its hegemony, modern man no longer communicates with the madman.27 After that, only certain extraordinary individuals, in episodic and often violent eruptions, can re-establish contact with the transcendent truth of madness. And these gures, often mad themselves, become exemplary for Foucault. I am referring, of course, to Sade, Hlderlin, Van Gogh, Nietzsche, Nerval and Artaud, who are, as Foucault puts it, the worthy heirs of Rameaus Nephew. Foucaults position vis--vis his gallery of transgressive heroes is, however, unclear. On the one hand, he seems to praise them for having pierced the rigid boundaries of the modern episteme and renewed the broken dialogue with unreason. Such a dialogue would both diminish the alienation of madness and expand, deepen and de-rigidify the experience of reason at the same time. On the other hand, however, their achievement seems to consist in having, in an eschatological act, leapt outside of those boundaries altogether and recaptured the transcendent experience of madness directly in what Foucault calls a limit experience. In such a case, madness can function as an infrarational source of fundamental truth, as Gutting puts it,28 which can be used to condemn the bourgeois world in toto. The tables are to be turned and the inverted universe set aright: The world that thought to measure and justify madness through psychology must justify itself before madness.29 At this point we arrive at the central ambiguity in Madness and

Civilization, which, in addition to determining Foucaults ambivalence to Freud, continues to generate other systematic and continuous vacillations and inconsistencies throughout his subsequent work. Already in the Preface to his next work, The Birth of the Clinic,30 Foucault explicitly renounced access to an extra-discursive referent, and hence to an infrarational truth, which could become a counter-norm for the wholesale condemnation of the existing order. I maintain, however, that the critico-romantic temptation to valorize the transgression of limits for which madness was a leading cipher remained with him throughout his career. And, as I have mentioned, this temptation, combined with the fact that he knew better, served to generate many of the gaps in his theoretical development as well as his aggressive refusal to discuss them. Foucaults praise of Freud, then, coincides with one pole of his equivocal stance towards his transgressive heroes. Which is to say, in the positive mode, Freud, like the heirs of Rameaus nephew and especially like Nietzsche is seen as reopening the dialogue with madness, and thereby subverting the smug complacency of modern rationality. I quote the relevant passage:
This is why we must do justice to Freud. [Unlike the other psychiatrists], Freud went back to madness at the level of its language, reconstituted one of the essential elements of an experience reduced to silence by positivism; he did not make a major addition to the list of psychological treatments for madness; he restored, in medical thought, the possibility of a dialogue with unreason. . . . It is not psychology that is involved in psychoanalysis: but precisely an experience of unreason that it has been psychologys meaning, in the modern world, to mask.31
In a symptomatic reading of this passage, Derrida detects a trace of antagonism even in Foucaults apparent praise for Freud. And this antagonism will determine Foucaults negative posture towards him. Derrida points out that the phrase one must do justice to suggests the necessity of correcting an impulse to commit an injustice. One is . . . recommending resisting a temptation, in this case, to subsume Freud under normalizing psychiatry. Derrida writes that since it is still necessary to call for vigilance . . . such a temptation must still be threatening [Foucault] and liable to reemerge.32 And in the negative mode, it is exactly this temptation to incorporate Freud into the history of normalizing psychiatry that does emerge. In this case, Freud is not situated on the side of Foucaults transgressive heroes but on the side of the immemorial gures of the Father and the Judge, of Family and Law, in the order of Order, of Authority and Punishment, as Derrida puts it.33 When Foucault applauds Freud for having broken with hospital psychiatry, his praise is basically backhanded. That is, while he praises Freud for having demystied most of the structures of the psychiatric asylum, he argues that the one feature

of the asylum Freud retained and even intensied was in fact the most central and pernicious: He exploited the structure that enveloped the medical personage; he amplied its thaumaturgical virtues, preparing for its omnipotence a quasi-divine status. Which is to say, although the psychoanalytic situation abandons the external features of the asylum, it comes to concentrate almost exclusively on the doctorpatient couple.34 The analytic setting, which intentionally isolates and intensies the transference, serves in turn to increase the moralizing sadism of the process. The analysts position behind the couch turns him into an absolute unobserved Observer, and his pure and circumspect Silence35 transforms him into an unreachable Judge. Thus psychoanalysiss advance over medical psychiatry consists, as Derrida puts it, in having achieved connement without connement,36 which is a dubious form of advancement indeed and which, for Foucault, came to typify the sort of progress carried out by the humanistic reformers. Whereas earlier Foucault had praised Freud for having restored . . . the possibility of a dialogue with unreason, now he argues that psychoanalysis, because it concentrates on the fatherdoctor transference, is unable to hear the voices of unreason, nor to decipher in themselves the signs of the madman.37 It is important to appreciate how deep Foucaults criticisms of the doctorpatient relationship go. They pertain not just to the moralizing content of the beliefs the doctor supposedly tries to inculcate in the patient but also to the very Cartesian structure of the relationship itself. Foucault maintains that the therapeutic relation between the doctor and the patient externalizes the relation between Cogito and the prereective self: The physician in relation to the madman, reproduces the moment of the Cogito in relation to the time of the dream, of illusion, and of madness. Moreover, because the reective understanding of the doctor represents a completely exterior Cogito which is alien to cogitation itself, it can be imposed upon it only in the form of an invasion. Foucault argues that this externalization transforms the solitude of Cartesian courage into an authoritarian intervention and dogmatically reduces Descartes long road into a therapeutic short cut.38 If Foucaults claim that the doctors reective understanding is a completely exterior Cogito were correct, a psychoanalysis would be inconceivable. Indeed, it could never get off the ground, for it would be impossible to establish a therapeutic alliance between analyst and analysand in either of its interrelated aspects. First, the analyst would not be able to develop and demonstrate the understanding of and empathy for the patients internal world no matter how alien or mad it might seem which is necessary to win his or her trust and develop a working relationship. Second, the analysts reective ego would not be able to form an alliance and communicate with the patients observing

ego that scrap of independence39 outside the fray, which is necessary for the work of analysis qua self-reection to proceed. Indeed, the work of analysis consists, to a signicant degree, in the expansion of the observing ego as well as the establishment of a new, more spontaneous relation between it and the experiencing self. And this is achieved, in large part, through the interaction with the analyst and the internalization of that relationship. In other words, one important goal of analysis is the establishment of a new, more reexive which is at the same time a more spontaneous relationship between the observing ego and the experiencing self through the internalization of the relationship with the analyst. For Foucault, however, the strengthening of the observing ego is objectionable as such. This is why his praise for Cartesian courage and Descartes long road in this context contains an element of bad faith. He wants to use the arduousness of Cartesian meditation to bash the superciality and externality of the therapeutic x that is imposed from the outside. But he does not believe in the goals of Cartesian meditation namely, the expansion and enrichment of the reecting self vis--vis the pre-reective self in the rst place. Against him, I am maintaining both that, understood correctly, these goals are themselves defensible, and that psychoanalysis, far from representing an abrogation of them, constitutes one of the most effective methods of pursuing them. I will argue, moreover, that Foucault himself seeks to short-circuit the long road of psychoanalytic reection, of the sustained and methodical dialogue with unreason, with his quasi-revelational concept of limit-experience. To use Hegels language, he wants the Absolute shot out of the barrel of a gun. Although, as we shall see, Foucault in part, because of the unacceptable political implications of his power/knowledge position made a move at reversing himself and introducing an afrmative notion of reection into his thinking late in his career, it remained an inadequately developed gesture. One would still be hard pressed to locate a positive notion of reection in Foucault; the gaze whether directed inwardly or outwardly is intrinsically malevolent. Martin Jay has remarked that, despite the centrality to his philosophical identity of his rebellion against Sartre, Foucaults liation to his forebear continued to show in his adherence to the paranoid ontology of the gaze.40 There is, as a result of this monolithically negative valuation of the gaze, no conceptual space in his theory for a positive notion of self-reection; the observing ego is, by its very nature, invasive and violent. Or, to put it differently, there is no conceptual space for the distinction between an observing ego, motivated by epistemophiliac curiosity which is the necessary precondition for a psychoanalytic process and a superego, motivated by sadism.41 The clinically attuned reader cannot but be moved by the unbearable

sense of guilt that Foucault seems to have suffered. Whatever its origins and Miller provides a not implausible account of them42 the existence of the guilt appears relatively incontrovertible. One gets a sense of its intensity, as well as its possible role as one of the pre-theoretical sources of Foucaults philosophy especially the sustained attacks on the subject and on vision by considering Foucaults relationship to Sartre. Going back to Foucaults remarks while following Sartres funeral cortge, Foucault explained to his student that what he wanted above all to renounce in Sartre was his terrorism.43 That terrorism consisted, above all, in the relentless scrutiny of the judgmental gaze of the persecutory superego to put it in psychoanalytic terms encapsulated, as Miller observes, in Sartres ocular reformulation of the Kantian categorical imperative. Whereas Kant had argued that one should act as though ones personal maxims could be generalized into universal principles, Sartre maintained that we should act as though the whole human race had its eyes xed upon44 us. Not without reason, Foucault found Sartres Ultracartesianism which was not unrelated to his Ultrabolshevism45 intolerable, and this intolerablity served, no doubt, as one of the biographical sources of Foucaults attack on the transparent and unied, which means culpable, subject and on the society of the panopticon. Indeed, Foucaults work in these areas provides an excellent opportunity to study the process of sublimation in both its successful and unsuccessful aspects. With respect to the theme of the panopticon, for example, Foucault was able successfully to sublimate his acute sensitivity to the persecutory gaze and elucidate a critical dimension of modern society, thus transforming a private preoccupation into a powerful theory possessing objective signicance. At the same time, however, the over-generalization of the phenomenon of the panopticon to the point where it denied the existence of the non-panoptical and reciprocal dimension of modernity indicates a failure of sublimation. Indeed, such an over-generalization from ones private experience is often a symptom of trauma.46
III The unobjectionable part of the transference

Having said this, however, it must also be acknowledged that not all the difculties are on Foucaults side. There are undeniably tensions within Freuds thinking notably, between his adherence to the norm of autonomy and his paternalistic tendencies that Foucaults vacillations can feed on.47 For example, Freuds position with respect to the question of the positive transference to the person of the doctor, as he liked to put it, was conspicuously uncritical. In The Dynamics of Transference, Freud advocates analyzing the negative transference because it can

endanger the treatment. At the same time, however, he recommends leaving the positive transference to the doctor untouched because it is unobjectionable and the vehicle of success in psychoanalysis as it is in other methods of treatment. He suggests, moreover, that the analyst can enlist this positive transference to promote the patients nal independence by using it to motivate the analysand to accomplish a piece of psychical work48 he or she would otherwise resist undertaking. But the question can be raised, Why stop there? Freud failed to recognize that the very motivational resources which, in the rst instance, derive from the positive and idealizing transferences, can be used to encourage the patient to reect back on those transferences with the intention of working them through and diminishing them in the long run. By failing to analyze the positive and idealizing transferences and leaving the authority of the analyst untouched, Freud placed unnecessary limits on the pursuit of autonomy and maturity, which, for him, were the selfprofessed goals of psychoanalysis.49 There can be no doubt, moreover, that Freuds myopia in these matters resulted from the limitations of his world-view as a 19th-century bourgeois paterfamilias, as Foucault claims. But this is precisely the point. They resulted from contingent factors having to do with Freuds background and character which later analysts have been able to surmount to a signicant degree. They are not problems intrinsic to psychoanalysis as such. Foucault, who, prior to writing Madness and Civilization, had been immersed in the study of psychology and psychoanalysis, must certainly have been aware of this fact. By reducing Freud to paternalistic normalizer, however, and by assimilating the discipline of psychoanalysis to his personal limitations, Foucault can, as I have been arguing, ignore the existence of a third alternative to normalization and transgression, namely, the dialogue with unreason. Foucault was no doubt condent that, with the eld reduced to a choice between the bourgeois normalizer and the pote maudit, the pote maudit would have the upper hand. Let me be clear. I do not mean to deny that much psychoanalysis has historically been conducted in an atmosphere of authoritarianism, conventionalism and omnipotence. The well-known attacks by the Frankfurt School and Lacan on psychoanalytic conformism and the subject supposed to know are well taken. Nor do I mean to deny the brutality of most in-patient psychiatric treatment. Having worked in a municipal psychiatric hospital, how could I? I do believe, however, that although the authoritarian style of analysis undoubtedly continues in some quarters its inuence has signicantly decreased over the last several decades under the impact of feminism and the Gay Movement, the progressive de-medicalization of psychoanalysis and the general transformations of post-1960s culture. Today, moreover, given what we have

learnt about the nature of idealization through research into pre-Oedipal development since Freud,50 it has become increasingly possible to analyze and work through the positive and idealizing transferences to the doctor and therefore the power relation within which analysis unfolds, as Forrester puts it.51 Indeed, I would go further and maintain that any analysis which failed to do so would have to be considered radically incomplete.52 What is essential is to analyze all the magical imagos of childhood central amongst which is the omnipotent father-doctor to the largest extent possible, not to re-enact them in the analysis. Foucaults stringent genealogical approach dovetails with the valorization of his transgressive heroes. Like Freud, who is also a postNietzschean genealogist in this respect, Foucault sets out to demonstrate the lowly origins of such higher things as personal identities, artistic and scientic objects and cultural institutions. For Foucault, the goal of this genealogical enterprise appears to be twofold. First, as part of his critique of the present, it is meant to demonstrate the contingency of all actually existing norms, institutions and practices in the hopes of churning up new historical possibilities. However, in addition to this laudable undertaking, Foucault also pursues a second, purely deationary goal, namely, to debunk all the purportedly higher things without putting anything in their place. Freud offered a theory of sublimation which, despite its glaring inadequacies, at least attempted to explain how lowly origins can be transformed into something which in part surpasses them.53 With one exception, however, Foucault offers, to use Ricoeurs terminology, no teleology of culture to complement the archaeology of the subject.54 He therefore lacks the conceptual resources to show how a cultural entity can transcend the conditions of its origins to any signicant degree. In the nal paragraph of Madness and Civilization, Foucault makes a reference to a concept of work in the case of such individuals as Nietzsche, Van Gogh and Artaud, which is distinct from the content of their madness, and which might have become the basis for a theory of sublimation. His comments are so elliptical and underdeveloped, however, that it is practically impossible to determine his meaning. There is a deep irony in all of this: where Freud, in the case of Leonardo for example, seeks to make the great mans achievements intelligible,55 Foucault is in a similar position to the pathologizer whom he excoriates; which is to say, he seeks to blacken the radiant and drag the sublime into the dust, to use the quote Freud borrows from Schiller.56 Like Nietzsche, who is his model in these matters, Foucault wants to adopt an attitude which is derisive and ironic and capable of undoing every infatuation with the so-called higher things by demonstrating their lowly origins.57 More specically, it has often been pointed out that Foucaults theory of power-knowledge does not contain the degree of freedom necessary to explain how a scientic discipline might

disentangle itself from the power relations that engendered it. Thus, with respect to our topic, he cannot account for how the discipline of psychoanalysis could have surpassed its origins in 19th-century bourgeois, patriarchal society and in its founders personality, which was itself in part a product of his society. He cannot, in other words, explain how it came to be something more than a mere Viennese prejudice. Nor does he want to. Again, by dismissing psychoanalysis as nothing but bourgeois normalization he can ignore the more challenging alternative of the dialogue with unreason.
IV Freud and Kant

With the next swing of the pendulum, Foucaults praise of Freud in The Order of Things although lavish is more disingenuous than real. To be sure, he extols psychoanalysis, along with ethnology, as one of the two critical counter-sciences which oppose the human sciences,58 that is, which oppose the normalizing sciences for which psychiatry is the prototype. We will see, however, when we examine what Foucault means by counter-science, that the praise of psychoanalysis is deceptive. It is not Freud as, I think one can argue, he understood himself that is praised, but Freud construed as a 1970s-style anti-humanist and structuralist la Lvi-Strauss and Lacan and as a modernist celebrant of death, madness and groundlessness. Furthermore, another theme, to which I have already alluded, comes into relief in conjunction with Foucaults slippery celebration of psychoanalysis as a critical counterscience: namely, the deep and systematic connections between his treatment of Freud and his treatment of Kant, which is equally conicted for precisely parallel reasons. Indeed, just as Derrida observed that the oscillations in Foucaults relation to Freud approach the drivenness and repetitiveness of a fort/da game, so Christopher Norris has spoken not only of Foucaults reiterated pattern of hostile yet compulsive engagements with Kant, but also of Foucaults description of his own project in terms that acknowledged (so to speak, malgr lui) the ineluctable claims and priorities of Kantian thought.59 Thus, whereas in The Order of Things, Foucault attacks Kant as the major gure in and culprit for philosophical humanism and the human sciences, in What is Enlightenment?60 he claims to return to Kant in order to take up and afrm his philosophical and ethical project of autonomy and maturity. Once again, however, the praise is more apparent than real. On close examination, it turns out that it is not in fact Kant whom Foucault is praising in the name of maturity and modernity or, better yet, aesthetic modernism61 but Baudelaire. Just as Foucaults vociferous praise, as we shall see, masks his dissolution of

Freud into a formalist crivain, so it masks his equally unlikely transformation of Kant into a dandy: the neur of Konigsberg. And in each case the motive is the same. While claiming the authority of Kant, Freud and the critical Enlightenment after all, homo criticus is as much a part of the humanist episteme as homo oeconomicus or homo psychologicus Foucault wants to rid himself of all a priori constraints in order to clear the way, early in his career, for transgression, and, later, for aesthetic selfcreation. With Freud those constraints pertain to the nature of the body, and, with Kant, to universal cognitive and moral structures. Herbert Schnadelbach has recognized that Foucault basically repeats the Hegelian demonstration of the impossibility of Kants transcendental project which means he assumes that the Hegelian critique of Kant is nished and legitimate62 without at the same time accepting the Hegelian solution to the impasse of Kantian philosophy. Instead, Foucault advocates the immanent dissolution of transcendental philosophy into a project of transgression. Thus, in the important programmatic article A Preface to Transgression,63 which should be read as a companion piece to The Order of Things, Foucault asks, From what impossibilities does the philosophy of transgression derive its hold on us? To which he answers: Undoubtedly, it can be said that it comes to us through the opening made by Kant in Western philosophy when he articulated . . . his reection on the limits of reason.64 What the inevitable impasse reached by the Kantian program reveals, according to Foucault, is the impossibility of satisfactorily validating reectively the subject and language of philosophy, which pre-Kantian philosophy had dogmatically taken for granted and which Kant had thematized and unsuccessfully sought to ground. Because the subject cannot gain complete control over a puried language but is, on the contrary, itself dispersed within a language that dispossesses it, or, alternatively, because it is impossible to be inside and outside the boundaries of language (and thought) at the same time, it is impossible to successfully execute the transcendental program. Foucault argues that insight into this impossibility constitutes one of the fundamental structures of contemporary thought,65 that is, one of the central learning experiences of modern philosophy. The collapse of the transcendental program, however, does not mean the end of philosophy, but only the end of philosophy as it has extended from Plato to Hegel. One would arrive at the philosophy of transgression, which Foucault would put in its place, by following the immanent implosion of transcendental philosophy to the depths where [discursive] language fails and where the subject who speaks has just vanished.66 As opposed to the traditional philosopher who sought the serenity of wisdom, Foucault celebrates the mad philosopher, who, having discovered the dissolution of language (and the subject), not as an external

fact, but at the inner core of its possibilities,67 embraces the transgressive experience of the non-discursive language that lies at the root of ordinary language and of the alien plenitude68 that swamps individuated consciousness. This is clearly not the dialogue with unreason, but the lionization of madness. Foucault, of course, takes Sade and Bataille,69 with their erotic experience and writing, as exemplary in this regard. And as he himself stressed in an interview with Duccio Tombadori, the dissolution of the subject in limit experiences was, for Foucault, not simply a theoretical matter. It was simultaneously an eminently practical project that sought to live . . . an experience that might be [the subjects] real destruction or dissociation, its explosion or upheaval into something radically other .70 Foucaults theoretical endeavors and his life-practices cannot on his own grounds, then, be completely separated. For this reason, it is not only legitimate, but necessary, in trying to understand Foucaults project, to consider the sort of personal material James Miller presents in his biography.71 The dangers of pathologization and reductionism must also be assiduously guarded against at the same time. But, as with Socrates, Nietzsche and Freud, it is difcult to imagine considering Foucaults work in isolation from his life. With his discussion of the analytic of nitude in The Order of Things, Foucault further elaborates the Hegelian critique of transcendental philosophy he had begun in Preface to Transgression. Indeed, his treatment of man and his doubles which contains some of the most brilliant pages of Foucaults oeuvre can be seen as his reworking of Lukcs antinomies of bourgeois thought.72 With the archaeological mutation of the classical episteme into the modern, man moves from being one object among many on the table of knowledge to being the subject of knowledge, while remaining, at the same time, an object albeit of a unique sort which can itself still be studied; hence, this strange empirico-transcendental73 doublet, or sensible-intelligible hermaphrodite, as Schnadelbach puts it.74 The antinomic structure of nitude deriving from the fact that the spectator can be observed, that the knowing subject can be known and that the speaking subject can talk about itself supposedly generates the bad innity to which Foucault objects. Foucault argues that whereas the strategy of transcendental philosophy requires the strict separation of levels of knowledge, what in fact occurs is an interminable and monotonous to-and-fro between empirical and transcendental, primary and derived, original and originated, principium and principiatum:75 Finitude [is] conceived in interminable cross-reference with itself.76 The only thing that would allow this unending oscillation to achieve a resolution would be the ability for the structure of nitude to reect upon itself. But this would require the illicit assumption of an absolute standpoint. The primary discovery of

nitude is therefore really an unstable one; nothing allows it to contemplate itself.77 Strictly speaking, as an archaeologist, Foucault can only, as Dreyfus and Rabinow observe,78 describe the structure of an episteme and indicate possible signs of its passing. Foucaults rhetoric, however, reveals a denite partisanship in favor of the demise of the humanist paradigm: as forms of reection that characterize humanism are irredeemably warped and twisted, there is no other way than to destroy the anthropological [conguration] in its very foundations.79 Against this diagnosis, Schnadelbach argues that the dualities of Kantian thought only appear as objectionable antinomies which regress into a bad innity indeed, nitude only appears as mere nitude , which is something to be overcome80 on the basis of certain Hegelian assumptions concerning the absolute. Which is to say, only on certain assumptions about the desirability and attainability of the absolute, does Kants work appear as a document of a tragic dualistic ontology, and the tradition running through Hlderlin, Schelling, Hegel, and Marx as a promising, even if unnished, solution.81 Schnadelbach maintains, moreover, that philosophical modernity is characterized, not by anthropological slumber, as Foucault would have it, but by two, if not equivalent, at least closely interrelated facts: that access to the absolute has been barred and that modernity must therefore draw its normative and cognitive content out of itself. In Kant, who, for Schnadelbach, is the quintessential modern philosopher, nitude means that the absolute cannot be mastered, and his separation of thing-in-itself, as well as all of the characteristic dualities of his philosophy, results from this fact.82 Insofar as the giant program of Hegelian dialectic, in contrast, aspired to the universal mediation of the positive and the fundamental, the empirical and the transcendental, the thought and the unthought, and the primary and the derived83 that is, all the doublets Foucault has described it is not a philosophy of modernity but rather . . . of transcending [Aufhebung] modernity. This program assumes that a way back to the absolute is both desirable and possible. It is the step from Kant to Hegel, in short, and the evaluation of Kant from that standpoint that allows philosophy to fall into84 the antinomic impasse described by Foucault. More specically, Schnadelbach argues that it was not through Hegel directly that Foucault encountered the totality motif. Rather, it was more through left Hegelianism which, as Foucault relates in an interview, was dominant in the tradition of the young French university85 in which he received his formation where he encountered it in its materialistically inverted form of a human species producing and reproducing itself through social praxis. His analysis in The Order of Things ts the left Hegelian tradition best. Foucaults error was to mistake this limited conceptual conguration for modern philosophy

in general, which resulted in the projection of the anthropological slumber onto the philosophical discourse of modernity as such.86 Thus, in Western Marxism, which wants to be both empirical and critical, eschatology and positivism do seem to be archaeologically indissociable; man appears within it as a truth both reduced and promised. He is reduced insofar as his essence is repressed in empirical history; and he is promised insofar as the realization of that essence is the telos of history, which, furthermore, makes empirical history intelligible. And, to be sure, the charge of pre-critical naivete87 does indeed apply to the more unmediated utopian thinkers in the left Hegelian tradition including Bloch, but also Lukcs as well. Habermas has tried, with his notions of the counter-factual assumptions and necessary idealizations of language which represent an attempt to locate an intra-mundane moment of transcendence, as it were to provide a more subtle treatment of these problems while not abandoning the intuitions of the left Hegelian tradition entirely. Whether or not he is ultimately successful, his position is less immediately vulnerable to Foucaults criticisms than those of the other thinkers in the tradition.88 But this is another story. The point I want to make against Foucault is the following. Despite his posture as a tough-minded archaeologist, he has really not given up the absolute, but retained it as a critical standard. As I have argued, following Schnadelbach, the antinomies and aporias he has elucidated come into relief only given the requirements of the absolute. Following a central trope of classical poststructuralist thought which has by now become familiar, Foucault has through unacknowledged Hegelian assumptions retained the most stringent demands of the onto-theological tradition, only to show that they cannot be fullled and to thereby discredit that tradition. The philosophy of total unmasking is, as Wellmer observed, fed by the same rationalistic metaphysics it claims to be destroying.89 And this debunking of the philosophical tradition serves Foucaults purposes well, for it clears the way, rst, for the project of transgression and, later, for aesthetic self-invention. Indeed, Foucault explicitly asserts that the emergence of the philosophy of transgression is a direct consequence of the death of god,90 that is, of the departure of the absolute. In that grand and seductive Either/Or,91 which was constitutive of much poststructuralist unmasking, we have either the absolute or transgression. There is no third alternative. While Schnadelbach points to certain alternative traditions within modern philosophy, I would like to return to Freud at this point. My claim is that as a dialogue with unreason, psychoanalysis provides an alternative to both transcendental philosophy and the philosophy of transgression. Against transcendental philosophy, it does not remain safely encamped within the immovable boundaries of the sayable but, in persistently pursuing the primordial unconditioned just beyond the edge

of the sayable,92 it in fact expands those boundaries from within. And against the transgressive project, psychoanalysis does not seek to leap directly into the alien plenitude that surrounds language in a Dionysian limit experience, but rather methodically and increasingly to advance towards this foreign territory through daily clinical work. Indeed, one might say that psychoanalysis is a methodical limit-practice. Moreover, if Kants philosophy produced antinomies, he at least attempted to confront them directly in a famous chapter of The Critique of Pure Reason. In Foucault, in contrast, one nds an incessant seesawing a near schizophrenic splitting93 between the two terms which are similar to the most famous of the Kantian antinomies, namely the Third, with no attempt to resolve them.94 Thus, during his genealogical phase, and owing in part to the continued inuence of structuralist motifs95 on his thinking, Foucault wholeheartedly embraced the determinist horn of the dilemma, arguing that the subject is entirely constituted by, entirely the effect of, language and power. Because this analysis was drawn in such a totalizing fashion, it left no margin of freedom96 that would make autonomous thought or action possible. Indeed, the notion of autonomy simply makes no sense in this context. And Norris argues that it was nally a growing sense of the moral and political bankruptcy entailed by any project that effectively renounced the principle of human agency and choice97 that led the increasingly activist Foucault, in large part, to the nal transmutation of his theory and especially to the return to Kant. This return, however, did not result in a signicant coming to terms with the internal demands of Kants philosophy, as Foucault seemed to promise. What it produced, rather, was an evasion of those demands in the form of a radical distortion of Kants ethical position, masked by a Kantian rhetoric in which the crucial terms, such as critique and autonomy, are subtly yet systematically perverted. Thus, in a crucial passage from What is Enlightenment?, no sooner has Foucault presented the standard Kantian conception of critique Criticism indeed consists of analyzing and reecting upon limits than he proceeds to stand it on its head:
But if the Kantian question was that of knowing what limits knowledge has to renounce transgressing [doit renouncer franchir], it seems to me that the critical question today has to be turned back into a positive one: in what is given to us as universal, necessary, obligatory, what place is occupied by whatever is singular, contingent, and the product of arbitrary constraints? The point, in brief, is to transform the critique conducted in the form of necessary limitation into a practical critique that takes the form of a possible transgression.98
Kant did not, however, seek to determine what limits knowledge has to

renounce transgressing, but to determine what universal and necessary limits knowledge should obey. And this distinction is not picayune. Foucaults awkward locution, which serves to obscure the extent of his disagreement with Kant, is telling. Through it, he attempts to turn the observance of universal and necessary conditions which Kant believed promoted autonomy and self-respect into something negative, and the possibility of transgression into something positive. Critique is transformed from seeking the universal structures of all knowledge or of all moral action to seeking to separate out, from the contingency that has made us what we are, the possibility of no longer being, doing or thinking what we are, do, or think, that is, to demonstrate the arbitrariness of the cognitive and normative structures which make demands on us. And Foucault maintains that this form of critique provides an impetus for this the undened work of freedom.99 At the beginning of this important article, Foucault seemed to signal a momentous change in his position by resituating his project in the critical tradition that extends from Hegel through Nietzsche or Max Weber to Horkheimer or Habermas.100 But it turns out that the substance of his position has not changed in the least. As it had been throughout his career, the content of critique is coextensive with, and therefore exhausted by unmasking like Borges and his Chinese encyclopedia the historicity and contingency of any given categorical or normative scheme. But the monotonous unmasking of the contingency of these schemes which no serious interlocutor denies today is only a propadeutic to the real work of critique: one then has to decide which are desirable and which are not. If his encounter with Kant released Foucault from the determinist horn of the dilemma, it did so by thrusting him onto its opposite, the voluntarist. It is noteworthy in the extreme that Foucault who, as we have seen, began his career in revolt against Sartre should himself end up holding a position of extreme existentialist voluntarism.101 Indeed, in a late interview, he went so far as to complain that Sartres voluntarism did not go far enough: insofar as he subscribed to the concept of authenticity, Sartre retained a residue of pregivenness which entailed a notion of a true self and put limits on the possibilities of self-creation.102 And this philosophical swerve towards voluntarism is strictly correlated with, indeed is a necessary condition for, an inversion of another key Kantian term, namely, autonomy. Whereas, for Kant, autonomy is dened as acting in accordance with laws of ones own making, for the late Foucault, it assumes the meaning of aesthetic self-creation. Again, almost imperceptibly, Kant slides into Baudelaire. Theoretically, the release from all pregiven limits, which Foucault believes he has accomplished in his encounter with Kant, provides the degree of indeterminacy required for a program of unrestricted self-invention.

This brings us to three of the glaring lacunae in Foucaults theoretical development which I referred to above. If earlier, in his archaeological phase, he spoke of a subject that must be stripped of its creativity and analyzed as a complex and variable function of discourse,103 he now speaks of a self, in its singular being, who seeks to modify itself aesthetically through reective and voluntary practices.104 Likewise, if self-reection had earlier been specically identied with the panoptical gaze of the Cartesian subject, it now provides freedom in relation to what one does: it allows one to step back from this way of acting or reacting, to present it to oneself as an object, and reect on it as a problem.105 And, nally, if earlier Foucault had painted a picture of power as utterly ubiquitous and hegemonic, refused to point to any margin of freedom that escaped it and to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate forms of power, he now distinguishes between power and domination; the latter represents mutable and illegitimate forms of power that can be effectively and rightfully struggled against. He refers to this as the practice of freedom.106 How can this be? While one certainly doesnt want to behave like the bureaucrats and police and force Foucault to put his papers in order,107 or to subject him to the simplistic and authoritarian alternative of Enlightenment blackmail,108 such fundamental reversals in a thinkers position cannot be passed over with as little clarication as Foucault provides for them. Given the foregoing considerations, Foucault could have been effected to have simply subsumed psychoanalysis under the humanist paradigm in The Order of Things and dismissed it as part of that doomed project. For example, the theory of the conscious and unconscious could have been assimilated, as Dreyfus, Rabinow and Schnadelbach suggest, to the doublet of the thought and the unthought, and the interminability of analysis explained by the innite regress which corresponds to it. Instead, we nd Foucault praising psychoanalysis in a somewhat unexpected way. Rather than constituting an emancipatory human science which, for him, is equivalent to a masked normalizing science psychoanalysis provides the experiential and conceptual basis for the generalized challenge to the humanist paradigm and the dissolution of the concept of man: it forms an undoubted and inexhaustible treasurehoard of experiences and concepts, and above all a perpetual principle of dissatisfaction, of calling into question, of criticism and contestation of what may seem, in other respects, to be established. As such, it occupies a privileged position in our knowledge.109 And the unconscious remains a central component of that subversive treasure-hoard. Once again, however, the unconscious that Foucault extols is not the dynamic unconscious of Freudian psychoanalysis, but the formal unconscious of structuralism in which signication is dissolved into a meaningless system or code.110

Furthermore, the meaninglessness and anonymity of the unconscious code are in turn connected with the larger substantive point Foucault wants to make in his analytic of nitude. And this connection provides the link between structuralist anti-humanism, avant-garde literature, and the project of transgression. Beyond the limits of our language and our knowledge lies the brute meaningless facticity of death, desire and law, which Foucault in fact claims constitute the condition of the possibility of our language and knowledge. Foucaults philosophical thesis is, as Habermas puts it, that the mute foundations of meaning at the basis of Occidental rationality are themselves meaningless.111 It is the privileged experience and cognizance of this groundlessness which constitutes madness in its present form, madness as it is posited in the modern experience112 that is shared by the avant-garde artist, the structuralist anthropologist and the psychoanalyst. We have come full circle, for their wisdom coincides with the tragic insight of the medieval madman, namely, that the head that will become the skull is already empty. Rather than being appreciated for having reinstituted the dialogue with unreason, psychoanalysis has, in this case, been assimilated into madness thus construed. I should note that the themes of death and the ultimate foundationlessness of all human beliefs and activities were, of course, the same motifs that attracted Foucault to Heideggerian philosophy and the avant-garde literature of his day. It is interesting to consider, however, that, with only a relatively subtle change of direction, Foucaults reections could have resulted in a consideration of the Freudian doctrine of Ananke rather than in an existential celebration of groundlessness. Indeed, the Freudian approach, no less than the existential, recognizes the brute meaningless necessity underlying all human endeavors; this is their shared Nietzschean backdrop. There is a major difference between the two, however. For Foucault, the uncovering of the groundlessness underlying our existence113 accompanied no doubt by a manic burst of triumphant laughter represents the culmination of his demonstration. For Freud, in contrast, the encounter with transience and necessity constitutes a point of departure. In psychoanalysis, it can initiate a process of mourning and working-through which is meant to decenter our infantile omnipotence and liberate our energies for a more erotic and creative life.
V Exorcizing Freud
In The History of Sexuality, Vol. I, Foucault reverses his estimation of psychoanalysis once again, and this nal attack is the most indirect and tortuous of all. Instead of being a critical event in the history of the

human sciences, as Forrester puts it, psychoanalysis becomes only one element in the entire apparatus of power-knowledge.114 Moreover, in addition to this reversal of status, the relative weight of psychoanalysis in the entire history of the deployment of sexuality is also radically diminished. Freud becomes only one ancillary gure in that larger history. To make matters even more curious, while Foucault acknowledges that his entire book could be read as an archaeology of psychoanalysis,115 and while the intended object of the critique of the repressive hypothesis is obviously Freud, psychoanalytic texts are rarely discussed and Freud is hardly mentioned by name. Forrester rightly observes that the obliqueness of the attack on Freud and the diminishing absorption of psychoanalysis into the history of sexuality give the book an odd, refracted and displaced character.116 He suspects, moreover, that they represent tactical cunning devise[s] which require comment, if not explanation.117 Unfortunately, however, Forrester is unable to carry this investigation further. Jaques-Alain Miller, on the other hand, can. Indeed, as a practicing psychoanalyst, he has more reason to spot the aggression coming his way and is therefore better able to untangle what Foucault is up to. Miller states his thesis directly: Foucault is looking for the devices that will enable [him] to erase the break that is located with Freud.118 He argues that the position occupied by psychoanalysis in La Volont de savoir (The History of Sexuality, Vol. I) is symmetrical and inverse to the position it occupies in Les Mots et les Choses (The Order of Things).119 If The Order of Things had praised psychoanalysis as a major critical counter-science, which could guide the archaeologist in his or her attack on humanism, now it has itself become the object of archaeological critique. And if, earlier, psychoanalysis had been in a position to foresee the next epistemic break, now it is the death of psychoanalysis that is being predicted and even promoted by Foucaults archaeological criticisms. Like the fate of man to be wiped away like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea , psychoanalysis is now seen as belonging to a structure whose historical emergence was contingent and which may also be receding.120 Indeed, for Foucault, the truly radical program for sexual politics would be the dismantling of that structure.121 In the beginning of The History of Sexuality, Vol. I, Foucault attempts to subvert the traditional notion of Victorian repressiveness in order to bring out his theory of the deployment of sexuality and, at the same time, to discredit the notion of a naturally given sexual substrate to human existence. Foucaults claim is the following: rather than a progressive increase in sexual repressiveness in modern society with Victorian society representing the pinnacle of this trend as the received view has it, there has in fact been an institutional incitement to speak about sex and a multiplication of discourses concerning it. And this

incitement has taken place in the eld of exercise of power itself.122 Whatever repressiveness has occurred is inconsequential in comparison to this much more pervasive and profound phenomenon. In an obvious allusion to the psychoanalytic principle of free association and an attempt to establish guilt by association, Foucault traces this incitement to speak back to the Catholic practice of Confession which prescribed as a fundamental duty the task of passing everything having to do with sex through the endless mill of speech.123 He maintains that what the penitents expresses in the confessional was not a deep and difcult truth about sex, rooted in biology, and emanating from the depths of the personality. Rather, it was something that had been implanted in them and stimulated by the confessor whose motives are twofold: voyeuristic pleasure and, perhaps more importantly, the attempt to control and manipulate individuals through the extraction of information. Foucault argues that in the 18th century, when questions of population and therefore of sexual reproduction and family relations assumed enormous economic importance, this basic strategy was applied on a larger scale. Representatives of the emerging human sciences who would come to employ clinical interviews, data collection, statistical analysis, the recording of case histories and the compilation of dossiers pursued the same institutional incitement to speak about sex as did the Church. However, rather than attempting to police sex through the power of moral sanction, the human sciences among which Foucault included psychoanalysis sought to apply the techniques of rationalized management. Before examining Foucaults indictment of psychoanalysis, let me again make my point clear: I do not mean to deny that his criticism of the social engineering that characterizes much criminology, pedagogy, social work, psychology and psychiatry is well taken. What I contest is his inclusion of psychoanalysis among the human sciences thus construed.124 Because, as we have noted, Foucault never takes up psychoanalytic texts in any detail, his case against Freudian theory proceeds more by derision and insinuation than by argument. He attempts, as Miller observes, to subsume psychoanalysis under the apparatus of sexuality by drawing on one key aspect, relevant for the purpose of inclusion in archaeology, which is summed up in the syntagma: talking about sex .125 But is that a sufcient reason for grouping it with these other approaches? Talking about sex is, after all, a rather undifferentiated concept that can subsume an array of radically heterogeneous and even contradictory phenomena. Telling a child about the sinfulness of masturbation or premarital sex and talking seductively to a lover are, for example, vastly different activities. This undifferentiated analysis is, moreover, reinforced by Foucaults genealogical approach. It is possible to grant as Freud himself recognized126 that certain elements of

psychoanalysis can be traced historically to the practice of Confession and that the two institutions therefore bear a certain resemblance to each other, without at the same time equating their function, or without putting Freud, the godless Jew and militant anti-cleric, on the same side as his arch-enemy, the Catholic Church. The identication of antecedents and formal similarities does not establish identity of function. A genealogical approach without a theory of sublimation, or its conceptual equivalent, to supplement it cannot avoid the genetic fallacy. Thus while Eribons objections to the reductio ad hominem argument, which we considered above, are absolutely correct, there is something ironical in their being deployed by a Foucauldian. With only one eeting exception, Foucaults thinking is thoroughly devoid of a notion of sublimation or some other mechanism to carry its conceptual load. The theory therefore has no place for the change of function through which a cultural entity can become differentiated from the conditions of its origins. Cultural entities, in this case psychoanalysis, are therefore necessarily reduced to the conditions that produced them. And this is, of course, what Foucault wants in order to assimilate psychoanalysis to the practice of Confession. From a substantive point of view, however, what distinguishes the two is vastly more important than what unites them. Whereas the Church endeavors to instill a sense of guilt in its penitents in order that they seek forgiveness for their sins, the intention of psychoanalysis which in principle repudiates the concept of sin is exactly the opposite. It seeks to methodically analyze the superego from whence the sense of guilt arises in order to provide the individual with increased inner freedom. To mark his point, Foucault introduces a distinction between sex, which is somehow naturally given that is, rooted in our biological makeup and therefore transhistorical and the deployment of sexuality, which emerged in modernity. The latter is, as he puts it:
. . . a historical construct: not a furtive reality that is difcult to grasp, but a great surface network in which the stimulation of bodies, the intensication of pleasures, the incitement to discourse, the formation of special knowledge, the strengthening of controls and resistances are linked to one another, in accordance with a few major strategies of knowledge and power.127
Having introduced the distinction between sex and the deployment of sexuality, Foucault attempts to nullify Freud by attacking a surrogate, namely, the Freudian left. Foucault argues that the entire strategy of the Freudian left from Wilhelm Reich, through Herbert Marcuse, to the French dsirants of the 1970s was misguided insofar as it based itself on the so-called Repressive Hypothesis and failed to recognize the deployment of sexuality. Stated in its most general terms, that hypothesis,

to which Foucault had himself subscribed in Madness and Civilization, delineates an opposition between two irreducible elements or sets of elements for example, sex, desire, or madness, on the one side, and the father, the law, or power, on the other in which the former are excluded or repressed by the latter because of the necessities of cohesive social existence. For the left Freudians, moreover, the repressed element is generally valorized as possessing an unbearable, too hazardous truth128 which has of necessity been censored. As they see it, insight into this truth and the liberation of the repressed substrate constitute emancipation. The Foucault of Madness and Civilization had been a left Freudian in this sense. As opposed to Freud, who held that the conict between Desire and the Law, as it were, belongs to the transhistorical necessities of civilization and that repression is therefore inevitable, the left Freudians view this opposition as a historically contingent fact, deriving from the conditions of modern capitalist society, which can and ought to be overthrown. For Foucault, however, the Freudian lefts attempt to emancipate sex from repression amounts to a relatively insignicant move within the larger apparatus of sexuality, which it failed to attack. As he puts it, We must not think that by saying yes to sex, one says no to power.129 By the late 1970s, however, the desirants, who were the immediate object of Foucaults polemic, had become rather easy targets. Caricaturing the position Foucault was attacking, Forrester writes that it was not difcult to cast a critical light upon the notion that truth is a means of liberation, that truth is always on the side of the repressed, of the oppressed, of the dominated a nal consolation for Gods always being on the side of the big battalions.130 Although he meant it sarcastically, Forresters reference to consolation and God points to the fundamental difference between Freud and the Freudian left. As we know, in the conclusion to Civilization and its Discontents, Freud wrote that he could offer his fellow-men . . . no consolation and at bottom that is what they are all demanding the wildest revolutionaries no less passionately than the most virtuous believers.131 As I have argued elsewhere,132 the Freudian left did indeed try to transform Freuds disabused, disillusioned and disconsolate, which is to say, anti-utopian, theory and practice back into a vehicle for redemption after the critique of religion. And it is leftwing psychoanalysis as a secularized quest for redemption which has forgotten the discipline of the Freudian critique of illusion that Foucault attacks as a tough-minded genealogist. By dismissing the chimera of Absolute Freedom, however, Foucault can avoid a real encounter with Freud, who never subscribed to the notion of Absolute Freedom but to the incremental and arduous increase in autonomy through the sustained dialogue with unreason.133 While Foucaults position has the appearance of being as

anti-utopian as Freuds, it is in fact even more utopian than the Freudian lefts. For Foucaults rejection of the repressive hypothesis conceived of as the opposition between power and its repressed or excluded other is more apparent than real. To occupy the place held by the previous contenders for the other of power madness, sex, desire and so on Foucault offers a new candidate. As he puts it, the rallying point for the counterattack against the deployment of sexuality ought not to be sexdesire, but bodies and pleasures.134 However, as Peter Dews argues, with this move, the repressive hypothesis has not been abolished, but simply displaced.135 By placing bodies and pleasures in the position of the repressed other of the apparatus of sexuality but not thematizing it directly, Foucault attempts to nesse his central dilemma. On the one hand, he still retains an extra-discursive, counter-norm to power which, as Dews argues, the critique of power logically requires. And, to his credit, Foucault still wants to criticize power. On the other hand, because the notion of bodies and pleasures is left so utterly indeterminant, he believes he has avoided the twin dangers of naturalism and essentialism. As compared with the sexual drives, desire and madness which were themselves already a rather indeterminate lot bodies and pleasures assume the character of pure, unformed matter which can be shaped and reshaped without constraint.136 The introduction of this innitely malleable matter, moreover, is integral to the late Foucaults program of an aesthetically oriented ethics. It provides him with the requisite material for the aesthetic fashioning of the self independently of historically instituted codes.137 But, as Miller asks, what could be more utopian that this body outside sex, that is to say, outside desire and prohibition, which can be endlessly refashioned at will? If utopianism is the omnipotent denial of our nitude, what could be more utopian than this? While Foucault wants to hoist Freud on the petard of naturalism, Freuds position as well as the theoretical issue at stake is more complex. I would suggest it is time to question the current anti-essentialist mood which permeates most intellectual disciplines, including psychoanalysis, in no small part because of Foucaults enormous inuence. Let us not forget that there are equally thorny problems on the constructivist horn of the dilemma. In fact, Foucaults strategy with respect to Freud misses the decisive feature of the latters position. In her excellent introduction to The Gender Conundrum, Dana Breen has argued that Freuds theory dees the binary choice between biological essentialism and historical constructivism:
It is part of the complexity of Freuds work that his theory has been seen by some as ascribing an inescapable biological destiny to man and woman, while others have understood him to uphold the revolutionary belief that, psychologically speaking, we are not born man or woman, and that masculinity and femininity are constructed over a period of time and are relatively independent of biological sex.

Breen goes on to argue that this duality is not the result of confusion or indecision on Freuds part but of an inherent tension existing at the heart of the matter. This is the reason, moreover, why this opposition is not going away and why the debate is still alive half a century after [Freuds] death.138 To use Foucauldian language, humans beings are biological-symbolic doublets. And, as we saw in the discussion of Kant, this is not an objectionable antinomy to be overcome, but an anthropological fact to be elucidated. To be sure, the notions of conundrum or inner tension are far from fully satisfying. They are, nevertheless, preferable to strong notions of either essentialism or constructivism which are indefensible on any count. For at least they delineate a forceeld in which the problem must be thought through. New School for Social Research, New York, USA
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Notes
1 Michel Foucault, Technologies of the Self, ed. Luther H. Martin et al. (Amherst, MA: 1988), p. 11. 2 Quoted in James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault (New York: 1993), p. 38. 3 Colin Gordon, Man of Action in a World of Thought, Times Literary Supplement (21 June 1996): 9. 4 Jacques Derrida, To Do Justice to Freud: the History of Madness in the Age of Psychoanalysis, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault et al., Critical Inquiry 20 (Winter 1994): 22765; and John Forrester, Michel Foucault and the History of Psychoanalysis, in The Seductions of Psychoanalysis: Freud, Lacan and Derrida (Cambridge: 1990), pp. 286316. 5 The facts of Foucaults early experience with psychology, psychiatry and psychoanalysis are generally not as well known as the details of the rest of his career. Already, as a student at the Ecole Normale Suprieure where he was unhappy with the prospects of a career in academic philosophy Foucault showed an intense interest in the psychological sciences, attending, among other things, case conferences at Sainte-Annes hospital. After receiving his rst license in philosophy in 1950, he took a second in psychology in 1950. And, in addition to this academic degree, he received a practical certication, the Diplome de Psycho-Pathologie, in 1952. During this period he worked in various clinical, diagnostic and research capacities at Sainte-Anne and the prison at Fresnes. Moreover, Foucaults rst two publications, which came out at roughly the same time Maladie mentale et personnalit and an introduction to Ludwig Binswangers Dream and Existence dealt with psychological topics. It seems incontrovertible that during this period Foucault was intensely involved with the psychological sciences and was seriously considering a career in this area. However, somewhere between 1954 and 1962, Foucault, as he himself

reports, underwent a profound emotional crisis while doing in-patient work. Partly as a result, he left the eld, took up residence in Ipsala and began research on the history of psychiatry which, of course, nally became Madness and Civilization (New York: 1965). Theoretically, he moved from being an intense practitioner of the psychological sciences to one of their staunchest critics. With this move, I would argue, Foucaults apprenticeship had ended and the project which would preoccupy him for the rest of his life had been articulated. While Foucault was not eager to discuss this early phase and sought to have his early publications suppressed, I would also maintain that it was essential in establishing not only his oscillating attitudes towards Freud, but the trajectory of his career in general. Indeed, those vacillations towards Freud are systematically connected with the larger contradictions and indecisions in his opus as a whole. I will examine all these issues in more detail in The Dialogue with Unreason: Freud, Foucault and the Fate of Psychoanalysis (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, forthcoming), Chapter 1. Derrida, To Do Justice to Freud , p. 252. ibid., p. 234. Michel Foucault, Dream, Imagination and Existence: An Introduction to Ludwig Binswangers Dream and Existence , trans. Forrest Williams, in Michel Foucault and Ludwig Binswanger, Dream and Existence, ed. Keith Hoeller (Seattle, WA: 1986), pp. 2978. For the foundational status of the theory of dreams in Freuds project see Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage (New Haven, CT: 1970), pp. 159 ff. See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume I, An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurely (New York, 1978). Thomas McCarthy, The Critique of Impure Reason: Foucault and the Frankfurt School, in Critique and Power: Recasting the Foucault/Habermas Debate, ed. Michael Kelly (Cambridge MA: 1994), p. 248. While McCarthy makes this comment with respect to Foucault and Critical Theory, it is equally applicable to Foucault and Psychoanalysis. Indeed, Foucaults objections to critical theory and psychoanalysis pertain to the deep assumptions they have in common. See Didier Eribon, Michel Foucault, trans. Betsy Wing (Cambridge, MA: 1991), pp. 24 ff.; David Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault (London: 1993), pp. 47ff.; and Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault, pp. 66 ff. Eribon, Michel Foucault, p. 28. ibid. See also Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault, pp. 37 ff. and Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault, pp. 47ff. Habermas also endorses the dialogue with unreason as the proper practicophilosophical program. Indeed, he argues that it was already articulated by German Idealism and that his theory of communicative action nally provides the means to pursue it adequately. I have argued elsewhere, however, that rationalistic biases of his approach which come to light especially in his Freud interpretation prevent him from pursuing that dialogue in a sufciently robust form. See Jrgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick
6 7 8
9 10
11 12 13 14

G. Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: 1987), p. 412, n. 3, and Joel Whitebook, Perversion and Utopia: A Study in Psychoanalysis and Critical Theory (Cambridge, MA: 1995), pp. 9 ff. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: 1974), pp. 60 and 73. For the concept of the normopath see Joyce McDougall, Theaters of the Mind: Illusion and Truth on the Psychoanalytic Stage (New York: 1985), p. 156. See Gary Gutting, Michel Foucaults Archaeology of Scientic Reason (Cambridge: 1989), p. 110. See Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago, IL: 1982), p. 4. Foucault, Madness and Civilization, p. ix. ibid., p. 16. Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, p. 242. Foucault, Madness and Civilization, p. 35. On the question of the extent to which modern rationality has excluded madness from its foundations see Jacques Derrida, The Cogito and the History of Madness, in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago, IL: 1978), and Michel Foucault, My Body, This Paper, This Fire, trans. Geoffrey Bennington, Oxford Literary Review 4 (1979): 528. Michel Foucault, Mental Illness and Psychology, trans. Alan Sheridan (Berkeley, CA: 1987), p. 73 (emphasis in the original). Foucault, Madness and Civilization, p. 252. Cf. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: 1979), pp. 238 ff. See Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Disintegration of Vision in TwentiethCentury French Thought (Berkeley, CA: 1993), pp. 381416. Foucault, Madness and Civilization, p. 258. ibid., xxii (emphasis in the original). Gutting, Michel Foucaults Archaeology of Scientic Reason, p. 109. Foucault, Madness and Civilization, p. 289. See also Dreyfus and Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, p. 11. Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: 1973), pp. xvixvii. See also Dreyfus and Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, pp. 1112. Foucault, Madness and Civilization, p. 198. Consider also: [Madness] entered a phase of silence from which it was not to emerge for a long time; it was deprived of its language; and although one continued to speak of it, it became impossible for it to speak of itself. Impossible at least until Freud, who was the rst to open up once again the possibility of reason and unreason to communicate in the danger of a common language, ever ready to break down and disintegrate into the inaccessible. Foucault, Mental Illness and Psychology, p. 69. While Foucault says very little about the nature of the dialogue with unreason indeed, it essentially serves as a marker for a positive program in Madness and Civilization I would suggest that Freuds encounter with Jung can be taken as an example of what it might mean. Freud did not try to counter the challenge of Jungs irrationalism simply by attempting to silence him. Rather, he stepped into
15
16 17 18 19 20 21 22
23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

the strength of Jungs position and took up his challenge and by immersing himself in the very irrational phenomena in which Jung claimed special expertise psychosis, animism, myth, narcissism in order to account for them within his own position. As a result of that encounter, not only did the claims of the irrational receive their due for example, the wish for narcissistic dedifferentiation gained its voice but Freuds own position was itself substantially altered as well. Indeed, the momentous introduction of the concept of narcissism in 1914, which in turn contributed to the major theoretical revisions of the 1920s, can, in no small part, be traced to Freuds encounter with Jung. Derrida, To Do Justice to Freud , p. 236. ibid., p. 272. Foucault, Madness and Civilization, p. 277. ibid., p. 278. Derrida, To Do Justice to Freud , p. 261 (emphasis in the original). Foucault, Madness and Civilization, p. 278. ibid., pp. 1845. Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, in The Standard Edition of the Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, Vol. 18 (London: 1955), p. 129. Jay, Downcast Eyes, p. 408. Jay also observes: With characteristic ascetic rigor, Foucault thus resisted exploring visions reciprocal, intersubjective, communicative potential, that of the mutual glance. Le regard never assumed for him its alternative meaning in English as well as French: to pay heed to or care for someone else. The care of the self which he explored in his nal work included a visual dimension only to the extent that it involved a certain manner of acting visible to others. But the ethical cum aesthetic self-fashioning he found so compelling did not go beyond a kind of dandiacal display, which left out more interactive affective ties, such as those in the family. ibid., pp. 41415. As Christopher Norris has observed, at the heart of Foucaults critique of Freud, as well as of Kant indeed, at the heart of his critique of the humanist paradigm is a protest against the notion of conscience. That is, Foucault objects to the notion of a moral agency in the psyche, which is created through the internalization of external authority, and through which, for Kant and Freud at least, the subject gains his or her autonomy. And the normative decit in Foucaults thinking results from the fact that although he repudiates the notion of conscience, he does not conceptualize an alternative moral agency to put in its place. Christopher Norris, What is Enlightenment?: Foucault on Kant, in The Truth About Postmodernism (Cambridge, MA: 1993), p. 67. A revised and shortened version of this article appears as What is Enlightenment?: Kant and Foucault, in The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, ed. Gary Gutting (New York: 1994), pp. 15996. For the topics the present article is concerned with, however, the longer version is much more relevant. See Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault, pp. 364 ff. ibid., p. 38. See also Eribon, Michel Foucault, p. 280. Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism, in Existentialism from Dostoyevsky to Sartre, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: 1975), p. 361.
32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40
41
42 43 44

45 See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Adventures of the Dialectic, trans. Joseph Bien (Evanston, IL: 1973), pp. 95 ff. 46 One could make a similar point about Freud. His particular sensitivity to the fatherson relationship undoubtedly enabled him to have exceptional insight into the Oedipus Complex and formulate his theory of it. His totalization of that theory, however, to the almost complete exclusion of the maternal and pre-Oedipal dimensions of human existence, represents a similar over-generalization of his own private concerns and hence another failure of sublimation. See also Lisa Appiganesi and John Forrester, Freuds Women (New York: 1992). 47 See Derrida, To Do Justice to Freud , p. 234. 48 Sigmund Freud, The Dynamics of Transference, in The Standard Edition, Vol. 12, pp. 1067. 49 See Whitebook, Perversion and Utopia: Chapter 3. 50 See especially Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel, The Ego Ideal: A Psychoanalytic Essay on the Malady of the Ideal, trans. Paul Barrows (New York, 1985). 51 Forrester, Foucault and the History of Psychoanalysis, p. 306, n. 48. See also John Forrester, Contracting the Disease of Love: Authority and Freedom in the Origins of Psychoanalysis and What the Psychoanalyst Does with Words: Austin, Lacan and the Speech Acts of Psychoanalysis, in The Seductions of Psychoanalysis: Freud, Lacan and Derrida. 52 In a more clinical vein, we have also learnt that it can be dangerous to ignore an idealizing transference, for it often masks aggression towards the analyst, which can at times do extensive damage to the treatment. See, for example, Otto F. Kernberg, Further Contributions to the Treatment of Narcissistic Personalities, in Essential Papers on Narcissism, ed. Andrew P. Morrison (New York: 1986), pp. 264 ff. 53 See Whitebook, Perversion and Utopia, Chapter 5. 54 Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, pp. 459 ff. 55 Sigmund Freud, Leonardo da Vinci and a Memoir of His Childhood, in The Standard Edition, Vol. 11. 56 ibid., p. 63. 57 Michel Foucault, Nietzsche, Genealogy, History, in Language, CounterMemory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca, NY: 1977), p. 143. 58 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: 1970), p. 379. 59 Norris, What is Enlightenment? , pp. 767. 60 Michel Foucault, What is Enlightenment?, in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York, 1984), pp. 3250. 61 See Norris, What is Enlightenment? , p. 60. See also Ronald Beiner, Foucaults Hyper-Liberalism, Critical Review 1 (1995): 368, n. 16. 62 See Herbert Schnadelbach, The Face in the Sand: Foucault and the Anthropological Slumber, in Philosophical Interventions in the Unnished Project of Enlightenment, ed. Axel Honneth et al., trans. William Rehg (Cambridge, MA: 1992), p. 320. 63 Michel Foucault, A Preface to Transgression, in Language, CounterMemory, Practice, pp. 2952. 64 ibid., p. 38.

65 ibid., p. 42. 66 ibid., p. 40. 67 ibid., p. 44. Similarly, in Nietzsche, Freud and Marx, Foucault describes a radicalization of self-reection to the breaking point where the interpreter himself that is, the reective philosopher disappears. He is quite explicit about the fact that this dissolution of the subject tends toward madness: What is in question at the breaking point of interpretation, in this convergence of interpretation toward a point that renders it impossible, could well be something like the experience of madness experience against which Nietzsche struggled and by which he was fascinated, experience against which Freud himself, all his life, had wrestled, not without anguish. This experience of madness would be the penalty for a movement of interpretation which approached the innity of its center, and which collapsed, calcinated. Michel Foucault, Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx, ed. Gayle Ormiston et al., in Transforming the Hermeneutical Contexts: Freud and Nietzsche to Nancy (Albany, NY: 1990), p. 64. For sublimation as an alternative to the philosophy of transgression see Whitebook, Perversion and Utopia, Chapter 5. 68 Foucault, p. 34. 69 It is interesting to note that the image of the already empty skull reappears in Foucaults discussion of Batailles ocular repudiation of the sovereign subject and transcendental philosophy. For Bataille, the eye, which is both in the world and on its limit and is also both a mirror and a lamp, which reects and illuminates the world is the transcendental organ par excellence. Its true function, however, is not revealed during sight, but during sleep, that is, when the upturned eye is directed into the bony cavern of the head. Then it beholds the darkness and emptiness that lie behind it and transcendental subjectivity and are the dark truth underlying of clarity and vision. ibid., pp. 456. See also Jay, Downcast Eyes, pp. 216 ff. 70 Michel Foucault, The Subject, Knowledge, and the History of Truth , in Remarks on Marx, trans. R. James Goldstein et al. (New York: 1991), p. 46. 71 See also the articles by Richard Rorty, Lynn Hunt, Alasdair MacIntyre and David Halperin in A Symposium on James Millers The Passion of Michel Foucault , Salmagundi 97 (Winter 1993): 3099. 72 See Georg Lukcs, Reication and the Consciousness of the Proletariat, in History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingston (Cambridge, MA: 1971), pp. 110 ff. 73 Foucault, The Order of Things, p. 318. 74 Schnadelbach, The Face in the Sand, p. 317. 75 ibid. 76 ibid., p. 318. 77 ibid., p. 314. 78 Dreyfus and Rabinow, Michel Foucault, p. 31. 79 ibid., pp. 2412. 80 Schnadelbach, The Face in the Sand, p. 334.

81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 ibid., p. 321. ibid., p. 322. ibid., p. 319. ibid., pp. 3345. Quoted in Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault, p. 51. Schnadelbach, The Face in the Sand, p. 327. Foucault, The Order of Things, p. 320. See Schnadelbach, The Face in the Sand, p. 331. Albrecht Wellmer, The Dialectic of Modernism and Postmodernism: The Critique of Reason since Adorno, in The Persistence of Modernity: Essays on Aesthetics, Ethics, and Postmodernism, trans. David Midgley (Cambridge, MA: 1991), p. 18. Similarly, Thomas McCarthy observes: That we now understand our capacities for reasoning to be tied to culturally variable and historically changeable forms of social practice can mean the end of the Enlightenment only for thinkers who remain so captivated by absolutist conceptions of reason, truth, and right that their passing means there is nothing left that really makes a difference. David Couzens Hoy and Thomas McCarthy, Critical Theory (New York, 1994), p. 42. See also Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, p. 408, n. 28. Foucault, Preface to Transgression, pp. 29 ff. Richard Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis (Philadelphia, PA: 1983), p. 18. Marcia Cavell, The Psychoanalytic Mind: From Freud to Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: 1993), p. 103. See also Malcolm Bowie, Lacan (Cambridge, MA: 1991), pp. 48 ff. Norris, What is Enlightenment? , p. 70. . . . if this were merely an argument for the need of supplementing an internalist view of social practices with an externalist one, of balancing an account of agency with an account of structure, of integrating a microanalysis of social practices with a structural analysis of persistent patterns of interaction or with a functional analysis of their unintended consequences or with an institutional analysis of the normative contexts of individual action, then there would be no incompatibility in principle between genealogy and approaches operating with the concept of agency. But Foucault does not want to supplement or balance or integrate, he wants to replace. And the results of this either/or thinking are no happier here than in the traditional theories he criticizes. McCarthy, The Critique of Impure Reason, pp. 2556. ibid., p. 256. Norris, What is Enlightenment? , p. 47. ibid., p. 32. Foucault, What is Enlightenment?, p. 45 (emphasis added). ibid., p. 46. ibid., p. 32. Norris, What is Enlightenment? , p. 83. It was this side of Foucault which Rorty, as Norris observes, picked up on to the exclusion of all others. Rorty attempts to construe Foucault, in his own mold, as a liberal ironist,
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pursing private self-invention. Norris is correct in objecting that this interpretation ignores both the determinist aspect of Foucaults archaeological and genealogical investigations and the more radical and dangerous sides of Foucaults politics. The point I want to make, however, is different. Both Foucault and Rorty, as advocates of aesthetic selfcreation, are forced either to dismiss Freud completely or radically to distort his position. Whereas Foucault, as we are seeing, adopted both strategies at different points in his career, Rorty adopts the latter. Michel Foucault, On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress, in The Foucault Reader, p. 351. See also Beiner, Foucaults Hyper-Liberalism, p. 363. Michel Foucault, What is an Author?, in Language, Counter-Memory and Practice, p. 138. Foucault, On the Genealogy of Ethics, p. 350. Michel Foucault, Polemics, Politics, and Problematization: an Interview, in The Foucault Reader, p. 389. Michel Foucault, The Ethic of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom, trans. J. D. Gauthier, in The Final Foucault, ed. James Bernauer and David Rasmussen (Cambridge, MA: 1991), pp. 23. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: 1972), p. 17. Foucault, What is Enlightenment?, pp. 423. ibid., p. 373. Cf. Freud himself was still a representative of European rationalism and the Enlightenment, albeit a skeptical one; he shook our faith in the rationality of the subject and the power of reason, but with the intention of strengthening the power of reason and the power of the Ego. The normative horizon of his critique and in this he remains an Enlightenment gure was a disabused, disillusioned humanity that had come to its senses and gained control of itself within limits. Wellmer, The Dialectic of Modernism and Postmodernism, pp. 589. See Jean Piaget, The Affective Unconscious and the Cognitive Unconscious, The Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 21 (1973): 24961. Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, p. 412, n. 3. Foucault, The Order of Things, p. 375. See also the parallel discussion of limit, transgression and the mad philosopher in Foucault, A Preface to Transgression, pp. 2952. This interpretation is in opposition to Dreyfuss claim that Foucault renounced the hermeneutical search for deep truths in all its forms, including the deep truth that there are no deep truths. See Hubert Dreyfus, Foreword to the California edition of Foucaults Mental Illness and Psychology, pp. xxvii ff. Forrester, Foucault and the History of Psychoanalysis, p. 297. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. I: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: 1978) p. 130. In the same passage Forrester reports that when he approached Foucault with these perplexities, Foucault proved genuinely evasive. Forrester, Foucault and the History of Psychoanalysis, p. 289.
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117 ibid., p. 299. 118 Michel Foucault et al., The Confession of the Flesh, in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 19721977, ed. Colin Gordon, trans. Colin Gordon et. al. (New York: 1980), p. 211. 119 Jacques-Alain Miller, Michel Foucault and Psychoanalysis, in Michel Foucault, Philosopher, trans. Timothy J. Armstrong, (New York: 1992), p. 58. 120 ibid. 121 See Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. I, p. 131. 122 ibid., p. 18. 123 ibid., p. 21. 124 See Paul Ricoeur, Technique and Nontechnique in Interpretation, in The Conict of Interpretations (Evanston IL: 1974), pp. 17795. 125 Miller, Michel Foucault and Psychoanalysis, p. 59. 126 See Forrester, Foucault and the History of Psychoanalysis, p. 299. 127 Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. I, p. 106. 128 ibid., p. 53. 129 ibid., p. 157. 130 Forrester, Foucault and the History of Psychoanalysis, pp. 3067. 131 Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, in The Standard Edition, Vol. 21, p. 145. 132 Whitebook, Introduction, in his Perversion and Utopia. 133 An even more damning criticism, which applies to the Freudian left as much as it does to Foucault, is that he tended to ignore the question of aggression and concentrate on sexuality. Freud, however, came increasingly to view aggression, that piece of unconquerable nature as opposed to sexuality, as the central source of the individuals inevitable conict with civilization. See Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, pp. 59148. 134 ibid., p. 157. 135 Dews, The Logics of Disintegration: Post-Structuralist Thought and the Claims of Critical Theory (New York: 1987), p. 168. 136 Thomas McCarthy makes the following comment in a similar vein: To be sure, [Foucault] does insist on the interdependence of the notions of power and resistance. Yet he refuses to link the latter to the capacity of competent subjects to say, with reason, yes or no to claims made upon them by others. As a result, he is hard put to identify just what it is that resists. Often he alludes to something like the body and its pleasures. But that only plunges us deeper into just the sorts of conceptual tangles he wants to avoid. For it is Foucault, after all, who so forcefully brought home to us just how historical and social the body and its pleasures are. But when the need arises, he seems to conjure up the idea of a presocial body that cannot be tted without remainder into any social mold. This begins to sound suspiciously like Freuds instinct theory [and Marcuses polymorphous perversity J. W.] and to suggest a refurbished model of the repressive hypothesis that Foucault so emphatically rejected. McCarthy, The Critique of Impure Reason, pp. 2578. 137 The idea of the bios as a material for an aesthetic piece of art is something which fascinates me. The idea also that ethics can be a very strong structure

of existence, without any relation with the juridical per se, with an authoritarian system, with a disciplinary structure. All that is very interesting. Foucault, On the Genealogy of Ethics, p. 348. 138 Dana Breen, General Introduction, in The Gender Conundrum, ed. Dana Breen (New York: 1993), p. 1.

Freud, Foucault and The Dialogue With Unreason': Joel Whitebook

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Joel Whitebook

Freud, Foucault and the dialogue with unreason

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II Madness and Civilization

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III The unobjectionable part of the transference

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IV Freud and Kant

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