In a new and groundbreaking book
titled, interestingly enough, Foucault 2.0: Beyond Power and Knowledge, as
if to suggest that we are now moving to another level of interpretation of
Foucault’s work, and another version altogether in the assessment of his legacy,
22 years after his untimely death, Eric Paras takes up the following question –which
has preoccupied many contemporary readers, sympathizers and critics alike: "How
and why does Foucault go from being a philosopher of the disappearance of the
subject to one wholly preoccupied with the subject?" (3).

  His carefully researched, scrupulously
documented, well-written and well-structured text, properly inscribed with the intellectual
history of contemporary French philosophy, consists essentially of three main parts
–preceded by an introduction into the Archive (1-15), and followed by a
conclusion characterizing "Foucault’s pendulum swing" in the course
of his career (149-158). Each part deals with various aspects of Foucault’s
work around the central notions of Discourse (17-71), Power (73-97), and
Subjects (99-148) It also contains abundant notes (159-208) and original
translations of new materials heretofore little-known of the broad academic
community, as well as a very helpful bibliography of both primary and secondary
sources (209-232). 

Paras’s central argument is that
that many contemporary philosophers have minimized the significance of Foucault’s
late recovery of a more robust concept of subjectivity either (1) because they
did not have access to his lectures–courses at the College de France from 1978
to 1983 (or recorded tapes thereof) or (2) because, like Luc Ferry and Alain
Renault,[1]
who had a political agenda and a philosophical ax to grind against Foucault and
others leading radical French philosophers of the 60s, they doubted the
sincerity of Foucault’s late conversion or transformation, or simply viewed it
as somehow too little too late (157).  Paras contends subsequently that a new
reading and interpretation must be articulated, which takes ‘Foucault’s turn’
more seriously by looking into the highly insightful and revealing contents of
the lectures and courses at the College de France — a point that had been made,
by the way, by a number of other scholars –e.g., Arnold Davidson, whose
contention in this regard is here recognized as "vindicated" (2).

Paras’ proposed new reading and
interpretation of Foucault’s philosophical odyssey and ultimate assessment of
his legacy, on such a rich and highly documented basis, makes it a strong contender,
one that is not easy to impeach. But whether or not it does become the
established and widely agreed upon interpretation, or Foucault 2.0 as Paras
puts it, remains to be seen. It will depend obviously on how well it passes the
test of critical scrutiny in the months and years to come as more scholars have
a chance to examine and re-examine the contents of Foucault’s lectures and
courses. In the meantime however, I believe that one could quite legitimately
take issue with a number of his (major and minor) contentions in an effort to
suggest already that we may have to consider an alternative interpretation, or
Foucault 2.1. This is what I intend to do in a very succinct way in this essay.

If we leave aside the literary
productions of Foucault — especially, during the time of his involvement with
the Tel Quel group in the late 50s-early 60s, and focus strictly on the
philosophical and historical works of "the early period," then the
following well-known published works must unquestionably be included: Madness
and Civilization (1961), Birth of the Clinic (1963), The Order of
Things (1968), The Archeology of Knowledge (1969), Discipline and
Punish (1975), and the History of Sexuality Vol. I: The Will to Know
(1976). However, after what we might consider to be a brief period of
transition during the 8-years hiatus (1976-1984) between major publications,
Foucault delivered a number of very important lectures-courses, starting in
1978, which  are of particular significance for understanding the marked
distancing from his earlier interests and "problematics,"[2]
and taking a proper measure of the shift that his thinking has undergone in "the
late period,"[3]
at the end of his career –esp. with regard to his "return to the subject,"
"the return to morality," his more optimistic ethical-political
horizon, and his connection with the legacy of the Enlightenment thinkers.. These
are: (a) Security, Territory, and Population (1978); (b) The Birth of
Bio-Politics (1979); (c) The Government of the Living (1980); (d) Subjectivity
and Truth (1981); (e) The Hermeneutics of the Subject (1982), and
(f) The Government of the Self and of Others (1983).[4]
Several of these lectures have now been published in French, and are
progressively being translated in English.[5]

I agree wholeheartedly with Paras
on the two points articulated above, and I believe he performs a valuable
service by providing extended discussions of the contents of these lectures
[esp., (b)-(c) as well as (d)-(e)] in an effort to reveal the "enormity of
the shift" (157) that had taken place in Foucault’s thinking. [I also
agree that of all these lectures, the one he delivered in 1978 was still framed
somehow with the ‘problematics’ of his genealogical phase, and may therefore be
said to correspond to the transition period, when Foucault was arguably still
groping for an alternative thrust altogether (92ff)].

 However, according to Paras, the
result of the still dominant yet deficient interpretation is that Foucault’s
philosophical career was read like a kind of arrow’s flight, with a
straight trajectory and an unwavering determination to deconstruct the subject.
He refers here for example to Habermas’ posthumous analysis (1994) of Foucault’
work, whose title presumably implies the metaphor.[6]
Nothing could be further from the truth about Foucault’s work taken in its
totality.

According to Paras, the swing of
a pendulum might instead be a more accurate depiction. His alternative
metaphor serves his purpose in characterizing Foucault’s entire corpus as
consisting ultimately of three phases, starting from (1) a position in which he
somehow still admitted the possibility of individual experience and
subjectivity, then moving on to (2) a period in-between, during which he
articulated the 20^th century’s most devastating critique of the (free)
subject, and finally  (3) returning or swinging back (25 years later) to a
position that "looked not a little like his starting point" in
that he now acknowledged "the existence of a pre-discursive subject,
enraptured by literature, politically unaffiliated, and pledged to a kind of
experience that pushed the limits of the known" (Paras, 2006: 157-8;
italics added).  

Paras
assume here, quite rightly I think, that period (2) covers all of Foucault’s
well-known archeological and genealogical studies –without however claiming,
as other authors have (e.g., Dreyfus and Rabinow (1983), Beatrice Han (2000)),
that there is a strong and substantial (methodological and theoretical)
discontinuity or rupture between these two phases of his inquiries into regimes
of discourse/knowledge and power/knowledge (10-11).

With
regards to period (1) above, however, Paras writes: "Arguably, it was his
awareness that certain kinds of subjects had been suppressed merely because of
the label one had affixed to them –‘mad,’ ‘demented,’ ‘enraged’–that
motivated him to write in the first place" (158). But it is questionable.
I believe, whether Foucault’s psychological  motivation to write (which may
be partially true) could constitute an adequate basis for interpreting the philosophical
position he sought to defend in his early works –even if at times his own language
bewitched him and betrayed his real intentions and purposes.

Finally,
with regards to period (3), Paras claims that Foucault seems to have altogether
abandoned his previous methods and adopted instead "a text-driven
hermeneutical method."  This is, I believe, a serious point of contention,
about which, I will suggest later on, we could have some reasonable
disagreement.  He also states, in a somewhat melodramatic way, that "in a
voice that by the end trembled from pain and debility, Foucault "liquidated"
his critique of the subject.  He goes on to add in the final lines of his book:
"For, the notion of the end of subjectivity had offered a kind of cold
clarity, as well as an immensely thought-provoking lens through which to view
the world. But ultimately, only the notion of strong subjectivity proved warm
enough to accommodate an overwhelming passion for life and an inextinguishable
belief in the primacy of human liberty" (158).

Paras’
discussion seems to imply somehow that there is a straightforward or simplistic
recovery of the liberal humanist subject in Foucault’s later work. But I don’t
think this is the case. Foucault was far too paranoid-critical (having gone
through the most radical archeological and genealogical deconstructions) to
merely return to notions (of subjectivity, experience, agency, autonomy, and critical
reflection), as if they could be recovered un-touched and un-informed by his
earlier devastating critiques and analyses. Under a certain construal of the principle
of charity (Davidson), consistency with what may be reasonably deemed the
most likely, general and over-arching thrust of a philosopher’s work is bound
to constitute a substantial advantage in interpretation. But the interpretation
that Paras offers is ultimately problematic, I believe,  because, like so many
other reconstructive proposals, it arguably fails to strike a proper and
judicious balance between ‘abstraction’ and ‘idealization’ in that,
paradoxically enough, his reconstructed intellectual history of Foucault’s
journey both ‘leaves out too much’ and ‘adds too much.’        

This is precisely the point where I
part company with Paras, for, I don’t think that Foucault had simply returned
to the exact same position he previously held — assuming of course that he
previously held the position that Paras attributes to him. Paras’ periodization
of Foucault’s career depends on such a claim (and this is in my view a serious
point of contention), according to which Foucault’s first major works
countenanced a notion of "lived experience" and therefore, of "pre-discursive
subjectivity." But, if his early work contained ‘traces’ attesting to a
still lingering concern with "lived experience," that he was not able
to dispense with completely, or that he was using, if I may say so, under erasure,
it is doubtful that Foucault thereby meant to uphold a notion of "pre-discursive
subjectivity" — let alone rehabilitate it as is in his later works –25
years later. 

Besides, as I suggested earlier, if
Foucault’s philosophical odyssey is any indication of his philosophical
temperament, it is hard to think that he would simply recover and re-validate a
position that he held at the beginning of his career. Metaphor for metaphor, a
more appropriate and judicious one, I believe, would be that of a flexible
spiral, whose end-points don’t necessarily touch each other, or
coincide, and cannot therefore be said to be indistinguishable, and whereby any
return to a previous point must be viewed as going back to a slightly different
point. Because it is flexible however, it may be viewed as bending at times in
one direction or another — so as to rectify occasional rhetorical excesses and
theoretical tactical exaggerations. [Naturally, the objections and
counter-claims made above require more substantial arguments and defense than I
can give here. Nevertheless, they are worth entertaining as just that —possible
objections and counter-claims].

The
philosophical odyssey and career of Foucault has confused and confounded
sympathizers and critics alike. This is no doubt due at least in part to the
sheer creativity that he was able to display in a relatively short life,
exploring different kinds of questions and directions, adopting different
methodologies and terminologies, changing focus and emphasis at different times.
In part, it was also due to his philosophical temperament, which made him
relish the pleasure to surprise his readers by going places where we did not
expect to find him.[7]
He furthermore affirmed his "intellectual homelessness" or "nomadism"
by emphatically stating his right to change his mind as he progressed in his
investigations, and showed a boundless propensity and capacity to reinterpret
his past efforts and achievements in light of his current concerns and
projects, and what’s even more confusing, in the conceptual and theoretical
terminology and language pertaining to the latter. 

Nevertheless, scholars have for the
most part pretty much understood the fundamental challenge that Foucault’s
early works had posed to the hegemony of ‘man,’ the sovereignty and autonomy of
the ‘subject.’[8]
But it has been more difficult to understand the second part of his career that
followed thereafter, from 1976 to 1984, the year of his untimely death. This is
due in part to the fact Foucault had not published any major works until 1984 –when
the long-waited volumes II and III of the History of Sexuality
(respectively sub-titled The Use of Pleasure and The Care of
the Self finally came out, and in another part, to the fact that up until
recently most scholars did not have access to his lectures-courses at the
College de France, particularly from 1979 until about 1983. This was however a
period during which Foucault abandoned the so-called "structuralist
program" that he later claimed never to have adopted, but only extended in
to an area in which it had theretofore never been applied. [Typical Foucaldian
move, some might argue, on a note of skepticism]. This was also the period
during which, to the dismay of many, showed a renewed and strong interest in "the
speaking, acting and creating subject" as well as in a self-defining, self-creating,
self-constituting rather than merely defined, determined, constructed and
constituted subjectivity, and many other notions that he had previously worked
hard to undermine, or rather, to ‘problematize,’ such as experience, freedom,
individualism, and even human rights. (101-148)

In my view, a close scrutiny of
Foucault’s later period does indeed reveal a dramatic turn or shift from his
earlier more constructivist and deterministic view of the efficacy of disciplinary
and normalizing forces. This shift leads to an increased concern with resistance
to paranoid totalizing systems and pervasive power-dispositifs, and an
exploration of the possibilities for ethico-political action, but I would be
prepared to argue at greater length that the latter remain somehow limited and
circumscribed –in-formed as they are and will remain by Foucault’s earlier
archeological and genealogical works. His late works see human beings less as merely
"constructed subjects," objects of discipline and control, and more
as beings with some capacity for effective and reflective action,
self-discipline, self-control and limited critical agency (Veyne, 1992:
340-345).

Again,
in contrast to Paras, I don’t believe that we can view Foucault’s later work as
having completely "liquidated" or "repudiated" his early
work, or, as having gone beyond power and knowledge. In this sense, one
could not compare Foucault’s trajectory to that of Wittgenstein, for example,
as he moved from the Tractatus to the Philosophical Investigations.
While some of the excesses and extremist positions of the early work may have
been later tempered and rectified somewhat so as to clear out the theoretical
and conceptual space for a different set of questions and inquiries, and for a
possible and effective ethical-political action, it is arguably not the case,
as Paras contends (12, 138ff), that Foucault has completely abandoned and
rejected his archeological and genealogical method in favor a new text-driven
hermeneutical method. As Foucault has shown repeatedly, his approach is not
that of a methodological chauvinist. If he has in later lectures, for example,
made a focused use of the latter method (which he has also used occasionally in
previous works), this could not and should not be taken to indicate that he now
favors this method over any other he had used before. If when all is said and
done, Foucault’s entire work is viewed, as he recommends in his own words,
merely as "tool box," then one could easily imagine that it will
contain different, diverse and heteroclite methods and methodologies suitable
for different tasks and purposes, which have been part of his philosophical
arsenal.

 In closing, we can therefore
observe both continuities and discontinuities between Foucault’s earlier
investigations of regimes of discourse/knowledge/truth and power/knowledge, and
his later focus on (critical) subjects, subjectification and ethics. His later
discussions point unquestionably to the possibility of a political ethics that
is not identical with, but may be compared to an ethics of self-discipline.
Local ethical action may not proceed as far as Foucault would want in
dismantling the humanist subject, but by challenging rather than embracing the
oppressive systems of the time, neither denying their responsibility nor
exaggerating their effectiveness. It is, I believe, in this context (pace
Paras (14) that we must understand his statement –which seems to play a
central role in Paras’ over-arching argument in defense of his interpretation: "Thought is freedom in
relation to what one does, the motion by which one detaches oneself from it,
establishes it as an object, and reflects on it as a problem." What we can
do is to ‘problematize,’ and we must do so differently from the vantage-point
of different subject-positions.  Neutrality is not possible.

Thus, Foucault’s work moves from an
earlier vision of structured discourses and regimes of discipline and power
that precludes autonomy, choice and even change to a vision of a
self-disciplined subject with some limited yet more effective ethico-political
agency and resistance. Although Foucault ascribe to agents in his late work an
ability to distance themselves critically from their historical present, such a
limited critical agency does not derive from a return to a humanist, or even purely
human, individual subject. Others late postmodern philosophers, such as Luc
Ferry and Alain Renault, were probably committed to recuperating the traditional
autonomous liberal individual subject. But Foucault, arguably interested in the
opposite of such a return, should be read instead as investigating the process
of subjectification (in its double, equivocal or ambiguous, meaning) as both possible
subject-formations and subject-positions, and trying to propose ways in which
people can participate to some extent in re-creating themselves as
locally situated ethical and political agents –who are perhaps better
apprehended as already situated in a post-humanist and post-postmodern era (see
Chokr, 2006).

      

References

Chokr, Nader N. "Foucault
on Power and Resistance–Another Take: Toward a Post-postmodern  Political
Philosophy." International Conference on ‘Resistance’ organized by the
Society for European Philosophy, Greenwich University, London, UK, August 2004.

________. "Mapping out a
Shift in Contemporary French Philosophy."  Yeditepe de felsefe Vol.
5, 2006 (forthcoming).

Dreyfus, Hubert and Paul
Rabinow. Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. 2^nd
Edition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1983. 

Faubion, James D. (Ed.) Michel
Foucault–Aesthetics, Method and Epistemology. The Essential Works,
1954-1984. Volume 2. New York: The New Free Press. 

_______. Michel Foucault–Power.
The Essential Works, 1954-1984. Volume 3. New York: The New Free Press.

Ferry, Luc and Alain Renault.
French Philosophy of the Sixties: Essay on Anti-Humanism (1985). Trans.
Mary H.S. Cattani. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990

Foucault. Michel. The Archaeology
of Knowledge (1969). Trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Harper Books,
1972.

_________. "Polemics,
Politics, and Problematizations." (1984). In The Essential Foucault.
Ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: The New Press, 2003, pp. 18-24. Reprinted in Paul
Rabinow (Ed.), 1994, pp. 111-119; 1989, pp. 381-390.

Habermas, Jürgen. "Taking
Aim at the Heart of the Present." In Michael Kelly (Ed.). Critique and
Power. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994, pp. 149-156.

Han, Beatrice. Foucault’s
Critical Project: Between the Transcendental and the Historical. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002.

Rabinow, Paul and Nikolas
Rose (Eds.). The Essential Foucault. Selections from Essential Works of
Foucault, 1954-1984. New York: The New Press, 2003.

Rabinow, Paul (Ed.). The
Foucault Reader. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984.

_______. Michel Foucault–Ethics:
Subjectivity and Truth. The Essential Works, 1954-1984. Volume 1. New York: The New Free Press, 1994.

Veyne, Paul. "Foucault
and Going Beyond (or the Fulfillment of) Nihilism." In Timothy Armstrong
(Ed.). Michel Foucault: Philosopher. New York: Routledge, 1992, pp.
340-344.

 

 

© 2006 Nader N. Chokr

 

Nader N. Chokr, Professor of Philosophy & Social Sciences, Shandong University, Jinan, China