Charles Shepherdson

Department of English
University of Missouri at Columbia

 

The entrance into world by beings is primal history [Urgeschichte] pure and simple. From this primal history a region of problems must be developed which we today are beginning to approach with greater clarity, the region of the mythic.

 

–Heidegger, The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic¹

 

The Oedipus myth is an attempt to give epic form to the operation of a structure.

 

–Lacan, Television²

 

By the madness which interrupts it, a work of art opens a void, a moment of silence, a question without answer, provokes a breach without reconciliation where the world is forced to question itself.

 

–Foucault, Madness and Civilization³

 

The historicity proper to philosophy is located and constituted in the transition, the dialogue between hyperbole and finite structure, between that which exceeds the totality and the closed totality, in the difference between history and historicity.

 

–Derrida, “Cogito and the History of Madness”⁴

 

Satire

 

In spite of the difference between English and Continental philosophy, there is a link between Foucault and writers like Swift, as there was between Nietzsche and Paul Rée: “The first impulse to publish something of my hypotheses concerning the origin of morality,” Nietzsche says, “was given to me by a clear, tidy and shrewd–also precocious–little book in which I encountered for the first time an upside-down and perverse species of genealogical hypothesis, the genuinely Engl ish type . . . The Origin of the Moral Sensations; its author Dr. Paul Rée” (emphasis mine).⁵ Taking this upside-down and perverse English type as a starting point, let us begin with the strange tale by Jonathan Swift.⁶

 

At the end of Gulliver’s Travels, after returning from his exotic and rather unexpected voyage to the land of the Houyhnhnms, where the horses are so wise and discourse so eloquently, while humans sit up in the trees throwing food at eac h other and defecating on themselves, our poor traveller goes back to his homeland, where he is so dislocated that he cannot even embrace his wife or laugh with his friends at the local pub (being “ready to faint at the very smell” of such a creature, tho ugh finally able “to treat him like an animal which had some little portion of reason”); and in this state of distress, he goes out to the stable and sits down with the horses, thinking that maybe he will calm down a bit, if only he can learn to whinny an d neigh.

 

In Swift, how is it that this voyage to the land of the Houyhnhnms and Yahoos is not simply an amusing story about some ridiculous foreign land? How is it that this “topsy-turvy world,” this inverted world (die verkehrte Welt), where horses d isplay the highest virtue and humans are regarded with disgust because they are so filthy and inarticulate–how is it that this is not merely an amusing departure from reality, an entertaining fiction, but also a revelation of the fact that our own world, the world of reality, is itself inverted, already an absurd fiction, a place where human beings are already disgusting irrational filthy inarticulate and comical creatures, worthy only of satirical derision? How is it that the inverted image turns out t o reflect back upon the real one–that what begins as the very reverse of our normal world, an absurd, excessive, and foreign place, a world of science fiction, where madmen wander freely in the streets and objects in nature are inscribed with strange ins ignias, written on their surfaces by god, turns out to be both foreign and yet also a picture, both exotic and yet precisely a mirroring of our own world, by which we are brought to see ourselves?

 

This is a question of fiction and truth, but it is also a question of history, a question concerning genealogy. How is it that genealogy, which wanders around in what is most distant and unfamiliar–not the old world where we recognize ourselves, fi nding continuity with our ancestors, but a strange and unfamiliar land–turns out to be, at the same time, an account of our own world, a history of the exotic that is also our own history?

 

Before we turn to the historical aspect of the question, let us stay a moment with the problem of fiction. For the exotic tale told by Swift captures the problem art posed for Plato: the problem is not that art produces an illusion, that it is merel y a copy of what already exists in reality, or even a deranged, imaginary substitute; the problem is rather that art rebounds upon the world, that it discloses a dimension of truth beyond immediate reality, a truth that competes with what Plato regarded a s the proper object of philosophy. As Lacan says, “The picture does not compete with the appearance, it competes with what Plato designates as beyond appearance, as the Idea.”⁷ In the artistic competition, it is not the still life of Zeuxis that wins the prize, a work so accomplished that even the birds come down to peck at the imaginary grapes; it is rather the veil of Parrhasios, the illusion painted so perfectly that Zeuxis, upon seeing it, asks Parrhasios to remove this veil so that he may see the painting of his competitor. This is the difference between the level of the imaginary and the level of desire. The function of art is to incite its viewer to ask what is beyond. Art is the essence of tr uth: it leads us not “to see,” as Lacan would put it, but “to look.” For the human animal is blind in this respect, that it cannot simply see, but is compelled to look behind the veil, driven, Freud would say, beyond the pleasure of seeing. This is where we find the split between the eye and the gaze that Lacan takes from Merleau-Ponty. This is where the symbolic aspect of art emerges, as distinct from its imaginary dimension. And it is here that the question of true and false ima ges must be replaced with a question about language.

 

If we return now to satire, it is clear that at one level, the satirical, inverted picture of the world, in which everything is rendered in an excessive form, may well evoke our laughter and entertain us, but the true function of satire, as a form of art that is also a political act, must be situated at another level, where the inverted image rebounds upon the so-called normal world, and shows that this world is itself already inverted. At the first level, we have an illusion, the false reality of a rt that distracts us from the truth, like a distorted mirror-image that captivates us while alienating us from reality; at the second level, we have an image that, precisely because of its unreal character, shows us that there is no reality, that reality itself is already an inverted image in which we are not at home. This is where the image goes beyond a picture, true or false, mimetically accurate or surrealistically bizarre; this is where art has to be understood, not in terms of the imaginary and rea lity, but in its symbolic function, its function as representation. The implication is that as long as we remain content with a discussion of the image and reality, fiction and truth, we will in effect repress the question of language.

 

The Place of Enunciation

 

Let us now pass from satire to consider the historical issue, the problem of how these stories that Foucault constructs for us (the strange laboratory of Doctor Caligari or the fantastic clinic of Boissier de Sauvages), however distant and unfamiliar , operate neither as “mere” fiction, nor simply as truth, neither as an entertaining disclosure of strange practices long ago forgotten, nor as a compilation of facts about the past, but rather by rebounding upon us, to show us who we are for the first ti me, as if in spite of everything these bizarre images were portraits of ourselves. In an interview from 1984, François Ewald asks, “Why turn your attention to those periods, which, some will say, are so very far from our own?” Foucault replies: ” I set out from a problem expressed in current terms today, and I try to work out its genealogy. Genealogy means that I begin my analysis from a question posed in the present.”⁸

 

With this remark, Foucault stresses the fact that the position of enunciation, the point from which he speaks, is always explicitly thematized in his works. This feature gives his writings a dimension that can only be obscured if one views them as a neutral, descriptive documentation of the past (history), or as an attempt to construct a grand methodological edifice (theory). This is the point at which Foucault’s work touches on something th at does not belong to history, or even to philosophy, something we might speak of as fiction. “If philosophy is memory, or a return of the origin,” Foucault writes, “what I am doing cannot, in any way, be regarded as philosophy; and if the history of tho ught consists in giving life to half-effaced figures, what I am doing is not history either.”⁹ This is also the point at which we may understand his work as a kind of action, what Foucault calls a “making of di fferences.”

 

The New Historicism, which often views Foucault’s work as revealing the specificity of various historical formations, without appealing to grand narratives of continuous emergence, or to universal notions (of “humanity” or “sex” or “justice”), nevert heless also regards his work as an effort at knowledge (rather than as a practice). If Foucault’s work is taken as a form of historicism, by which the real strangeness and diversity of historical formations is revealed (and, to be sure, this captures one aspect of his work), such a view nevertheless subscribes to the idea that his work is a variety of historical knowledge, which aims at the truth about the past: which is to say (A) a truth that is partial, no doubt, and elabor ated from within a historical perspective, but that still shows us what was previously hidden, like any form of hermeneutics (the secret normalization being installed under the guise of “liberal” institutions such as psychiatry, or the modern judic ial system), and at the same time (B) a truth about the past, since it is always a question, in this perspective, of re-reading the archive, a question of historical knowledge, knowledge that is bound to the past since, according to the ofte n-quoted position, the archaeologist can by definition have no knowledge of his own archive, and thus cannot address the truth about his own discursive arrangement. Given this virtually canonical stress upon the “historicist” aspect of Foucault’s work, w hich is thought to reveal the contingent moment in which things are given a historically specific form, one might take pause at Foucault’s remarks in The Archaeology of Knowledge: “My discourse,” he writes,

 

does not aim to dissipate oblivion, to rediscover in the depth of things the moment of their birth (whether this is seen as their empirical creation, or the transcendental act that gives them origin); it does not set out to be a recollection of the original or a memory of truth. On the contrary, its task is to make differences. (205, original emphasis)

 

There are in fact two separate questions here. First, how are we to construe the relation between the present and the past? For if history traditionally represents itself as a neutral recounting of the past, at the level of knowledge, Foucault by c ontrast, however much he may insist upon the documentary and empirical nature of his work, nevertheless also emphasizes that the work is not written from the standpoint of eternity, as a knowledge or representation that would have no place of birth, but r ather has an origin of its own, in the present. What is the function of memory in genealogy, if it is not simply the recollection of the past, in the name of information or knowledge? With this question, we come close to the psychoanalytic problem of me mory: what does it mean to say that in dredging up the past, repeating it, going back across the river to where the ancestors lie buried, one is concerned, not so much with what really happened–with what Leopold von Ranke called “the past as it really wa s in itself”–but rather with intervening, rewriting the past, producing a shift in the symbolic structure of the narrative that has brought us to the point where we are now?¹⁰ As is often said, Freud’s disco very concerning the symbolic nature of the symptom also meant that he had to shift his focus–to abandon his initial and “realist” interest in getting the patient to remember exactly what had happened, and to recognize instead that fantasy was every bit a s real as reality. This is why it is correct to say that psychoanalysis begins with the displacement of the theory of trauma. With this displacement, Freud abandons the idea that the primal scene is a real event that took place in historical time, and r ecognizes instead that the trauma has the structure of myth, and that human history as such differs from natural, chronological time, precisely to the extent that it is subject to myth.

 

This first question about genealogical memory and the relation between the present and the past is consequently linked to a second question about truth and fiction. How are we to understand the peculiar duality in Foucault’s work–the patient, archi val research, the empiricist dedication, and on the other hand his continual assertions that he has never written anything but fictions? Can we genuinely accept both of these features without eliminating one? In fact Foucault believes that the standard histories are the product of institutions that write grand narratives culminating in the discoveries of the present, tales of the gradual emergence of truth and reason. These histories, according to Foucault, are false, and can be replaced with a more ac curate account by the genealogist, who is not seduced by the mythology of a prevailing narrative.

 

But what are we then to make of his claim that he has never written anything but fiction? Is it simply a stylish, French gesture that forms part of the public image of Foucault, a rhetorical aside that has no serious philosophical weight? To say th is would be to refuse the statement, not to take it seriously. Or does the remark simply mean that he knows he might not have all his facts straight, and that one day someone may find it necessary to improve his account, in short, that his account is tru e but contingent, or true but written from a perspective? To say this would be to remain within the arena of knowledge, in which a “relativism” is endorsed that covertly maintains the very commitment to truth which it seems to overcome, by admitting that it is “only a perspective,” while simultaneously insisting upon a rigorous adherence to documentary evidence that tells the truth better than the grand narratives of the received history. What is this vacillation that makes genealogy neither an operatio n of knowledge, a true (or at least “more true”) account of the past, nor simply a fable, a distorted image, an entertaining but bizarre representation of a time that is foreign to us? If we ask about the nature of genealogical knowledge, the fiction tha t genealogy is, how can we distinguish it from this dichotomy between the imaginary and the true? Once again, it is a question of language, a question that cannot be resolved at the imaginary level, by appeal to the dialectical interplay of image and rea lity.

 

Foucault touches here on the very structure we find in Swift, whereby the function of satire is not simply to create a strange and unfamiliar world, but rather to return, to rebound upon the present, such that the real world is shown to be itself a p arody. Slavoj Zizek explains the shift from the imaginary to the symbolic in the following way, arguing that we will only misconstrue the relation between the image and reality if we attempt to resolve it dialectically (by showing that the image and real ity are interwoven, that the image is a fiction that nevertheless rebounds upon the true world with formative effects, as Hegel shows in the Aesthetics). For there is a point at which the relation between the distorted image and the real thi ng becomes unstable, beyond all dialectical mediation, a point at which, moreover, it loses the generative force that is given in the concept of productive negation. The fact that the inverted image turns out not to be an inversion, but to reveal that the normal world is itself already inverted, calls into question the very standard of “normality” by which one might measure invertedness.¹¹ Freud says something similar about hallucination when he elabo rates the concept of “the reality principle.” According to the usual, “adaptive” view of analysis, the analyst seeks to replace the patient’s “delusions” by adjusting the client to “reality.” The patient’s “narcissism” and the ego’s pleasure principle a re thus opposed to the “reality principle.” But Lacan stresses that, contrary to the usual interpretation, Freud’s “reality principle” is not simply opposed to the pleasure principle, as a “pre-linguistic” domain (the “external world”). On the co ntrary, “reality” is the strict counterpart of the ego, and is constructed as much as the ego is, though not in exactly the same way. Thus, “reality” is not simply opposed to the realm of delusion or hallucination, but constituted through t he formation of the “pleasure principle.” Consequently, as Freud himself discovered, analytic technique must abandon the aim of “adjusting the patient to reality,” and the entire framework which sets the “imaginary” against the “real”: it is not by means of shock therapy or behavior modification or any other adaptive technique (which are all governed by a certain conception of “reality”), nor through any “reality-testing,” that one modifies a hallucination or fantasy; on the contrary, it is only t hrough a symbolic action that the mutually constitutive relation between the “imaginary” and the “real” can be realigned.¹² This is why Lacan spoke of analysis as a way of working on the real by symbolic mean s.¹³

 

To understand the relation between the imaginary and reality when it is regarded from the standpoint of the symbolic, consider the example of Adorno’s remarks on totalitarian authority. How does the liberal individual, the free, authentic moral subj ect, stand in relation to the oppressive totalitarian dictator (the figure parodied by Charlie Chaplin)? According to Martin Jay, Adorno described the typical authoritarian personality by reversing all the features of the bourgeois individual: as Zizek puts it, “instead of tolerating difference and accepting non-violent dialogue as the only means to arrive at a common decision, the [totalitarian] subject advocates violent intolerance and distrust in free dialogue; instead of critically examining e very authority, this subject advocates uncritical obedience of those in power” (slightly modified).¹⁴ From one standpoint–what one might call standpoint of “realism,” the imaginary level where reality is bro ught face to face with its distorted image–these two are in complete opposition, mutually opposed ideals charged with all the pathos and investment of realist urgency; but from the standpoint of satire, from the standpoint of fiction, which asks about re presentation itself, the authoritarian personality reflects its image back onto the bourgeois democratic subject, and is revealed as already contained there, as the truth of the liberal individual, its constitutive other–or, to put it differently, its common origin.

 

This common origin is at play in Madness and Civilization, when Foucault speaks of the peculiar moment when madness and reason first come to be separated from one another, and are shown to have a common birth. This raises a question about history, for Foucault seems to suggest that the common origin of madness and reason is always concealed by historical narrative. The usual history of madness is a discourse of reason on madness, a discourse in which reason has already established itself as the measure, the arena within which madness will appear; it is therefore a history in which madness is relegated to silence. As a result, th e standard history, according to Foucault, is one in which a separation between madness and reason has already occurred, thereby concealing their original relation. Derrida stresses this point when he cites Foucault’s own remark that “the necessity of madness is linked to the possibility of history”: history itself would seem to arise only insofar as a separation has been made between madness and reason. To go back to their common origin would thus be not simply to aim at writing history, but also to raise a question concerning the very possibility of history.¹⁵ This would be, as Derrida puts it, “the maddest aspect of Foucault’s work.”16

 

Thus, the peculiar identity which links the liberal individual with the obscene and tyrannical force of fascism must be disavowed, and the best form of disavowal is narrative: what is in fact an original unity, a structural relation linking th e Reign of Terror with the rise of free democracy and the Rights of Man, is best concealed by a genetic narrative, in which the original condition is said to be one of pure freedom, liberty, fraternity and equality, an ideal which eventually comes to be corrupted by a degenerate or perverted form. In this case–what we might call the case of realism, the imaginary level where the true reality is set over against its distorted image–we would be tempted to denounce the authoritarian personal ity as an extreme distortion of the natural order of things, by measuring this degenerate form against the liberal, democratic individual; we would seek a return to the origin, before it was contaminated by the tyrannical violence of a degenerate form; bu t in the second case, when we see with the eye of the satirist who recognizes that the natural order of things is already a parody, we have to recognize that the supposedly natural state of things, the normal, liberal individual who has “natural rights” a nd a native capacity for moral reflection, is itself already inverted, that it contains the totalitarian authority in its origins, not as its opposite, not as its contradiction, not as its degenerate or perverted form, but as its repressed foundation, its internal “other.”¹⁷ In Lacanian terms, the first relation of aggressive, mirroring opposition (in which the communist and the democrat face off) is imaginary, whereas the second relation (in which they are m utually constitutive) is symbolic, which means that it can only be grasped at the level of language, and not by a return to some mythical origin–the liberation of our supposedly innate but repressed libido, or the restoration of our so-called “natural” d emocratic rights.

 

The point here is not simply to dwell on the purportedly shocking revelation concerning the symptomatic link–what one might call the equiprimordiality–of totalitarianism and democracy, but rather to show that the ideal of the liberal individual (wh ose right to freedom is accompanied by an inborn capacity for tolerance, and whose healthy conscience is the sign of an innate moral disposition, and so on), is a construction whose supposedly natural status is a fiction. This amounts to dismantling the idea that totalitarian governments are a secondary formation, the corruption of an origin, or the perversion of what would otherwise be a natural system of equally distributed justice. That story of the origin and its subsequent perv ersion is a myth, in the sense in which Lacan uses the word when he writes that the Oedipus myth is the attempt to give epic form to what is in fact the operation of a structure. This is where Rousseau is more radical than other “state of nature” theoris ts: his explanation of the social contract relies on the idea that originally, before any conventions or institutional constraints were established, human nature took a certain form, but as his argument unfolds, it becomes clear that this original state i s purely mythical, a fiction that his own political discourse confronts as such, whereas other writers who engage in the “state of nature” argument rely unequivocally on a theory of “human nature” that is always presupposed rather than demonstrated (as is suggested by the Hobbesian model, in the fact for example that when I agree to leave your acorns alone if you agree to leave mine alone, I am already operating as the rational agent whose existence is supposed to be generated by the social contract, and not presupposed as original–since originally nature is said to have been merely violent and aggressive, and thus dependent upon the arrival of law for its rational coherence).¹⁸ We there by see that the symbolic order forces upon us a confrontation with the equiprimordiality of two opposed positions which an historical account would regard according to a genetic narrative, as sequential, and also as hierarchically ordered in such a way th at one position can be regarded as natural, while the other is treated as a cultural product–the choice being left open as to whether one prefers a “return to nature,” or a celebration of the “higher law” of culture, though in either case the common orig in has been repressed.

 

The “Historical Sense”

 

In his essay on Nietzsche, Foucault distinguishes the work of the historian from the first genealogical insights that go under the name of “the historical sense”: “The historical sense,” he writes,

 

gives rise to three . . . modalities of history [all of them deployed against the pious restoration of historical monuments]. The first is parodic, directed against reality, and opposes the theme of history as reminiscence or recognition.¹⁹

 

The historian’s gaze is thereby distinguished from that of the satirical genealogist:

 

The historian offers this confused and anonymous European, who no longer knows himself or what name he should adopt, the possibility of alternate identities, more individualized and substantial than his own. But the man with historical sense will see that this substitution is simply a disguise. Historians supplied the Revolution with Roman prototypes, romanticism with knight’s armor, and the Wagnerian era was given the sword of the German hero. (160, emphasis added)

 

“The genealogist,” Foucault continues,

 

will know what to make of this masquerade. He will not be too serious to enjoy it; on the contrary, he will push the masquerade to its limit and prepare the great carnival of time where masks are constantly reappearing. . . . In this, we recognize the parodic double of what the second Untimely Meditation called ‘monumental history’. . . Nietzsche accused this history, one totally devoted to veneration, of barring access to the actual intensities and creations of life. The parody of his last texts serves to emphasize that “monumental history” is itself a parody. Genealogy is history in the form of a concerted carnival.” (160-61, slightly modified)

 

Fiction

 

Parody is of course only one of the lessons Foucault takes from Nietzsche. If we ask more generally about the relation of genealogy to fiction, we may recognize the peculiar “distance” that genealogy inhabits–not the transcendental distance that al lows a perfect view of the past, and not the distance of escape, the distance of an imaginary world that takes us away from reality, but the distance of words. In an essay on Robbe-Grillet, Foucault writes:

 

What if the fictive were neither the beyond, nor the intimate secret of the everyday, but the arrowshot which strikes us in the eye and offers up to us everything which appears? In this case, the fictive would be that which names things, that which makes them speak, and that which gives them in language their being already apportioned by the sovereign power of words. . . . This is not to say that fiction is language: this trick would be too easy, though a very familiar one nowadays. It does mean, though, that . . . the simple experience of picking up a pen and writing creates . . . a distance. . . . If anyone were to ask me to define the fictive, I should say . . . that it was the verbal nerve structure of what does not exist.²⁰

 

Later in the same essay, Foucault returns to the word “distance”:

 

I should like to do some paring away, in order to allow this experience to be what it is . . . I should like to pare away all the contradictory words, which might cause it to be seen too easily in terms of a dialectic: subjective and objective, interior and exterior, reality and imagination. . . . This whole lexicon . . . would have to be replaced with the vocabulary of distance. . . . Fiction is not there because language is distant from things; but language is their distance, the light in which they are to be found and their inaccessibility. (149)

 

Thus, when we ask (in regard to Jonathan Swift and his satirical text) how the inverted image is not just an entertaining fiction, a journey to the underground world of the Marquis de Sade, or the exotic dungeons of Bicêtre, but rather an image that reflects back upon the normal world, the “arrowshot” that returns to “strike us in the eye,” we cannot understand this in terms of the opposition between “fiction and truth.” This answer, even if it proceeds beyond opposition to a sort of dialectic al interplay, in which the imaginary and “reality” interact, is insufficient, because it does not adequately confront the role of language.²¹ If we wish to understand language, then, we cannot rest con tent with a dialectical solution, according to Foucault: “reality and imagination,” Foucault says: “This whole lexicon . . . would have to be replaced.” When we speak of fiction then, we are no longer in the realm of truth and falsity; we have passed fro m the image to the word, from the opposition between reality and imagination, to the symbolic.

 

Image and Word

 

This discrepancy between the image and the word is the source of Foucault’s constant preoccupation with the difference between seeing and saying, perception and verbalization, the level of visibility and the function of the name. If, as we have seen , the relation between the image and reality is not a matter of productive negation, in which the encounter with an alien image cancels out our own self-knowledge and requires us to be transformed; if the dialectical account of the image and reality someh ow obscures the role of language, perhaps this is because there is a difference between the image and the word, a gap or void that, according to Foucault, is not sufficiently confronted by phenomenology. Perhaps “distance” names the lack that separates t he symbol from the domain of perception, evidence, and light. “Fiction is not there because language is distant from things; but language is their distance, the light in which they are to be found and their inaccessibility (149). Perhaps ” distance,” in naming the lack of any dialectical relation between speech and vision, also amounts to a refusal of all attempts to generate a stable historical unfolding, the gradual emergence of an origin, or the teleological production of something that had to be gradually constructed through the handing-down of a common tradition. Perhaps “distance” is the name for why Foucault refuses to participate in the Husserlian response to the crisis of the human sciences (see AK, 204).

 

In that case, language would not only destabilize the usual dialectic between fiction and truth; it would also call for a reconfiguration of the concept of history, one in which things would retain their inaccessibility, beyond all phenomenological r etrieval, even the retrieval that might seem to operate in archaeology itself. This would bring archaeology very close to what Foucault speaks of as fiction. Such a revision of historical knowledge is evident in the remark already cited, where Foucault remarks that his work does not aim “to dissipate oblivion, to rediscover in the depth of things . . . the moment of their birth (whether this is seen as their empirical creation, or the transcendental act that gives them origin); it does not set out to be a recollection of the original or a memory of the truth. On the contrary, its task is to make differences” (205, original emphasis).

 

Such a making of differences, such a disruption of phenomenological retrieval, can only be grasped through maintaining the space that separates the image and the word, the instability that keeps the relation of perception and language perpetua lly subject to dislocation: in The Birth of the Clinic, his analysis shows that modern medicine was organized precisely through a mapping of discourse that would coincide with the space of corporeal visibility, and that this perfect formaliza tion of the field can be maintained only through a metaphysics of the subject, a modern philosophical anthropology. The first sentence of The Birth of the Clinic reads: “This book is about space, about language, and about death; it is about the act of seeing, the gaze.”²² In The Order of Things, we find a similar gesture, when Foucault discusses the image painted by Velasquez: in one sense, it would be possible to regard this painti ng as a complete display, a Gestalt, the manifestation of all the techniques of representation at work in Classical thought, the very image of representation, in which the distance between the visible world and its verbal representation would be definitiv ely closed within the confines of the encyclopedia.²³ In order for this to be possible, Foucault says, all that is necessary is that we give a name to the one spot at which the surface of the painting seems i ncomplete (the mirror at the back which does not reflect, but which should show the subjects being painted, who will eventually appear on the canvas whose back we see in the painting called Las Meniñas): this hole could be filled with the proper na me, “King Philip IV and his wife, Mariana” (OT 9). Foucault continues:

 

But if one wishes to keep the relation of language to vision open, if one wishes to treat their incompatibility as a starting-point for speech instead of as an obstacle to be avoided . . . then one must erase those proper names. (9)

 

The play of substitutions then becomes possible in which, as Foucault shows, the royal subjects alternate place with the spectator of the painting, who also becomes the object of the painter’s regard. In this opening, this void that marks the relation be tween the image and the word, we can begin to approach what Lacan calls the question of the real.

 

Repression and Power

 

Let us now see if we can carry these remarks over into Foucault’s analysis of power. In an interview with Bernard Henri-Lévi, Foucault remarks that movements of humanitarian reform are often attended by new types of normalization. Contempora ry discourses of liberation, according to Foucault, “present to us a formidable trap.” In the case of sexual liberation for example,

 

What they are saying, roughly, is this: ‘You have a sexuality; this sexuality is both frustrated and mute . . . so come to us, tell us, show us all that. . . . ‘ As always, it uses what people say, feel, and hope for. It exploits their temptation to believe that to be happy, it is enough to cross the threshold of discourse and to remove a few prohibitions. But in fact it ends up repressing.”²⁴

 

Power, according to Foucault, is therefore not properly understood in the form of juridical law, as a repressive, prohibitive agency which transgression might overcome, but is rather a structure, a relation of forces, such that the law, far from bein g simply prohibitive, is a force that generates its own transgression. In spite of the claims of reason, the law is always linked to violence in this way, just as the prison, in the very failure of its aim at reform, reveals that at another level it is a n apparatus destined to produce criminality (Lacan’s remarks on “aim” and “goal” would be relevant here). This is why Foucault rejects the model of law, and the idea that power is a repressive force to be overthrown. Transgression, liberation, revolutio n and so on are not adequately grasped as movements against power, movements that would contest the law or displace a prohibition; for these forms of resistance in fact belong to the apparatus of power itself. Transgression and the law thus have t o be thought otherwise than in the juridical, oppositional form of modernity, which is invested with all the drama and pathos of revolutionary narratives; we are rather concerned with a structural relation that has to be undone.

 

We can see here why Foucault says that genealogy is not simply a form of historical investigation. It does not aim at recovering lost voices, or restoring the rights of a marginalized discourse (speaking on behalf of the prisoners, or recovering the discourse of madness). Genealogy does not participate in this virtuous battle between good and evil, but is rather an operation that goes back to the origins, the first moments when an opposition between madness and reason took shape, and came to be ord ered as a truth.²⁵ This distinction between genealogy and historical efforts at recovering lost voices bears directly on Foucault’s sense of the ethical dimension of genealogy: “What often embarrasses me toda y,” he says,

 

is that all the work done in the past fifteen years or so . . . functions for some only as a sign of belonging: to be on the ‘good side,’ on the side of madness, children, delinquency, sex. . . . One must pass to the other side–the good side–but by trying to turn off these mechanisms which cause the appearance of two separate sides . . . that is where the real work begins, that of the present-day historian (emphasis added).²⁶

 

Beyond Good and Evil

 

This is not to say that there is no difference between the fascist and the liberal, madness and reason. This game of dissolving all differences by showing that you can’t tell one thing from another is not what is at stake.²⁷ The point is rather to refuse to reanimate the forces of moral approbation and censure–denouncing the enemy and congratulating oneself on having achieved a superior stance–and rather to ask how one is to conduct an analysis. Fou cault’s work often reaches just such a point, where he seems to pass beyond good and evil.

 

In books like Discipline and Punish, and even as early as Madness and Civilization, he says that, as terrible and oppressive as the imprisonment of the insane may be, as intolerable as the torture and public humiliation of c riminals may seem to us today–we who look back with our enlightened eyes–it is not our censure of this barbarism that Foucault wishes to enlist. What really matters, for us today, is not the deficiency of the past, but the narrative that reassures us a bout our own grasp on the truth, our possession of more humane and rational methods. As horrific as the tale of the torture of Damiens may be in the opening pages of Discipline and Punish–and it is a story, a little image or vignette, that frames this long mustering of documentary evidence, as Velasquez’s artful painting frames the meticulous and patient discourse on knowledge in The Order of Things (see also the opening of The Birth of the Clinic)–this scene of t orture, which captures the eye and rouses the passions, is not offered up as a spectacle for our contempt. To be sure, it does tempt the appetite of our moral indignation, but also our satisfaction in ourselves, our certainty that we have arrived at a be tter way. But the genealogy of the prison is not the story of the progressive abandonment of an unjust system of monarchical power, and the emergence of a more democratic legal order; it is the story of the formation of the modern police state, a network of normalization which is concealed by the conventional history of law and justice. That history is a narrative written by the conquerors, in which the truth about the present is lost.

 

Counter-Memory

 

It is the same in Madness and Civilization. Foucault’s work is often written against a prevailing narrative, as a kind of counter-memory: it is usually said, he tells us, that the liberation of the insane from their condition of imprisonment constitutes an improvement, a sort of scientific advance–a greater understanding of the insane, and a progressive reform of the barbaric practices which previously grouped the insane together with the criminal and the poor. But this story o nly serves the interests of the present; it is not the true history, but a history written by the conqueror. For the fact is that the organization of this supposedly liberal and scientific discipline of psychiatric knowledge only served to produce greate r and more diversified forms of subjugation, a greater and more subtle surveillance of the minutiae of interior mental life. The body has been freed, Foucault says, only for the soul to become a more refined an effective prison: you watch too much tv., y ou eat too much, you don’t get enough exercise, you waste your time, you criticize yourself too much, and you should be ashamed for feeling guilty about all this, for dwelling so much on your pathetic problems. This is “the genealogy of the modern ‘soul’ .”²⁸ “Th[is] soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy.” It was once the body that was put in prison, but now “the soul is the prisoner of the body” (DP 30). And it is on the basis of this mo dern psychological soul that “have been built scientific techniques and discourses, and the moral claims of humanism” (DP 30), whose handbooks can be found on the bestseller lists, and whose various institutional forms are distributed across the entire so cial network, from outpatient clinics to recreational packages. It is that contemporary regime, and not the earlier incarceration of the insane, that captures Foucault’s attention. It is the story we tell ourselves, and not the barbarism of the p ast, that Foucault wishes to interrogate. That is why he does not simply produce a history for us, but also tells us the usual story, and asks us to think about who it is that tells that story, who is speaking in the received narrative.

 

In The History of Sexuality, we find a similar gesture: it looks as if the Victorians repressed sex, and perhaps it could be shown that repression is not an adequate concept, that in fact power does not operate by means of repression, bu t that there was rather an incitement to discourse, a complex production of sexuality. And yet, however much ink has been spilled over this thesis, the central focus of this first volume is not simply on whether there was “repression” among the Victorian s, or something more complex, but also on the way in which the usual story of liberalization is a history written by the conquerors, their fiction.

 

We may return here to our basic question. In fact it is incorrect to say that whereas the Victorians repressed sex, we have liberated it. Our knowledge of the past should be altered in this respect. But Foucault does not simply drop the usual hist ory, in order to replace it with a better one. He is not simply interested in the truth, a better method, a more accurate history. He does not simply reject the false narrative, but asks: if it is so often told, what satisfactions does the received stor y contain? This is a question about the present and not about the Victorian era. If this story of repression is told so often, who does it please and who does it celebrate? Who is the subject that enunciates this history? For the story of liberated se xuality, or the promise of its liberation, does contain its satisfactions: even if it is not the truth, Foucault writes at the beginning of the first volume, the narrative of sexual repression among the Victorians, has its reasons, and “is easily analyzed ,” for we find that “the sexual cause–the demand for sexual freedom . . . becomes legitimately associated with the honor of a political cause”.²⁹ The received history is thus a lie that has its reasons. How now? These brave Europeans! That they should need to tell such tales about their ancestors! “A suspicious mind might wonder,” says Foucault (HS 6).

 

It is therefore not the oppressiveness of Victorian life that interests Foucault at this point, nor even a revised account of the past; what concerns him is rather our story, the narrative we have consented to believe.³⁰ There may be a reason, he writes,

 

that makes it so gratifying for us to define the relationship between sex and power in terms of repression: something that one might call the speaker’s benefit. If sex is repressed . . . then the mere fact that one is speaking about it has the appearance of a deliberate transgression. . . . [O]ur tone of voice shows that we know we are being subversive, and we ardently conjure away the present and appeal to the future, whose day will be hastened by the contribution we believe we are making. Something that smacks of revolt, of promised freedom, of the coming age of a different law, slips easily into this discourse on sexual oppression. Some of the ancient functions of prophecy are reactivated therein. (HS 6-7, emphasis added)

 

History, Theory, Fiction

 

In short, it is true that Foucault wishes to tell us a different history, to show us that sex in the nineteenth century was not in fact repressed, but rather incited to speak, articulated in many new discursive forms, and not simply silenced or prohi bited. It is also true that this argument, this revised history, contributes at another level to a theoretical elaboration of power. But we cannot be satisfied with this operation of knowledge. For in addition to the revised history, and beyond the theoretical doctrine, what ultimately drives Foucault is a desire, not to construct a more accurate history (the truth about the past–that of the historian), or to erect a great theoretical edifice (a universal truth–that of the philosopher), but to dismantle the narratives that still organize our present experience (a truth that bears on the position of enunciation).³¹ “I would like to explore not only these discourses,” Foucault writes,

 

but also the will that sustains them . . . The question I would like to pose is not ‘Why are we repressed?’ but rather, ‘Why do we say, with so much passion and so much resentment against our most recent past, against our present, and against ourselves, that we are repressed?’ (HS 8-9)

 

It is the same in Discipline and Punish, when Foucault responds to an imaginary reader who wonders why he spends so much time wandering among obsolete systems of justice and the obscure ruins of the torture chamber. “Why?” he replies. “Simp ly because I am interested in the past? No, if one means by that writing a history of the past in terms of the present. Yes, if one means writing a history of the present” (DP 31, emphasis added). It is this counter-memory, this interplay betwee n one story and another, that leads us to consider the relation between history, theory, and fiction.

 

Transgression and the Law

 

Although Foucault’s refusal of the repressive conception of power appears in his discussion of the Victorians, one does not have to wait for the History of Sexuality to find this thesis on power, this rejection of the theory of power as prohibition, the so-called repressive hypothesis, which generates so many discourses of resistance and liberation. In 1963, Foucault formulates a similar claim in his “Preface to Transgression.”³² Curiously enough, this formulation also has to do with sexuality.

 

Foucault begins his essay with the same focus on the present: “We like to believe that sexuality has regained, in contemporary experience, its full truth as a process of nature, a truth which has long been lingering in the shadows” (LCMP 29, e mphasis added). But as writers like Bataille have shown us, transgression is not the elimination of the law by means of a force or desire that might be thought to pre-exist all prohibition. It is not the restoration of an origin, a return to immediacy, or the liberation of a prediscursive domain, by means of which we might overcome all merely historical and constituted limits.³³ On the contrary, “the limit and transgression depend on each other” (LCMP 34). “Transgression,” Foucault writes, “is not related to the limit as black to white, the prohibited to the lawful, the outside to the inside” (LCMP 35). Long before his final books on the relation between sexuality and ethics, these remarks already have co nsequences for our conception of the ethical. Transgression is therefore not the sign of liberation; it “must be detached from its questionable association to ethics if we want to understand it and to begin thinking from it. . . it must be liberated from the scandalous or subversive” (LCMP 35). This is what would be required if we were to think the obscure relation that binds transgression to the law.

 

Let us add that these reflections on the limit, on power and transgression, are not simply formulated as an abstract philosophical question, as though it were a theoretical matter of understanding power correctly. On the contrary, Foucault’s claims only make sense if they are seen as part of his understanding of history. It is a question of the contemporary experience of transgression, in which the concept of the limit does not take a Kantian form, does not entail a line that cannot (or shou ld not) be crossed (a logical or moral limit), but is rather a fold, the elaboration of a strange non-Euclidean geometry of space, another mathematics, in which the stability of inside and outside gives way to a limit that exists only in the moveme nt which crosses it (like a Moëbius strip, the two sides of which constantly disappear as one circles around its finite surface–as if the point at which one passes from one side to the other were constantly receding, so that the mathematization of s pace, the difference between one and two, were constantly being destabilized).³⁴

 

In short, this concept of transgression has a historical location: it is clearly bound up with the epoch for which anthropological thought has been dismantled. Foucault puts the history very concisely in the “Preface to Transgression,” where he uses the categories of “need,” “demand” and “desire.” In the eighteenth century, Foucault writes, “consumption was based entirely on need, and need based itself exclusively on the model of hunger.” This formulation will be developed in The Order of Th ings when Foucault elaborates the Enlightenment’s theory of exchange and its political economy, in their fundamental dependence on the concept of natural need. “When this element was introduced into an investigation of profit,” when, in other word s, the natural foundation of need was reconfigured by an economics that aimed to account for the superfluity of commodities, an economics that went beyond natural law, explaining the genesis of culture through a demand that exceeded all natural need (what Foucault calls “the appetite of those who have satisfied their hunger”), then the Enlightenment theory of exchange gave way to Modern philosophical anthropology: European thought

 

inserted man into a dialectic of production which had a simple anthropological meaning: if man was alienated from his real nature and his immediate needs through his labor and the production of objects . . . it was nevertheless through its agency that he recaptured his essence. (LCMP 49)

 

For contemporarythought, however, this shift from need to demand will be followed by yet another dislocation, a shift from demand to desire, in which the conceptual framework of modernity no longer functions; and this time, instead of labor, sexua lity will play a decisive role, obliging us to think transgression differently than in the form of dialectical production.

 

This new formation is not a return to “nature,” but an encounter with language. “The discovery of sexuality,” Foucault argues, forces us into a conception of desire that is irreducible to need or demand (the requirements of nature or the dialectical self-production of culture that characterizes anthropological thought). “In this sense,” Foucault writes, “the appearance of sexuality as a fundamental problem marks the transformation of a philosophy of man as worker to a philosophy based on a being who speaks” (LCMP 49-50). The same historical shift is stressed in Madness and Civilization: this book, which might at first glance seem to include an indictment of Freud, as one of those who participate in the modern, psychiatric impri sonment of madness, in fact argues that Freud marks an essential displacement in relation to psychiatry, a displacement that coincides with what the “Preface to Transgression” regards as the end of philosophical anthropology:

 

That is why we must do justice to Freud.³⁵

 

Between Freud’s Five Case Histories and Janet’s scrupulous investigations of Psychological Healing, there is more than the density of a discovery; there is the sovereign violence of a return. . . . Freud went back to madness at the level of its language, reconstituted one of the elements of an experience reduced to silence by positivism; . . . he restored, in medical thought, the possibility of a dialogue with unreason. . . . It is not psychology that is involved in psychoanalysis. (MC 198)

 

The break with psychology that arrives with Freud marks the end of philosophical anthropology.

 

Lacan

 

If, as we have seen, resistance belongs to the apparatus of power, and is consequently not so much a threat to power, as a product, an effect of power (just as the totalitarian state is structurally linked to the founding of the democratic community, which would seem to be opposed to it in every respect), then it is the obscure, symptomatic relation between the two that Foucault’s conception of power obliges us to confront.

 

Lacan says something similar about transgression and the law: we do not enjoy in spite of the law, but precisely because of it. This is what the thesis on jouissance entails: jouissance is not the name for an instinctual pleasure that runs counter t o the law (in spite of the biological paradigm that still governs so many readings of Freud); it is not the fulfillment of a natural urge, or a momentary suspension of moral constraint, but quite the contrary: it is Lacan’s name for Freud’s thesis on the death drive, the name for a dimension of (unnatural) suffering and punishment that inhabits human pleasure, a dimension that is possible only because the body and its satisfaction are constitutively denatured, always already bound to representation. Joui ssance is thus tied to punishment, organized not in defiance of the repressive conventions of civilization, not through the transgression of the moral law, but precisely in relation to the law (which does not mean “in conformity with it”). This is precis ely Foucault’s thesis on the productive character of power, even if it does not entail a complete theoretical overlap with Lacan in other respects.

 

Slavoj Zizek reminds us of Lacan’s paradoxical reversal of Dostoevski here: “against [the] famous position, ‘If god is dead, everything is permitted,'” Lacan claims instead that “if there is no god. . . everything is forbidden.” Zizek remarks:

 

How do we account for this paradox that the absence of Law universalizes prohibition? There is only one possible explanation: enjoyment itself, which we experience as ‘transgression,’ is in its innermost status something imposed, ordered–when we enjoy, we never do it ‘spontaneously,’ we always follow a certain injunction. The psychoanalytic name for this injunction, this imperative to ‘Enjoy!’ is Superego. (slightly modified)³⁶

 

We find here, in the relation between the law and transgression, not a simple opposition of outside and inside, prohibition and rebellion, cultural conventions opposed to natural desires, but rather a paradoxical relation of forces, not the Newtonian syst em of natural forces, the smooth machinery in which every action produces an equal and opposite reaction, not a physics of libido based on natural law, a theory of charge and discharge, tension and homeostasis, but a more peculiar form of power, one that takes us away from natural law toward the law of language, in which force is tied to representation.³⁷

 

Here the space of the body is given over to the unnatural network of discourse and its causality. In this framework, the relation between law and transgression is such that the rule of law appears not to “repress” or “prohibit,” but to produce its o wn exception, not to function but to malfunction, thereby making manifest the incompleteness of the law, the impossibility of closure, the element of lack that destabilizes the structural, symbolic totality. As a result, moreover, the symbolic order itse lf appears to function only on the basis of this exception, this peculiar remainder, this excess–as though the very rule of law somehow depended upon a level of malfunction and perverse enjoyment (what Freud called the “death drive,” and what Lacan formu lates in terms of jouissance).³⁸ Now this is precisely how the prison seems to function in relation to the “criminal element” that it supposedly aims at eliminating: for the prison acts not simply as a limit or prohibition, but carries within it a perverse productivity, a level of sadistic enjoyment that Kafka represented so well, by generating the illusion that behind the mechanical operation of a neutral, anonymous, bureaucratic law there lay an obsc ure level of sadistic enjoyment, a peculiar agency that wants the criminal to exist, in order to have the pleasure of inflicting punishment (this Other who is imagined to enjoy is one aspect of the father, a perverse manifestation Lacan gestures to ward with the word “père-version,” perversion being a “turning-towards the father” in which the father is outside the law).³⁹ This is the point of jouissance that marks the excess that always accompani es the law, an excess that Freud called “primary masochism.”⁴⁰ This excess is not a natural phenomenon, a primordial force that disrupts the polished machinery of culture; it is rather a peculiar feature of c ulture itself, not a matter of natural law, but an effect of language which includes its own malfunction–the “remainder” or “trace” of what did not exist before the institution of the law, but remains outside, excluded, in an “a priori” fashion that is l ogical rather than chronological. This is what Lacan understands as the relation between the symbolic and the real.

 

Freud: The Myth of Origins and the Origin of Myth

 

Freud explains this relation between the law and transgression in Totem and Taboo, by giving us two equiprimordial aspects of the father. This conception of the paternal function does not simply reduce to the figure of prohibition or la w, as is so often said, but reveals a primordial split by which the law is originally tied to a perversion of the law. We should note here that in this text, which seeks to account for the origin of the law (and Freud even refers to Darwin), Freud does not conceive of desire as a natural fact that would eventually, with the advent of culture, come to be organized by various prohibitions. He does not seek, in other words, to provide a genesis, a genetic narrative, in which the law would be subsequ ent to desire, like the imposition of a convention or social contract upon what would otherwise be a natural impulse; nor, conversely, does he follow the usual historicist argument according to which desire is simply the product of the law, the effect of various cultural prohibitions. Freud’s account, in effect, abandons the genetic narrative, and gives us instead an account of the origin that is strictly and rigorously mythical. That is the radicality of Totem and Taboo.⁴¹

 

Freud’s mythic account thus gives us two simultaneous functions for the father: one is the father of the law, Moses, or God, the giver of language and symbolic exchange, the father who represents the limiting function of castration; the other is the father of the Primal Horde, the mythical figure who, before he is murdered, possesses all the women, and is (therefore) precisely the one outside the law, the one whose enjoyment has no limit, who does not rule with the even hand of disinterested justice, but rather takes an obscene pleasure in arbitrary punishment, using us for his sport, devouring his children like Chronos, feeding his limitless appetite on our sacrifices and enjoying the pure expression of his will–“the dark god,” as Lacan puts it: no t the Christian god of love and forgiveness, who keeps together the sheepish flock of the human community, but the god of terror and indifferent violence, the god of Abraham and Job, so much more clearly grasped in the Judaic tradition.⁴²

 

The Symbolic and the Real: Jouissance

 

We can therefore see in Freud the precise relation between prohibition and this peculiar excess, between the law and violence, that Foucault develops in his remarks on power. This explains why Foucault argues that the contemporary experience of sexu ality is a central place in which the relation between the law and transgression demands to be rethought, beyond the legislative, prohibitive conception that characterizes modernity. This obscure, symptomatic relation by which the law is bound to its own transgression, to that dimension of excess, violence and suffering, can perhaps be seen in its most conspicuous form in America: with all its defiant freedom and carefree self-indulgence, America does not show itself as the land of freedom and pleasure, but may be said to display the most obscene form of superego punishment: you must enjoy, you must be young and healthy and happy and tan and beautiful. The question, “What must I do?” has been replaced with the higher law of the question: “Are we having fun yet?” The imperative is written on the Coke can: “Enjoy!” That is American Kantianism: “think whatever you like, choose your religion freely, speak out in any way you wish, but you must have fun!”⁴³ The reverse side of this position, the guilt that inhabits this ideal of pleasure, is clear enough: don’t eat too much, don’t go out in the sun, don’t drink or smoke, or you won’t be able to enjoy yourself!⁴⁴

 

Thus, as Foucault argues in his thesis on power, it is not a matter of overcoming repression, of liberating pleasure from moral constraint, or defending the insane against the oppressive regime of psychiatry, but of undoing the structure that produce d these two related sides. Such is the distance between the Kantian position and that of Foucault and Lacan: the law no longer serves as a juridical or prohibitive limit, but as a force, an imperious agency that does not simply limit, but produces an excess which Kant did not theorize, a dimension of punishment and tyranny that it was meant to eliminate.⁴⁵ This is the kind of logic addressed by Foucault in Discipline and Punish, when he a sks, for example, whether the very failure of the prison as an institution, the malfunction of the law, the fact that the prison seems to be a machine for organizing and proliferating criminality, is not in fact part of the very functioning of the prison: that the law includes this excess which seems on the surface to contradict it. Lacan puts Kant together with Sade in order to show the logical relation between them, in the same way that we might speak of the obscure relation between the Rights of Man a nd the Reign of Terror–two formations which, from an imaginary point of view, are completely opposed and antithetical, but which turn out to have an obscure connection.⁴⁶

 

In Lacan’s terminology, the establishment of the symbolic law, the (systemic) totalization of a signifying structure, cannot take place without producing a remainder, an excess, a dimension of the real that marks the limit of formalization. Somethin g similar occurs in Foucault: where the Kantian formulation gives us an anthropology, a form of consciousness that is able, freely, to give itself its own law, and thereby to realize its essence, Foucault speaks instead of an apparatus that produces the c riminal, the insane, and the destitute, all in the name of the law–so that the excess of Sade is the strict counterpart of Kant, and not his contradiction or antithesis. It should come as no surprise that Foucault mentions, in connection with Kan t’s text, “What is Enlightenment?,” that it raises, among other things, the question of “making a place for Jewish culture within German thought.” This text, which Kant wrote in response to a question that had been answered two months earlier by Moses Me ndelssohn, is part of his effort to elaborate a “cosmopolitan view” of history, in which the promise of a community of Man would be maintained; it is thus, according to Foucault, “perhaps a way of announcing the acceptance of a common destiny.” And yet, as Foucault points out, history produced for us a paradoxical perversion of this common destiny. Contrary to everything Kant might have hoped for, Foucault remarks, “we now know to what drama that was to lead” (WE 33). It is this product, this excess, t his remainder which accompanies the very morality meant to exclude it, that Foucault addresses by his formulation of power as a relationship that does not take the form of justice and law (nor, we might add, of mere tyranny, mere “force” or exploitation, the simple “opposite” of law), but is rather productive, a force that must be conceived in relation to this excess or remainder that Lacan calls jouissance.⁴⁷

 

The “Origin” of Foucault’s Work (Origins Against Historicism)

 

What would it mean to focus on this element of excess, as it appears in Foucault’s own work, this strange relation between the symbolic and the real, the law and its own disruption–as though the meticulous order of things, the symbolic totality governing thought, were in fact confronted with a fundamental disorder, a domain of chaos or nonsense that falls outside representation, but nevertheless remains present, like a traumatic element that cannot be put in place, or given a name with in the encyclopedic mastery of Foucault’s work, but that continues to haunt it like a ghost, or like the perpetual possibility of madness itself? Commentators who take pleasure in the encyclopedia of knowledge are not very happy with this grimace that em erges demonically behind the lucid surface of Foucault’s pages. It would be better, and we would feel less anxiety, if Foucault confined himself to the documentary procedures that constitute historical research, or if he would be content with the elabora tion of great theoretical models–archaeology, or genealogy, or the theory of “bio-power.” These are the things the commentaries would prefer to discuss.

 

And Foucault does in fact devote himself to both these tasks–the task of the historian and that of the philosopher. The Order of Things for instance is both a history and a contribution to the theory of history. But something else eme rges in his work, something that is neither history nor theory, something we might call fiction, but that is perhaps more accurately grasped in terms of what Lacan calls the real–that element that has no place in the symbolic order, but manifests itself as a trauma that cannot be integrated, and not only as a trauma, but often, in Foucault’s work, in the forms of laughter, anxiety and fiction. It is this distress and this laughter that might be called the origin of Foucault’s work. Perhaps more attention could be devoted to these places where Foucault refuses to identify his work with the accumulation of historical knowledge, or with the discipline of history, which has nevertheless tried to renew itself by appeal to Foucault. “I am not writing a history of morals, a history of behavior, or a social history of sexual practices”–Foucault makes such remarks again and again (such remarks do not keep his readers from proceeding as if this were precisely his project). “I had no intention of writin g the history of the prison as an institution,” he says; “that would have required a different kind of research.”⁴⁸

 

What do such claims mean for Foucault’s relation to the discipline of history? One approach to this question would be to lay out the distinctions that separate genealogy from traditional history: history is continuous, genealogy is discontinuous; hi story is always the history of reason, a narrative written from the point of view of gradual discoveries and progressive clarification; genealogy is the recounting of acts of aggression, violent usurpations, interpretations that made certain statements va lid and ruled out others. And so on. Such distinctions are important, but we might also return here to the link between genealogy and fiction, a link we have already touched upon, which could be understood as the aspect of Foucault’s work that brings hi m closest to Lacan. This approach would have to entail a consideration of the way in which Foucault’s work, far from aiming to give an abstract, neutral, descriptive account of the past, for the sake of knowledge, in fact always begins from within a particular situation, and may perhaps be more accurately understood as an act–an act aimed at the present, rather than a knowledge serenely directed elsewhere, towards the past, the place of the other, where it can be contained.

 

This emphasis on the particular situation of writing does not merely mean that Foucault writes from a perspective, like anyone else, and that he acknowledges this while some others do not. It means rather that the entire analysis, however descriptiv e and documentary it may be, is explicitly governed by the position in the present (“Genealogy means that I begin my analysis from a question posed in the present” Kritzman 262). In short, unlike the “new historicism” with which Foucault is so often conf used, genealogy is not an elaboration of knowledge that admits to having a perspective, in the sense that it may one day prove to be inadequate, or to be only one point of view, but rather an act that bears on the present, on what Lacan call s the position of enunciation. The same holds for psychoanalysis: its aim is not to uncover the truth about the past, contrary to many commentators; it does not seek to discover “what really happened,” as if a realist view of the past could address the q uestions proper to psychoanalysis.⁴⁹ On the contrary, it is directed at what Lacan calls imaginary and symbolic elements, at the narrative which, however real or fabricated, has brought the client into analys is. In a similar way, genealogy is irreducible to history; it is not a discourse on the past that admits to having a perspective, and will eventually be seen as the product of its time, but rather a discourse on the present, something like an analysis of the position from which it speaks. To maintain a realist view of history, however partial, limited, and subject to revision, is to read genealogy as if it were reducible to history; to maintain a realist view of the past in psychoan alysis, according to which it is the task of the analyst to know what really happened, and to given this knowledge to the patient, in the interest of reflection, introspection, and self-knowledge, is to abandon what Lacan calls the ethics of psychoanalysi s, replacing it with the false reassurance of a supposed science of the past, in which the objectivity of the researcher is covertly secured, and the analyst is secretly maintained as the subject supposed to know.

 

Thus, in contrast to the historian, the genealogist not only speaks, like everyone, from a particular place in the present (the Crocean thesis), but directs his attention to that place, in order to act upon it. This place, this point o f departure, might in fact be called the origin of Foucault’s books. This is as much a philosophical question as it is historical, or rather, it raises the problem of the relation between philosophy and history: “since the 19th century,” Foucault says, “philosophy has never stopped raising the same question: ‘What is happening right now, and what are we, we who are perhaps nothing more than what is happening at this moment?’ Philosophy’s question therefore is the question as to what we ourselves are. That is why contemporary philosophy is entirely political and entirely historical” (Kritzman 121). To the extent that Foucault’s work bears on his own position of speech, it cannot be reduced to historical research, or regarded as the proliferation of knowledge about the past, but must be considered as an event, an intervention in the present. If we examine the position of enunciation, this origin that serves as the finite point from which Foucault speaks, we will be led along a trajectory that li nks history, theory, and fiction. This is the point at which his work may be characterized as an encounter with the real, a moment when Foucault’s thought reaches its own limits.

 

Let us look in closing at The Order of Things in order to grasp more clearly how Foucault’s work bears on its own place of enunciation, and issues in a form of anxiety that we have spoken of in terms of fiction, and that might also be ca lled an encounter with the real. We will consider two examples in which the book encounters its own contingency. The first example is drawn from the descriptive content of the book, its concrete, historical exposition. The second example comes from the theoretical framework, where Foucault addresses the problem of his method. The first example involves an interplay of light and shadow; the second takes up the question of laughter and anxiety.

 

Example One: The Backward Glance

 

At the very beginning of chapter 9, Foucault concludes his discussion of the Classical Age: “Classical thought can now be eclipsed. At this time, from any retrospective viewpoint [pour tout regard ulterieur], it enters a region of shade” (314 /303). Before proceeding with his apparent task of accumulating knowledge, before bringing more archaeological evidence to light, Foucault finds it necessary to hesitate here, weighing this further. Already it is clear, however, that precisely the ecli pse of Classical thought has made possible its manifestation to the retrospective gaze. For as Foucault repeatedly points out, Classical discourse is invisible as long as it functions; it only shows itself in its demise, to retrospection (as though histo ry were the tale of Orpheus). Obviously this does not mean that the Classical Age knew nothing about representation. On the contrary, they took great trouble to examine it in detail. But this examination, which Foucault explores in chapters 3 and 7, an d especially in the section titled “Idealogy and Criticism,” consisted in demonstrating how that discourse functioned, how it exercised its representational capacities; it did not suspend representation in order to examine its conditions of possibility. Thus, once it was no longer maintained in its functioning, Classical discourse became visible as such in its demise. One began to ask not about the methods by which we might arrive at clear and distinct representations, but rather about the horizons with in which representation can arise: a transcendental arena was opened in which actual representations were now only a surface effect, whose conditions of possibility had to be provided elsewhere, outside or beneath representation.

 

This analysis, however, does not simply give a description of events in intellectual history. It suggests that the Classical Age could not have understood itself in the way that the archaeologist understands it. The very nature of representation in the Classical Age functioned by means of a kind of invisibility, which was removed only with the death of Classical thought: the moment it becomes visible to the archaeologist is also the moment that the Age of Reason acquires the status of myth. There is here, and throughout this book, a question as to how historical difference can be known, how one period, with its dense, opaque construction of knowledge, its specific discursive possibilities, and its own empirical orders, can “communicate itse lf,” or at least “show itself,” to the backward glance of another. This is a question concerning historical knowledge, a question which moves Foucault beyond the historicist procedure of explaining a period by articulating it in terms of the concepts and values it would have had regarding itself. If we acknowledge Foucault’s vocabulary of “eclipse” and “manifestation,” moreover, we will recognize another question, quietly sustained, entirely unheard by the historians whose guide-books have no use for it, concerning light and shadow, in which it becomes clear that the gaze of the archaeologist is not only explicitly finite, located rather than transcendent or purely objective, but also that the position from which the archaeologist looks is a central thematic issue in the book. These two questions overlap, as the first example already indicates: entering a region of shade, one period will suddenly show itself to the retrospection of another. It is the death of thought that makes history p ossible, but in death, the object is lost, irrevocably given over to a world of shadow, an alterity that we can only present to ourselves through a memory supported by the protective power of myth. At this juncture, the text requires of us a sustained in quiry into the complex, Heideggerian meditation on truth as the interplay of lethe and aletheia, a meditation which forms the minimal background against which the question of the truth of Foucault’s historical representations can begi n to be read.

 

Pushing on however, let us only note here that the death of Classical thought, its entrance into a land of shadow, is also its manifestation–for the first time?–as Foucault will go on to indicate:

 

a region of shade. Even so, we should speak not of darkness but of a somewhat blurred light, deceptive in its apparent clarity [faussement evident], and hiding more than it reveals [et qui cache plus qu’elle ne manifeste]. (314/303)

 

Not only does the Classical Age appear only in the moment of its eclipse, but it also shows itself deceptively, with a false evidence, hiding more, in its manifestation, than it reveals. Thus, before offering us further historical information, before une arthing more knowledge to the light of day, Foucault will finish this paragraph:

 

When [Classical] discourse ceased to exist and function. . . . Classical thought ceased at the same time to be directly accessible to us. (315/304)

 

In passages such as these, Foucault makes it unmistakably clear that archaeology cannot possibly be regarded as a new methodology that would finally provide a means of access to a transcendental point of view, a kind of linguistic formalization that would turn history into a genuinely rigorous science. For this book, this history of forms of representation, it will not be possible to dismiss the question of the truth of history and historical representations. This is not at all to say that the book is s imply content to offer its account as somehow less than “true,” and thus as “fictional” in some trivial sense (as if it were already self-evident what truth is, and as if history does not oblige us to engage in a question concerning truth). The po int is not to ask whether Foucault’s account is truth or fiction, an accurate archaeological picture of the past or the expression of the present perspective; the point is rather to raise the question of the relation between the content of the book, its h istorical exposition or knowledge, and its functioning as a discursive practice, the degree to which it intervenes in the forms of thought that have produced it. The question concerns the difference between its character as knowledge and its chara cter as an event. Not only does the text refuse to function as a new foundation for historical knowledge, the discovery of the so-called archaeological method, not only does it resist the transcendental model according to which it (archaeology) wo uld provide the conditions of possibility governing discourse at a certain time; it also issues in a thought concerning the relation of representation and death (of which the phrase “retrospective gaze” is only the most obvious example).

 

There is a second example in which it becomes clear that Foucault’s book, passing between history and theory, between concrete historical exposition and theoretical reflection upon history itself, begins to open up a question that belongs to neither of these two dimensions of his book, a question that is neither a matter of historical information, nor a matter that concerns the theoretical apparatus of archaeology, its methodological procedures (“discontinuity,” “episteme,” “discursive regularity,” e tc.). This example is drawn from the preface to the book, where Foucault speaks of a certain “experience.” We must proceed carefully here, for this “experience,” which belongs neither to history nor to theory, is what Foucault expressly calls the ori gin of his work.

 

Example Two: The Middle Region

 

In The Order of Things, Foucault wants to give us a history, a revised account of the past, which would replace the usual story of the gradual development of the human sciences, their slow emergence out of error and superstition, into th eir current state of scientific sophistication. At this level, his work is historical and documentary. At another level, The Order of Things develops a theoretical reflection on history itself; it is a contribution to the archeological meth od. These two aspects of the book have been given the most attention–the content of his historical reconstruction, and the theoretical position it entails. But there is another aspect of the book that is perhaps more fundamental, the status of the book as an act, an event, and perhaps even an experience.

 

This is a peculiar feature of the book, one that does not fit very well with its historical and methodological aspects. In The Order of Things, he speaks of it as “the pure experience of order” (13/xxi, emphasis added)–not the p articular order which characterizes the Classical Age, or our own Anthropological Era, and not the order of Foucault’s own book, the great, encyclopedic system of archaeological knowledge, but rather the experience of what he calls “order itself [en so n être même]” (12/xxi) and “order in its primary state [l’être brut de l’ordre]” (12/xxi). The passage is well-known: The fundamental codes of a culture, he writes,

 

establish for every man . . . the empirical orders with which he will be dealing, and in which he will be at home. At the other extremity of thought, there are scientific theories or philosophical interpretations which explain why order exists in general [pourquoi il y a en general un ordre]. (11-12/xx)

 

We must hesitate here on a point of translation (a point, one might add, of representation). There are, on the one hand, fundamental codes, those which establish the empirical orders which govern a particular historical period, and, on the other hand, re flections upon those empirical orders, scientific or philosophical efforts to explain “pourquoi il y a en general un ordre,” that is, why generally speaking there is an order such as this one. The English text says “why order exists in general,” but it i s not at all a question of “order in general,” or of why order “exists.” Rather, it is a matter, in the case of scientific theories or philosophical efforts at reflexive knowledge, of determining the general configuration (en general) of an order like this (un ordre), determining the empirical situation of those who act and know.

 

With this distinction between the empirical codes and philosophical reflection, we are of course on familiar ground: these two levels, one which is determining for all concrete investigation and another which seeks to analyze that determination, will appear again in great detail in chapter nine, in the context of what Foucault calls “the empirical and the transcendental.” In that context Foucault characterizes “man” as a figure that appears to mediate between and unify precisely these two orders, on e of empirical determination, and one of theoretical reflection upon that empirical determination, by means of which the external, empirical determination of thought from outside (by conditions of speech or labor of physiology) can be reflected upon, mani pulated, and “taken in hand,” as Heidegger might say. Man is thus the figure who, in spite of being totally given over to external, contingent, historical determination, can nevertheless–or precisely for this reason, precisely on the basis of this empir ical, concrete existence–alter the conditions of existence, and thereby make his own history, come to stand at the origin of what would otherwise precede and determine him.

 

The passage continues. Between these two levels, the empirical and the transcendental, there is another level: “between these two regions,” he says, “lies a domain which, though its role is mainly an intermediary one, is nonetheless fundamental”:

 

It is here that a culture, imperceptibly deviating from the empirical order prescribed for it by its primary codes, instituting an initial separation from them . . . frees itself sufficiently to discover that they are perhaps not the only possible ones or the best ones; this culture then finds itself faced with the stark fact . . . that order exists [qu’il y a de l’ordre] . . . [and] by this very process, [comes] face to face with order in its primary state [l’être brut de l’ordre]. (12/xx-xxi, original emphasis)

 

“This middle region,” he adds, “can be posited as the most fundamental of all,” for it is here, “between the use of what one might call the ordering codes and reflections upon order, there is the pure experience of order” (13/xxi, emphasis added). “The present study,” he writes, “is an attempt to analyze that experience” (13/xxi, emphasis added).

 

This experience cannot be situated at the level of historical knowledge; nor can it be understood as an element within the theoretical framework of archaeology. It is neither a piece of historical knowledge, nor part of the theoretical apparatus, bu t an excessive moment, something that calls into question the other levels of Foucault’s analysis, exceeding and contradicting them, marking their contingency–something outside the symbolic system that is unthinkable, beyond representation, but that neve rtheless marks the point of trauma, and shows the incompleteness of the very symbolic structure that has been established with such masterful and encyclopedic comprehensiveness. This is what Lacan calls the encounter with the real, something that falls o utside the operation of knowledge, the deployment of the signifier. Foucault speaks of it in terms of anxiety, and also in terms that bring us back to the question of literature.

 

Let us recall Foucault’s remarks on the origin of The Order of Things. “This book,” Foucault says, “arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought–< b>our thought, the thought that bears the stamp of our age” (7/xv). Later he adds, “the uneasiness that makes us laugh when we read Borges is certainly related to the profound distress of those whose language has been destroyed” (10/xviii-xix).^{< a name=”ref50″ href=”#foot50″>50} This distress is also the anxiety of the aphasiac who creates a multiplicity of groupings, only to find that they “dissolve again, for the field of identity that sustains them, however limited it may be, is stil l too wide not to be unstable; and so the sick mind continues to infinity . . . teetering finally on the brink of anxiety” (10/xviii).

 

It is clear that these remarks are meant to rebound upon archaeology itself. If we return the previous question, we can see that in spite of his interest in producing a revised history, a truer history, and in spite of his effort to construct a theo retical edifice–or rather precisely because of these things, these patient, empirical, documentary procedures–there emerges a level of anxiety that cannot be mastered by the operation of knowledge, historical or theoretical, a level that Foucault addres ses explicitly in his preface. To read Foucault’s text for its historical analysis, or for its methodological innovations, would be to refuse this experience, this encounter with the real, this domain of anxiety in which the symbolic operation of archaeo logical knowledge comes face to face with its own contingency. Reading without this encounter is reading in the name of man.

 

We know that Heidegger’s work undergoes a similar deformation, in which the effort to locate an origin for metaphysics perpetually recedes–being located first sometime after the Greek term aletheia was converted into homoiosis, and the n perhaps earlier, already in Plato and Aristotle, who did not really think aletheia as such, and then perhaps even earlier, in the pre-Socratics. We know that this displacement of the origin is accompanied by a symmetrical difficulty regarding the place of enunciation, the position from which Heidegger speaks, namely the moment of the “end” of metaphysics, its termination, closure, or perhaps its perpetual, and perpetually different repetition. The question about the end of metaphysics is not simply a historical question, a matter of recording birth and death, but a question about history itself. But it is also not simply a theoretical question, a matter of determining the proper conceptual approach to the problem of origins and ends. I t is also a matter of encountering the place from which one speaks–not for the sake of a transcendental reflection upon the conditions which would validate one’s own discourse, but for the sake of a movement that would exhaust what is most tedious and re petitious in one’s own speech, to let it go, and make room for something else.

 

Notes

 

1. Martin Heidegger, The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, trans. Michael Heim (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 209.

 

2.Jacques Lacan, “Television,” trans. Denis Hollier, Rosalind Krauss, and Annette Michelson. Television: A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment, ed. Joan Copjec (New York: Norton, 1990), 30. Translat ion modified.

 

3.Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Vintage, 1965), 288.

 

4.Jacques Derrida, “Cogito and the History of Madness,” Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1978), 60. Henceforth cited in the text as WD.

 

5.Friedrich Nietzsche, On The Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1967).

 

6.This essay was first given as a lecture at the Collegium Phaenomenologicum in Perugia, Italy, in 1993. I thank the directors, Charles C. Scott and Philippe van Haute, for the invitation, and for their hospitality.

 

7. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1978), 112. Translations are occasionally modified; see Le Séminaire, livre XI: Les quat res concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 1973).

 

8. Michel Foucault, “The Concern for Truth,” interview with François Ewald. Michel Foucault: Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman (New York, Routledge , 1988), 255-67. Cited from 262, emphasis added. This volume will henceforth be cited as “Kritzman.”

 

9.Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan-Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), 206. References will henceforth appear in the text preceded by AK.

 

10.Leopold von Ranke, Sämmtliche Werke (Leipzig:Verlag, 1867). See also Leonard Krieger, Ranke: The Meaning of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), and Haydn White, Metahistory: the Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1973).

 

In The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault conjures up an imaginary interlocutor, who challenges him to distinguish his work from structuralism, and then upon hearing Foucault’s reply, says “I can even accept that one should dispense, as far a s one can, with a discussion of the speaking subjects; but I dispute that these successes [of archaeology, as distinct from structuralism] give one the right to turn the analysis back on to the very forms of discourse that made them possible, and to question the very locus in which we are speaking today.” Instead, the interlocutor argues, we must acknowledge that “the history of those analyses . . . retains its own transcendence.” Foucault replies, “It seems to me that the difference betwe en us lies there [much more than in the over-discussed question of structuralism]” (202).

 

11.Slavoj Zizek, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor (New York: Verso, 1992), 13.

 

12.See Sigmund Freud, “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes,” vol 14, 117-40; “Formulations of the Two Principles of Mental Functioning,” vol 12, 218-26; An Outline of Psychoanalysis, vol 23, 144-207; esp. “The Psychic Apparatus and the External World,” 195-207. All references are to The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey et al. (London:Hogarth Press, 1953). Lacan’s account of pleas ure and reality is scattered throughout his work. But see “La chose freudienne,” Écrits (Paris: Seuil, 1966), 401-36; and “D’une question préliminaire à tout traitment possible de la psychose,” Écrits , 531-83. Available in English as Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977). See “The Freudian Thing,” 114-45, and “On a Question Preliminary to any Possible treatment of Psychosis,” 178-225. See also The Sem inar of Jacques Lacan, Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954-55, Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli, with notes by John Forrester (New York: Norton, 1988), 134-71, and Book VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959-60, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: Norton, 1992), 19-84. see also Moustafa Safouan, L’échec du principe du plaisir, (Paris: Seuil, 1979); in English as Pleasure and Bein g, trans. Martin Thom (New York: Macmillan, 1983).

 

13.In his essay on psychosis, Lacan makes it explicit that the categories of “reality” and the “imaginary” not only overlap, but are themselves structured through the symbolic. Thus, “reality” no longer ha s the status of a “true reality” that one might oppose to an “imaginary” or “fictional” construction, and in addition, the fact that these two categories are in some sense mutually constitutive is itself the result of language. Thus, whereas the animal m ight be said to “adapt to reality” (in the usual sense of that word), the human being “adapts” (if one can still use this word) by means of representations that are constitutive of both “reality” and the “imaginary.” See Jacques Lacan, “D’une question pr éliminaire à tout traitment possible de la psychose,” Ecrits (Paris: Seuil, 1966). A portion of this volume has appeared in English. See “On a Question Preliminary to any Possible Treatment of Psychosis” in Ecrits: A Sel ection, trans Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977). Henceforth references will appear in the text preceded by E, French pagination first, English (whenever possible) second; in this case, E 531-83/179-225).

 

14. Zizek, 14. See also Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination (London: Heinemann, 1974).

 

15.Foucault makes just such a remark in “The Concern for Truth”: “The history of thought means not just the history of ideas or representations, but also an attempt to answer this question. . . . How can thought . . . ha ve a history?” (Kritzman 256).

 

16.Derrida, WD 34.

 

17.To develop this properly, one would have to explore Foucault’s remarks on the specifically modern form of “the other,” as he explains it in Les mots et les choses: une archéologie des sciences humaines (Paris: Galimard, 1966); The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Random, 1970). References will henceforth be to both editions, French first, English second. As he says in “The Retreat and Return of the Or igin,” for modern thought, the origin “is very different from that ideal genesis that the Classical Age had attempted to reconstitute . . . the original in man is that which articulates him from the very outset upon something other than himself. . . . Par adoxically, the original, in man, does not herald the time of his birth, or the most ancient kernel of his experience . . . it signifies that man . . . is the being without origin . . . that man is cut off from the origin that would make him contemporaneo us with his own existence” (331-32).

 

18.Jacques Lacan, Television, 30. See also Jean-Jacques Roussaeu, Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité, in Oeuvres complètes, ed. Bernard Ga gnebin and Marcel Raymond (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), vol 3. Also, Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Michael Oakeshott (Oxford: Blackwell, 1946).

 

19.Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Geneology, History,” Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F Bouchard (Ithaca, Cornell UP, 1977), 139-64. Cited from 160; henceforth cited in the text as LCMP.

 

20.Michel Foucault, “Distance, aspect, origine,” Critique, November 1963, 20-22. Cited from Raymond Bellour, “Towards Fiction,” in Michel Foucault: Philosopher, trans. Timothy J. Armstrong (New York: Routledge, 1992), 148-56.

 

21. See Jean Hyppolite’s remarkable but succinct discussion of Hegel on just this point, in The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man, ed. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1970). This suggests that what we are here calling “dialectic” in fact refers not so much to Hegel as to a received version of “dialectic.”

 

22.Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Vintage, 1973), ix.

 

23. Another relevant discussion of this painting from a Lacanian perspective is Pierre-Gilles Guéguen, “Foucault and Lacan on the Status of the Subject of Representation,” Newsletter of the Freudian Field, vol. 3, nos. 1-2 (Spring/Fall 1989), 51-57.

 

24.Michel Foucault, “Power and Sex,” interview with Bernard Henri-Lévi in Kritzman, 110-24. Cited from 114.

 

25.”A few years ago, historians were very proud to discover that they could write not only the history of battles, of kings and institutions, but also of the economy . . . feelings, behavior, and the body. Soon, they wi ll understand that the history of the West cannot be dissociated from the way its ‘truth’ is produced. . . . The achievement of ‘true’ discourses . . . is one of the fundamental problems of the West.” See Kritzman, 112.

 

26.Kritzman, 120-1.

 

27.Bernard Henri-Lévi points out that because Foucault suggests that there is a relation between the (mistaken) thesis asserting sexual repression and those practices which aim at liberation, he has sometimes been misunderstood to argue that they are the same: “Hence the misunderstanding of certain commentators: ‘According to Foucault, the repression or liberation of sex amounts to the same thing'” (Kritzman, 114). Foucault replies that the point was not to erase the difference between these two (or between madness and reason), but simply to consider the way in which the two things were bound to one another, in order to recognize that the promise of liberation takes part in the same conceptual arrangement that pr oduced the idea of repression, to such a degree that the very aim of liberation often “ends up repressing” (as in the case of psychoanalysis, perhaps). This is why Foucault regards psychoanalysis with such suspicion, in spite of the connections we are pu rsuing between Foucault and Lacan. The question is whether psychoanalysis indeed remains trapped within the modern discourses of liberation that were born alongside what Foucault regards as the “monarchical” theories of power (what he also speaks of as t he “repressive hypothesis”), or whether, as Foucault sometimes suggests, psychoanalysis in fact amounts to a disruption of that paradigm, just as genealogy does.

 

28.Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage, 1977), 29. Henceforth cited in the text as DP.

 

29. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, trans Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1978), 6. Henceforth cited in the text as HS.

 

30.The paper by Jana Sawicki responding to a paper by Issac Balbus shows very clearly the difference between a genealogical perspective and the “modern” discourses of liberation. These two papers offer an admirable exam ple of the contrast between a “Marxist” analysis and a feminism that is influenced in part by genealogy. In her remarks, Sawicki shows how the promise of a liberated future is haunted by the “most virulent” forms of humanism, in the sense that liberation carries with it a normative componant that that would itself escape genealogical analysis. See Isaac Balbus, “Disciplining Women: Michel Foucault and the Power of Feminist Discourse” and Jana Sawicki, “Feminism and the Power of Foucaultian Discourse,” i n After Foucault: Humanistic Knowledge, Postmodern Challenges, ed. Jonathan Arac (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1988).

 

31.Just as with psychoanalysis, there is here a focus on the past, and an elaboration of general principles, but the final word bears on the subject who is speaking, for that is where the reality of history lies.

 

32.Michel Foucault, “Preface to Transgression,” Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, 29-52. The essay was first published as “Hommage à George Bataille” in Critique, nos. 195-96 (1963), 7 51-70.

 

33. At the end of HS, Foucault makes a similar point: sex is the most refined product, and not the origin; it is what one might call a discursive effect and not a “natural” basis that is shaped by various restrictions or prohibitions. The question we are asking, with Lacan, however, is whether “sex” is simply or entirely discursive. To speak of the “real” is not to speak of a “pre-discursive reality” such as “sex,” but it is to ask about what “remains” outside represen tation (as madness, for Foucault, is left in silence or in shadow by the discourses of reason.

 

34. I am thinking here of Lacan’s reflections upon the body itself as structured by such limits–the eyes, ears, and other orifices seeming to participate in just this dislocation of Euclidean space. See Jeanne Granon-L afont, La topologie ordinaire de Jacques Lacan (Paris: Point Hors Ligne, ). I have discussed this briefly in “On Fate: Psychoanalysis and the Desire to Know,” in Dialectic and Narrative, ed. Dalia Judowitz and Thomas Flynn (New York: SUNY, 1993).

 

35. See Derrida’s recent remarks on this sentence in “Etre juste avec Freud,” in Penser la folie: Essais sur Michel Foucault (Paris: Galilée, 1992), 141-95.

 

36. Slavoj Zizek, 9-10.

 

37. It is true that the “mechanics” of libido at one point occupied Freud, when he still believed it possible to measure libido according to a model of charge and discharge, homeostasis and tension: but something always disturbs this model, and Freud’s use of such paradigms always follows them to the limit, to the point where they collapse, rather than elaborating them as a satisfactory answer. This does not keep his commentators from taking the bait, and putting their faith in an engine Freud has dismantled.

 

38. Nestor Braunstein, La Jouissance: un concept lacanien (Paris: Point Hors Ligne, 1990).

 

39. See Catherine Millot, Nobodaddy: L’hystérie dans la siècle (Paris: Point Hors Ligne, 1988).

 

40. See “The Economic Problem of Masochism,” Standard Edition vol 19, 155-72.

 

41. Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, Standard Edition, vol 13, 1-161.

 

42. See the end of “Vital Signs: The Place of Memory in Psychoanalysis,” Research in Phenomenology 1993, 22-72.

 

43. See Foucault’s “What is Enlightenment?” trans. Catherine Porter, in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), esp. 35-36. Henceforth cited in the text as WE. See also Zizek’s re marks on Kant in For They Know Not What They Do, 203-9 and 229-37. In “What is Enlightenment?” Foucault’s question is very close to Lacan’s: what linkage, what common origin, do we find between these two fathers, terror and enlightenment?

 

44. Zizek argues that racism is another symptom in which the moral law reveals its dependence on this excess: the reason we hate the Jews is that they have too much money; the blacks have too much fun; the gay community has too much sex, and so on. The formation of the law that limits pleasure will always produce a locus in which the “stolen” pleasure resides, a place where we can locate the “original” satisfaction that has supposedly been given up, or “lost”: namely, i n the other [or in the paranoia that confuses the other with the Other of jouissance]. The myth of an original state of nature, a natural plenitude that was lost when we agreed to sign the social contract, would thus be linked by psychoanalysis to the my thology that is always constructed in order for racism to operate.

 

45. This thesis has been elaborated in considerable detail by Slavoj Zizek, in The Sublime Object of Idealogy (New York: Verso, 1989).

 

46. Jacques Lacan, “Kant avec Sade,” Écrits, 765-90. “Kant With Sade,” October 51 (Winter 1989), 55-75.

 

47. The discussion of Foucault and Derrida by Ann Wordsworth (“Derrida and Foucault: writing the history of historicity,” Postructuralism and the Question of History, ed. Derek Attridge, Geoff Bennington, an d Robert Young (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987), 116-25.) mentions the fact that the question of violence is one of several points at which these two thinkers, in spite of their apparent conflict, comes closest together. Foucault points out that madness a nd reason are not distinguished by natural necessity or by right, but only by the contingency of a certain formation of knowledge, and that history itself can be understood as occurring precisely because of the inevitability (the “law”) of such contingent formations, and not as the unfolding of a fundamental “truth” of culture or human nature (teleological or merely sequentially continuous). Derrida himself says this “amounts to saying that madness is never excluded, except in fact, violently in history; or rather that this exclusion, this difference between the fact and the principle is historicity, the possibility of history itself. Does Foucault say otherwise? ‘The necessity of madness is linked . . . to the possibility of history'” (WD 310). Like F oucault and Lacan, so also Foucault and Derrida are much closer than their current academic reception would suggest.

 

48. Kritzman, 256-7. See also 121, 262, 112.

 

49. See Charles Shepherdson, “On Fate: Psychoanalysis and the Desire to Know,” Dialectic and Narrative, ed. Thomas R. Flynn and Dalia Judowitz (Albany: SUNY Press, 1993), 271-302.

 

50. As Nietzsche remarks in the Genealogy of Morals: “On the day when we can say with all our hearts, ‘Onwards! our old morality too is part of the comedy!’ we shall have discovered a new complication and po ssibility for the Dionysian drama” (21-2).