What is serious is that, as one continues to write one is no longer read at all; some readers, reading the new books on the backs of the earlier ones, and from one distortion to another, arrive at an
absolutely
gro- tesque image of the book.
Foucault-Live
287
? I think that one of the most fundamental tasks would be to rethink the meaning that one can give to legal punishment today, in its articulation with law, morality and the institution.
? Q: The problem of the definition of punishment is all the more complex because not only do we not know exactly what it is to punish but it seems that we are loathe to do it. Indeed, judges more and more refrain from punishing; they intend to care for, treat, re-educate, and cure, a little as if they were trying to exculpate themselves from exercising repres- sion. In Discipline and Punish moreover you write that "penal and psychiatric discourse blur their boundaries. " And, "Thus is established, with the multiplicity of scientific discourses, a difficult and infinite relationship, which penal justice today is not ready to control. The maker of justice is no longer the master of truth. " Today the recourse to psychiatry, to psychol- ogy and to social welfare is routine judiciary fact, as much penal as civil. You analyze phenomena that no doubt indicate an epistemological change in the juridico-penal sphere. Penal justice seems to have changed meaning. The judge less and less applies the penal code to a lawbreaker; more and more he treats pathologies and disturbances of the personality.
? MF: I think you're completely right. Why has penal justice established these relationships with psychiatry, which ought to greatly hinder it. For obviously, between the prob-
lematic of psychiatry and what is demanded by the very prac- tice of penal law concerning responsibility I would not say there is contradiction but heterogeneity. They are two forms of thought that are not on the same plane, and consequently one doesn't see by what rule the one could utilize the other, yet it is certain, and it's a striking thing since the 19th century, that penal justice, which one would have supposed would have enormously distrusted this psychiatric, psychological and medical thought, instead seems to have been fascinated by it.
? What Calls for Punishment? 289
? proceedures of arbitration and non-judicial conciliation. Look at infractions as social risks, the essential being the indeminfi- cation of the victims. The intervention of the judicial appara- tus would be reserved for serious matters, or as the last re- course in the case of failure in attempts of reconciliation or solutions by civil law. Louk Hulsman's theory is one of those that assumes a cultural revolution.
? What do you think of this idea of abolition, thus sche- matically summarized? Can possible extensions of Discipline and Pimsh be seen there?
? MF; I think there are an enormous number of inter- esting things in Hulsman's thesis, even if it is only the chal- lenge that it poses to the question of the basis of the right to punish by asserting that there is no longer any reason to pun- ish. I also find very interesting the fact that he poses the ques- tion of the basis of punishment by taking account at the same time of the means by which 01>> responds to something con- sidered an infraction. In other words, the question of means is not simply a consequence of what might be posed concerning the basis of the right to punish, but for him the reflection on the basis of the right to punish and the manner of reacting to an infr^tion must be part of the same thing. All that appears to me to be very stimulating and important. Perhaps I am not sufficiently familiar with his work, but I would ask about the following points. Is the notion of problem-situations not going to lead to a psychologizing of both the question and the reac- tion? Doesn't a practice like this one risk--even if it's not what he wants--^leading to a kind of dissociation between on the one side the social, collective and institutional reactions to the crime which will be considered an accident and which will have to be regulated in the same way, and then on the other side a hyper-psychologizing around the criminal himself that
will constitute him as the object of psychiatric or medical interventions with therapeutic ends?
? 290 What Calls for Punishment?
? Q: But does this conception of the crime not lead to the abolition of notions of responsibility and guilt? To the extent to which evil exists in our society, does not the con- sciousness of guilt, which according to Ricoeur was bom with the Greeks, fill a necessary social function? Can one conceive of a society exonerated from every feeling of guilt?
MF: I don't think that the question is to know if a society can fiinction without guilt but if a society can make guilt function as an organizing principle and foundation of a law. And that's where the question becomes difficult.
? Paul Ricoeur is perfectly right to pose the problem of the moral conscience, and he poses it as a philosopher or his- torian of philosophy. It is completely legitimate to say that guilt exists, and that it has existed since a certain time. One can discuss whether the feeling of guih comes from the Greeks or has another origin. In any case, guilt exists and one doesn't see how a society Uke ours, still so strongly rooted in a tradition which is also that of the Greeks, could dispense with it. It has been possible for a very long time to cehsider whether or not one could directly articulate a system of law and a judicial institution onto a notion Uke that of guilt. For us, on the contrary, the question is open.
? Q: Today, when an individual appears before one or another instance of penal justice, he must account not only for the interdicted act he has committed but also for his very Ufe.
? MF: It's true. In the United States, for example, in- determinate penalties have been much discussed. Almost eve- rywhere, I believe, one has abandoned the practice, but it im- plied a certain tendency, a certain endeavor that appears to me not to have disappeared; the tendency to make the penal judgement bear much more on a somehow quantitative set
? What Calls for Punishment? 291
? characterizing an existence and a manner of being tahn on a specific act. There is also the measure passed recently in france concerning the carrying out of punishments. One has wanted to reinforce--and the intention is a good one--the power and control of the judiciary apparatus on the unfolding of the punishment. Which is good, because it diminishes the independence of the penitentiary institution. Only here is what we have: there will now be a tribunal, three judges I think, who will decide whether or not conditional Uberty can be ac- corded to a prisoner; and this decision will be made by taking into account elements in which there will be first the initial infraction, which will be re-actualized in some way, since the civil party and the representatives of the victim will be present and will be able to intervene. And then one will integrate with that the elements of the individual's conduct in prison,, such as have been observed, appreciated, interpreted, and judged by the guards, administrators, psychologists and doctors. It's this jumble of heterogeneous elements that will contribute to a judicial decision. Even if it is juridically acceptable, it is nec- essary to know what factual consequences all that will entail. And at the same time, what dangerous model that might pres- ent for penal justice in its current usage, if, in effect, a penal decision is habitually made a function of good or bad conduct.
? Q: The medicalization of justice leads little by httle to a removal of the penal right of judiciary practices. The subject of law cedes place to the neurotic or psychopath, more or less irresponsible, whose behavior would be determined by psycho-biological factors. In reaction against this conception, certain penal experts envisage a retum to the concept of pun- ishment more susceptible to reconciliation with the respect of hberty and the dignity of the individual. It's not a question of returning to a system of brutal and mechanical punishment that would make an abstraction of the socio-economic regime
? 22
The Concern for Truth
? Q: The Archeology to Knowledge announced a forth- coming History of Sexuality. The next volume appeared eight years later and according to a plan completely different.
MF: I changed my mind. A work, when it's not at the same time an attempt to modify what one thinks and even what one is, is not much fun. I had begun to write two books in accordance with my original plan; but very quickly I got bored. It was unwise on my part and contrary to my habits.
Q: Why then did you do it?
MF: Out of laziness. I dreamed that a day would come when I would know in advance what I meant and would only have to say it. That was a reflection of old age. I imag- ined I had finally reached the age when one only has to reel out what's in one's head. It was both a form of presumption and an abandonment of restraint. Yet to work is to undertake to think something other than what one has thought before.
Q: The reader thought so too.
? 308 The Concern for Truth
? ment and of the alliance on which it is based? These questions certainly don't define a politics; but they are questions to which those who do define a politics ought to respond.
Q: Would the role that you assume in politics corre- spond to this principle of "fi-ee speech" that has been the theme of your courses in recent years?
? MF: Nothing is more inconsistent than a political regime that is indifferent to the truth; but nothing is more dan- gerous than a political system that claims to prescribe the truth. The function of "free speech" doesn't have to take legal form, just as it would be vain to beUeve that it resides by right in spontaneous exchanges of communication. The task of speaking the truth is an infinite labor; to respect it in its com- plexity is an obligation that no power can afford to short- change, iinless it would impose the silence of slavery. A
? Translated by John Johnston
? 23
An Aesthetics of Existence
? ? Q: Seven years have passed since A History of Sexu- ality appeared. I know that your last books posed problems for you and that you have encountered difficulties. Would you talk a httle about these difficulties and this excursion to the Greco-Roman world, a world that was if not unknown at least foreign to you.
? MF: The difficulties arose from the project itself, which was intended to avoid them. I planned my work in several volumes according to a program established in ad- vance, telling myself that now the time had come when I could write them without difficulty simply by spinning out what was in my head, confirming what was there with the work of em- pirical research. But I almost died of boredom writing these books; they were too much like their precedents. For some authors, to write a book is always to risk something; for ex- ample, to fail to finish it. When one knows in advance where one wants to go, a dimension of the experience is lacking, which consists precisely in running the risk of not going to the end. Therefore I changed the general project: instead of study- ing sexuality at the confines of knowledge (savoir) and power.
? 310 An Aesthetics of Existence
I tried to investigate at a deeper level how the experience of sexuality as desire had been constituted for the subject him- self. In order to disengage this problematic, I was led to look very closely at very old Latin and Greek texts, which required much preparation and effort and which left me, until the end, with a good number of uncertainties and hesitations.
Q: There is always a certain "intentionality" in your works, which has often escaped your readers. Madness and Civilization was at bottom the history of the constitution of this knowledge that we call psychology; The Order of Things was the archeology of the human sciences; Discipline and Punish, the setting in place of the disciplines of the body and the soul. It seems that what is at the center of your last books is what you call the "play of truth. "
? MF: I don't think there is a great difference between these books and their precedents. When one writes books like these recent ones one wants very much to modify completely what one thinks and to find oneself at the end completely other than what one was at the start. Then one perceives that really one has changed very little. One has perhaps changed perspec- tives, one has turned the problem around, but it's always the same problem: that is, the relations between the subject, the truth and the constitution of experience. I have sought to ana- lyze how fields like madness, sexuality and delinquence could enter into a certain play of the truth, and how on the other hand, through this insertion of human practice and behavior into the play of truth, the subject himself is effected. That was the problem of the history of madness, and of sexuality.
? Q: Isn't it basically a question of a new genealogy of
? morals?
? An Aesthetics of Existence 311
? MF: If not for the solemnity of the title and the imposing mark that Nietzsche left on it, I would say yes.
Q: In a piece that appeared in Debat (November, 1983), you speak in regard to Antiquity of a morality tumed towards ethics and a morality tumed towards a code. Is that the division between Greco-Roman morality and the one bom of Christianity?
MF: With Christianity we see a slow progressive change brought about in relation to ancient morality, which was essentially a practice, a style of hberty. Naturally there were also certain norms of behavior that regulated the conduct of each person. But in Antiquity the will to be a moral subject, the search for an ethics of existence, was principally an effort to affirm one's liberty and to give to one's own life a certain form in which one could recognize oneself, be recognized by others, and in which even posterity could find an example.
This elaboration of one's own hfe as a personal work of art, even if it obeyed collective canons, was at the center, it seems to me, of moral experience, of the moral will, in Antiq- uity; whereas in Christianity, with the religion of the text, the idea of God's will and the principle of obedience, morality took much more the form of a code of rales. Only certain ascetic practices were more closely linked to the exercise of a personal hberty.
From Antiquity to Christianity one passes from a mo- rality that was essentially a search for a personal ethics to a morality as obedience to a system of rales. And if I have taken an interest in Antiquity, it is because, for a whole series of reasons, the idea of a morality as obedience to a code of rales is now disappearing, has already disappeared. To this absence of a morality, one responds, or must respond, with a research which is that of an aesthetics of existence.
? ? ? 312 An Aesthetics of Existence
? Q: Has all the knowledge of the body, sexuality and training that has accumulated in the last years ameliorated our relationship with others and our being in the world?
MF; I can't help from thinking that the whole series of things put into discussion around certain forms of existence, rules of behavior, etc. , even independently of political choices, have been profoundly beneficial in relations with the body, between men and women, and with sexuality.
Q; So this knowledge has helped us to live better.
MF; There was not simply a change in our preoccu- pations, but in philosophical, critical, and theoretical dis- course; in most of the analyses carried out one did not suggest what people ought to be, what they ought to do, what they ought to think and believe. It was a matter rather of showing how social mechanisms up to the present have been able to work, how forms of repression and constraint have acted, and then, starting from there, it seems to me, one left to the people themselves, knowing all the above, the possibility of self- de- termination and the choice of their own existence.
Q; Five years ago one began to read, in your seminar at the Colle`ge de France, Hayek and Von Mises. ' It was then said that, through a reflection on liberalism, Foucault is going to give us a book on politics. Liberalism thus seemed to be a detour taken to discover the individual beyond the mecha- nisms of power. One knows your dispute with the phenom- enological subject, and the psychological subject. At that pe- riod, one began to speak of a subject of practices, and the re- reading of liberalism took place somewhat in that context. It's no secret to anyone that it was often said that there is no subject in Foucault's work. Subjects are always subjugated;
? An Aesthetics of Existence 313
? they are the point of apphcation of techniques, normative dis- ciphnes, but they are never sovereign subjects.
MF; We have to make distinctions. In the first place, I don't think there is actually a sovereign, founding subject, a universal form of subject that one could find everywhere. I am very sceptical and very hostile toward this conception of the subject. I think on the contrary that the subject is constituted through practices of subjection, or, in a more anonymous way, through practices of liberation, of fi'eedom, as in Antiquity, starting of course from a certain number of rules, styles and conventions that are found in the culture.
? Q: That leads us to the present political scene. These are difficult times: on the international level there's the black- mail of Yalta and the confrontation of blocks; on the national level there's the spectre of crisis. In relation to all this it seems that between the Left and the Right there is no longer anything but a difference of style. How can one achieve a self-determi- nation then, face to face with this reality and its dictates, which appears to offer no possible altemative?
? MF: Your question seems to me both just and a little too compressed. One would have to break it into two kinds of questions: in the first place, is it necessary to accept or refiite the present situation? Secondly, if one doesn't accept it, what can one do? To the first question one must respond without any ambiguity: it is not necessary to accept either the residues of the war and the prolongation of a certain strategic situation in Europe, or the fact that half of Europe is enslaved.
? Next, the other question is posed: What can one do against a power like the Soviet Union, in relation to our own government and with the people on both sides of the iron curtain who intend to put into question the division such as it
? 314 An Aesthetics of Existence
has been established? In relation to the Soviet Union there is not much to do, except to help as effectively as possible those who are fighting it on their own ground. As for the two other targets, there is a great deal to do; the bread is on the shelf. ^
Q: One doesn't therefore have to assume an He- gelian attitude, so to speak, by accepting reality such as it is and as it is presented to us. There remains a last question: Does "a truth in politics" exist?
? MF: I believe too much in the truth not to suppose that there are different truths and different ways of saying it. To be sure, one cannot demand a government to speak the truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth. On the other hand, it is possible to demand from governments a certain truth as to final aims, the general choice of its tactics, and on a certain number of particular points of its program: that is the parrhe- sia (free speech) of the governed, who can and must summon in the name of knowledge and their experience and because they are citizens the government to answer for what it does, for the meaning of its actions, and the decisions that it has taken.
? Nevertheless, we must avoid a trap into which gov- ernments want intellectuals to fall (and often they do): "Put yourself in our place and tell us what you would do. " This is not a question to which one has to respond. To make a deci- sion on any matter implies a knowledge of the facts refused us, an analysis of the situation we aren't allowed to make. There's the trap. Yet as governed we still have the perfect right to pose questions about the truth: "What are you doing, for example, when you are hostile to Euromissiles, or when, on the contrary, you re-structure the steel industry, or when you open the debates on fi<<e teaching? "
? An Aesthetics of Existence 315
? Q: In this descent into hell that involves a long medi- tation and research--a descent in which one goes somehow in search of the truth--^what type of reader would you like to encounter and to whom you could recount this truth? While there still may be good authors, it's a fact that there are fewer and fewer good readers.
? MF: I would say some readers. It's true that one is no longer read. The first book that one writes is read, because one is not known, because people don't know who we are, and it is read in disorder and confusion, which for me is fine. There is no reason for the writing of a book, nor is there a law of the book. The only law is that there are all manner of possible readings. I don't see any major inconvenience if a book, being read, is read in different ways.
What is serious is that, as one continues to write one is no longer read at all; some readers, reading the new books on the backs of the earlier ones, and from one distortion to another, arrive at an absolutely gro- tesque image of the book.
? Here we have a real problem: must one enter the fray and respond to each of these distortions, and, consequently, give the law to readers, which I am loath to do, or allow the book to be distorted into a caricature of itself, which I am equally loath to do?
There would be one solution: the only law for book publication, the only law concerning the book that I would like to see passed, would be to prohibit the use of the author's name more than once, with the additional right to anonymity and the use of pseudonyms, in order that each book might be read for itself. There are books for which recognition of the author provides the key to their intelligibility. But outside of a few great authors, this knowledge of the author's name has no real use. It serves only as a screen. For someone like me, who is not a great author but only someone who writes books.
? ? 316 An Aesthetics of Existence
? books ought to be read for themselves, with their imperfec tions and their possible good qualities. A
Translated by John Johnston Notes
' Friedrich A. Hayek, Individualism and Economic Order (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1948); Ludwig Von Mises, The Anti-Capitalist Mentality (Libertarian Press, 1981).
^ "The bread is on the shelf' is a colloquial expression mean- ing "Much remains to be done. "
? 24
? The Retum of Morality
? Q: What strikes the reader of your last books is the writing--clear, pure, smooth, and very different from your habitual style. Why this change?
? MF; I am currently rereading the manuscripts that I wrote for this history of morality and that concern the begin- ning of Christianity (these books--this is one reason for their tardiness--are presented in the inverse order of their composi- tion). In rereading these manuscripts abandoned some time ago I find again the same refusal of style evident in The Order of Things, Madness and Civilization or Raymond Roussel. I should say that it's a problem for me because this break did not occur progressively. Very abruptly, in 1975-76, I com- pletely gave up this style, for I had it in mind to do a history of the subject, which is not that of an event that would be pro- duced one day and of which it would be necessary to recount the genesis and the outcome.
? Q; In ridding yourself of a certain style, didn't you become more philosophical than you were before?
? I think that one of the most fundamental tasks would be to rethink the meaning that one can give to legal punishment today, in its articulation with law, morality and the institution.
? Q: The problem of the definition of punishment is all the more complex because not only do we not know exactly what it is to punish but it seems that we are loathe to do it. Indeed, judges more and more refrain from punishing; they intend to care for, treat, re-educate, and cure, a little as if they were trying to exculpate themselves from exercising repres- sion. In Discipline and Punish moreover you write that "penal and psychiatric discourse blur their boundaries. " And, "Thus is established, with the multiplicity of scientific discourses, a difficult and infinite relationship, which penal justice today is not ready to control. The maker of justice is no longer the master of truth. " Today the recourse to psychiatry, to psychol- ogy and to social welfare is routine judiciary fact, as much penal as civil. You analyze phenomena that no doubt indicate an epistemological change in the juridico-penal sphere. Penal justice seems to have changed meaning. The judge less and less applies the penal code to a lawbreaker; more and more he treats pathologies and disturbances of the personality.
? MF: I think you're completely right. Why has penal justice established these relationships with psychiatry, which ought to greatly hinder it. For obviously, between the prob-
lematic of psychiatry and what is demanded by the very prac- tice of penal law concerning responsibility I would not say there is contradiction but heterogeneity. They are two forms of thought that are not on the same plane, and consequently one doesn't see by what rule the one could utilize the other, yet it is certain, and it's a striking thing since the 19th century, that penal justice, which one would have supposed would have enormously distrusted this psychiatric, psychological and medical thought, instead seems to have been fascinated by it.
? What Calls for Punishment? 289
? proceedures of arbitration and non-judicial conciliation. Look at infractions as social risks, the essential being the indeminfi- cation of the victims. The intervention of the judicial appara- tus would be reserved for serious matters, or as the last re- course in the case of failure in attempts of reconciliation or solutions by civil law. Louk Hulsman's theory is one of those that assumes a cultural revolution.
? What do you think of this idea of abolition, thus sche- matically summarized? Can possible extensions of Discipline and Pimsh be seen there?
? MF; I think there are an enormous number of inter- esting things in Hulsman's thesis, even if it is only the chal- lenge that it poses to the question of the basis of the right to punish by asserting that there is no longer any reason to pun- ish. I also find very interesting the fact that he poses the ques- tion of the basis of punishment by taking account at the same time of the means by which 01>> responds to something con- sidered an infraction. In other words, the question of means is not simply a consequence of what might be posed concerning the basis of the right to punish, but for him the reflection on the basis of the right to punish and the manner of reacting to an infr^tion must be part of the same thing. All that appears to me to be very stimulating and important. Perhaps I am not sufficiently familiar with his work, but I would ask about the following points. Is the notion of problem-situations not going to lead to a psychologizing of both the question and the reac- tion? Doesn't a practice like this one risk--even if it's not what he wants--^leading to a kind of dissociation between on the one side the social, collective and institutional reactions to the crime which will be considered an accident and which will have to be regulated in the same way, and then on the other side a hyper-psychologizing around the criminal himself that
will constitute him as the object of psychiatric or medical interventions with therapeutic ends?
? 290 What Calls for Punishment?
? Q: But does this conception of the crime not lead to the abolition of notions of responsibility and guilt? To the extent to which evil exists in our society, does not the con- sciousness of guilt, which according to Ricoeur was bom with the Greeks, fill a necessary social function? Can one conceive of a society exonerated from every feeling of guilt?
MF: I don't think that the question is to know if a society can fiinction without guilt but if a society can make guilt function as an organizing principle and foundation of a law. And that's where the question becomes difficult.
? Paul Ricoeur is perfectly right to pose the problem of the moral conscience, and he poses it as a philosopher or his- torian of philosophy. It is completely legitimate to say that guilt exists, and that it has existed since a certain time. One can discuss whether the feeling of guih comes from the Greeks or has another origin. In any case, guilt exists and one doesn't see how a society Uke ours, still so strongly rooted in a tradition which is also that of the Greeks, could dispense with it. It has been possible for a very long time to cehsider whether or not one could directly articulate a system of law and a judicial institution onto a notion Uke that of guilt. For us, on the contrary, the question is open.
? Q: Today, when an individual appears before one or another instance of penal justice, he must account not only for the interdicted act he has committed but also for his very Ufe.
? MF: It's true. In the United States, for example, in- determinate penalties have been much discussed. Almost eve- rywhere, I believe, one has abandoned the practice, but it im- plied a certain tendency, a certain endeavor that appears to me not to have disappeared; the tendency to make the penal judgement bear much more on a somehow quantitative set
? What Calls for Punishment? 291
? characterizing an existence and a manner of being tahn on a specific act. There is also the measure passed recently in france concerning the carrying out of punishments. One has wanted to reinforce--and the intention is a good one--the power and control of the judiciary apparatus on the unfolding of the punishment. Which is good, because it diminishes the independence of the penitentiary institution. Only here is what we have: there will now be a tribunal, three judges I think, who will decide whether or not conditional Uberty can be ac- corded to a prisoner; and this decision will be made by taking into account elements in which there will be first the initial infraction, which will be re-actualized in some way, since the civil party and the representatives of the victim will be present and will be able to intervene. And then one will integrate with that the elements of the individual's conduct in prison,, such as have been observed, appreciated, interpreted, and judged by the guards, administrators, psychologists and doctors. It's this jumble of heterogeneous elements that will contribute to a judicial decision. Even if it is juridically acceptable, it is nec- essary to know what factual consequences all that will entail. And at the same time, what dangerous model that might pres- ent for penal justice in its current usage, if, in effect, a penal decision is habitually made a function of good or bad conduct.
? Q: The medicalization of justice leads little by httle to a removal of the penal right of judiciary practices. The subject of law cedes place to the neurotic or psychopath, more or less irresponsible, whose behavior would be determined by psycho-biological factors. In reaction against this conception, certain penal experts envisage a retum to the concept of pun- ishment more susceptible to reconciliation with the respect of hberty and the dignity of the individual. It's not a question of returning to a system of brutal and mechanical punishment that would make an abstraction of the socio-economic regime
? 22
The Concern for Truth
? Q: The Archeology to Knowledge announced a forth- coming History of Sexuality. The next volume appeared eight years later and according to a plan completely different.
MF: I changed my mind. A work, when it's not at the same time an attempt to modify what one thinks and even what one is, is not much fun. I had begun to write two books in accordance with my original plan; but very quickly I got bored. It was unwise on my part and contrary to my habits.
Q: Why then did you do it?
MF: Out of laziness. I dreamed that a day would come when I would know in advance what I meant and would only have to say it. That was a reflection of old age. I imag- ined I had finally reached the age when one only has to reel out what's in one's head. It was both a form of presumption and an abandonment of restraint. Yet to work is to undertake to think something other than what one has thought before.
Q: The reader thought so too.
? 308 The Concern for Truth
? ment and of the alliance on which it is based? These questions certainly don't define a politics; but they are questions to which those who do define a politics ought to respond.
Q: Would the role that you assume in politics corre- spond to this principle of "fi-ee speech" that has been the theme of your courses in recent years?
? MF: Nothing is more inconsistent than a political regime that is indifferent to the truth; but nothing is more dan- gerous than a political system that claims to prescribe the truth. The function of "free speech" doesn't have to take legal form, just as it would be vain to beUeve that it resides by right in spontaneous exchanges of communication. The task of speaking the truth is an infinite labor; to respect it in its com- plexity is an obligation that no power can afford to short- change, iinless it would impose the silence of slavery. A
? Translated by John Johnston
? 23
An Aesthetics of Existence
? ? Q: Seven years have passed since A History of Sexu- ality appeared. I know that your last books posed problems for you and that you have encountered difficulties. Would you talk a httle about these difficulties and this excursion to the Greco-Roman world, a world that was if not unknown at least foreign to you.
? MF: The difficulties arose from the project itself, which was intended to avoid them. I planned my work in several volumes according to a program established in ad- vance, telling myself that now the time had come when I could write them without difficulty simply by spinning out what was in my head, confirming what was there with the work of em- pirical research. But I almost died of boredom writing these books; they were too much like their precedents. For some authors, to write a book is always to risk something; for ex- ample, to fail to finish it. When one knows in advance where one wants to go, a dimension of the experience is lacking, which consists precisely in running the risk of not going to the end. Therefore I changed the general project: instead of study- ing sexuality at the confines of knowledge (savoir) and power.
? 310 An Aesthetics of Existence
I tried to investigate at a deeper level how the experience of sexuality as desire had been constituted for the subject him- self. In order to disengage this problematic, I was led to look very closely at very old Latin and Greek texts, which required much preparation and effort and which left me, until the end, with a good number of uncertainties and hesitations.
Q: There is always a certain "intentionality" in your works, which has often escaped your readers. Madness and Civilization was at bottom the history of the constitution of this knowledge that we call psychology; The Order of Things was the archeology of the human sciences; Discipline and Punish, the setting in place of the disciplines of the body and the soul. It seems that what is at the center of your last books is what you call the "play of truth. "
? MF: I don't think there is a great difference between these books and their precedents. When one writes books like these recent ones one wants very much to modify completely what one thinks and to find oneself at the end completely other than what one was at the start. Then one perceives that really one has changed very little. One has perhaps changed perspec- tives, one has turned the problem around, but it's always the same problem: that is, the relations between the subject, the truth and the constitution of experience. I have sought to ana- lyze how fields like madness, sexuality and delinquence could enter into a certain play of the truth, and how on the other hand, through this insertion of human practice and behavior into the play of truth, the subject himself is effected. That was the problem of the history of madness, and of sexuality.
? Q: Isn't it basically a question of a new genealogy of
? morals?
? An Aesthetics of Existence 311
? MF: If not for the solemnity of the title and the imposing mark that Nietzsche left on it, I would say yes.
Q: In a piece that appeared in Debat (November, 1983), you speak in regard to Antiquity of a morality tumed towards ethics and a morality tumed towards a code. Is that the division between Greco-Roman morality and the one bom of Christianity?
MF: With Christianity we see a slow progressive change brought about in relation to ancient morality, which was essentially a practice, a style of hberty. Naturally there were also certain norms of behavior that regulated the conduct of each person. But in Antiquity the will to be a moral subject, the search for an ethics of existence, was principally an effort to affirm one's liberty and to give to one's own life a certain form in which one could recognize oneself, be recognized by others, and in which even posterity could find an example.
This elaboration of one's own hfe as a personal work of art, even if it obeyed collective canons, was at the center, it seems to me, of moral experience, of the moral will, in Antiq- uity; whereas in Christianity, with the religion of the text, the idea of God's will and the principle of obedience, morality took much more the form of a code of rales. Only certain ascetic practices were more closely linked to the exercise of a personal hberty.
From Antiquity to Christianity one passes from a mo- rality that was essentially a search for a personal ethics to a morality as obedience to a system of rales. And if I have taken an interest in Antiquity, it is because, for a whole series of reasons, the idea of a morality as obedience to a code of rales is now disappearing, has already disappeared. To this absence of a morality, one responds, or must respond, with a research which is that of an aesthetics of existence.
? ? ? 312 An Aesthetics of Existence
? Q: Has all the knowledge of the body, sexuality and training that has accumulated in the last years ameliorated our relationship with others and our being in the world?
MF; I can't help from thinking that the whole series of things put into discussion around certain forms of existence, rules of behavior, etc. , even independently of political choices, have been profoundly beneficial in relations with the body, between men and women, and with sexuality.
Q; So this knowledge has helped us to live better.
MF; There was not simply a change in our preoccu- pations, but in philosophical, critical, and theoretical dis- course; in most of the analyses carried out one did not suggest what people ought to be, what they ought to do, what they ought to think and believe. It was a matter rather of showing how social mechanisms up to the present have been able to work, how forms of repression and constraint have acted, and then, starting from there, it seems to me, one left to the people themselves, knowing all the above, the possibility of self- de- termination and the choice of their own existence.
Q; Five years ago one began to read, in your seminar at the Colle`ge de France, Hayek and Von Mises. ' It was then said that, through a reflection on liberalism, Foucault is going to give us a book on politics. Liberalism thus seemed to be a detour taken to discover the individual beyond the mecha- nisms of power. One knows your dispute with the phenom- enological subject, and the psychological subject. At that pe- riod, one began to speak of a subject of practices, and the re- reading of liberalism took place somewhat in that context. It's no secret to anyone that it was often said that there is no subject in Foucault's work. Subjects are always subjugated;
? An Aesthetics of Existence 313
? they are the point of apphcation of techniques, normative dis- ciphnes, but they are never sovereign subjects.
MF; We have to make distinctions. In the first place, I don't think there is actually a sovereign, founding subject, a universal form of subject that one could find everywhere. I am very sceptical and very hostile toward this conception of the subject. I think on the contrary that the subject is constituted through practices of subjection, or, in a more anonymous way, through practices of liberation, of fi'eedom, as in Antiquity, starting of course from a certain number of rules, styles and conventions that are found in the culture.
? Q: That leads us to the present political scene. These are difficult times: on the international level there's the black- mail of Yalta and the confrontation of blocks; on the national level there's the spectre of crisis. In relation to all this it seems that between the Left and the Right there is no longer anything but a difference of style. How can one achieve a self-determi- nation then, face to face with this reality and its dictates, which appears to offer no possible altemative?
? MF: Your question seems to me both just and a little too compressed. One would have to break it into two kinds of questions: in the first place, is it necessary to accept or refiite the present situation? Secondly, if one doesn't accept it, what can one do? To the first question one must respond without any ambiguity: it is not necessary to accept either the residues of the war and the prolongation of a certain strategic situation in Europe, or the fact that half of Europe is enslaved.
? Next, the other question is posed: What can one do against a power like the Soviet Union, in relation to our own government and with the people on both sides of the iron curtain who intend to put into question the division such as it
? 314 An Aesthetics of Existence
has been established? In relation to the Soviet Union there is not much to do, except to help as effectively as possible those who are fighting it on their own ground. As for the two other targets, there is a great deal to do; the bread is on the shelf. ^
Q: One doesn't therefore have to assume an He- gelian attitude, so to speak, by accepting reality such as it is and as it is presented to us. There remains a last question: Does "a truth in politics" exist?
? MF: I believe too much in the truth not to suppose that there are different truths and different ways of saying it. To be sure, one cannot demand a government to speak the truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth. On the other hand, it is possible to demand from governments a certain truth as to final aims, the general choice of its tactics, and on a certain number of particular points of its program: that is the parrhe- sia (free speech) of the governed, who can and must summon in the name of knowledge and their experience and because they are citizens the government to answer for what it does, for the meaning of its actions, and the decisions that it has taken.
? Nevertheless, we must avoid a trap into which gov- ernments want intellectuals to fall (and often they do): "Put yourself in our place and tell us what you would do. " This is not a question to which one has to respond. To make a deci- sion on any matter implies a knowledge of the facts refused us, an analysis of the situation we aren't allowed to make. There's the trap. Yet as governed we still have the perfect right to pose questions about the truth: "What are you doing, for example, when you are hostile to Euromissiles, or when, on the contrary, you re-structure the steel industry, or when you open the debates on fi<<e teaching? "
? An Aesthetics of Existence 315
? Q: In this descent into hell that involves a long medi- tation and research--a descent in which one goes somehow in search of the truth--^what type of reader would you like to encounter and to whom you could recount this truth? While there still may be good authors, it's a fact that there are fewer and fewer good readers.
? MF: I would say some readers. It's true that one is no longer read. The first book that one writes is read, because one is not known, because people don't know who we are, and it is read in disorder and confusion, which for me is fine. There is no reason for the writing of a book, nor is there a law of the book. The only law is that there are all manner of possible readings. I don't see any major inconvenience if a book, being read, is read in different ways.
What is serious is that, as one continues to write one is no longer read at all; some readers, reading the new books on the backs of the earlier ones, and from one distortion to another, arrive at an absolutely gro- tesque image of the book.
? Here we have a real problem: must one enter the fray and respond to each of these distortions, and, consequently, give the law to readers, which I am loath to do, or allow the book to be distorted into a caricature of itself, which I am equally loath to do?
There would be one solution: the only law for book publication, the only law concerning the book that I would like to see passed, would be to prohibit the use of the author's name more than once, with the additional right to anonymity and the use of pseudonyms, in order that each book might be read for itself. There are books for which recognition of the author provides the key to their intelligibility. But outside of a few great authors, this knowledge of the author's name has no real use. It serves only as a screen. For someone like me, who is not a great author but only someone who writes books.
? ? 316 An Aesthetics of Existence
? books ought to be read for themselves, with their imperfec tions and their possible good qualities. A
Translated by John Johnston Notes
' Friedrich A. Hayek, Individualism and Economic Order (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1948); Ludwig Von Mises, The Anti-Capitalist Mentality (Libertarian Press, 1981).
^ "The bread is on the shelf' is a colloquial expression mean- ing "Much remains to be done. "
? 24
? The Retum of Morality
? Q: What strikes the reader of your last books is the writing--clear, pure, smooth, and very different from your habitual style. Why this change?
? MF; I am currently rereading the manuscripts that I wrote for this history of morality and that concern the begin- ning of Christianity (these books--this is one reason for their tardiness--are presented in the inverse order of their composi- tion). In rereading these manuscripts abandoned some time ago I find again the same refusal of style evident in The Order of Things, Madness and Civilization or Raymond Roussel. I should say that it's a problem for me because this break did not occur progressively. Very abruptly, in 1975-76, I com- pletely gave up this style, for I had it in mind to do a history of the subject, which is not that of an event that would be pro- duced one day and of which it would be necessary to recount the genesis and the outcome.
? Q; In ridding yourself of a certain style, didn't you become more philosophical than you were before?
