So everything is concentrated and he fills the margins like correspondents who have too much to say for the space
available
to them.
Foucault-Psychiatric-Power-1973-74
?
MICHEL FOUCAULT
Psychiatric Power
LECTURES AT THE COLLEGE DE FRANCE, 1973-74
Edited by Jacques Lagrange
General Editors: Francois Ewald and Alessandro Fontana
English Series Editor: Arnold I. Davidson TRANSLATED BY GRAHAM BURCHELL
liberte >>Egalite - Fraternity REPUBLIQUE FRANCAISE
This hook is supported hy the French Ministry ol Foreign Allairs, as part ol the Burgess programme run hy the Cultural Department ol ,hc Frcnch Embassy in London.
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? PSYCHIATRIC POWER
(C) Editions du Seuil/Gallimard, 2003. Edition established under the direction of Francois Ewald and Alessandro Fontana, by Jacques Lagrange. Translation (C) Graham Burchell, 2006. Introduction (C) Arnold I. Davidson, 2006.
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? CONTENTS
Foreword: Francois Ewald and Alessandro Fontana
Introduction: Arnold I. Davidson Translator's Note
one
7 NOVEMBER 1973
The space of the asylum and disciplinary order. ^
process and "moral treatment. " ^ Scenes of curing. ^ Changes made by the coursefrom the approach o^Histoire de la folie;
1. From an analysis of "representations" to an "analytics of power"; 2. From "violence" to the "microphysics of power";
3. From "institutional regularities" to the "arrangements" of power.
14 NOVEMBER 1973
Scene of a cure: George HI. From the "macrophysics of sovereignty " to the "microphysics of disciplinary power. " ^ The newfigure of the madman. ^ Little encyclopedia of scenes of cures. ^ The practice of hypnosis and hysteria. ^ The psychoanalytic scene; the antipsychiatric scene. ^
Mary Barnes at Kingsley Hall. ^ Manipulation
of madness and stratagem of truth: Mason Cox.
two
Therapeutic
? VI
CONTENTS
three
21 NOVEMBER 1973 39
four
Genealogy of "disciplinary power. " The "power of sovereignty. yy The subjectfunction in disciplinary power and in the power of sovereignty. ^ Forms of disciplinary power: army,
police, apprenticeship, workshop, school. ^ Disciplinary power as "normalizing agency. " ^ Technology of disciplinary power and constitution of the "individual. " ^ Emergence of the human sciences.
28 NOVEMBER 1973
Elementsfor a history of disciplinary apparatuses: religious communities in the Middle Ages; pedagogical colonisation of youth; the Jesuit missions to Paraguay; the army; workshops;
workers' cities. ^ Theformali^ation of these apparatuses in Jeremy Bentham's model of the Panopticon. ^ The family
institution and emergence of the Psy function.
5 DECEMBER 1973
The asylum and thefamily. From interdiction to confinement. The break between the asylum and thefamily. ^ The asylum; a curing machine. nu Typology of "corporal apparatuses
(appareils corporels) ". ^ The madman and the child. r^f Clinics (maisons de sante). ^ Disciplinary apparatuses andfamily power.
12 DECEMBER 1973
Constitution of the child as target of psychiatric
intervention. ^ A family-asylum utopia: the Clermont-en-Oise asylum. ~ From psychiatry as "ambiguous master" of reality and truth in proto-psychiatric practices to psychiatry as "agent of intensification " of reality. ^ Psychiatric power and discourse of truth. ^ The problem of simulation and the insurrection of the hysterics. ^ The question of the birth of psychoanalysis.
63
five
93
six
123
seven
19 DECEMBER 1973 17l3
Psychiatric power. ^ A treatment by Francois Leuret and its strategic elements: 1-creating an imbalance of power; 2-the ruse
? eight
of language; 3-the management of needs; 4-the statement of truth. ^ The pleasure of the illness. ^ The asylum apparatus ('dispositif).
9 JANUARY 1974
Psychiatric power and the practice of "direction". ^ The game of "reality " in the asylum. ^ The asylum, a medically demarcated space and the question of its medical or administrative direction. ^ The tokens of psychiatric knowledge: (a) the technique of questioning; (b) the interplay of medication and punishment; (c) the clinical
presentation. ^ Asylum "microphysics of power. " ^ Emergence of the Psyfunction and of neuropathology. ^ The triple destiny of psychiatric power.
16JANUARY 1974
The modes of generalization of psychiatric power and the psychiatrixation of childhood. ^ 1. The theoretical specification
of idiocy. The criterion of development. ^ Emergence of a psychopathology of idiocy and mental retardation. Edouard
Seguin: instinct and abnormality. ^ 2. The institutional annexation of idiocy by psychiatric power. ^ The "moral treatment" of idiots: Seguin. ^ The process of confinement and the stigmati\ation of the dangerousness of idiots. ^ Recourse to the notion of degeneration.
23 JANUARY 1974
Psychiatric power and the question of truth: questioning and confession; magnetism and hypnosis; drugs. ^ Elementsfor a history of truth: 1. The truth-event and itsforms: judicial, alchemical and medical practices. ^ Transition to a technology of demonstrative truth. Its elements: (a) procedures of inquiry; (b) institution of a subject of knowledge; (c) ruling out the crisis in medicine and psychiatry and its supports: the disciplinary space of the asylum, recourse to pathological anatomy; relationships between madness and
crime. ^ Psychiatric power and hysterical resistance.
173
nine
201
ten
233
Contents vii
? vni CONTENTS
eleven 30 JANUARY 1977I
The problem of diagnosis in medicine and psychiatry. ^ The
place of the body in psychiatric nosology: the model of general paralysis. ^ Thefate of the notion of crisis in medicine and psychiatry. ^ The test of reality in psychiatry and its forms:
1. Psychiatricquestioning(l'interrogatoire) andconfession. The ritual of clinical presentation. Note on "pathological heredity" and degeneration. ^ 2. Drugs. Moreau de Tours and hashish. Madness and dreams. ^ 3. Magnetism and hypnosis. The discovery of the "neurological body. "
265
twelve 6 FEBRUARY 1974 297 The emergence of the neurological body: Broca and Duchenne
de Boulogne. ^ Illnesses of differential diagnosis and illnesses of absolute diagnosis. ^ The model of "generalparalysis" and the neuroses. ^ The battle of hysteria: 1. The organisation of a
"symptomatological scenario. " ^ 2. The maneuver of the "functional mannequin " and hypnosis. The question of
simulation. ^ sexual body.
Course Summary Course Context Index of Names Index of Notions Index of Places
3. Neurosis and trauma. The irruption of the
335
3zl9 369 376 383
? FOREWORD
MICHEL FOUCAULT TAUGHT AT the College de France From January 1971 until his death in June 1984 (with the exception of 1977 when he took a sabbatical year). The title of his chair was "The History ol Systems of Thought. "
On the proposal of Jules Vuillemin, the chair was created on 30 November 1969 by the general assembly of the professors of the College de France and replaced that of "The History of Philosophical Thought" held by Jean Hyppolite until his death. The same assembly elected Michel Foucault to the new chair on 12 April 1970. ' He was 43 years old.
Michel Foucault's inaugural lecture was delivered on 2 December 1970. 2 Teaching at the College de France is governed by particular rules. Professors must provide 26 hours of teaching a year (with the possibil ity of a maximum of half this total being given in the form of seminars^). Each year they must present their original research and this obliges them to change the content of their teaching for each course. Courses and seminars are completely open; no enrolment or qualification is required and the professors do not award any qualifications/1 In the ter minology of the College de France, the prolessors do not have students but only auditors.
Michel Foucault's courses were held every Wednesday from January to March. The huge audience made up ol students, teachers, researchers and the curious, including many who came Irom outside France, required two amphitheaters of the College de France. Foucault olten complained about the distance between himsell and his "public" and ol how lew exchanges the course made possible. 5 He would have liked a seminar in which real collective work could take place and made a number of attempts to bring
? X
FOREWORD
this about. In the final years he devoted a long period to answering his auditors' questions at the end of each course.
This is how Gerard Petitjean, a journalist from Le Nouvel Observateur, described the atmosphere at Foucault's lectures in 1975:
When Foucault enters the amphitheater, brisk and dynamic like someone who plunges into the water, he steps over bodies to reach his chair, pushes away the cassette recorders so he can put down his papers, removes his jacket, lights a lamp and sets off at full speed. His voice is strong and effective, amplified by loudspeakers that are the only concession to modernism in a hall that is barely lit by light spread from stucco bowls. The hall has three hundred places and there are five hundred people packed together, filling the smallest free space . . . There is no oratorical effect. It is clear and terribly effective. There is absolutely no concession to impro- visation. Foucault has twelve hours each year to explain in a pub- lic course the direction taken by his research in the year just ended. So everything is concentrated and he fills the margins like correspondents who have too much to say for the space available to them. At 19. 15 Foucault stops. The students rush towards his desk; not to speak to him, but to stop their cassette recorders. There are no questions. In the pushing and shoving Foucault is alone. Foucault remarks: "It should be possible to discuss what I have put forward. Sometimes, when it has not been a good lecture, it would need very little, just one question, to put everything straight. However, this question never comes. The group effect in France makes any genuine discussion impossible. And as there is no feedback, the course is theatricalized. My relationship with the people there is like that of an actor or an acrobat. And when I have finished speaking, a sensation of total solitude . . . "6
Foucault approached his teaching as a researcher: explorations for a future book as well as the opening up of fields of problematization were formulated as an invitation to possible future researchers. This is why the courses at the College de France do not duplicate the published books. They are not sketches for the books even though both books and courses
? share certain themes. They have their own status. They arise from a specific discursive regime within the set of Foucault's "philosophical activities. " In particular they set out the programme for a genealogy of knowledge/power relations, which are the terms in which he thinks of his work from the beginning of the 1970s, as opposed to the programme of an archeology of discursive formations that previously orientated his work. 7
The courses also performed a role in contemporary reality. Those who followed his courses were not only held in thrall by the narrative that unfolded week by week and seduced by the rigorous exposition, they also found a perspective on contemporary reality. Michel Foucault's art con- sisted in using history to cut diagonally through contemporary reality. He could speak of Nietzsche or Aristotle, of expert psychiatric opinion or the Christian pastoral, but those who attended his lectures always took from what he said a perspective on the present and contemporary events. Foucault's specific strength in his courses was the subtle interplay between learned erudition, personal commitment, and work on the event.
*
With their development and refinement m the 1970s, Foucault's desk was quickly invaded by cassette recorders. The courses--and some seminars--have thus been preserved.
This edition is based on the words delivered in public by Foucault. It gives a transcription of these words that is as literal as possible. 8 We would have liked to present it as such. However, the transition from an oral to a written presentation calls for editorial intervention: At the very least it requires the introduction of punctuation and division into para- graphs. Our principle has been always to remain as close as possible to the course actually delivered.
Summaries and repetitions have been removed whenever it seemed to be absolutely necessary. Interrupted sentences have been restored and faulty constructions corrected. Suspension points indicate that the recording is inaudible. When a sentence is obscure there is a conjectural integration or an addition between square brackets. An asterisk directing the reader to the bottom of the page indicates a significant divergence between the notes used by Foucault and the words actually
Foreword xi
? xii FOREWORD
uttered. Quotations have been checked and references to the texts used are indicated. The critical apparatus is limited to the elucidation of obscure points, the explanation of some allusions and the clarification of critical points. To make the lectures easier to read, each lecture is pre ceded by a brief summary that indicates its principal articulations. 9
The text of the course is followed by the summary published by the Annuaire du College de France. Foucault usually wrote these in June, some time after the end of the course. It was an opportunity for him to pick out retrospectively the intention and objectives ol the course. It consti tutes the best introduction to the course.
Each volume ends with a "context" for which the course editors are responsible. It seeks to provide the reader with elements of the bio- graphical, ideological, and political context, situating the course within the published work and providing indications concerning its place within the corpus used in order to facilitate understanding and to avoid misinterpretations that might arise from a neglect of the circumstances in which each course was developed and delivered.
Psychiatric Power, the course delivered in 1973 and 1974, is edited by Jacques Lagrange.
*
A new aspect of Michel Foucault's "oeuvre" is published with this edition of the College de France courses.
Strictly speaking it is not a matter of unpublished work, since this edition reproduces words uttered publicly by Foucault, excluding the often highly developed written material he used to support his lectures.
So everything is concentrated and he fills the margins like correspondents who have too much to say for the space available to them. At 19. 15 Foucault stops. The students rush towards his desk; not to speak to him, but to stop their cassette recorders. There are no questions. In the pushing and shoving Foucault is alone. Foucault remarks: "It should be possible to discuss what I have put forward. Sometimes, when it has not been a good lecture, it would need very little, just one question, to put everything straight. However, this question never comes. The group effect in France makes any genuine discussion impossible. And as there is no feedback, the course is theatricalized. My relationship with the people there is like that of an actor or an acrobat. And when I have finished speaking, a sensation of total solitude . . . "6
Foucault approached his teaching as a researcher: explorations for a future book as well as the opening up of fields of problematization were formulated as an invitation to possible future researchers. This is why the courses at the College de France do not duplicate the published books. They are not sketches for the books even though both books and courses
? share certain themes. They have their own status. They arise from a specific discursive regime within the set of Foucault's "philosophical activities. " In particular they set out the programme for a genealogy of knowledge/power relations, which are the terms in which he thinks of his work from the beginning of the 1970s, as opposed to the programme of an archeology of discursive formations that previously orientated his work. 7
The courses also performed a role in contemporary reality. Those who followed his courses were not only held in thrall by the narrative that unfolded week by week and seduced by the rigorous exposition, they also found a perspective on contemporary reality. Michel Foucault's art con- sisted in using history to cut diagonally through contemporary reality. He could speak of Nietzsche or Aristotle, of expert psychiatric opinion or the Christian pastoral, but those who attended his lectures always took from what he said a perspective on the present and contemporary events. Foucault's specific strength in his courses was the subtle interplay between learned erudition, personal commitment, and work on the event.
*
With their development and refinement m the 1970s, Foucault's desk was quickly invaded by cassette recorders. The courses--and some seminars--have thus been preserved.
This edition is based on the words delivered in public by Foucault. It gives a transcription of these words that is as literal as possible. 8 We would have liked to present it as such. However, the transition from an oral to a written presentation calls for editorial intervention: At the very least it requires the introduction of punctuation and division into para- graphs. Our principle has been always to remain as close as possible to the course actually delivered.
Summaries and repetitions have been removed whenever it seemed to be absolutely necessary. Interrupted sentences have been restored and faulty constructions corrected. Suspension points indicate that the recording is inaudible. When a sentence is obscure there is a conjectural integration or an addition between square brackets. An asterisk directing the reader to the bottom of the page indicates a significant divergence between the notes used by Foucault and the words actually
Foreword xi
? xii FOREWORD
uttered. Quotations have been checked and references to the texts used are indicated. The critical apparatus is limited to the elucidation of obscure points, the explanation of some allusions and the clarification of critical points. To make the lectures easier to read, each lecture is pre ceded by a brief summary that indicates its principal articulations. 9
The text of the course is followed by the summary published by the Annuaire du College de France. Foucault usually wrote these in June, some time after the end of the course. It was an opportunity for him to pick out retrospectively the intention and objectives ol the course. It consti tutes the best introduction to the course.
Each volume ends with a "context" for which the course editors are responsible. It seeks to provide the reader with elements of the bio- graphical, ideological, and political context, situating the course within the published work and providing indications concerning its place within the corpus used in order to facilitate understanding and to avoid misinterpretations that might arise from a neglect of the circumstances in which each course was developed and delivered.
Psychiatric Power, the course delivered in 1973 and 1974, is edited by Jacques Lagrange.
*
A new aspect of Michel Foucault's "oeuvre" is published with this edition of the College de France courses.
Strictly speaking it is not a matter of unpublished work, since this edition reproduces words uttered publicly by Foucault, excluding the often highly developed written material he used to support his lectures. Daniel Defert possesses Michel Foucault's notes and he is to be warmly thanked for allowing the editors to consult them.
This edition of the College de France courses was authorized by Michel Foucault's heirs who wanted to be able to satisfy the strong demand for their publication, in France as elsewhere, and to do this under indisputably responsible conditions. The editors have tried to be equal to the degree ol conlidence placed in them.
FRANCOIS EWALD AND ALESSANDRO FONTANA
? 1. Michel Foucault concluded a short document drawn up in support of his candidacy with these words: "We should undertake the history ol systems of thought. " "Titres et travaux," in Dils et Ecrits, 195/l-19S8, four volumes, ed. Daniel Defert and Francois Ewald (Paris: Gallimard, 1994) vol. 1, p. 846; English translation, "Candidacy Presentation: College de France," in The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954-1984, vol. 1: Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow, trans. Robert Hurley and others (New York: The New Press, 1997) p. 9.
2. It was published by Gallimard in May 1971 with the title VOrdre du discours (Paris). English translation: "The Order of Discourse," trans. Rupert Swyer, appendix to M. Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge (New York: Pantheon, 1972).
3. This was Foucault's practice until the start of the 1980s.
4. Within the framework of the College de France.
5. In 1976, in the vain hope of reducing the size of the audience, Michel Foucault changed the
time of his course from 17/i5 to 9. 00. See the beginning of the lirst lecture (7 January 1976) ol "1/ Jaut defendre la societe". Cours au College de France, 1976 (Pans: Gallimard/Seuil, 1997); English translation, "Society Must be Defended". Lectures at the College de France 1975-1976, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003).
6. Gerard Petitjean, "Les Grands Pretres de I'universite Iranc. aise," Lc Nouvel Observateur, 1 April 1975-
7. See especially, "Nietzsche, la genealogie, I'histoire," in Dils et Ecrils, vol. 2, p. 137. English translation, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," trans. Donald F. Brouchard and Sherry Simon in, The Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954-1984, vol. 2: Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, ed. James Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley and others (New York: The New Press, 1998), pp. 369 92.
8. We have made use ol the recordings made by Gilbert Burlet and Jacques Lagrange in particular. These are deposited in the College de France and the Institut Memoires de I'Edition Contemporaine.
9. At the end of the book, the criteria and solutions adopted by the editors ol this year's course are set out in the "Course context. "
Foreword xiii
? INTRODUCTION Arnold I. Davidson
MICHEL FOUCAULT'S CENTRAL CONTRIBUTION to political philosophy was his progressive development and refinement of a new conception of power, one that put into question the two reigning conceptions of power, the juridical conception found in classical liberal theories and the Marxist conception organized around the notions of State apparatus, dominant class, mechanisms of conservation, and juridical superstruc- ture. If the first volume of his history of sexuality, La Volonte de savoir (1976), is a culminating point of this dimension of Foucault's work, his courses throughout the 1970s return again and again to the problem of how to analyze power, continually adding historical and philosophical details that help us to see the full import and implications of his ana- lytics of power. At the beginning of the chapter "Methode" in La Volonte de savoir Foucault warns his readers against several misunderstandings that may be occasioned by the use of the word "power," misunder standings concerning the identity, the form, and the unity of power. Power should not be identified, according to Foucault, with the set of institutions and apparatuses in the State; it does not have the form of rules or law; finally, it does not have the global unity of a general system of domination whose effects would pass through the entire social body. Neither state institutions, nor law, nor general effects of domination constitute the basic elements of an adequate analysis of how power works in modern societies. 1 Without having yet developed all of the tools of his own analysis, Psychiatric Power already exhibits Foucault's aware ness of the shortcomings of available conceptions of power, and nowhere more clearly than in his own critique of notions implicit or explicit in
? his Histoire de lafolk. Foucault's dissatisfaction with his previous analy- sis of asylum power centers around two basic features ol the analysis in Histoire de lafolie: first, the privileged role he gave to the "perception of madness" instead of starting, as he does in Psychiatric Power, from an apparatus of power itself; second, the use of notions that now seem to him to be "rusty locks with which we cannot get very far" and that therefore compromise his analysis of power as it is articulated in Histoire de lafolie. 2
As regards this second point, Foucault's critique of his own use of the notions of violence, of institution, and of the family can be seen in ret- rospect to be an important part of his development of that alternative model of power that will be at the center of Surveiller et punir and La Volonte de savoir. In effect, Foucault's criticisms here take aim precisely at assumptions concerning the identity, the form, and the unity of power. Rather than thinking of power as the exercise of unbridled violence, one should think of it as the "physical exercise of an unbalanced force" (in the sense of an unequal, non symmetrical force), but a force that acts within "a rational, calculated, and controlled game of the exercise of power. '0 Instead of conceptualizing psychiatric power in terms of insti tutions, with their regularities and rules, one has to understand psychi- atric practice in terms of "imbalances of power" with the tactical uses of "networks, currents, relays, points of support, differences of potential" that characterize a form of power/1 Finally, in order to understand the functioning of asylum power, one cannot invoke the paradigm of the family, as if psychiatric power "does no more than reproduce the family to the advantage of, or on the demand of, a form of State control orga- nized by a State apparatus"; there is no foundational model that can be projected onto all levels of society, but rather different strategies that allow relations of power to take on a certain coherence. 3 In La Volonte de savoir, with more conceptual precision, Foucault explicitly understands power in terms of a multiplicity of relations of force, of incessant tacti cal struggles and confrontations that affect the distribution and arrangement of these relations of force, and of the strategies in which these relations of force take effect, with their more general lines of integration, their patterns and crystallizations. 6 And the nominalism
advocated in La Volonte de savoir is present in practice in Psychiatric
Introduction xv
? xvi INTRODUCTION
Power: power is "the name that one gives to a complex strategic situation in a given society. "7
The stakes of this nominalism are evident in one of the first theoretical claims about power that Foucault makes in Psychiatric Power, a claim that, despite its apparent simplicity, already requires an entire reelaboration of our conception of power:
. . . power is never something that someone possesses, any more than it is something that emanates from someone. Power does not belong to anyone or even to a group; there is only power because there is dispersion, relays, networks, reciprocal supports, differ ences of potential, discrepancies, etcetera. It is in this system of dir ferences, which have to be analyzed, that power can begin to lunction. 8
This claim is the basis of Foucault's later insistence on "the strictly rela tional character of relationships of power" (and of relationships of resis tance), the fact that power "is produced at every moment, in every point, or rather in every relation Irom one point to another. "9 Foucault was never interested in providing a metaphysics of Power; his aim was an analysis of the techniques and technologies of power, where power is understood as relational, multiple, heterogeneous, and, of course, pro ductive. 10 Foucault went so far as once to proclaim, "power, it does not exist" so as to emphasize that, from his perspective, it is always bundles of relations, modifiable relations of force, never power in itself, that is to be studied--that is to say, to render the exercise of power intelligible, one should take up the point of view of "the moving base of relations of force that, by their inequality, continually lead to states of power, but always local and unstable. "" As late as 1987i, when the focus of his inter ests had already shifted, he stressed this point yet again: "I hardly employ the word power, and if I occasionally do, it is always as a short- hand with respect to the expression that I always use: relations of power.
I believe that it is precisely this relational conception ol power, with all ol its accompanying instruments of analysis, that allows Foucault to give his extraordinary historical reinterpretation ol the problem ol
? hysteria at the conclusion of Psychiatric Power. When in the final part of his lecture of 6 February Foucault takes up Charcot's treatment of hys terics and what he names "the great maneuvers of hysteria," he announces the angle of analysis he will adopt: "I will not try to analyze this in terms of the history of hysterics any more than in terms of psy chiatric knowledge of hysterics, but rather in terms ol battle, confronta- tion, reciprocal encirclement, of the laying of mirror traps |by which Foucault means traps that reflect one another], of investment and counter investment, of struggle for control between doctors and hysterics. "1* All of the terms in this description answer to his new analytics of power, with its "pseudo military vocabulary," that will provide the framework for his examination of a wide variety of historical phenomena during the 1970s. 1H And when he sets aside the idea of an epidemic of hysteria (a scientific-epistemological notion) in favor of an analysis focused on "the maelstrom of this battle" (le tourbillon de cette bataille) that sur rounds hysterical symptoms, one cannot help but hear an anticipation of the last line of Surveiller el punir where Foucault tells us that in those apparatuses of normalization that are intended "to provide relief, to cure, to help" one should hear "the rumbling of battle" (/e grondemenl de la balaille)P It is this rumbling, this maelstrom of battle that Foucault's perspective renders visible, a struggle that is effaced in a purely episte mological analysis and that is left out of sight within a theory of power built on a juridical and negative vocabulary. (Hence the way in which the "repressive hypothesis" renders imperceptible the multiplicity of possible points ol resistance. ) To take just one example, Foucault's ana lytics restores this relational dimension of battle to the great problem of simulation that was so crucial to the history of psychiatry; it enables him to treat simulation not as a theoretical problem, but as a process by which the mad actually responded to psychiatric power, a kind of "anti power," that is a modification ol the relations ol lorce, in the face ol the mechanisms ol psychiatric power--thus the appearance ol simulation not as a pathological phenomenon, but as a phenomenon of struggle. 16 As a result, lrom this point of view, hysterical simulation becomes "the militant underside |the militant reverse side] ol psychiatric power" and hysterics can be seen as "the true militants ol antipsychiatry. "1' Moreover, the elaboration of this microphysics of power does not require
Introduction X V l l
? xviii INTRODUCTION
Foucault to ignore the epistemological dimensions of the history of psychiatry, the discursive practices of psychiatric knowledge. On the contrary, it allows him to place these practices within a political history of truth, to reconnect these practices to the functioning of an apparatus of power, to link them to a level "that would allow discursive practice to be grasped at precisely the point where it is formed. "18 Psychiatric Power can be read as a kind of experiment in method, one that responds in his- torical detail to a set of questions that permeated the genealogical period of Foucault's work:
. . . to what extent can an apparatus of power produce statements, discourses and, consequently, all the forms of representation that may then [. . . ] derive from i t . . . How can this deployment of power, these tactics and strategies of power, give rise to assertions, negations, experiments (experiences^), and theories, in short to a game of truth? 19
At the very end of his course, when Foucault returns to the relations of power between hysteric and doctor, to hysterical resistance to medical power, the scene of sexuality is center stage. But the introduction of sex- uality into this scenario does not derive from the "power" of the doc tors, but rather from the hysterics themselves, as their putting into play of a point of resistance within the strategic field of existing relations of power. As a counter attack to the medical need to find an etiology for hysteria that will give its symptoms a pathological status, and more specifically (given the distributions of power-knowledge that surround the hysterical body) to find a trauma that will function as a "kind of invisible and pathological lesion which makes all of this a well and truly morbid whole," the hysteric will respond with the counter maneuver of a recounting of her sexual life, with all of its possible traumatism, thereby effecting a redistribution of force relations and a new configura tion of power.
. . . w h a t will the patients do with this injunction to find the trauma that persists in the symptoms? Into the breach opened by this injunction they will push their life, their real, everyday life,
? that is to say their sexual life. It is precisely this sexual life that they will recount, that they will connect up with the hospital and endlessly reactualize in the hospital. 20
And Foucault draws the following remarkable conclusion, which needs to be underlined and related, after the fact, to the context of his later history of sexuality:
It seems to me that this kind of bacchanal, this sexual pantomime, is not the as yet undeciphered residue of the hysterical syndrome. My impression is that this sexual bacchanal should be taken as the counter-maneuver by which the hysterics responded to the ascrip- tion of trauma: You want to find the cause of my symptoms, the cause that will enable you to pathologize them and enable you to function as a doctor; you want this trauma, well, you will get all my life, and you won't be able to avoid hearing me recount my life and, at the same time, seeing me mime my life anew and endlessly reactualize it in my attacks!
So this sexuality is not an indecipherable remainder but the hysteric's victory cry, the last maneuver by which they finally get the better of the neurologists and silence them: If you want symp- toms too, something functional; if you want to make your hypno- sis natural and each of your injunctions to cause the kind of symptoms you can take as natural; if you want to use me to denounce the simulators, well then, you really will have to hear what I want to say and see what I want to do! 21
This victory cry or the hysteric, although a genuine cry of victory, is not a definitive cry. Like all triumphs within the field of mobile and reversible power relations, one can be sure that it will be met by further tactical interventions, actions intended to modify the new disposition of force relations, rearranging yet again the existing relations of power. If it is the hysteric herself who, from within the field of power relations, imposes the sexual body on the neurologists and doctors, these latter, according to Foucault, could respond with one ol two possible attitudes. They could either make use of these sexual connotations to discredit
Introduction xix
? xx INTRODUCTION
hysteria as a genuine illness, as did Babinski, or they could attempt to circumvent this new hysterical maneuver by surrounding it once more medically--"this new investment will be the medical, psychiatric, and psychoanalytic take over of sexuality. "22 History has taught us that the second response would be the triumphant one. And the first volume of Foucault's history of sexuality picks up the battle where Psychiatric Power left off, with the codification of scientia sexualis and the solidification of the apparatus of sexuality, with a new medical victory cry in favor of sexuality. Indeed, the "hysterisation" of women's bodies is one of the four great strategic ensembles with respect to sex that Foucault singles out as having attained an historically noteworthy "efficacity" in the order of power and "productivity" in the order of knowledge. 23 The effects of an initially disruptive recounting of her sexual life by the hysteric will be reorganized by means of the constitution of a scientific modality of confession; the traumas of sexuality will become integrated into those procedures of individualization that produce our subjection. 27' If Charcot could not see or speak of this sexuality, the later history of psychiatry would find it everywhere, would insist on putting sex into discourse, would enjoin its patients to speak of their sexuality. When the science of the subject began to revolve around the question of sex, the hysteric's victory was effectively countered by new tactics and strategies of power, and the reactualization of one's sexual life was divested ol its potential ol resistance and became a practice now crucial to the functioning of psychiatric power. That is why Foucault's histonco-pohtical project will be "to define the strategies of power which are immanent to this will to know" that continues to encircle sexuality. 2S
It is in this light that we should read the last sentence ol Psychiatric Power, a phrase that might have seemed enigmatic when pronounced by Foucault on 6 February 1977i, but whose force is quite clear in the context ol La Volonte de savoir:
By breaking down the door ol the asylum, by ceasing to be mad so as
to become patients, by finally getting through to a true doctor, that
is to say the neurologist, and by providing him with genuine func- tional symptoms, the hysterics, to their greater pleasure, but doubtless to our greater misfortune, gave rise to a medicine of sexuality. 26
? This final diagnosis, namely that the great pleasure of the hysteric's vie tory became the great misfortune of our subjection to the apparatus of sexuality, focuses our attention on that moving stratum of force relations that underlies the instability, the transformability, of relations of power/resistance. If today the sexual body is no longer primarily the hysterical body, but rather, let us say, the perverse body, it remains up to us to learn to hear anew the rumbling of the current battle. Only in this way will we be able "to determine what is the principal danger" and "to render problematic everything that is habitual"--thus we will be able to put into movement the points of support for our counter attack against the apparatus of sexuality. 27
Introduction xxi
? XX11 INTRODUCTION
1. Michel Foucault, Histore de la sexualite, vol. 1, La Volonte de savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), p. 121.
2. This volume, pp. 13 14.
3. This volume, p. 14.
4. This volume, p. 15-
5. This volume, p. 16.
6. Michel Foucault, La Volonte de savoir, pp. 121 122.
7. Ibid. , p. 123.
Psychiatric Power
LECTURES AT THE COLLEGE DE FRANCE, 1973-74
Edited by Jacques Lagrange
General Editors: Francois Ewald and Alessandro Fontana
English Series Editor: Arnold I. Davidson TRANSLATED BY GRAHAM BURCHELL
liberte >>Egalite - Fraternity REPUBLIQUE FRANCAISE
This hook is supported hy the French Ministry ol Foreign Allairs, as part ol the Burgess programme run hy the Cultural Department ol ,hc Frcnch Embassy in London.
(www. lrenchhooknews. com)
? PSYCHIATRIC POWER
(C) Editions du Seuil/Gallimard, 2003. Edition established under the direction of Francois Ewald and Alessandro Fontana, by Jacques Lagrange. Translation (C) Graham Burchell, 2006. Introduction (C) Arnold I. Davidson, 2006.
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First published in 2006 by
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? CONTENTS
Foreword: Francois Ewald and Alessandro Fontana
Introduction: Arnold I. Davidson Translator's Note
one
7 NOVEMBER 1973
The space of the asylum and disciplinary order. ^
process and "moral treatment. " ^ Scenes of curing. ^ Changes made by the coursefrom the approach o^Histoire de la folie;
1. From an analysis of "representations" to an "analytics of power"; 2. From "violence" to the "microphysics of power";
3. From "institutional regularities" to the "arrangements" of power.
14 NOVEMBER 1973
Scene of a cure: George HI. From the "macrophysics of sovereignty " to the "microphysics of disciplinary power. " ^ The newfigure of the madman. ^ Little encyclopedia of scenes of cures. ^ The practice of hypnosis and hysteria. ^ The psychoanalytic scene; the antipsychiatric scene. ^
Mary Barnes at Kingsley Hall. ^ Manipulation
of madness and stratagem of truth: Mason Cox.
two
Therapeutic
? VI
CONTENTS
three
21 NOVEMBER 1973 39
four
Genealogy of "disciplinary power. " The "power of sovereignty. yy The subjectfunction in disciplinary power and in the power of sovereignty. ^ Forms of disciplinary power: army,
police, apprenticeship, workshop, school. ^ Disciplinary power as "normalizing agency. " ^ Technology of disciplinary power and constitution of the "individual. " ^ Emergence of the human sciences.
28 NOVEMBER 1973
Elementsfor a history of disciplinary apparatuses: religious communities in the Middle Ages; pedagogical colonisation of youth; the Jesuit missions to Paraguay; the army; workshops;
workers' cities. ^ Theformali^ation of these apparatuses in Jeremy Bentham's model of the Panopticon. ^ The family
institution and emergence of the Psy function.
5 DECEMBER 1973
The asylum and thefamily. From interdiction to confinement. The break between the asylum and thefamily. ^ The asylum; a curing machine. nu Typology of "corporal apparatuses
(appareils corporels) ". ^ The madman and the child. r^f Clinics (maisons de sante). ^ Disciplinary apparatuses andfamily power.
12 DECEMBER 1973
Constitution of the child as target of psychiatric
intervention. ^ A family-asylum utopia: the Clermont-en-Oise asylum. ~ From psychiatry as "ambiguous master" of reality and truth in proto-psychiatric practices to psychiatry as "agent of intensification " of reality. ^ Psychiatric power and discourse of truth. ^ The problem of simulation and the insurrection of the hysterics. ^ The question of the birth of psychoanalysis.
63
five
93
six
123
seven
19 DECEMBER 1973 17l3
Psychiatric power. ^ A treatment by Francois Leuret and its strategic elements: 1-creating an imbalance of power; 2-the ruse
? eight
of language; 3-the management of needs; 4-the statement of truth. ^ The pleasure of the illness. ^ The asylum apparatus ('dispositif).
9 JANUARY 1974
Psychiatric power and the practice of "direction". ^ The game of "reality " in the asylum. ^ The asylum, a medically demarcated space and the question of its medical or administrative direction. ^ The tokens of psychiatric knowledge: (a) the technique of questioning; (b) the interplay of medication and punishment; (c) the clinical
presentation. ^ Asylum "microphysics of power. " ^ Emergence of the Psyfunction and of neuropathology. ^ The triple destiny of psychiatric power.
16JANUARY 1974
The modes of generalization of psychiatric power and the psychiatrixation of childhood. ^ 1. The theoretical specification
of idiocy. The criterion of development. ^ Emergence of a psychopathology of idiocy and mental retardation. Edouard
Seguin: instinct and abnormality. ^ 2. The institutional annexation of idiocy by psychiatric power. ^ The "moral treatment" of idiots: Seguin. ^ The process of confinement and the stigmati\ation of the dangerousness of idiots. ^ Recourse to the notion of degeneration.
23 JANUARY 1974
Psychiatric power and the question of truth: questioning and confession; magnetism and hypnosis; drugs. ^ Elementsfor a history of truth: 1. The truth-event and itsforms: judicial, alchemical and medical practices. ^ Transition to a technology of demonstrative truth. Its elements: (a) procedures of inquiry; (b) institution of a subject of knowledge; (c) ruling out the crisis in medicine and psychiatry and its supports: the disciplinary space of the asylum, recourse to pathological anatomy; relationships between madness and
crime. ^ Psychiatric power and hysterical resistance.
173
nine
201
ten
233
Contents vii
? vni CONTENTS
eleven 30 JANUARY 1977I
The problem of diagnosis in medicine and psychiatry. ^ The
place of the body in psychiatric nosology: the model of general paralysis. ^ Thefate of the notion of crisis in medicine and psychiatry. ^ The test of reality in psychiatry and its forms:
1. Psychiatricquestioning(l'interrogatoire) andconfession. The ritual of clinical presentation. Note on "pathological heredity" and degeneration. ^ 2. Drugs. Moreau de Tours and hashish. Madness and dreams. ^ 3. Magnetism and hypnosis. The discovery of the "neurological body. "
265
twelve 6 FEBRUARY 1974 297 The emergence of the neurological body: Broca and Duchenne
de Boulogne. ^ Illnesses of differential diagnosis and illnesses of absolute diagnosis. ^ The model of "generalparalysis" and the neuroses. ^ The battle of hysteria: 1. The organisation of a
"symptomatological scenario. " ^ 2. The maneuver of the "functional mannequin " and hypnosis. The question of
simulation. ^ sexual body.
Course Summary Course Context Index of Names Index of Notions Index of Places
3. Neurosis and trauma. The irruption of the
335
3zl9 369 376 383
? FOREWORD
MICHEL FOUCAULT TAUGHT AT the College de France From January 1971 until his death in June 1984 (with the exception of 1977 when he took a sabbatical year). The title of his chair was "The History ol Systems of Thought. "
On the proposal of Jules Vuillemin, the chair was created on 30 November 1969 by the general assembly of the professors of the College de France and replaced that of "The History of Philosophical Thought" held by Jean Hyppolite until his death. The same assembly elected Michel Foucault to the new chair on 12 April 1970. ' He was 43 years old.
Michel Foucault's inaugural lecture was delivered on 2 December 1970. 2 Teaching at the College de France is governed by particular rules. Professors must provide 26 hours of teaching a year (with the possibil ity of a maximum of half this total being given in the form of seminars^). Each year they must present their original research and this obliges them to change the content of their teaching for each course. Courses and seminars are completely open; no enrolment or qualification is required and the professors do not award any qualifications/1 In the ter minology of the College de France, the prolessors do not have students but only auditors.
Michel Foucault's courses were held every Wednesday from January to March. The huge audience made up ol students, teachers, researchers and the curious, including many who came Irom outside France, required two amphitheaters of the College de France. Foucault olten complained about the distance between himsell and his "public" and ol how lew exchanges the course made possible. 5 He would have liked a seminar in which real collective work could take place and made a number of attempts to bring
? X
FOREWORD
this about. In the final years he devoted a long period to answering his auditors' questions at the end of each course.
This is how Gerard Petitjean, a journalist from Le Nouvel Observateur, described the atmosphere at Foucault's lectures in 1975:
When Foucault enters the amphitheater, brisk and dynamic like someone who plunges into the water, he steps over bodies to reach his chair, pushes away the cassette recorders so he can put down his papers, removes his jacket, lights a lamp and sets off at full speed. His voice is strong and effective, amplified by loudspeakers that are the only concession to modernism in a hall that is barely lit by light spread from stucco bowls. The hall has three hundred places and there are five hundred people packed together, filling the smallest free space . . . There is no oratorical effect. It is clear and terribly effective. There is absolutely no concession to impro- visation. Foucault has twelve hours each year to explain in a pub- lic course the direction taken by his research in the year just ended. So everything is concentrated and he fills the margins like correspondents who have too much to say for the space available to them. At 19. 15 Foucault stops. The students rush towards his desk; not to speak to him, but to stop their cassette recorders. There are no questions. In the pushing and shoving Foucault is alone. Foucault remarks: "It should be possible to discuss what I have put forward. Sometimes, when it has not been a good lecture, it would need very little, just one question, to put everything straight. However, this question never comes. The group effect in France makes any genuine discussion impossible. And as there is no feedback, the course is theatricalized. My relationship with the people there is like that of an actor or an acrobat. And when I have finished speaking, a sensation of total solitude . . . "6
Foucault approached his teaching as a researcher: explorations for a future book as well as the opening up of fields of problematization were formulated as an invitation to possible future researchers. This is why the courses at the College de France do not duplicate the published books. They are not sketches for the books even though both books and courses
? share certain themes. They have their own status. They arise from a specific discursive regime within the set of Foucault's "philosophical activities. " In particular they set out the programme for a genealogy of knowledge/power relations, which are the terms in which he thinks of his work from the beginning of the 1970s, as opposed to the programme of an archeology of discursive formations that previously orientated his work. 7
The courses also performed a role in contemporary reality. Those who followed his courses were not only held in thrall by the narrative that unfolded week by week and seduced by the rigorous exposition, they also found a perspective on contemporary reality. Michel Foucault's art con- sisted in using history to cut diagonally through contemporary reality. He could speak of Nietzsche or Aristotle, of expert psychiatric opinion or the Christian pastoral, but those who attended his lectures always took from what he said a perspective on the present and contemporary events. Foucault's specific strength in his courses was the subtle interplay between learned erudition, personal commitment, and work on the event.
*
With their development and refinement m the 1970s, Foucault's desk was quickly invaded by cassette recorders. The courses--and some seminars--have thus been preserved.
This edition is based on the words delivered in public by Foucault. It gives a transcription of these words that is as literal as possible. 8 We would have liked to present it as such. However, the transition from an oral to a written presentation calls for editorial intervention: At the very least it requires the introduction of punctuation and division into para- graphs. Our principle has been always to remain as close as possible to the course actually delivered.
Summaries and repetitions have been removed whenever it seemed to be absolutely necessary. Interrupted sentences have been restored and faulty constructions corrected. Suspension points indicate that the recording is inaudible. When a sentence is obscure there is a conjectural integration or an addition between square brackets. An asterisk directing the reader to the bottom of the page indicates a significant divergence between the notes used by Foucault and the words actually
Foreword xi
? xii FOREWORD
uttered. Quotations have been checked and references to the texts used are indicated. The critical apparatus is limited to the elucidation of obscure points, the explanation of some allusions and the clarification of critical points. To make the lectures easier to read, each lecture is pre ceded by a brief summary that indicates its principal articulations. 9
The text of the course is followed by the summary published by the Annuaire du College de France. Foucault usually wrote these in June, some time after the end of the course. It was an opportunity for him to pick out retrospectively the intention and objectives ol the course. It consti tutes the best introduction to the course.
Each volume ends with a "context" for which the course editors are responsible. It seeks to provide the reader with elements of the bio- graphical, ideological, and political context, situating the course within the published work and providing indications concerning its place within the corpus used in order to facilitate understanding and to avoid misinterpretations that might arise from a neglect of the circumstances in which each course was developed and delivered.
Psychiatric Power, the course delivered in 1973 and 1974, is edited by Jacques Lagrange.
*
A new aspect of Michel Foucault's "oeuvre" is published with this edition of the College de France courses.
Strictly speaking it is not a matter of unpublished work, since this edition reproduces words uttered publicly by Foucault, excluding the often highly developed written material he used to support his lectures.
So everything is concentrated and he fills the margins like correspondents who have too much to say for the space available to them. At 19. 15 Foucault stops. The students rush towards his desk; not to speak to him, but to stop their cassette recorders. There are no questions. In the pushing and shoving Foucault is alone. Foucault remarks: "It should be possible to discuss what I have put forward. Sometimes, when it has not been a good lecture, it would need very little, just one question, to put everything straight. However, this question never comes. The group effect in France makes any genuine discussion impossible. And as there is no feedback, the course is theatricalized. My relationship with the people there is like that of an actor or an acrobat. And when I have finished speaking, a sensation of total solitude . . . "6
Foucault approached his teaching as a researcher: explorations for a future book as well as the opening up of fields of problematization were formulated as an invitation to possible future researchers. This is why the courses at the College de France do not duplicate the published books. They are not sketches for the books even though both books and courses
? share certain themes. They have their own status. They arise from a specific discursive regime within the set of Foucault's "philosophical activities. " In particular they set out the programme for a genealogy of knowledge/power relations, which are the terms in which he thinks of his work from the beginning of the 1970s, as opposed to the programme of an archeology of discursive formations that previously orientated his work. 7
The courses also performed a role in contemporary reality. Those who followed his courses were not only held in thrall by the narrative that unfolded week by week and seduced by the rigorous exposition, they also found a perspective on contemporary reality. Michel Foucault's art con- sisted in using history to cut diagonally through contemporary reality. He could speak of Nietzsche or Aristotle, of expert psychiatric opinion or the Christian pastoral, but those who attended his lectures always took from what he said a perspective on the present and contemporary events. Foucault's specific strength in his courses was the subtle interplay between learned erudition, personal commitment, and work on the event.
*
With their development and refinement m the 1970s, Foucault's desk was quickly invaded by cassette recorders. The courses--and some seminars--have thus been preserved.
This edition is based on the words delivered in public by Foucault. It gives a transcription of these words that is as literal as possible. 8 We would have liked to present it as such. However, the transition from an oral to a written presentation calls for editorial intervention: At the very least it requires the introduction of punctuation and division into para- graphs. Our principle has been always to remain as close as possible to the course actually delivered.
Summaries and repetitions have been removed whenever it seemed to be absolutely necessary. Interrupted sentences have been restored and faulty constructions corrected. Suspension points indicate that the recording is inaudible. When a sentence is obscure there is a conjectural integration or an addition between square brackets. An asterisk directing the reader to the bottom of the page indicates a significant divergence between the notes used by Foucault and the words actually
Foreword xi
? xii FOREWORD
uttered. Quotations have been checked and references to the texts used are indicated. The critical apparatus is limited to the elucidation of obscure points, the explanation of some allusions and the clarification of critical points. To make the lectures easier to read, each lecture is pre ceded by a brief summary that indicates its principal articulations. 9
The text of the course is followed by the summary published by the Annuaire du College de France. Foucault usually wrote these in June, some time after the end of the course. It was an opportunity for him to pick out retrospectively the intention and objectives ol the course. It consti tutes the best introduction to the course.
Each volume ends with a "context" for which the course editors are responsible. It seeks to provide the reader with elements of the bio- graphical, ideological, and political context, situating the course within the published work and providing indications concerning its place within the corpus used in order to facilitate understanding and to avoid misinterpretations that might arise from a neglect of the circumstances in which each course was developed and delivered.
Psychiatric Power, the course delivered in 1973 and 1974, is edited by Jacques Lagrange.
*
A new aspect of Michel Foucault's "oeuvre" is published with this edition of the College de France courses.
Strictly speaking it is not a matter of unpublished work, since this edition reproduces words uttered publicly by Foucault, excluding the often highly developed written material he used to support his lectures. Daniel Defert possesses Michel Foucault's notes and he is to be warmly thanked for allowing the editors to consult them.
This edition of the College de France courses was authorized by Michel Foucault's heirs who wanted to be able to satisfy the strong demand for their publication, in France as elsewhere, and to do this under indisputably responsible conditions. The editors have tried to be equal to the degree ol conlidence placed in them.
FRANCOIS EWALD AND ALESSANDRO FONTANA
? 1. Michel Foucault concluded a short document drawn up in support of his candidacy with these words: "We should undertake the history ol systems of thought. " "Titres et travaux," in Dils et Ecrits, 195/l-19S8, four volumes, ed. Daniel Defert and Francois Ewald (Paris: Gallimard, 1994) vol. 1, p. 846; English translation, "Candidacy Presentation: College de France," in The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954-1984, vol. 1: Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow, trans. Robert Hurley and others (New York: The New Press, 1997) p. 9.
2. It was published by Gallimard in May 1971 with the title VOrdre du discours (Paris). English translation: "The Order of Discourse," trans. Rupert Swyer, appendix to M. Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge (New York: Pantheon, 1972).
3. This was Foucault's practice until the start of the 1980s.
4. Within the framework of the College de France.
5. In 1976, in the vain hope of reducing the size of the audience, Michel Foucault changed the
time of his course from 17/i5 to 9. 00. See the beginning of the lirst lecture (7 January 1976) ol "1/ Jaut defendre la societe". Cours au College de France, 1976 (Pans: Gallimard/Seuil, 1997); English translation, "Society Must be Defended". Lectures at the College de France 1975-1976, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003).
6. Gerard Petitjean, "Les Grands Pretres de I'universite Iranc. aise," Lc Nouvel Observateur, 1 April 1975-
7. See especially, "Nietzsche, la genealogie, I'histoire," in Dils et Ecrils, vol. 2, p. 137. English translation, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," trans. Donald F. Brouchard and Sherry Simon in, The Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954-1984, vol. 2: Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, ed. James Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley and others (New York: The New Press, 1998), pp. 369 92.
8. We have made use ol the recordings made by Gilbert Burlet and Jacques Lagrange in particular. These are deposited in the College de France and the Institut Memoires de I'Edition Contemporaine.
9. At the end of the book, the criteria and solutions adopted by the editors ol this year's course are set out in the "Course context. "
Foreword xiii
? INTRODUCTION Arnold I. Davidson
MICHEL FOUCAULT'S CENTRAL CONTRIBUTION to political philosophy was his progressive development and refinement of a new conception of power, one that put into question the two reigning conceptions of power, the juridical conception found in classical liberal theories and the Marxist conception organized around the notions of State apparatus, dominant class, mechanisms of conservation, and juridical superstruc- ture. If the first volume of his history of sexuality, La Volonte de savoir (1976), is a culminating point of this dimension of Foucault's work, his courses throughout the 1970s return again and again to the problem of how to analyze power, continually adding historical and philosophical details that help us to see the full import and implications of his ana- lytics of power. At the beginning of the chapter "Methode" in La Volonte de savoir Foucault warns his readers against several misunderstandings that may be occasioned by the use of the word "power," misunder standings concerning the identity, the form, and the unity of power. Power should not be identified, according to Foucault, with the set of institutions and apparatuses in the State; it does not have the form of rules or law; finally, it does not have the global unity of a general system of domination whose effects would pass through the entire social body. Neither state institutions, nor law, nor general effects of domination constitute the basic elements of an adequate analysis of how power works in modern societies. 1 Without having yet developed all of the tools of his own analysis, Psychiatric Power already exhibits Foucault's aware ness of the shortcomings of available conceptions of power, and nowhere more clearly than in his own critique of notions implicit or explicit in
? his Histoire de lafolk. Foucault's dissatisfaction with his previous analy- sis of asylum power centers around two basic features ol the analysis in Histoire de lafolie: first, the privileged role he gave to the "perception of madness" instead of starting, as he does in Psychiatric Power, from an apparatus of power itself; second, the use of notions that now seem to him to be "rusty locks with which we cannot get very far" and that therefore compromise his analysis of power as it is articulated in Histoire de lafolie. 2
As regards this second point, Foucault's critique of his own use of the notions of violence, of institution, and of the family can be seen in ret- rospect to be an important part of his development of that alternative model of power that will be at the center of Surveiller et punir and La Volonte de savoir. In effect, Foucault's criticisms here take aim precisely at assumptions concerning the identity, the form, and the unity of power. Rather than thinking of power as the exercise of unbridled violence, one should think of it as the "physical exercise of an unbalanced force" (in the sense of an unequal, non symmetrical force), but a force that acts within "a rational, calculated, and controlled game of the exercise of power. '0 Instead of conceptualizing psychiatric power in terms of insti tutions, with their regularities and rules, one has to understand psychi- atric practice in terms of "imbalances of power" with the tactical uses of "networks, currents, relays, points of support, differences of potential" that characterize a form of power/1 Finally, in order to understand the functioning of asylum power, one cannot invoke the paradigm of the family, as if psychiatric power "does no more than reproduce the family to the advantage of, or on the demand of, a form of State control orga- nized by a State apparatus"; there is no foundational model that can be projected onto all levels of society, but rather different strategies that allow relations of power to take on a certain coherence. 3 In La Volonte de savoir, with more conceptual precision, Foucault explicitly understands power in terms of a multiplicity of relations of force, of incessant tacti cal struggles and confrontations that affect the distribution and arrangement of these relations of force, and of the strategies in which these relations of force take effect, with their more general lines of integration, their patterns and crystallizations. 6 And the nominalism
advocated in La Volonte de savoir is present in practice in Psychiatric
Introduction xv
? xvi INTRODUCTION
Power: power is "the name that one gives to a complex strategic situation in a given society. "7
The stakes of this nominalism are evident in one of the first theoretical claims about power that Foucault makes in Psychiatric Power, a claim that, despite its apparent simplicity, already requires an entire reelaboration of our conception of power:
. . . power is never something that someone possesses, any more than it is something that emanates from someone. Power does not belong to anyone or even to a group; there is only power because there is dispersion, relays, networks, reciprocal supports, differ ences of potential, discrepancies, etcetera. It is in this system of dir ferences, which have to be analyzed, that power can begin to lunction. 8
This claim is the basis of Foucault's later insistence on "the strictly rela tional character of relationships of power" (and of relationships of resis tance), the fact that power "is produced at every moment, in every point, or rather in every relation Irom one point to another. "9 Foucault was never interested in providing a metaphysics of Power; his aim was an analysis of the techniques and technologies of power, where power is understood as relational, multiple, heterogeneous, and, of course, pro ductive. 10 Foucault went so far as once to proclaim, "power, it does not exist" so as to emphasize that, from his perspective, it is always bundles of relations, modifiable relations of force, never power in itself, that is to be studied--that is to say, to render the exercise of power intelligible, one should take up the point of view of "the moving base of relations of force that, by their inequality, continually lead to states of power, but always local and unstable. "" As late as 1987i, when the focus of his inter ests had already shifted, he stressed this point yet again: "I hardly employ the word power, and if I occasionally do, it is always as a short- hand with respect to the expression that I always use: relations of power.
I believe that it is precisely this relational conception ol power, with all ol its accompanying instruments of analysis, that allows Foucault to give his extraordinary historical reinterpretation ol the problem ol
? hysteria at the conclusion of Psychiatric Power. When in the final part of his lecture of 6 February Foucault takes up Charcot's treatment of hys terics and what he names "the great maneuvers of hysteria," he announces the angle of analysis he will adopt: "I will not try to analyze this in terms of the history of hysterics any more than in terms of psy chiatric knowledge of hysterics, but rather in terms ol battle, confronta- tion, reciprocal encirclement, of the laying of mirror traps |by which Foucault means traps that reflect one another], of investment and counter investment, of struggle for control between doctors and hysterics. "1* All of the terms in this description answer to his new analytics of power, with its "pseudo military vocabulary," that will provide the framework for his examination of a wide variety of historical phenomena during the 1970s. 1H And when he sets aside the idea of an epidemic of hysteria (a scientific-epistemological notion) in favor of an analysis focused on "the maelstrom of this battle" (le tourbillon de cette bataille) that sur rounds hysterical symptoms, one cannot help but hear an anticipation of the last line of Surveiller el punir where Foucault tells us that in those apparatuses of normalization that are intended "to provide relief, to cure, to help" one should hear "the rumbling of battle" (/e grondemenl de la balaille)P It is this rumbling, this maelstrom of battle that Foucault's perspective renders visible, a struggle that is effaced in a purely episte mological analysis and that is left out of sight within a theory of power built on a juridical and negative vocabulary. (Hence the way in which the "repressive hypothesis" renders imperceptible the multiplicity of possible points ol resistance. ) To take just one example, Foucault's ana lytics restores this relational dimension of battle to the great problem of simulation that was so crucial to the history of psychiatry; it enables him to treat simulation not as a theoretical problem, but as a process by which the mad actually responded to psychiatric power, a kind of "anti power," that is a modification ol the relations ol lorce, in the face ol the mechanisms ol psychiatric power--thus the appearance ol simulation not as a pathological phenomenon, but as a phenomenon of struggle. 16 As a result, lrom this point of view, hysterical simulation becomes "the militant underside |the militant reverse side] ol psychiatric power" and hysterics can be seen as "the true militants ol antipsychiatry. "1' Moreover, the elaboration of this microphysics of power does not require
Introduction X V l l
? xviii INTRODUCTION
Foucault to ignore the epistemological dimensions of the history of psychiatry, the discursive practices of psychiatric knowledge. On the contrary, it allows him to place these practices within a political history of truth, to reconnect these practices to the functioning of an apparatus of power, to link them to a level "that would allow discursive practice to be grasped at precisely the point where it is formed. "18 Psychiatric Power can be read as a kind of experiment in method, one that responds in his- torical detail to a set of questions that permeated the genealogical period of Foucault's work:
. . . to what extent can an apparatus of power produce statements, discourses and, consequently, all the forms of representation that may then [. . . ] derive from i t . . . How can this deployment of power, these tactics and strategies of power, give rise to assertions, negations, experiments (experiences^), and theories, in short to a game of truth? 19
At the very end of his course, when Foucault returns to the relations of power between hysteric and doctor, to hysterical resistance to medical power, the scene of sexuality is center stage. But the introduction of sex- uality into this scenario does not derive from the "power" of the doc tors, but rather from the hysterics themselves, as their putting into play of a point of resistance within the strategic field of existing relations of power. As a counter attack to the medical need to find an etiology for hysteria that will give its symptoms a pathological status, and more specifically (given the distributions of power-knowledge that surround the hysterical body) to find a trauma that will function as a "kind of invisible and pathological lesion which makes all of this a well and truly morbid whole," the hysteric will respond with the counter maneuver of a recounting of her sexual life, with all of its possible traumatism, thereby effecting a redistribution of force relations and a new configura tion of power.
. . . w h a t will the patients do with this injunction to find the trauma that persists in the symptoms? Into the breach opened by this injunction they will push their life, their real, everyday life,
? that is to say their sexual life. It is precisely this sexual life that they will recount, that they will connect up with the hospital and endlessly reactualize in the hospital. 20
And Foucault draws the following remarkable conclusion, which needs to be underlined and related, after the fact, to the context of his later history of sexuality:
It seems to me that this kind of bacchanal, this sexual pantomime, is not the as yet undeciphered residue of the hysterical syndrome. My impression is that this sexual bacchanal should be taken as the counter-maneuver by which the hysterics responded to the ascrip- tion of trauma: You want to find the cause of my symptoms, the cause that will enable you to pathologize them and enable you to function as a doctor; you want this trauma, well, you will get all my life, and you won't be able to avoid hearing me recount my life and, at the same time, seeing me mime my life anew and endlessly reactualize it in my attacks!
So this sexuality is not an indecipherable remainder but the hysteric's victory cry, the last maneuver by which they finally get the better of the neurologists and silence them: If you want symp- toms too, something functional; if you want to make your hypno- sis natural and each of your injunctions to cause the kind of symptoms you can take as natural; if you want to use me to denounce the simulators, well then, you really will have to hear what I want to say and see what I want to do! 21
This victory cry or the hysteric, although a genuine cry of victory, is not a definitive cry. Like all triumphs within the field of mobile and reversible power relations, one can be sure that it will be met by further tactical interventions, actions intended to modify the new disposition of force relations, rearranging yet again the existing relations of power. If it is the hysteric herself who, from within the field of power relations, imposes the sexual body on the neurologists and doctors, these latter, according to Foucault, could respond with one ol two possible attitudes. They could either make use of these sexual connotations to discredit
Introduction xix
? xx INTRODUCTION
hysteria as a genuine illness, as did Babinski, or they could attempt to circumvent this new hysterical maneuver by surrounding it once more medically--"this new investment will be the medical, psychiatric, and psychoanalytic take over of sexuality. "22 History has taught us that the second response would be the triumphant one. And the first volume of Foucault's history of sexuality picks up the battle where Psychiatric Power left off, with the codification of scientia sexualis and the solidification of the apparatus of sexuality, with a new medical victory cry in favor of sexuality. Indeed, the "hysterisation" of women's bodies is one of the four great strategic ensembles with respect to sex that Foucault singles out as having attained an historically noteworthy "efficacity" in the order of power and "productivity" in the order of knowledge. 23 The effects of an initially disruptive recounting of her sexual life by the hysteric will be reorganized by means of the constitution of a scientific modality of confession; the traumas of sexuality will become integrated into those procedures of individualization that produce our subjection. 27' If Charcot could not see or speak of this sexuality, the later history of psychiatry would find it everywhere, would insist on putting sex into discourse, would enjoin its patients to speak of their sexuality. When the science of the subject began to revolve around the question of sex, the hysteric's victory was effectively countered by new tactics and strategies of power, and the reactualization of one's sexual life was divested ol its potential ol resistance and became a practice now crucial to the functioning of psychiatric power. That is why Foucault's histonco-pohtical project will be "to define the strategies of power which are immanent to this will to know" that continues to encircle sexuality. 2S
It is in this light that we should read the last sentence ol Psychiatric Power, a phrase that might have seemed enigmatic when pronounced by Foucault on 6 February 1977i, but whose force is quite clear in the context ol La Volonte de savoir:
By breaking down the door ol the asylum, by ceasing to be mad so as
to become patients, by finally getting through to a true doctor, that
is to say the neurologist, and by providing him with genuine func- tional symptoms, the hysterics, to their greater pleasure, but doubtless to our greater misfortune, gave rise to a medicine of sexuality. 26
? This final diagnosis, namely that the great pleasure of the hysteric's vie tory became the great misfortune of our subjection to the apparatus of sexuality, focuses our attention on that moving stratum of force relations that underlies the instability, the transformability, of relations of power/resistance. If today the sexual body is no longer primarily the hysterical body, but rather, let us say, the perverse body, it remains up to us to learn to hear anew the rumbling of the current battle. Only in this way will we be able "to determine what is the principal danger" and "to render problematic everything that is habitual"--thus we will be able to put into movement the points of support for our counter attack against the apparatus of sexuality. 27
Introduction xxi
? XX11 INTRODUCTION
1. Michel Foucault, Histore de la sexualite, vol. 1, La Volonte de savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), p. 121.
2. This volume, pp. 13 14.
3. This volume, p. 14.
4. This volume, p. 15-
5. This volume, p. 16.
6. Michel Foucault, La Volonte de savoir, pp. 121 122.
7. Ibid. , p. 123.
