No More Learning

? MF: We hit upon here one of the most destructive habits of contemporary thought. Perhaps even one of the most destructive of modem thought--in any case, of post-Hegelian thought. That is that the moment of the present is considered in history as the break, the chmax, the fulfillment, the retum of youth, etc. The solemnity with which everyone who has a philosophical discourse reflects his own time seems a stigma to me. I say this particularly because it happens to me and one finds it constantly in Nietzsche. One must probably find the humility to admit that the time of one's own life is not the one- time, basic, revolutionary moment of history, from which eve- rything begins and is completed. At the same time humility is needed to say without solemnity that the present time is rather exciting and demands an analysis. We must ask ourselves the question, what is today? In relation to the Kantian question, What is Enlightenment? One can say that it is the task of philosophy to explain what today is and what we are today, but without breast-beating drama and theatricality and main- taining that this moment is the greatest damnation or daybreak of the rising sun. No, it is a day like every other, or much more, a day which is never like another.
? Q: That brings up a lot of questions which you have posed yourself. What is today? Can one characterize this ep-
? 252 How Much Does It Cost. .
? och despite everything as a great fragmentation in regard to others, through deterritorialization and schizophrenia?
MF: I want to say about the task of a diagnosis of today that it does not consist only of a description of who we are, rather a hne of fragility of today to follow and understand, if and how what is, can no longer be what it is. In this sense, the description must be formulated in a kind of virtual break, which opens room, understood as a room of concrete freedom, that is possible transformation.
Q: Does the practical work of the intellectual focus on this place of the crack?
? MF: I believe so. The work of the intellect is to show that what is, does not have to be, what it is. Therefore this des- ignation and description of reality never has the value of a pre- scription according to the form "because this is, that is. " Therefore the retum to history makes sense in the respect that history shows that that which is was not always so. It unites casual movements into threads of a fragile and uncertain his- tory. Thus things were formed which give the impression of the greatest self-evidence. What reason considers its necessity or much more what various forms of rationality claim to be their necessity existence, has a history which we can deter- mine completely and recover from the tapestry of contingency. But this doesn't mean that these forms of rationality are irra- tional. They rest upon a foundation of human practices and human faces, because they are made they can be unmade--of course, assuming we know how they were made.
? Q: This work on the breaks is both descriptive and practical, is work on a particular place.
? . . For Reason to Tell the Truth? 253
? MF: Perhaps a place and perhaps work which must retum as a result of the questions asked there so far back into historical analysis.
Q: Is the work on the place of the break that which you call microphysics of power or analysis of power?
MF: A little. These forms of rationality in the proc- ess of dominance must be analyzed for themselves. These forms of rationality are alien to other forms of power like recognition or technology. On the contrary, there is an ex- change, transfer, interference. But it is impossible however to designate these three realms as the only and constant form of rationality. We find the same types again displaced, dense manifold circuits, but still no isomorphism.
Q: Sometimes or always?
MF: There are no universal rules which estabhsh the types of relationship between rationality and the processes of govemance.
? Q: I asked this question because a number of critics express the same criticism--like Jean Baudrillard*--which claims the beginning of microphysics reflects a situation in which power has been rendered irreparable through dissemina- tion. That you speak up at a point in time when capitalism has decomposed the subject so much that it is possible to realize that the subject was never anything but a multiphcity of posi- tions.
? MF: I'll talk about that soon but I started with some- thing else. First, when I examine the rationality of govemance, I seek to estabhsh circuits which are not isomorphisms. Sec-
? 254 How Much Does It Cost. .
? ond, when I speak about the relationships of power and the forms of rationality, which regulate and govern these, then I'm not speaking about the power, which governs all of society and superimposes its rationality on it. Relationships of power are manifold. They have various forms which can be executed within the family, inside an institution, an administration, be- tween a ruhng and subservient class in specific and common forms of rationality. It is a matter of a field of analysis and not a reference to a unique instance. Third, when I examine rela- tionships of power, I create no theory of power. It is how relationships of power interact, are determining elements in every relationship which I want to examine; between the re- flexivity of the subject and the discourse of truth when my question is: How can the subject tell the truth about itself? That is obvious for my examination of insanity. The subject was able to tell the truth about his insanity, because the struc- tures of the Other allowed him to. That was possible as a result of a specific kind of dominance, which some persons exerted over others.
? I am no theoretician of power. The question of power in itself doesn't interest me. When I did speak often about this question fo power, I did so because the given political analysis of the phenomenon of power could not be properly given jus- tice from the fine and small appearances which I wanted to recall, when I asked the question of the "dire-vrai" about oneself. If I "tell the truth" about myself, I constitute myself as subject by a certain number of relationships of power, which weigh upon me and which I lay upon others. I am not creating a theory of power or an analysis of contemporary power. I am working on the way the reflexivity of self to self has been estabhshed and which discourse of truth is tied to it. When I speak about the institutions of confinement in the 18th cen- tury, then I am speaking about the point in time of existing relationships of power. I take contemporary psychiatry for ex-
? . . For Reason to Tell the Truth? 255
? amination. A number of problems arise in the interdepend- ences of function of the institution. They point to a relatively
ancient history, which encompasses several centuries. I write the history or archaeology of the kind and way one tried in the 17th or 18th century to tell the truth about insanity. I want to show it as it existed at that time. If for example I described the criminal and system of punishment in the 18th century I have researched how the forms and practices of power in a small number of 18th century institutions, which can serve as a model, existed. Therefore, I do not find it correct at all to say
power is no longer the same. A
Translated by Mia Foret and Marion Martius.
Notes
? 1 Dominique Desanti, A Woman in Revolt: A Biography of Flora Tristan, trans, Elizabeth Zewin (New York: Crown, 1976); Les Staliniens, 1944-1956: une expe? rience politique
(Paris: Fayard, 1975).
? 2 Mikel Dufresne, The Sciences of Art (Westport, Conn,: Greenwood, 1963); Jean-Franc? ois Lyotard, Driftworks (New York: Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents Series, 1984).
3 Paul Ricoeur wrote extensively on hermeneutics. See, for example. The Conflict of Interpretations (Chicago: North- western University Press, 1974), and Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (Texas Christian Univ. Press, 1976).
Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). See also On the Line, trans. John Johnston (New York:
? 4
? 25(5 How Much Does It Cost. . .
Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents Series, 1983), and Nomadol- ogy: The War Machine, trans. Brian Massumi (New York: Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents Series, 1987).
5 Michel Foucault, "Nietzsche, Geneaology, History," Semiotext(e) (Vol III, No. 1,1978).
6 Jean Baudrillard, Forget Foucault (New York: Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents Series, 1987). See also Jean Baudrillard, In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities, trans. Paul Foss, John Johnston, and Paul Patton (New York: Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents Series, 1983); Simulations, trans. Philip Beitchman, Paul Foss, Paul Patton (New York: Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents Series, 1985); and The Ecstasy of Communications, trans. Bernard Schutze and Caroline Schutze(New York: Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents Series, 1988).
? 20
An Ethics of Pleasure
? ? Q; In your interview with geographers at Herodote, you said that architecture beocomes political at the end of the eighteenth century. Obviously, it was political in earlier peri- ods, too, such as during the Roman Empire. What is particular about the eighteenth century?
? MF: My statement was awkward in that form. Of course I did not mean to say that architecture was not political before, becoming so only at that time. I only meant to say that in the eighteenth century one sees the development of reflec- tion upon architecture as a function of the aims and techniques of the government of societies. One begins to see a form of political lietarature that addresses what the order of a society should be, what a city should be, given the requirements of the maintenance of order; given that one should avoid epidemics, avoid revolts, permit a decent and moral family life, and so on. In terms of these objectives, how is one to conceive of both
? 21
What Calls For Punishment?
? ? Q: Your book Discipline and Punish, published in 1974, fell Uke a meteor onto the domain of criminology and penal studies. Proposing an analysis of the penal system in the perspective of political tactics and the technology of power, this work collided with traditional conceptions of delinquency
and the social function of punishment. It has troubled repres- sive judges, at least those who examine the meaning of their work; it has shaken up a number of criminologists who hardly enjoyed having their discourse described as idle chatter. In- creasingly rare today are books on criminology that don't refer to Discipline and Punish as an incontrovertible work. How- ever, the penal system doesn't change and the "idle chatter" of criminologists continues invariably, as if one rendered homage to the theoretician of juridico-penal epistemology without being able to learn from his teachings, as if a totally airtight barrier existed between theory and practice. No doubt your intention was not to be a reformer, but can one imagine a politics of criminology that would take support from your analysis and try to draw from it certain lessons?
? 280 What Calls for Punishment?
? MF: Perhaps I first ought to explain precisely what I intended to do in this book. I didn't want to write a directly critical work, if one means by "critical" the denunciation of the drawbacks of today's penal system. Nor did I want to write an historical work about the institution, in the sense that I did not want to recount how the penal and carceral institution functioned in the course of the 19th century. I tried to pose another problem: to discover the system of thought, the form of rationality, which since the end of the 18th century has underlain the idea that the prison is in sum the best means, one of the most efficient and most rational, to punish in fi'actions in a society. It is clear that in doing this I had certain preoccu- pations concerning what one could do now. Indeed, it often appeared to me that in opposing as one did in the traditional way through reformism and revolution, one did not give one- self the means to think what could yield to a real, profound and radical transformation. It seems to me that very often in the reforms of the penal system one accepted implicitly and sometimes even explicitly the system of rationality that had been defined and put into place a long time ago, and that one tried simply to know what the institutions and the practices would be that would permit realization of the project and at- tanment of its ends. By isolating the system of rationality underlying punitive practices, I wanted to indicate what postu- lates of thought it was necessary to reexamine if one wanted to transform the penal system.
? I do not say that one had necessarily to free oneself from them; but I believe that it is very important when one wants to do a work of transformation to know not only what are the institutions and their real effects, but equally what is the type of thought that sustains them: what can one still ac- cept of this system of rationality? What part, on the contrary, deserves to be set aside, transformed, or abandoned? I had tried to do the same thing in regard to the history of psychiat-
? What Calls for Punishment? 281
? lie institutions. And it's true that I have been somewhat sur- prised and fairly disappointed to see that all that did not derive firom any enterprise of reflection and thought that might have been able to re-unite, around the same problem, very different people: judges, theoreticians of penal law, employees of peni- tentiary institutions, lawyers, social workers, and people with prison experience. It's true, on that side, no doubt for social and cultural reasons, that the 1970s have been extremely dis- appointing. Many criticisms have been launched in every di- rection; often these ideas have had certain influence, but there rarely has been a crystallization of questions posed as a collec- tive enterprise, to determine in any case what are the transfor- mations to be made. In any case, for my part and despite my desire, I have never had the possibility of a working contact with any professor of penal law, any judge, or any political party--that's obvious. Thus the Socialist Party, founded in
1972, which for nine years was able to prepare its assumption to power and which to a certain point echoed in its discourse several themes developed in the course of the 1960s and 1970s, never made a serious attempt to define in advance what its real practice would be when it came to power. It seems institutions, groups and political parties that might have been able to promote this work of reflection did nothing. . .
? Q: One has the impression that the conceptual sys- tem hasn't evolved at all. Although jurists and psychiatrists recognize the pertinence and the novelty of your analyses, they collide, it would seem, with the impossibility of translat- ing them into practice and into research on what is ambigu- ously called "a politics of criminality. "
? MF: You are posing a problem that is indeed very important and difficult. You know that I belong to a genera- tion of people that has seen most of the utopias framed in the
? 252 What Calls for Punishment?
? 19th century and at the beginning of the 20th century collapse one after another, and that has also seen the perverse and sometimes disasterous effects that could follow from projects which were the most generous in their intentions. I have al- ways insisted on not playing the role of the prophet intellec- tual who tells people in advance what they must do and pre- scribes to them the frameworks of thought, the objectives and the means--all drawn from his own brain while working in an office among his books. It has seemed to me that the work of an intellectual, what I call a "specific intellectual," is to try to isolate, in their power of constraint but also in the contingency of their historical formation, the systems of thought that have now become familiar to us, that appear evident to us, and that have become part of our perceptions, attitudes and behavior. Next, it is necessary to work in common with practitioners, not only to modify institutions and practices but to elaborate forms of thought.
Q: What you have called the "idle chatter of crimi- nologists" and which no doubt has been poorly understood, is it precisely the fact that this system of thought in which all these analyses have been carried out for a century and a half has not been put into question?
? MF: Yes, that's it. Perhaps that phrase was a httle too off-hand. Let's take it back then. But I have the impression that the difficulties and contradictions that penal practice has encountered over the last two centuries have never been deeply re-examined. And now, one hundred and fifty years later, the same notions, the same themes, the same reproaches, the came criticisms, the same demands are being repeated, as if nothing had changed, and in a sense, indeed nothing has. From the moment when an institution presents so many draw- backs, arouses so much criticism, and can only give rise to the
? What Calls for Punishment? 283
? indefinite repetition of the same discourse, "idle chatter" is a serious symptom.
? Q: In Discipline and Punish, you analyze this "strat- egy" which consists in transforming certain illegalisms into delinquency, making a success out of this apparent failure of the prison. Everything happens as if a certain "group" more or less consciously used this means to arrive at certain effects which would not be announced. One has the impression, per- haps false, that that's a ruse of power that subverts the projects and undermines the discourse of humanist reformers. From this point of view, there would be some similarity between your analysis and the model of Marxist interpretation of his- tory (I am thinking of the paper in which you show that a certain type of illegalism is singled out for repression whereas others are tolerated). But one does not see clearly, in contrast with Marxism, what "group" or what "class" or what interests are at work in this strategy.
? MF; In the analysis of an institution different things must be distinguished. First, what one could call its rationality or its end, that is to say the objectives that it proposes and the means it has of attaining these objectives; in short, the pro- gram of the institution such as it has been defined; for ex- ample, Bentham's conception concerning the prison. Sec- ondly, there is the question of effects. Obviously the effects only rarely coincide with the ends; thus the objective of the corrective prison, of the means of rehabilitating the individual, has not been attained; the effect has been rather the inverse, and the prison has been led rather to the behavior of delin- quency. But when the effect does not coincide with the end there are several possibilities: either one reforms or one util- izes these effects for something that wasn't foreseen at the beginning but which can well have a meaning and a use. This
?
284 What Calls for Punishment?
? is what one could call the usage: thus the prison, which did not have the effect of rehabilitation, has served rather as a mecha- nism of elimination. The fourth level of the analysis is what one could call the "strategic configurations"--^in other words, beginning from these usages in some new and unforeseen way, but in spite of everything intentional to a certain point, one can construct new rational behaviors, different from the initial program but which thus respond to their objective, and in which play between different social groups can take place.
? ? Q: Effects that are themselves transformed into ends.
MF: That's right. They are effects that are taken up in different usages and these usages are rationalized, organized in any case by means of new ends.
Q: But that's obviously not premeditated. There's no occult Machiavellian project at the base.
MF: Not at all. There's no person or group, no titular head of this strategy: but beginning from effects different from their initial ends and from the capacity to utilize these effects, a certain number of strategies are formed.
Q: Strategies of which the finality in its turn partly escapes those who conceive them.
MF: Yes. Sometimes these strategies are completely conscious: one can say that the manner in which the pohce use the prisoii is almost conscious. These strategies are simply not formulated, in contrast to the program. The institutions's first program, its initial finality is on the contrary displayed and used as justification, while the strategic configurations are not often clear in the very eyes of those who occupy a place and
? ? ? ? ? What Calls for Punishment? 285
? play a role there. But this play can perfectly solidify an institu- tion, and the prison has been solidified, despite all the criti- cisms that have been made, because several strategies of dif- ferent groups have come to intersect at this particular place.
? Q: You explain very clearly how the penalty of im- prisonment was fi'om the beginning of the 20th century de- nounced as the great failure of penal justice, and in the same terms as is done today. There is no penal expert who is not convinced that the prison does not attain the ends it was given: the rate of criminality doesn't diminish; far fi-om "socializing," the prison produces delinquents. It increases the recidivism; it doesn't guarantee security. Yet the penitentiary establishments are always full, and one sees no initiation of a change, in this regard, under the socialist government in France.
? But at the same time you have tumed around the question. Rather than search for the reasons for a perennial failure, you are asking what this problematic failure serves, and who profits from it. You discover that the prison is an instrument of differential management and the control of ille- galisms. In this sense, far from constituting a failure the prison on the contrary has succeeded perfectly in specifying a certain delinquency, that of the popular classes, in producing a deter- mined category of delinquents, and in circumscribing them better to disassociate them from other categories of lawbreak- ers coming notably from the bourgeoisise.
? Finally, you observe that the carceral system suc- ceeds in rendering legitimate the legal power to punish, which it "naturalizes. " This idea is linked to the old question of the legitimacy and the foundation of punishment, for the exercise of disciplinary power does not exhaust the power of punish- ment, even if that's its major function, as you have shown.
? MF: Let's set aside, if you like, several misunder- standings. First, in this book on the prison it is clear that I did
? 286 What Calls for Punishment?
? not want to pose the question of the basis of the right to punish. What I wanted to show is the fact that, starting from a certain conception of the basis of the right to punish, one can find in the work of penal experts and philosophers of the 18th century that different means of punishment were perfectly conceivable. Indeed, in the reform movement of the second half of the 18th century, one finds a whole spectrum of means to punish that are suggested, and finally it happens that the prison was in some way the privileged one. It has not been the only means, but it became nonetheless one of the principle ones. My problem was to know why this means was chosen. And how this means of punishing reoriented not only judicial practice but even a certain number of rather fundamental prob- lems in penal law. Thus the importance given to the psycho- logical aspects or the psychopathology of the criminal person- ality, which is affirmed all along in the 19th century, and which was to a certain degreeextrapolated from a punitive practice that took rehabilitation as its end and encountered only the impossibility of rehabilitating. I therefore left the problem of the basis of the right to punish to the side, in order to make another problem appear, which was I believe more often neglected by historians: the means of punishment and their rationality. But that does not mean that the question of the basis of punishment is not important. On this point I be- lieve that one must be radical and moderate at the same time, and recall what Nietzsche said over a century ago, to wit, that in our contemporary societies we no longer know what we are doing when we punish and what at bottom, in principle, can justify punishment. Everything happens as if we carry out a punishment by allowing a certain number of heterogeneous ideas, at different layers of sedimentation and stemming from different histories, distinct movements and divergent rationali- ties, to prevail.
Thus, if I have not spoken about the basis for the right to punish it's not because I consider it to be unimportant:
? ? What Calls for Punishment? 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.
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