How men, life, self were objects of a certain number of technai, which can be compared completely in thek
compelling
rationality of a production technology.
Foucault-Live
MF: Indeed, why not this term?
In regard to Structu- ralism, neither the exponents of this movement nor those who were designated "Structuralists" knew what it was about.
Those who used the structural method in very limited areas like Hnguistics or comparative mythology knew that it was structuralism.
But as soon as one went beyond these very lim- ited areas, nobody knew what that was.
I am not certain it
jKQuId-be very interesting to attempt to redefine what was called Structuralism then. Instead it seems interesting to me to study Formal Thinking, the different types of Formalism, which have traversed Western culture during all the 20th
ntury.
? ce
? 234 How Much Does It Cost. .
? I'm thinking of the unusual skill of Formalism in
painting, the formal research in music, the significance of For- malism in the analysis of folklore, the sagas, architecture, the application of some of its forms to theoretical thinking. For- malism was probably in general one of the most powerful and complex forces in 20th century Europe. Moreover, Formalism was associated very often with conditions and even political movements, which were certainly equally stimulating each time. The relationship between Russian Formalism and the Russian Revolution should definitely be investigated precisely anew. The role of formal thinking and formal art at the begin- ning of the 20th century, its ideological value, its ties to vari- ous political movements should be analyzed. What strikes me about the so-called structuralist movement in France and in Western Europe during the 1960s: it was really like an echo of the efforts of certain countries in the East and particularly Czechoslovakia to free themselves from dogmatic Marxism. While in a country like Czechoslovakia, the old tradition of pre-war European Formalism was revived--around 1955 or in the 1960s--so-called Structuralism arose at about the same time in Western Europe--that is, I believe, a new form, a new modality of this thinking, of this formalistic investigation. That's the way I would classify this structural phenomenon -- through its revitalization in the great stream of formal thought.
? Q: There is no longer a direct connection between Critical Theory and the student movement in the Federal Re- public of Germany. Perhaps the student movement rather made instrumental use of Critical Theory. It sought refuge there. In the same way, perhaps there is no direct causality anymore between Structuralism and '68.
MF: That's right.
4
? ? ? . . For Reason to Tell the Truth? 235
? Q: But would you say that Structuralism was like a necessary forerunner?
MF: No, nothing is necessary in this order of ideas. But one could say very roughly that formalistic culture, thought, and art in the first third of the 20th century were generally associated with critical pohtical movements of the Left--and even with revolutionary movements--and Marxism obscured all that. Marxism devoted itself to an angry criticism of Formahsm in art and in theory which has become manifest since 1930. Thirty years later you can see in a few Eastern countries and in France, how people have attacked dogmatic Marxism, in that they use forms and types of analysis which are obviously inspired by Formalism. The events in France and other countries in 1968 are to the same degree as highly exciting as they are ambiguous; and ambiguous because they are exciting. It's a matter of movements, which often clearly showed a definite respect toward Marxism while at the same time strongly criticizing the dogmatic Marxism of parties and institutions. And the play between a certain pro-Marxist form of thought and Marxist references created room in which the student movements developed. Eventually they brought the revolutioi^y^arxist discourse to the height of exaggeration. At the same time they were possessed by an antidogmatic impetuosity which prohibits any type of discourse.
Q: In Freud's camp or in Structuralism's camp.
? MF: That's right. I would like to retum to the history of Formalism and the small Structuralist episode in France, which was relatively, with widely dispersed forms, embedded in the heart of Formalism in the 20th century which is in my opinion as significant as Romanticism or Positivism in the 19th century. Marxism constituted in France a kind of horizon.
? 236 How Much Does It Cost.
? which Jean-Paul Sartre once considered impassable. At that time Marxism was in fact a rather closed and in any case a controlling mental horizon. From 1945 to 1955 the entire French university life--^the group university life in order to differentiate it from the university tradition--^was busy with or even fully engrossed in achieving something; not Freud/Marx, rather Husserl/Marx, the relationship to Phenomenological Marxism. That was the beginning of the discussion and the ef- forts of a whole group of people: Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, who came to Marxism by way of Phenomenology, and also Dominique Desanti. '
Q: Mikel Dufresne, even Jean-Franc? ois Lyotard. ^
MF: Paul Ricoeur, who is certainly no Marxist, but who was a phenomenologist and not inchned to ignore Marx- ism. 3 Then one attempted to combine Marxism with Phenome- nology and, as a certain form of structural thought and struc- tural method began to develop. Structuralism took the place of Phenomenology, in order to couple itself with Marxism. The transition from Phenomenology to Structuralism occurred and focused basically on the problem of language. It was a signifi- cant moment, as Merleau-Ponty discovered the problem of language. You know that Merleau-Ponty's last efforts were directed to this end: I remember exactly a lecture in which he began to speak about Saussure, who even though he had been dead for only about 50 years, had been completely ignored by the cultivated public--^not to mention the French philologists and linguists. The problem of language arose and it became obvious that phenomenology could not do it as m much justice as the structural analysis of signification which could be pro- duced by a structure of a linguistic nature, a structure in which the subject in the phenomenological sense could not be en- gaged as a creator of meaning and naturally, since the phe-
? . For Reason to Tell the Truth? 237
? nomenological bride did not understand how to speak about language, she was let go. Structuralism became the new bride. That's the way it happened. Psychoanalysis also brought-- mostly due to the influence of Jacques Lacan--a problem to the fore, which was indeed very different, but not without analogy to the above. The problem was the unconscious, which cannot fit into an analysis of a phenomenological na- ture. The best proof, that it could not be included in phenome- nology, not at least into the one constructed by the French, is the following. Sartre or Merleau-Ponty--I don't want to speak about others--have so^jgHfindefatigably to dethrone what they called "Positivism. " And when the question of language arose, Lacan said: Your efforts are in vain, the activity of the uncon- scious cannot be reduced to the effects of giving meaning, for which phenomenology is suited. Then Lacan formulated an absolutely symmetrical problem for the hnguists. The phe- nomenological subject was disqualified a second time by psy- choanalysis, as it had already been disqualified by linguistic theory. One understands why Lacan could say at this moment that the unconscious was structural like a language. It's the same type of problem. So one had a structural Freudo-Marx- ism. While phenomenology is excluded on the basis of the above reasons, there are now many more suitors who give Marx their hands and that's a merry group. What I described here was done and embraced by a certain number of people, but there was a whole group of individuals who did not follow this movement. I'm thinking of those who participated in the history of science, those who showed by aligning themselves with Comte a noteworthy tradition, particularly those around Canguilhem, who had a decidedly influential effect on the young French university life. Many of his students were nei- ther Marxist nor Freudians or Structuralists. If you wish. I'm speaking about myself here. At that time I was a Freudian. I was never a Marxist and never a Structuralist.
? . ForReason to Tell the Truth? 239
? earlier ones. In France the relationship to Nietzsche--even the relationship of all 20th century thought--^was difficult, for un- derstandable reasons. But I keep talking about myself. One must also speak about Gilles Deleuze. Deleuze wrote his book on Nietzsche around 1960. It was published in 1965. " I am quite certain that he is in debt to Hume since he is interested in empiricism and also in the same question: is the theory of the subject presented by phenomenology satisfying? He escapes this question through Hume's subterfoge of empuicism. I am convinced that he met Nietzsche under the same conditions. Everything which happened in the 1960s came from this dis- satisfaction with phenomenology's theory of the subject with various digressions, escapes and breakthroughs, according to whether one understood an expression to be positive or nega- tive--to hnguistics, to psychology, to Nietzsche.
? Q: In any case, Nietzsche represented a certain expe- rience in order to offer the founding act of a subject a check.
MF: Exactly. And here French authors like Maurice Blanchot and Georges Bataille are very important for us. As I just said, I asked myself why I read Nietzsche. I do know why I read Nietzsche. I read Nietzsche because of Bataille and I read Bataille because of Blanchot. It's not true at all that Nietzsche first appeared in French philosophy in the 1970s. At first his influence appeared in the discourse of people who were Marxists in the 1960s and left Marxism as a result of Nietzsche. But those who first reached back to Nietzsche didn't want to leave Marxism. They were not Marxists. They wanted to leave phenomenology.
Q: They spoke one after the other of historians of science and then about writing a history of knowledge, a his- tory of rationality, a history of reason. Before we return to
? 240 How Much Does It Cost. .
? Nietzsche one can certainly summarize these four terms: one can assume that is a matter of quasi-synonyms.
MF: No, not at all. I have described a movement which encompassed many parts and many different problems. I didn't identify the problems. I'm speaking about relation- ships of research and the proximity of the people who practice them.
Q: Can one attempt to ascertain their relationships?
? MF: That's not easy to do in an interview. The his- tory of science played a significant role in the philosophy of France. If modem philosophy of the 19th and 20th centuries derives primarily from the Kantian question, namely "What is Enlightenment? " and if one admits that modem philosophy took up the test of every historical moment, since reason in the form of "maturity" and "without guardian" could appear, un- der its principle functions, so the function of philosophy of the 19th century consists of the question after the moment in which reason finds access to autonomy, what history means to reason and which value the sway of reason in the modem worid straight through the three great forms of objective thought, of technical apparatus and political organization, must be accorded. That was a great task for philosophy since the test of these three domains signifies a reckoning or intro- ducing an unsetding question into the realm of reason. It meant, continuing the Kantian question of "What is Enlighten- ment? " This taking up against this reiteration of Kant's ques- tion in France has found a certain and by the way inadequate form: "What is the history of science? What has happened since Greek mathematics to modem physics, since this uni- verse of science has been erected? " From Auguste Comte until the 1960s it was the philosophical task of history of science to
? . . . For Reason to Tell the Truth? 241
? take up this question again. In Germany the question of the history of reason or the history of forms of rationality in Eu- rope manifested itself not so much in the history of science as much more in that stream of thought, which, talking in gener- alities, stretches from Max Weber to Critical Theory.
Q; Yes, reflection on norms and values.
? MF: From Max Weber to Habermas. It seems to me that there the same questions arise about the history of reason, about the various forms of exercising this sway of reason. Surprisingly, France knew little, indirectly or not at all the stream of Weber's thought. Critical Theory or the Frankfurt School. By the way, that presents a small historical problem, which vexes me and I cannot escape from it. It's known that many representatives of the Frankfurt School came to Paris in 1935 to find refuge. But they left again fairy rapidly, most likely repelled--some have said this--^in any case sad and dis- enheartened that they had not found acclaim again. The 1940s came, but they had already left for England or North America, where they were really received much better. A small agree- ment was struck between the Frankfiirt School and a French philosophical thought, which would have been able to come to an understanding over the history of science, as well as the question of the history of rationality. I can assure you, that during my student days none of my professors mentioned the Frankfurt School.
? Q: That's amazing.
? MF: If I had known the Frankfurt School at the right time, I would have been spared a lot of work. Some nonsense, I wouldn't have expressed and taken many detours as I sought
? 242 How Much Does It Cost. .
? not to let myself be led astray when the Frankfurt School had already opened the ways. There is a remarkable problem of non-penetration of two forms of thought, which are akin to each other. Perhaps h is this proximity which explains the non-penetration. Nothing obscures a common problem more than two related ways of approaching it.
? Q: It is interesting that you say you would have avoided certain things if you had been familiar with the Frank- furt School and Critical Theory, especially since Habermas and Negt have applauded your efforts. In a conversation with Habermas, hepraised to me your idea of la bifurcation de la raison--that in every moment reason is supposed to be di- vided in two. Despite that I asked myself if you would agree with the bifurcation of reason as Critical Theory conceives of it. That is, with the dialectic of reason according to which reason is perverted by the effect of its own power, is trans- formed and reduced to a type of thought which is technical thought. The ruhng thought in Critical Theory is that of a dialectical continuity of reason, with a perversion, which changes it completely suddenly and which serves to correct it, which should be the beginning of the battle for emancipation. The will to knowledge has made in its own way a lot of trust in history ambiguous (bifurquer). The word bifurquer is per- haps not the right word. Reason has divided knowledge many times.
? MF: Yes, one has often tried to blackmail all criti- cism of reason and every critical test of the history of rational- ity so that one either recognizes reason or casts it into irration- alism--as if it were not possible to write a rational criticism of rationahty, a rational history of all ambiguity and biftircations, a contingent history of rationality. Since Max Weber in the Frankfurt School and in every case with many historians of
? . . For Reason to Tell the Truth? 243
? science like Canguilhem it was a matter of determining the form of rationalism, which is presented as the ruling one and to which one gives the status of reason, in order to let it appear as one of the possible forms of rational work. In this history of French science, which is considerably significant, Gaston Bachelard also plays a central role.
? Q: Despite that the hymns of praise are a bit poi- soned. According to Habermas you described the moment of the bifurcation of reason splendidly. This bifurcation is sup- posed to be a one-time occurrence, you had determined, as reason took a turn, which led to technical rationalism, to a self-diminution, to a self-limiting. If this bifurcation is also a split, then it could only have happened a single time in history, in order to divide two realms as one has called them since Kant. This analysis of bifurcation is Kantian. There is knowl- edge of understanding, the knowledge of reason, technical rea- son and moral reason. In order to judge this bifiircation one accepts the position of moral-practical reason. Therefore, a one-time bifurcation, a division between technical and practi- cal which governs all of the history of thought in Germany. You just said that this tradition stems from the question "What is Enlightenment? " This praise seems to diminish your assess- ment of the history of ideas.
? MF: In fact, I do not speak of a bifurcation of reason. Rather I speak of multiple bifurcations. I speak of an endless prohfic division. I am not speaking of the moment when rea- son became technical. At the present, in order to give an ex- ample I am researching the problem of technology of self in Greco-Roman antiquity.
How men, life, self were objects of a certain number of technai, which can be compared completely in thek compelling rationality of a production technology.
? 244 How Much Does It Cost. .
? Q: But without including the entire society.
MF: Without including the entire society. What a technai or technology of self brings to development is a his- torical phenomenon, which is completely analyzable and de- terminable and is not the bifurcation of reason. In the prolific division, breaks, caesuras, this was an occurrence, a signifi- cant epoch, which had noteworthy consequences, but is not a one-time phenomenon.
Q: If one then assumes that the phenomenon of the self-perversion of reason is not a one-time occurrence, didn't occur just once in history where reason lost something essen- tial, something substantial--as Weber would say--does your work aim to rehabihtate fruitful reason? Is there another kind of conception of reason in your work, another concept of ra- tionality as that which is accepted by us today.
? MF: Yes. But here I would like to free myself from phenomenology which was my starting point. I don't believe that there is here a kind of founding act through which reason in its essence discovers or would be engaged and afterwards could be broken off from any occurrence. I believe that there is a self-creation of reason and therefore I am trying to analyze the forms of rationality: various proofs, various formulations, various modifications by which rationalities educe each other, contradict one another, chase each other away, without one therefore being able to designate a moment in which reason vypuld have lost its basic design or changed from rationalism to irrationahsm. Very schematically, I wanted in the 1960s to give up the phenomenological thesis as well as the Marxist thesis (Luka? cs). There was a rationality which was the exem- plary form of reason itself which had been led into a crisis by a number of social necessities (capitahsm or even more the
? . For Reason to Tell the Truth? 245
? transition of one form of capitalism to another). That is, into a forgetting of reason and a descent into irrationalism. That is the second great model, schematically correct and unjust, from which I tried to free myself.
? Q: According to this model there was a one-time bi- furcation, be it after a forgetting, be it after an expropriation by a class. Therefore the emancipation movement in history did not just consist of a retaking of what had been expropri- ated in order to re-expropriate it, but rather on the contrary in that reason was given back its entire truth, given back its status of absolute universal science. It is clear that you have no proposal of a new science or an expanded science.
? MF; Absolutely not.
Q; But you show that every time a form of rational- ity asserts itself, it occurs through division, that is, through closure or alienation, through the demarcation of a boundary between itself and another. Does your proposal include a wish to rehabilitate this other one? For example, when you embrace the silence of a madman, do you consider it a language which expresses itself comprehensively on the necessities of the creation of works?
? MF; Yes. What interested me in this general frame- work were the forms of rationality, which the human subject applied to himself. While the historian of science in France busied himself primarily with the problem of the constitution of scientific objects, I asked myself another question. How does it happen that the human subject makes himself into an object of possible knowledge, through which forms of ration- ality, through which historical necessities, and at what price? My question is this; How much does it cost the subject to be
? ? 246 How Much Does It Cost.
? able to tell the truth about itself? How much does it cost the subject as madman to be able to tell the truth about itself? About the cost of constituting the madman as the absolute other and in that it not only pays this theoretical price, but also an institutional and even economic price as the organization of psychiatry allows it to be determined. A complex and multi- layered totality with an institutionalized game, class relation- ships, class conflicts, modalities of knowledge and finally a whole history, subjects and reason are involved in it. That is what I tried to reconstitute. That is perhaps a completely crazy, very complex project, of which I could only observe a few moments, a few special points, hke the problem of the insane subject. How can one tell the truth about an insane subject? Those were my first two books. The Order of Things asked, what is the cost of problematizing and analyzing the speaking, working, living subject. That's why I transferred the same kinds of questions to criminals and penal institutions. How can one tell the truth about oneself as a criminal. And I want to continue that in respect to sexuality. How can the subject tell the truth about itself as a subject of sexual gratifi-
cation, and at what cost?
Q: It is in no way a matter of exhuming using ar- chaeology something archaic which existed before history.
MF: No. Absolutely not. When I use the word ar- chaeology, which I don't do anymore, then I use it to say that the type of analysis which I conduct was displaced, not in time blit by the level at which it is determined. My probleni is not to study the evolution of the history of ideas, but rather much more to observe the ideas, how this or that object could appear as a possible object of perception. Why for example insanity became at one time an object of perception, which corre- sponded to a type of recognition. This displacement between
? ? ? . . For Reason to Tell the Truth? 247
? the ideas about insanity and the constitution of insanity as object I wanted to delineate through the use of the word ar- chaeology as opposed to history.
Q: I asked this question because there are now ten- dencies, under the guise that the New German Right is influ- enced by Nietzsche, to assume that French Nietzscheanism comes from the same vein. One mixes everything together in order to renew basically the fronts of a new theoretical class war, which is very difficult to find these days.
? MF: There is not just one Nietzscheanism. One can- not say there is a true Nietzsceanism and that this one is truer than the other. But those who found Nietzsche a tool more than 25 years ago, to change their position in regard to the body of philosophical thought ruled by one of phenomenology or Marxism, have nothing to do with those who use Nietzsche today. GUles Deleuze wrote a powerful book about Nietzsche and Nietzsche is present in his work in general, but without noisy reference and without the desire to flaunt Nietzsche's banner for a rhetorical or political effect. It is impressive that someone like Deleuze simply turned to Nietzsche and took him seriously. I also wanted to do that: what serious use can one make of Nietzsche? I gave a lecture about Nietzsche and have written a little about him. ' The only honor I accorded him, weakly, was naming the first part of The History of Sexu- ality "The Will to Knowledge. "
? Q; Motivated by this will to knowledge there was al- ways a rapport or relationship. I suspect you avoid both these words because they are colored by Hegelianism. Perhaps we should speak about evaluation, as Nietzsche did; a way to evaluate truth and the power to give it structure to create it; a power which does not exist as archaically as reason or source.
? 248 How Much Does It Cost. .
? but rather a relationship of powers--perhaps already a rela- tionship of power in the act of constituting all knowledge.
MF: No, I wouldn't say that. That is too comph- cated. My problem is the relationship of self to self and that of saying the truth. What I thank Nietzsche for, I owe more to his texts of around 1880 in which the question of truth, of the truth of history and the will to truth were central for him. The first text which Sartre wrote as a young student was a Nietzschean text. "The History of Truth," a tiny text which appeared for the first time around 1925 in a gymnasium jour- nal. His departure point was from the same problem. And it is very noteworthy that his way led from the history of truth to phenomenology while the way of the subsequent generation to which we belong, arose particularly to severe itself from phe- nomenology in order to retum to the question of the history of truth.
Q: You admit to an affinity to Deleuze, to a certain extent. Does this include Deleuze's concept of desire?
MF: No.
Q: It seems to me that desire by Deleuze is a produc- tive desire and gives the species its form-giving reason for genesis.
? MF: I don't want to take a position or say what Deleuze meant. People say what they want to or what they can. When a system of thought is created it always becomes fixed and identified in the heart of a cultural tradition. It is perfectly normal that this cultural tradition takes it up and re- stricts it, does what it wants with it, has it express what it didn't say, but with the allusion that it is only another form of
? . . For Reason to Tell the Truth? 249
? what one intended to say. That belongs to the play of culture. But that cannot be my relationship to Deleuze. I will not say what he wanted to say. His problem was the problem of desire. Probably we will find in the theory of desh-e the effect of a re- lationship to Nietzsche. While my problem always was truth. Wahr-Sagen and the relationship between it and the forms of reflexivity, the reflexivity of self above self.
Q: Yes, I think Nietzsche did not differentiate thor- oughly enough the will to knowledge fi^om the will to power.
? MF; There's a noticeable shifting in Nietzsche's text between those who are governed by the question about the will to knowledge and the will to power. But I didn't want to debate this for a simple reason. I haven't read Nietzsche for a good many years.
Q: The elaboration seemed to be important for me because of the truly confused reception of Nietzsche abroad, as characterized by the way also in France.
MF: My relationship to Nietzsche is not a historical relationship. I am not so interested in Nietzsche's history of thought as in this quality of the challenge, which I felt--rather long ago--as I read Nietzsche for the first time. If one reads
"Fro? hliche Wissenschaft" or "Morgenrote" while one is being formed by the great and old university tradition of Des- cartes, Kant, Hegel, Husserl, then one stumbles on these witty, strange, and impudent texts and says to oneself, good, I won't do it the way my fiiends, colleagues, and professors do it, peering in arrogance from on high. What is the epitome of philosophical intensity and what are the actual philosophical effects, which we can find in these texts. That for me is the challenge of Nietzsche.
? 250 How Much Does It Cost. .
? Q: In the actual reception there is a second confu- sion, that is post-modernism, to which not insignificant people refer and which played a certain role in Germany, since Habermas took up this expression and criticized it. Do you see a tendency in it ? Can you ascertain a place for yourself in it?
? MF: I must say, I find that difficult to answer. First, because I never really understood how modernism is defined in France. It's clear by Baudelaire, but after that it seems to lose meaning for me. I don't know in what sense Germans speak of modernism. I know that Americans are planning a kind of seminar with Habermas and me and Habermas pro- posed modernism as the topic. I'm at a loss; I don't know what that means nor what the problematic is. As much as I recog- nize behind the expression Structuralism, the problem of the subject and its transformation, as little do I see the common problematic between post-modernism or post-structuralism,
? Q: Accepting modernism or rejecting it is not only ambiguous, it truncates modernism. Also it has at least three definitions: the definition of the historian, Weber's definition, and Adorno's which alludes to Benjamin's Baudelaire. Haber- mas seems to prefer here against Adorno the tradition of rea- son, that is, Weber's definition of modernism. Therefore he perceives in post-modernism the decline of reason, so that reason basically becomes a form of the will to knowledge, among other things.
MF: That isn't my problem. I don't at all identify reason with the totality of the forms of rationality. The latter could until recently dominate in the types of knowledge, the forms of technology and the modalities of governance. The application of rationality occurs primarily in these areas. I don't deal with the problem of art, it is too complicated. For
? . . For Reason to Tell the Truth? 251
? me no given form of rationality is reason. Therefore I don't see how one can say that the forms of rationality, which have governed these three realms, break apart and disperse. I simply see multiple transformations--^but why should one call that the demise of reason? Endlessly other forms of rationality are born. Therefore I claim that reason is a long narrative, which ends today and makes room for another, and makes no sense.
? Q: The field is open for many forms of narratives.
? 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.
?
jKQuId-be very interesting to attempt to redefine what was called Structuralism then. Instead it seems interesting to me to study Formal Thinking, the different types of Formalism, which have traversed Western culture during all the 20th
ntury.
? ce
? 234 How Much Does It Cost. .
? I'm thinking of the unusual skill of Formalism in
painting, the formal research in music, the significance of For- malism in the analysis of folklore, the sagas, architecture, the application of some of its forms to theoretical thinking. For- malism was probably in general one of the most powerful and complex forces in 20th century Europe. Moreover, Formalism was associated very often with conditions and even political movements, which were certainly equally stimulating each time. The relationship between Russian Formalism and the Russian Revolution should definitely be investigated precisely anew. The role of formal thinking and formal art at the begin- ning of the 20th century, its ideological value, its ties to vari- ous political movements should be analyzed. What strikes me about the so-called structuralist movement in France and in Western Europe during the 1960s: it was really like an echo of the efforts of certain countries in the East and particularly Czechoslovakia to free themselves from dogmatic Marxism. While in a country like Czechoslovakia, the old tradition of pre-war European Formalism was revived--around 1955 or in the 1960s--so-called Structuralism arose at about the same time in Western Europe--that is, I believe, a new form, a new modality of this thinking, of this formalistic investigation. That's the way I would classify this structural phenomenon -- through its revitalization in the great stream of formal thought.
? Q: There is no longer a direct connection between Critical Theory and the student movement in the Federal Re- public of Germany. Perhaps the student movement rather made instrumental use of Critical Theory. It sought refuge there. In the same way, perhaps there is no direct causality anymore between Structuralism and '68.
MF: That's right.
4
? ? ? . . For Reason to Tell the Truth? 235
? Q: But would you say that Structuralism was like a necessary forerunner?
MF: No, nothing is necessary in this order of ideas. But one could say very roughly that formalistic culture, thought, and art in the first third of the 20th century were generally associated with critical pohtical movements of the Left--and even with revolutionary movements--and Marxism obscured all that. Marxism devoted itself to an angry criticism of Formahsm in art and in theory which has become manifest since 1930. Thirty years later you can see in a few Eastern countries and in France, how people have attacked dogmatic Marxism, in that they use forms and types of analysis which are obviously inspired by Formalism. The events in France and other countries in 1968 are to the same degree as highly exciting as they are ambiguous; and ambiguous because they are exciting. It's a matter of movements, which often clearly showed a definite respect toward Marxism while at the same time strongly criticizing the dogmatic Marxism of parties and institutions. And the play between a certain pro-Marxist form of thought and Marxist references created room in which the student movements developed. Eventually they brought the revolutioi^y^arxist discourse to the height of exaggeration. At the same time they were possessed by an antidogmatic impetuosity which prohibits any type of discourse.
Q: In Freud's camp or in Structuralism's camp.
? MF: That's right. I would like to retum to the history of Formalism and the small Structuralist episode in France, which was relatively, with widely dispersed forms, embedded in the heart of Formalism in the 20th century which is in my opinion as significant as Romanticism or Positivism in the 19th century. Marxism constituted in France a kind of horizon.
? 236 How Much Does It Cost.
? which Jean-Paul Sartre once considered impassable. At that time Marxism was in fact a rather closed and in any case a controlling mental horizon. From 1945 to 1955 the entire French university life--^the group university life in order to differentiate it from the university tradition--^was busy with or even fully engrossed in achieving something; not Freud/Marx, rather Husserl/Marx, the relationship to Phenomenological Marxism. That was the beginning of the discussion and the ef- forts of a whole group of people: Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, who came to Marxism by way of Phenomenology, and also Dominique Desanti. '
Q: Mikel Dufresne, even Jean-Franc? ois Lyotard. ^
MF: Paul Ricoeur, who is certainly no Marxist, but who was a phenomenologist and not inchned to ignore Marx- ism. 3 Then one attempted to combine Marxism with Phenome- nology and, as a certain form of structural thought and struc- tural method began to develop. Structuralism took the place of Phenomenology, in order to couple itself with Marxism. The transition from Phenomenology to Structuralism occurred and focused basically on the problem of language. It was a signifi- cant moment, as Merleau-Ponty discovered the problem of language. You know that Merleau-Ponty's last efforts were directed to this end: I remember exactly a lecture in which he began to speak about Saussure, who even though he had been dead for only about 50 years, had been completely ignored by the cultivated public--^not to mention the French philologists and linguists. The problem of language arose and it became obvious that phenomenology could not do it as m much justice as the structural analysis of signification which could be pro- duced by a structure of a linguistic nature, a structure in which the subject in the phenomenological sense could not be en- gaged as a creator of meaning and naturally, since the phe-
? . For Reason to Tell the Truth? 237
? nomenological bride did not understand how to speak about language, she was let go. Structuralism became the new bride. That's the way it happened. Psychoanalysis also brought-- mostly due to the influence of Jacques Lacan--a problem to the fore, which was indeed very different, but not without analogy to the above. The problem was the unconscious, which cannot fit into an analysis of a phenomenological na- ture. The best proof, that it could not be included in phenome- nology, not at least into the one constructed by the French, is the following. Sartre or Merleau-Ponty--I don't want to speak about others--have so^jgHfindefatigably to dethrone what they called "Positivism. " And when the question of language arose, Lacan said: Your efforts are in vain, the activity of the uncon- scious cannot be reduced to the effects of giving meaning, for which phenomenology is suited. Then Lacan formulated an absolutely symmetrical problem for the hnguists. The phe- nomenological subject was disqualified a second time by psy- choanalysis, as it had already been disqualified by linguistic theory. One understands why Lacan could say at this moment that the unconscious was structural like a language. It's the same type of problem. So one had a structural Freudo-Marx- ism. While phenomenology is excluded on the basis of the above reasons, there are now many more suitors who give Marx their hands and that's a merry group. What I described here was done and embraced by a certain number of people, but there was a whole group of individuals who did not follow this movement. I'm thinking of those who participated in the history of science, those who showed by aligning themselves with Comte a noteworthy tradition, particularly those around Canguilhem, who had a decidedly influential effect on the young French university life. Many of his students were nei- ther Marxist nor Freudians or Structuralists. If you wish. I'm speaking about myself here. At that time I was a Freudian. I was never a Marxist and never a Structuralist.
? . ForReason to Tell the Truth? 239
? earlier ones. In France the relationship to Nietzsche--even the relationship of all 20th century thought--^was difficult, for un- derstandable reasons. But I keep talking about myself. One must also speak about Gilles Deleuze. Deleuze wrote his book on Nietzsche around 1960. It was published in 1965. " I am quite certain that he is in debt to Hume since he is interested in empiricism and also in the same question: is the theory of the subject presented by phenomenology satisfying? He escapes this question through Hume's subterfoge of empuicism. I am convinced that he met Nietzsche under the same conditions. Everything which happened in the 1960s came from this dis- satisfaction with phenomenology's theory of the subject with various digressions, escapes and breakthroughs, according to whether one understood an expression to be positive or nega- tive--to hnguistics, to psychology, to Nietzsche.
? Q: In any case, Nietzsche represented a certain expe- rience in order to offer the founding act of a subject a check.
MF: Exactly. And here French authors like Maurice Blanchot and Georges Bataille are very important for us. As I just said, I asked myself why I read Nietzsche. I do know why I read Nietzsche. I read Nietzsche because of Bataille and I read Bataille because of Blanchot. It's not true at all that Nietzsche first appeared in French philosophy in the 1970s. At first his influence appeared in the discourse of people who were Marxists in the 1960s and left Marxism as a result of Nietzsche. But those who first reached back to Nietzsche didn't want to leave Marxism. They were not Marxists. They wanted to leave phenomenology.
Q: They spoke one after the other of historians of science and then about writing a history of knowledge, a his- tory of rationality, a history of reason. Before we return to
? 240 How Much Does It Cost. .
? Nietzsche one can certainly summarize these four terms: one can assume that is a matter of quasi-synonyms.
MF: No, not at all. I have described a movement which encompassed many parts and many different problems. I didn't identify the problems. I'm speaking about relation- ships of research and the proximity of the people who practice them.
Q: Can one attempt to ascertain their relationships?
? MF: That's not easy to do in an interview. The his- tory of science played a significant role in the philosophy of France. If modem philosophy of the 19th and 20th centuries derives primarily from the Kantian question, namely "What is Enlightenment? " and if one admits that modem philosophy took up the test of every historical moment, since reason in the form of "maturity" and "without guardian" could appear, un- der its principle functions, so the function of philosophy of the 19th century consists of the question after the moment in which reason finds access to autonomy, what history means to reason and which value the sway of reason in the modem worid straight through the three great forms of objective thought, of technical apparatus and political organization, must be accorded. That was a great task for philosophy since the test of these three domains signifies a reckoning or intro- ducing an unsetding question into the realm of reason. It meant, continuing the Kantian question of "What is Enlighten- ment? " This taking up against this reiteration of Kant's ques- tion in France has found a certain and by the way inadequate form: "What is the history of science? What has happened since Greek mathematics to modem physics, since this uni- verse of science has been erected? " From Auguste Comte until the 1960s it was the philosophical task of history of science to
? . . . For Reason to Tell the Truth? 241
? take up this question again. In Germany the question of the history of reason or the history of forms of rationality in Eu- rope manifested itself not so much in the history of science as much more in that stream of thought, which, talking in gener- alities, stretches from Max Weber to Critical Theory.
Q; Yes, reflection on norms and values.
? MF: From Max Weber to Habermas. It seems to me that there the same questions arise about the history of reason, about the various forms of exercising this sway of reason. Surprisingly, France knew little, indirectly or not at all the stream of Weber's thought. Critical Theory or the Frankfurt School. By the way, that presents a small historical problem, which vexes me and I cannot escape from it. It's known that many representatives of the Frankfurt School came to Paris in 1935 to find refuge. But they left again fairy rapidly, most likely repelled--some have said this--^in any case sad and dis- enheartened that they had not found acclaim again. The 1940s came, but they had already left for England or North America, where they were really received much better. A small agree- ment was struck between the Frankfiirt School and a French philosophical thought, which would have been able to come to an understanding over the history of science, as well as the question of the history of rationality. I can assure you, that during my student days none of my professors mentioned the Frankfurt School.
? Q: That's amazing.
? MF: If I had known the Frankfurt School at the right time, I would have been spared a lot of work. Some nonsense, I wouldn't have expressed and taken many detours as I sought
? 242 How Much Does It Cost. .
? not to let myself be led astray when the Frankfurt School had already opened the ways. There is a remarkable problem of non-penetration of two forms of thought, which are akin to each other. Perhaps h is this proximity which explains the non-penetration. Nothing obscures a common problem more than two related ways of approaching it.
? Q: It is interesting that you say you would have avoided certain things if you had been familiar with the Frank- furt School and Critical Theory, especially since Habermas and Negt have applauded your efforts. In a conversation with Habermas, hepraised to me your idea of la bifurcation de la raison--that in every moment reason is supposed to be di- vided in two. Despite that I asked myself if you would agree with the bifurcation of reason as Critical Theory conceives of it. That is, with the dialectic of reason according to which reason is perverted by the effect of its own power, is trans- formed and reduced to a type of thought which is technical thought. The ruhng thought in Critical Theory is that of a dialectical continuity of reason, with a perversion, which changes it completely suddenly and which serves to correct it, which should be the beginning of the battle for emancipation. The will to knowledge has made in its own way a lot of trust in history ambiguous (bifurquer). The word bifurquer is per- haps not the right word. Reason has divided knowledge many times.
? MF: Yes, one has often tried to blackmail all criti- cism of reason and every critical test of the history of rational- ity so that one either recognizes reason or casts it into irration- alism--as if it were not possible to write a rational criticism of rationahty, a rational history of all ambiguity and biftircations, a contingent history of rationality. Since Max Weber in the Frankfurt School and in every case with many historians of
? . . For Reason to Tell the Truth? 243
? science like Canguilhem it was a matter of determining the form of rationalism, which is presented as the ruling one and to which one gives the status of reason, in order to let it appear as one of the possible forms of rational work. In this history of French science, which is considerably significant, Gaston Bachelard also plays a central role.
? Q: Despite that the hymns of praise are a bit poi- soned. According to Habermas you described the moment of the bifurcation of reason splendidly. This bifurcation is sup- posed to be a one-time occurrence, you had determined, as reason took a turn, which led to technical rationalism, to a self-diminution, to a self-limiting. If this bifurcation is also a split, then it could only have happened a single time in history, in order to divide two realms as one has called them since Kant. This analysis of bifurcation is Kantian. There is knowl- edge of understanding, the knowledge of reason, technical rea- son and moral reason. In order to judge this bifiircation one accepts the position of moral-practical reason. Therefore, a one-time bifurcation, a division between technical and practi- cal which governs all of the history of thought in Germany. You just said that this tradition stems from the question "What is Enlightenment? " This praise seems to diminish your assess- ment of the history of ideas.
? MF: In fact, I do not speak of a bifurcation of reason. Rather I speak of multiple bifurcations. I speak of an endless prohfic division. I am not speaking of the moment when rea- son became technical. At the present, in order to give an ex- ample I am researching the problem of technology of self in Greco-Roman antiquity.
How men, life, self were objects of a certain number of technai, which can be compared completely in thek compelling rationality of a production technology.
? 244 How Much Does It Cost. .
? Q: But without including the entire society.
MF: Without including the entire society. What a technai or technology of self brings to development is a his- torical phenomenon, which is completely analyzable and de- terminable and is not the bifurcation of reason. In the prolific division, breaks, caesuras, this was an occurrence, a signifi- cant epoch, which had noteworthy consequences, but is not a one-time phenomenon.
Q: If one then assumes that the phenomenon of the self-perversion of reason is not a one-time occurrence, didn't occur just once in history where reason lost something essen- tial, something substantial--as Weber would say--does your work aim to rehabihtate fruitful reason? Is there another kind of conception of reason in your work, another concept of ra- tionality as that which is accepted by us today.
? MF: Yes. But here I would like to free myself from phenomenology which was my starting point. I don't believe that there is here a kind of founding act through which reason in its essence discovers or would be engaged and afterwards could be broken off from any occurrence. I believe that there is a self-creation of reason and therefore I am trying to analyze the forms of rationality: various proofs, various formulations, various modifications by which rationalities educe each other, contradict one another, chase each other away, without one therefore being able to designate a moment in which reason vypuld have lost its basic design or changed from rationalism to irrationahsm. Very schematically, I wanted in the 1960s to give up the phenomenological thesis as well as the Marxist thesis (Luka? cs). There was a rationality which was the exem- plary form of reason itself which had been led into a crisis by a number of social necessities (capitahsm or even more the
? . For Reason to Tell the Truth? 245
? transition of one form of capitalism to another). That is, into a forgetting of reason and a descent into irrationalism. That is the second great model, schematically correct and unjust, from which I tried to free myself.
? Q: According to this model there was a one-time bi- furcation, be it after a forgetting, be it after an expropriation by a class. Therefore the emancipation movement in history did not just consist of a retaking of what had been expropri- ated in order to re-expropriate it, but rather on the contrary in that reason was given back its entire truth, given back its status of absolute universal science. It is clear that you have no proposal of a new science or an expanded science.
? MF; Absolutely not.
Q; But you show that every time a form of rational- ity asserts itself, it occurs through division, that is, through closure or alienation, through the demarcation of a boundary between itself and another. Does your proposal include a wish to rehabilitate this other one? For example, when you embrace the silence of a madman, do you consider it a language which expresses itself comprehensively on the necessities of the creation of works?
? MF; Yes. What interested me in this general frame- work were the forms of rationality, which the human subject applied to himself. While the historian of science in France busied himself primarily with the problem of the constitution of scientific objects, I asked myself another question. How does it happen that the human subject makes himself into an object of possible knowledge, through which forms of ration- ality, through which historical necessities, and at what price? My question is this; How much does it cost the subject to be
? ? 246 How Much Does It Cost.
? able to tell the truth about itself? How much does it cost the subject as madman to be able to tell the truth about itself? About the cost of constituting the madman as the absolute other and in that it not only pays this theoretical price, but also an institutional and even economic price as the organization of psychiatry allows it to be determined. A complex and multi- layered totality with an institutionalized game, class relation- ships, class conflicts, modalities of knowledge and finally a whole history, subjects and reason are involved in it. That is what I tried to reconstitute. That is perhaps a completely crazy, very complex project, of which I could only observe a few moments, a few special points, hke the problem of the insane subject. How can one tell the truth about an insane subject? Those were my first two books. The Order of Things asked, what is the cost of problematizing and analyzing the speaking, working, living subject. That's why I transferred the same kinds of questions to criminals and penal institutions. How can one tell the truth about oneself as a criminal. And I want to continue that in respect to sexuality. How can the subject tell the truth about itself as a subject of sexual gratifi-
cation, and at what cost?
Q: It is in no way a matter of exhuming using ar- chaeology something archaic which existed before history.
MF: No. Absolutely not. When I use the word ar- chaeology, which I don't do anymore, then I use it to say that the type of analysis which I conduct was displaced, not in time blit by the level at which it is determined. My probleni is not to study the evolution of the history of ideas, but rather much more to observe the ideas, how this or that object could appear as a possible object of perception. Why for example insanity became at one time an object of perception, which corre- sponded to a type of recognition. This displacement between
? ? ? . . For Reason to Tell the Truth? 247
? the ideas about insanity and the constitution of insanity as object I wanted to delineate through the use of the word ar- chaeology as opposed to history.
Q: I asked this question because there are now ten- dencies, under the guise that the New German Right is influ- enced by Nietzsche, to assume that French Nietzscheanism comes from the same vein. One mixes everything together in order to renew basically the fronts of a new theoretical class war, which is very difficult to find these days.
? MF: There is not just one Nietzscheanism. One can- not say there is a true Nietzsceanism and that this one is truer than the other. But those who found Nietzsche a tool more than 25 years ago, to change their position in regard to the body of philosophical thought ruled by one of phenomenology or Marxism, have nothing to do with those who use Nietzsche today. GUles Deleuze wrote a powerful book about Nietzsche and Nietzsche is present in his work in general, but without noisy reference and without the desire to flaunt Nietzsche's banner for a rhetorical or political effect. It is impressive that someone like Deleuze simply turned to Nietzsche and took him seriously. I also wanted to do that: what serious use can one make of Nietzsche? I gave a lecture about Nietzsche and have written a little about him. ' The only honor I accorded him, weakly, was naming the first part of The History of Sexu- ality "The Will to Knowledge. "
? Q; Motivated by this will to knowledge there was al- ways a rapport or relationship. I suspect you avoid both these words because they are colored by Hegelianism. Perhaps we should speak about evaluation, as Nietzsche did; a way to evaluate truth and the power to give it structure to create it; a power which does not exist as archaically as reason or source.
? 248 How Much Does It Cost. .
? but rather a relationship of powers--perhaps already a rela- tionship of power in the act of constituting all knowledge.
MF: No, I wouldn't say that. That is too comph- cated. My problem is the relationship of self to self and that of saying the truth. What I thank Nietzsche for, I owe more to his texts of around 1880 in which the question of truth, of the truth of history and the will to truth were central for him. The first text which Sartre wrote as a young student was a Nietzschean text. "The History of Truth," a tiny text which appeared for the first time around 1925 in a gymnasium jour- nal. His departure point was from the same problem. And it is very noteworthy that his way led from the history of truth to phenomenology while the way of the subsequent generation to which we belong, arose particularly to severe itself from phe- nomenology in order to retum to the question of the history of truth.
Q: You admit to an affinity to Deleuze, to a certain extent. Does this include Deleuze's concept of desire?
MF: No.
Q: It seems to me that desire by Deleuze is a produc- tive desire and gives the species its form-giving reason for genesis.
? MF: I don't want to take a position or say what Deleuze meant. People say what they want to or what they can. When a system of thought is created it always becomes fixed and identified in the heart of a cultural tradition. It is perfectly normal that this cultural tradition takes it up and re- stricts it, does what it wants with it, has it express what it didn't say, but with the allusion that it is only another form of
? . . For Reason to Tell the Truth? 249
? what one intended to say. That belongs to the play of culture. But that cannot be my relationship to Deleuze. I will not say what he wanted to say. His problem was the problem of desire. Probably we will find in the theory of desh-e the effect of a re- lationship to Nietzsche. While my problem always was truth. Wahr-Sagen and the relationship between it and the forms of reflexivity, the reflexivity of self above self.
Q: Yes, I think Nietzsche did not differentiate thor- oughly enough the will to knowledge fi^om the will to power.
? MF; There's a noticeable shifting in Nietzsche's text between those who are governed by the question about the will to knowledge and the will to power. But I didn't want to debate this for a simple reason. I haven't read Nietzsche for a good many years.
Q: The elaboration seemed to be important for me because of the truly confused reception of Nietzsche abroad, as characterized by the way also in France.
MF: My relationship to Nietzsche is not a historical relationship. I am not so interested in Nietzsche's history of thought as in this quality of the challenge, which I felt--rather long ago--as I read Nietzsche for the first time. If one reads
"Fro? hliche Wissenschaft" or "Morgenrote" while one is being formed by the great and old university tradition of Des- cartes, Kant, Hegel, Husserl, then one stumbles on these witty, strange, and impudent texts and says to oneself, good, I won't do it the way my fiiends, colleagues, and professors do it, peering in arrogance from on high. What is the epitome of philosophical intensity and what are the actual philosophical effects, which we can find in these texts. That for me is the challenge of Nietzsche.
? 250 How Much Does It Cost. .
? Q: In the actual reception there is a second confu- sion, that is post-modernism, to which not insignificant people refer and which played a certain role in Germany, since Habermas took up this expression and criticized it. Do you see a tendency in it ? Can you ascertain a place for yourself in it?
? MF: I must say, I find that difficult to answer. First, because I never really understood how modernism is defined in France. It's clear by Baudelaire, but after that it seems to lose meaning for me. I don't know in what sense Germans speak of modernism. I know that Americans are planning a kind of seminar with Habermas and me and Habermas pro- posed modernism as the topic. I'm at a loss; I don't know what that means nor what the problematic is. As much as I recog- nize behind the expression Structuralism, the problem of the subject and its transformation, as little do I see the common problematic between post-modernism or post-structuralism,
? Q: Accepting modernism or rejecting it is not only ambiguous, it truncates modernism. Also it has at least three definitions: the definition of the historian, Weber's definition, and Adorno's which alludes to Benjamin's Baudelaire. Haber- mas seems to prefer here against Adorno the tradition of rea- son, that is, Weber's definition of modernism. Therefore he perceives in post-modernism the decline of reason, so that reason basically becomes a form of the will to knowledge, among other things.
MF: That isn't my problem. I don't at all identify reason with the totality of the forms of rationality. The latter could until recently dominate in the types of knowledge, the forms of technology and the modalities of governance. The application of rationality occurs primarily in these areas. I don't deal with the problem of art, it is too complicated. For
? . . For Reason to Tell the Truth? 251
? me no given form of rationality is reason. Therefore I don't see how one can say that the forms of rationality, which have governed these three realms, break apart and disperse. I simply see multiple transformations--^but why should one call that the demise of reason? Endlessly other forms of rationality are born. Therefore I claim that reason is a long narrative, which ends today and makes room for another, and makes no sense.
? Q: The field is open for many forms of narratives.
? 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.
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