No More Learning

Q; In other words, power is no longer necessarily that which condemns and encloses?
? MF: In general terms, I would say that the interdic- tion, the refusal, the prohibition, far from being essential forms of power, are only its limits: the frustrated or extreme forms of power. The relations of power are, above all, produc- tive.
Q: This is a new idea compared with your previous books.
? MF: If I wanted to pose and drape myself in a sUghdy fictive coherence, I would tell you that this has always been my problem: effects of power and the production of "truth. " I have always felt ill at ease with this ideological notion which has been used so much in recent years. It has been used to explain errors or illusions, shaded representa- tions--^in short, everything that impedes the formation of true discourses. It has also been used to show the relationship be- tween what goes on in peoples' heads and their place in the relations of production. In all, the economy of untruth. My problem is the poUtics of truth. I have taken a lot of time in realizing it.
? Q: Why?
? MF: For several reasons. First, because power in the West is what diplays itself the most, and thus what hides itself
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? best. What we have called "political life" since the nineteenth century is (a bit like the court in the age of monarchy) the manner in which power gives itself over to representation. Power is neither there, nor is that how it functions. The rela- tions of power are perhaps among the most hidden things in the social body.
On the other hand, since the nineteenth century, the critique of society has been essentially carried out, starting with the effectively determining nature of the economy. Cer- tainly a healthy reduction of "pohtics," but also with the ten- dency to neglect the relations of elementary power that could be constitutive of economic relations.
The third reason is the tendency, which is itself com- mon to institutions, political parties, and an entire current of revolutionary thought and action, which consists in not seeing power in any other form than that of the state apparatus.
? All of which leads, when one turns to individuals, to finding power only in their heads (under the form of represen- tation, acceptation, or interiorization).
? Q: And what did you want to do in the face of this?
MF: Four things: investigate what might be most hidden in power relations; anchor them in their economic in- frastructures; trace them not only in their governmental forms but also in their infra-govemmental or para-govemmental ones; and recuperate them in their material play.
? Q: At what point did you begin this type of study?
? MF: If you want a bibliographical reference, it was in Discipline and Punish. But I would rather say that it began with a series of events and experiences since 1968 concerning psychiatry, delinquency, the schools, etc. But I believe that
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? these elements themselves would never have been able to take their direction and intensity if there had not been those two gigantic shadows of fascism and Stalinism behind them. If proletarian misery--this sub-existence--caused political thought of the nineteenth century to revolve around the econ- omy, then these super-powers fascism and Stalinism induce political anxiety about our present-day societies.
Hence two problems. Power--how does it work? Is it enough that it imposes strong prohibitions in order to function effectively? And does it always move from above to below and from the center to the periphery?
Q: I saw this in The History of Sexuality, this shift- ing, this essential sliding. This time you made a clean break with the diffuse naturalism that haunts your previous books. . .
MF: What you call "naturalism" designates two things, I believe. A certain theory, the idea that underneath power with its acts of violence and its artifice we should be able to recuperate things themselves in their primitive vivac- ity: behind the asylum walls, the spontaneity of madness; through the penal system, the generous fever of delinquence; under the sexual interdiction, the freshness of desire. And also a certain aesthetic and moral choice: power is evil, it's ugly, poor, sterile, monotonous, dead; and what power is exercised upon is right, good, rich.
Q: Yes. And finally the theme common to the ortho- dox Marxist and to the New Left: "Under the cobblestones lies the beach. "
MF: If you like. There are moments when such sim- phfications are necessary. Such a dualism is provisionally useful to change the scenery from time to time and move from pro to contra.
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? Q: And then comes the time to stop, the moment of reflection and of regaining equilibrium?
? MF: On the contrary. The moment of new mobility and displacement must follow. Because these reversals of pro to contra are quickly blocked, unable to do anything except repeat themselves and form what Jacques Ranciere calls the "Leftist doxa. " As soon as we repeat indefinitely the same refrain of the anti-repressive ditty, things remain in place-- anyone can sing the tune, without anyone paying attention. This reversal of values and of truths, which I was speaking about a while ago, has been important to the extent that it does not stop with simple cheers (long live insanity, delinquency, sex), but it permits new strategies. You see, what often bothers me today, in fact, what really troubles me, is that all the work done in the past fifteen years or so, often under hardship and solitude, functions only for some as a sign of belonging on the "good side" of insanity, children, delinquency, sex.
? Q: There is no good side?
MF: One must pass to the other side--the "good side"--but in order to extract oneself from these mechanisms which make two sides appear, in order to dissolve the false unity, the illusory "nature" of this other side with which we have taken sides. This is where the real work begins, that of the historian of the present.
Q: You have already several times defined yourself as an historian. What does it mean? Why "historian" and not "philosopher? "
? MF: Under a form as naive as a child's tale, I will say that the question of philosophy has been for a long time:
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? "In this world where all perishes, what doesn't pass away? Where are we, we who must die, in relation to that which doesn't? " It seems to me that, since the nineteenth century, philosophy has not ceased asking itself the same question: "What is happening right now, and what are we, we who are perhaps nothing more than what is happening at this mo- ment? " Philosophy's question is the question of this present age which is ourselves. This is why philosophy is today en- tirely political and entirely historical. It is the politics imma- nent in history and the history indispensable for politics.
Q: But isn't there also a return today to the most classical, metaphysical kind of philosophy?
MF; I don't believe in any form of return. I would say only this, and only half-seriously. The thinking of the first Christian centuries would have had to answer the question: "What is actually going on today? What is this age in which we live? When and how will this promised retum of God take place? What can we do with this intervening time which is superfluous? And what are we, we who are in this transition?
One could say that on this slope of history, where the revolution is supposed to hold back and has not yet come, we ask the same question: "Who are we, we who are superfluous in this age where what should happen is not happening? " All modem thought, like all politics, has been dominated by this question of revolution.
Q; Do you continue for your part to pose this ques- tion of revolution and reflect upon it? Does it remain in your eyes the question par excellence?
? MF: If politics has existed since the nineteenth cen- tury, it's because there was revolution. The current one is not a
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? variant or a sector of that one. It's politics that always situates itself in relation to revolution. When Napoleon said, "The modem form of destiny is pohtics," he was only drawing the consequences from this truth, for he came after the revolution and before the eventual retum of another one.
? The retum of revolution--that is surely our problem. It is certain that without it's retum, the question of Stalinism would be only an academic one--a mere problem of the or- ganization of societies or of the validity of the Marxist scheme of things. But it's really quite another question concerning Stalinism. You know very well what it is: the very desirabiUty of the revolution is the problem today.
Q: Do you want the revolution? Do you want some- thing more than the simple ethical duty to stmggle here and now, at the side of one or another group of mental patients and prisoners, oppressed and miserable?
? MF: I have no answer. But I believe that to engage in politics---aside from party politics--is to try to know with the greatest possible honesty whether or not the revolution is de- sirable. It is in exploring this terrible molehill that politics runs the danger of caving in.
? Q: If the revolution were no longer desirable, would politics remain what you say it is?
MF: No, I don't beheve so. It would be necessary to invent another one or something which could be a substitute for it. We are perhaps living the end of politics. For it's true that politics is a field which was opened by the existence of the revolution, and if the question of revolution can no longer be asked in these terms, then politics risks disappearing.
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? Q: Let's return to your politics in The History of Sexuality. You say: "Where there is power, there is resis- tance. " Are you not thus bringing back this nature which a while back you wanted to dismiss?
? MF: I don't think so, because this resistance I am speaking of is not a substance. It is not anterior to the power which it opposes. It is coextensive with it and absolutely its contemporary.
Q: The inverse of power? That would come to the same thing. Always the cobblestones under the beach. . .
MF: It isn't that either. For if it were only that, it wouldn't resist. To resist, it would have to operate like power. As inventive, mobile and productive power. Like power, it would have to organize, coagulate, and solidify itself. Like power, it would have to come from "underneath" and distrib- ute itself strategically.
Q: "Where there is power, there is resistance. " It's almost a tautology, consequently. . .
MF: Absolutely. I am not positing a substance of resistance in the face of power. I am simply saying: as soon as there is a power relation, there is the possibility of resistance. We are never trapped by power: we can always modify its grip in determinate conditions and according to a precise strategy.
Q: Power and resistance. . . tactics and strategy. . . Why this stock of military metaphors? Do you think that power from now on must be thought of in the form of war?
? MF: For the moment, I really don't know. One thing seems certain to me; it is that to analyze the relationships of
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? power, we have at present only two models at our disposal: the one proposed by law (power as law, interdiction, the institu- tion) and the military or strategic model in terms of power relations. The first has been much used and has proven its inadequate character, I believe. We know very well that law does not describe power.
? I know that the other model is also much discussed. But we stop with words: we use ready-made ideas or meta- phors ("war of all against all," "struggle for life"), or again formal schemata (strategies are very much in fashion among certain sociologists or economists, especially Americans). I believe that this analysis of power relations should be tight- ened up.
Q: This military conception of power relations, was it already used by the Marxists?
? MF: What strikes me about Marxist analyses is that it's always a question of "class struggle," but there is one word in the expression to which less attention is paid, namely "struggle. " Here again qualifications must be made. The great- est of the Marxists (starting with Marx himself) insisted a great deal on "mihtary" problems (the army as an instrument of the state, armed insurrection, revolutionary war). But when they speak of "class struggle" as the mainspring of history, they worry especially about defining this class, where it is situated, who it encompasses, but never concretely about the nature of the struggle. With one exception, however: Marx's own non-theoretical, historical texts, which are better in this regard.
? Q: Do you think that your book can fill such a gap?
? MF: I don't make any such claim. In a general way, I think that intellectuals--^if this category exists, if it should
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? exist at all, which is not certain nor perhaps even desirable-- are renouncing their old prophetic function.
? And by that I'm not thinking only of their claim to say what is going to happen, but also of the legislative func- tion which they've aspired to for so long: "See what must be done, see what is good, follow me. In the turmoil you're all in, here is the pivotal point, it's where I am. " The Greek sage, the Jewish prophet, and the Roman legislator are still models that haunt those who practice today the profession of speaking and writing. I dream of the intellectual destroyer of evidence and universalities, the one who, in the inertias and constraints of the present, locates and marks the weak points, the openings, the lines of power, who incessantly displaces himself, doesn't know exactly where he is heading nor what he'll think tomor- row because he is too attentive to the present; who, in passing, contributes the posing of the question of knowing whether the revolution is worth it, and what kind (I mean what kind of revolution and what effort), it being understood that they alone who are willing to risk their lives to bring it about can answer the question.
? As for all the questions of classification and program- ming that we are asked: "Are you a Marxist? " "What would you do if you had power? " "Who are your allies and where are your sympathies? "--these are truly secondary questions com- pared with the one that I have just indicated. That is the ques- tion of today. A
? Translated by Dudley M. Marchi Notes
' La Mort propagande (Paris: R. Deforges, 1977). ^ Co-ire (Paris: Recherches, 1976).
? 14
? The Anxiety of Judging
? Jean Laplanche: The death penalty is absolute, in the sense that it abolishes the criminal at the same time as the crime.
' Yet we no longer have the theological certainty, the blind faith, that would authorize us to pronounce such a penalty. For me it would be enough to know that, out of a thousand condemned to death there was a single innocent one, to make the abolition of the death penalty essential. When the court makes a mistake, there's no way to make reparations, since its "object"--^the condemned man--^no longer exists. I am therefore personally and unambiguously in favor of the suppression of the death penalty.
That said, my article was bom of a disturbing aston- ishment. I perceived that in this great debate there was a tacit agreement to refer only to utilitarian arguments. To me that was particularly shocking on the part of people who, claiming to be mostly on the left, consider themselves partisans of the abolition of the death penalty. Before the deluge of statistics "showing" that the death penalty doesn't discourage crime and that it has no dissuasive power, I asked myself: how can something so serious be discussed by considering it only from the point of view of the fear it provokes, even if it is to try to show that the latter is ineffective? And if other statistics were to "demonstrate" that the penalty is dissuasive? Your convic- tion wouldn't change a bit!
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? Robert Badinter: In your article you alluded to the role of the defense in the jury trial and you reproach me for using "utilitarian" arguments. There's much to say about that! But, before everything, I must make clear that for me a plea for the defense is dead the very moment it's uttered. It's an action, not a reflection. It can't be dissociated from the trial of which it is part. I had a stenographer record all the debates in Patrick Henry's trial. I thought, like everyone, that it was going to end with his death sentence. I wanted--and this will not surprise Michel Foucault--^the debates to remain, as an historic document. Had Henry been condemned to death, I would have published this text immediately.
? Michel Foucault: You just said something very important: no one really knows what happens in the course of a trial. Which is surprising if nothing else, insofar as it's a public procedure, in principle. Because of the distrust of the secret and the written word--which were the two principles of penal justice under the monarchy--our trials since 1794 have supposedly been oral and public. The indictments of the prose- cution are only preparatory documents. All must be played out in a theater with the public supposedly present. Yet, con- cretely, only fifty people, some journalists, a hurried judge, and an overwhelmed jury participate. There is no doubt that in France justice is a secret. And, after the verdict, it remains as such. It is nevertheless extraordinary that every day dozens of indictments are pronounced in the name of the "French people," who are essentially ignorant of them.
? A debate like the one at Troyes was extremely impor- tant. For months Patrick Henry's crime was made the object of an unprecedented dramatization in all the press. And then, and I don't know if we should be congratulating ourselves, during the trial the history of the death penalty became involved in the issue. Yet, in spite of all that, no one really knows what
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? was said about it, what argument hit home. In my opinion the uncensored publication of the debates is indispensable, what- ever your reserves.
RB: What you just said encourages me to ask Jean Laplanche a preliminary question, a minor but very important question: Have you ever witnessed a great criminal trial?
JL: No, never.
RB: You neither, Michel Foucault?
MF: Never a big criminal trial. And The Nouvel Observateur never asked me to cover the Troyes trial, which I regret. . .
RB: Jean Laplanche has only seen artifice and clev- erness where all those who were present at the trial felt exactly the contrary. In fact, for me it was only a matter of leading the jury to a state of lucidity about what the death penalty repre- sented for them as human beings.
? I said to myself: the true problem for the jury member is his personal, secret relationship to death. I wanted to make them feel that they represented, finally, only themselves, fac ing a man seated very close to them. And that they had the aberrant and exorbitant power to prohibit this man from con- tinuing to live. Of course I spoke of the man "cut in two. " But, contrary to what Jean Laplanche imagines, this was not done out of a taste for oratorical effect. I am horrified by every rhetorical exploitation of the guillotine and torture. It was ex- actly to avoid description that I sought the barest image to represent the decapitation of a man. And however you inter- pret it, at the end of the execution this man is in two pieces in the court of Sante. That's all. So, instead of going into a wealth
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of disturbing details--they're going to cut off his head and put it into a basket--chose extreme bareness.
That this image evokes fundamental notions like cas- tration for a psychoanalyst is possible. But in what concerns me, it's the opposite of rhetorical artifice. That's why this ar- ticle shocked and wounded me.
JL: Badinter seems to think that I reproached him for techniques and "effects. " But it's not the sincerity of the law yer that's in question. At bottom, it hardly matters whether or not I was present at the trial. The trials like the one at Troyes
are spectator trials: all citizens, not just the audience, are sum- moned to them.
? And this leads to my second remark: you arenecessar- ily in a compromised position between your function as a defender of a man and your mission as reformer of a law. I very much admired your book L'Execution^ where you show that the defense of a man can be only an absolute witnessing, body to body, that no longer has to be concemed with justice. It's a redoubtable and admirable position. Assuming you have used certain "effects" to this end, I see nothing more to add. But your position is untenable when, at the same moment, you intend to take action against the death penalty. One of two things: either you still situate yourself in reference to the law and to justice--but tiiat impedes your absolute defense; or it's the very notion of penalty that you contest; yet tiie critic of tiie death penalty who emphasizes its "efficacity" presupposes that
justice has only the administration of the best possible rela- tionships between men as its object.
? RB: But finally the problem of the death penahy is not posed only in itself, abstractiy! It is first posed very con- cretely at the moment when a man is there next to you, at risk of being condemned to death. It takes on all its meaning, be-
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? lieve me, only at the last bloody minute in the court of Sante. There's nothing theoretical about it, alas!
? JL: You tell us that each jury member finally re- presents only himself. But one can claim the same thing for every pronouncement of a penalty, whatever it is! Let's sup- pose that the death penalty is abolished. Isn't it the same situ- ation? Isn't the jury member then the person who slides the bolt on the prison cell? Don't we retum, as in the case of the death penalty, to a "man-to-man" situation where no decision can be conceived but the one of vengeance? That's very much the reason why justice is only possible when rendered "in the name of. . . " If you suppress this reference that transcends the individual you suppress justice. But what is substituted for it is not liberty, but the obligatory administration of men, with its multiple faces: technical, psychiatric, the police, etc.
? RB: At no moment in his life does a man dispose of a power comparable to the one when he says: "What am I going to do with him? Am I going to send him to prison for five years? Ten years? " And from that moment of course a lawyer's first duty is to recall to the jury the immensity of those five years. But, in the case of a prison term, which can easily be changed, nothing is really definitive. The trial will proceed in the shadow or within the framework of detention, sometimes a pardon or conditional freedom, etc. When it's a matter of death the choice is radical: it changes nature. After the decision--except for the possibility of pardon--^it's all over. When the jurors have to pronounce sentence, it's death that looks them in the face. And it is conjured away, erased, masked by the whole judicial ceremony.
? JL: The ceremony is ridiculous and absolute only when deprived of its symbolic significance, of its reference "in
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? the name of. . . " You insist on individualizing the judifical de- cision. But, by doing that, you render every decision impos- sible--or criminal. Every day, aren't there numerous circum- stances in which the decision of a single person leads to the death of thousands? Imagine that you are President of the RepubUc and that you have to decide whether to lower the speed hmit on highways to 90 km/hour. There's reason to spend a few bad nights. There again, the filing of a charge is not a vain trifle but what allows culpabihty to be tied to every decision. Presidents, judges, jurors obsessionally made to feel guilty: is that what we want? But then, in turn, pohce superin- tendents, technocrats, and the specialists "of the human soul" will disburden themselves of all scruples. . .
? RB: I don't see the connection. How can the fact that certain pohtical or strategic decisions invoke the life and death of others justify the judicial decision to put someone to death? It's true that the decision to keep a man in prison for five years more or less is a serious one. But how are we to admit the death penalty into today's system? At Troyes Patrick Henry escaped with his life. But Ranucci had just been guillo- tined, and, a week after Troyes, Carrein was sentenced, per- haps because some jurors felt frustrated by Henry's release. This relativism alone suffices to condemn capital punishment.
So, why not use all the arguments one has at one's disposal? There is the prosecutor, standing before you, saying: "If you don't condemn this man to death other innocent chil- dren will be savagely murdered. " At that point of the trial, if you don't respond in kind, if you don't destroy his argument-- which in reality is only a disguise for the death drive that works within us all--^you are lost. Of course criminals aren't executed in order to protect other potential victims. They are killed for other reasons, reasons that I would like to hear you, as a psychoanalyst, explain to us. But before getting to the
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? heart of the issue, these pseudo-rational arguments have to be destroyed. If we don't take that approach it's not worth the trouble trying to save a man.
? JL: To be sure, you're in touch with the reality of the court. But I wonder if this milieu of the court, with its argu- ments that move in a closed circle, is really connected to this other reality, that of the social body, and its need for justice that you have wrongly reduced to a need for vengeance. The exemplarity or inefficiency of the penalty--that's not what resonates at the level of the population. Or rather, to make a finer distinction, we ought to distinguish between two aspects of what is called "exemplarity. " One is purely utilitarian: man is compared to a rat that one trains in a maze. If he gets a shock, he'll go in another direction. We know that this kind of conditioning--fortunately--^is for man greatly inefficient. And there is a different exemplarity that one can call symbohc, which attests to the durability of a certain network of values: the value of human life for example. So I think that, if you go to the heart of things, the "real" dissuasion doesn't particularly interest the people who clamor, sometimes in a fnghtfiil or vehement way, for criminals to be punished. What they want, simply, is that the crime be punished; the "example" of the punishment is there to attest to the durability of certain "ta- boos. " Yet, on that level, you're not responding to them; you never say to them, at any point: "Do you really understand what the punishment is? Do you really know why you desire it so much? "
? MF: Badinter's defense plea at Troyes seemed strong to me on precisely those points that Jean Laplanche is contest ing. But I don't think that you. Monsieur Badinter, are giving but a minimal interpretation of what you have done. You said to the jurors: "In the end your conscience doesn't allow you to
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? condemn someone to death! " And you said equally; "You don't know this individual; the psychiatrists haven't been able to tell you anything about him, and you're going to condemn him to death! " You have also criticized the exemplarity of the punishment. Yet these arguments are possible only because penal justice doesn't function so much as the application of a law or a code than as a sort of corrective mechanism in which the psychology of the defendant and the conscience of the jurors interfere with one another.
? If your strategy appears shrewd to me, it's because it puts the way penal justice has worked since the beginning of the 19th century into a trap. You have taken it literally. You have said to yourself: "According to our justice the jurors, these people chosen randomly, are reputed to be the universal conscience of the people. But there is no reason that twelve people can suddenly, by a kind of judicial grace, begin to function as the universal conscience. " Having raised this chal- lenge, you have said to them: "Monsieur Untel, you have your humors, your mother-in-law, your Uttle hfe. Can you take it upon yourself, such as you are, to kill someone? " And you were right to speak to them like that. For justice functions on the equivocation between the juror as universal conscience, as abstract citizen, and the individual juror drawn randomly according to a certain number of criteria.
Similarly, you have said: "At bottom, we judge peo- ple not so much according to their acts as according to their personality. " The best proof: We bring in a psychiatrist, character witnesses, we ask the little sister if the accused was nice, we question his parents about his childhood. We judge the criminal more than the crime. And it's the knowledge we gain of the criminal that justifies whether we inflict such and such a punishment. But, continuing to raise the challenge, you have drawn the consequences: "The psychiatrists have not been capable of telling us about Patrick Henry, we don't really know him. We cannot therefore kill him. "
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? Your arguments were tactically skillful, to be sure. But above all they had the merit of openly making use of the logic of the current penal system, and of turning it back against itself. You have demonstrated that the death penalty couldn't function within such a system. But then Jean Laplan- che intervenes by saying that this system is dangerous.
JL: If I say that it's dangerous it's because it leads us to a conformism much worse than that of the law: that of con- formity. Foucault emphasizes an evolution but he pushes also in the direction of the latter. The law whose death he an- nounces is replaced, in an insidious way, by the manipulation of man in the name of a "norm" claimed to be rational. And the "norm" will not be so easily put off: it's the crabgrass that ceaselessly pushes back the ground "liberated" from the law.
MF; Let's imagine a justice that functions only ac- cording to a code: if you steal, your hand is cut off; if you
commit adultery, your sex organs are slit; if you murder, your head is cut off. It's a system of arbitrary and obligatory rela- tionships between the acts and the punishment that sanctions the crime in the person of the criminal. Thus it is possible to condemn someone to death.
But, if justice is concerned with correcting an individ- ual, of gripping the depths of his soul in order to transform
him, then everything is different: it's a man who is judging another and the death penalty is absurd. Monsieur Badinter has proved it; his defense, in this sense, is un-arguable.
JL: Not only does the death penalty become impos- sible but no punishment is truly possible.
MF: That's right. Today two systems are super- imposed on one another. On the one hand, we are still living
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