The Art of Telling the Truth: Language, Power and the Play of the Outside in Michel Foucault Thesis submitted to Jawaharlal Nehru University in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Abhilash G Nath Centre for Linguistics School of Language, Literature and Culture Studies Jawaharlal Nehru University New Delhi - 110067, India 2014 Centre for Linguistics School of Language, Literature and Culture Studies Jawaharlal Nehru University New Delhi - 110067, India Date: Certificate This thesis titled “The Art of Telling the Truth: Language, Power and the Play of the Outside in Michel Foucault” submitted by Abhilash G Nath, Centre for Linguistics, School of Language, Literature and Culture Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, for the award of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, is an original work and has not been submitted so far in part or in full, for any other degree, diploma of any university or institution. This may be placed before the examiners for evaluation for the award of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. (Prof. Franson Manjali) (Prof. Saugata Bhaduri) (Prof. Ayesha Kidwai) Supervisor Supervisor Chairperson Date: Declaration by the Candidate This thesis titled “The Art of Telling the Truth: Language, Power and the Play of the Outside in Michel Foucault” submitted by me for the award of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, is an original work and has not been submitted so far in part or in full, for any other degree, diploma of any university or institution. (Abhilash G Nath) PhD Student Centre for Linguistics, School of Language, Literature and Culture Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 1 PART I CHAPTER I Subject, Power and Method: What is Thinking? 17 CHAPTER II Optics and the Folding of Light 53 CHAPTER III Form, Force and the Fold of the Articulable 77 PART II CHAPTER IV The Theatrics: Body, Self and the Play of the Outside 121 CONCLUSION 209 APPENDIX 219 BIBLIOGRAPHY 241 1 | P a g e Introduction Introduction I The present study revolves around a series of related questions that connect one of the central arguments in Foucault’s work. Foucault argues that the self (or the ‘I’) that contemplates is indeed only a fold of outside. Consequently, thinking itself is essentially folding of the outside. It is the distancing of itself from itself, through folding thought as it arrives from the outside. Man, The Order of Things suggests, is compressed and withheld in a hollowed out space formed at the middle of the folds of life, language and labour. Still, these respective folds, Foucault insists, can unfold themselves in him that is, only in man (Foucault, 1994, p. 313). These folds that are prior to his own birth and, for that very reason, having an existence ontologically independent of his own, do not actually carry the truth of his own being, and still it can only be 2 | P a g e Introduction through his life, labour and language that he (man) can evaluate himself and the world. What unfolds at the very heart of this field of movement is a recurring absence – a signal of the presence of an absolute other. The inner most inside of all thoughts is a recurring absence – an absence that incessantly splits the very instance that releases them. “A Preface to Transgression,” for instance, proposes that “the interior is an empty skull, a central absence” (Foucault, 1980, p. 49). Consequently, it is the very recurring of a central absence, (an absolute limit) that infinitely unfolds the folds of life, labour and language in man. No absolute truth, nothing in man is stable enough (and that means, not even the material body) to hold the truth of both himself and the world. The very absence of a univocal truth, in contrast, establishes a differential relationship between the space of the body and the time of the culture. In the modern discourse on man, Foucault suggests, the recurring of the absolute absence – a radical finitude that hollows out the instance by splitting it, relentlessly fibrillates the time that presences thought to itself through differentiating and repeating of the empirical (the space of the body) and the transcendental (the time of the culture) contents within that thought. It, then, establishes a field of forces between these contents of thought, given thought a nocturnal dimension. Man, consequently, is constituted as an empirico-transcendental doublet. He is always in a ceaseless unfolding within a field of temporal becoming, within a play of repetition, where repetition will always repeat itself with difference. What, then, itself repeats as the same is nothing but the model of movement – and Deleuze would call it: the repetition of pure difference. The present study poses to itself: if thinking comes from the outside, then under what condition thinking can encounter itself – its colour, texture and topography? That is, under what condition can man encounter himself and the world? If put differently: the present study, essentially, takes the form of time 3 | P a g e Introduction meditating upon the condition of its own origin, in order to make sense of its own space and movements. Since this problem does not have its origin in Foucault’s work, this work does not arrive at any conclusion, merely by analysing and evaluating his work alone. Rather, it aims to explore how Foucault has incorporated Kant and Nietzsche into his thinking, on the one hand, and contextualises him within the Western tradition in general and his responses to contemporaries Deleuze and Derrida, in particular, on the other. Consequently, this study is limited by the sheer weight of its own problematisation. It is important to make sense of Foucault’s work not just with an academic interest, but also to make sense of our own present. Through a broad comparison (and that is just to make sense of the implications of his work), one could suggest that if Deleuze is a giant in building a new system of thought, Foucault is a warrior who prefers to position himself strategically at the threshold, at the very frontiers that divide the interior from the outside of Western sensibilities. In The Order of Things, while going through Borges’ Chinese encyclopaedia, one, for instance, finds him showing the audacity to laugh at himself – at the very limits of his own sensibilities (Foucault, 1994, pp. xviii – xix). In him, one encounters a modern-day Samurai at war. His campaign, however, is not directed against the outside and, for that reason, is anti-expansionistic. It is a war directed against oneself, against the interiority of one’s own culture. Still, like the flash of reflected light on a swinging sword in mid-air, he hides more than what he reveals of himself. He is a master strategist and a tactician, who uses them like weapons and tools to subvert systems of normalised practices. His genealogical critique of the present explores the possibilities for the creation a new man. At the very heart of the Foucauldian endeavour is empiricism, and a concern with the everyday life. 4 | P a g e Introduction To Foucault, the place of man reveals to himself when language recovered its lost consistency that would thicken it into words that can be deciphered. He appears to himself as a private concern, when language lost its transparency that shaped Classical world, and transformed itself into a reality with its own density. In the modern age, man appears to himself as compressed and withheld in a hollowed out space formed at the middle of the folds of life, labour and language, and still it can only be within him that these respective folds can unfold themselves. For that reason, Foucault in his work on Kant’s Anthropology suggests that it can only be in man that a synthesis of the world (known) and the God (unknown) is possible. Since these folds are prescribed to him in advance, and have their own modes of being independent of his own, their folding towards themselves allows him to constitute a self that is external to them and yet, in relation to them, in a state of ceaseless becoming. Consequently, Foucault defines modernity as an attitude. It is a mode of relating to contemporary reality, a voluntary choice made by certain people and played out against the attitudes of counter-modernity. In the end, it is, according to Foucault, a way of thinking and feeling, and a way, too, of acting and behaving. It is a way of constituting oneself, through ceaseless active and passive syntheses, as a man who is responsible for his own actions. Unlike the Cartesian cogito with innate qualities and the Leibnizian monad that is folded towards itself, the self, according to Foucault, is only a fold of the outside, and it is so, due to the changed relation between being and representation in the modern age. When language regained its lost opacity and became a reality with its own density, a new form of discourse came into being whose internal tension would keep separate the empirical and the transcendental, while being directed at both, and with its birth, it became possible to analyse man as a subject. With the emergence of the tension within a new form of discourse 5 | P a g e Introduction that keeps the space of the body and the time of the culture separated from each other, man quickly appears to himself as an object of analysis. One encounters three forms of ontology in Foucault’s work: the first analyses man as the subject of truth; the second takes up man as the subject of power; and the third analyses man as an ethical being.