Foucault Live
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Semiotext (e) Foreign A gents Series Jim Fleming and SyMre Lx)tringer, Editors IN THE SHADOW OF THE FOUCAULT LIVE SILENT MAJORITIES Michel Foucault Jean Baudrillard FORGETFOUCAULT NOMADOLOGY: Jean Baudrillard THE WAR MACHINE Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari BEHOLD METATRON, THE RECORDING ANGEL DRIFTWORKS SolYurick Jean-François Lyotard BOLO'BOLO POPULAR DEFENSE AND P. M. ECOLOGICAL STRUGGLES Paul Virilio SPEED AND POLITICS Paul Virilio SIMULATIONS Jean Baudrillard ON THE UNE Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari THE SOCIAL FACTORY Toni Negri & Mario Tronti SADNESS AT LEAVING Erje Ay den PURE WAR Paul Virilio & Sylvère Lotringer REMARKS ON MARX Michel Foucault LOOKING BACK ON THE END OF THE WORLD 69 WAYS TO SING THE BLUES Jean Baudrillard Jürg Laéderach Gunter Gebauer Dietmar Kamper INTERVENTIONS - - Dieter Lenzen Michel Foucault Edgar Morin Gerburg Treusch-Dieter ASSASSINATION RHAPSODY Paul Virilio Derek Pell Christoph Wulf Foucault Live (Interviews, 1966-84) Michel Foucault Translated by John Johnston Edited by Sylvère Lotringer Semiotext (e) Foreign A gents Series Publication references and acknowledgements appear in the final section of this book. Special thanks to Vincent Errante, Jim Fleming, Michel Foucault, John Johnston, and Lewanne Jones. Copyright © 1989 Semiotext(e) Semiotext(e) 522 Philosophy Hall Columbia University New York, NY 10027 USA Printed in the United States of America Contents 1 The Order of Things..................................................................1 2 The Discourse of History.......................................................11 3 Foucault Responds to Sartre ................................................... 35 4 The Archeology of Knowledge.............................................. 45 5 The Birth of a World.............................................................. 57 6 Rituals of Exclusion............................................................... 63 7 An Historian of Culture.......................................................... 73 8 Film and Popular Memory.....................................................89 9 Sorcery and Madness.......................................................... 107 10 On Literature........................................................................113 11 The Politics of Soviet Crime ............................................... 121 12 L Pierre Rivière ................................................................... 131 13 The End of the Monarchy of Sex........................................ 137 14 The Anxiety of Judging........................................................157 15 Clarifications on the Question of Power.............................179 i 16 The Masked Philosopher..........................................................193 17 Friendship as a Way of Life................................................ 203 18 Sexual Choice, Sexual Act.................................................. 211 19 How Much Does it Cost to Tell the Truth?...233 20 An Ethics of Pleasure...........................................................257 21 What Calls for Punishment?.................................................27 5 22 The Concern for Truth........................................................ 293 t 23 An Aesthetics of Existence.......................................................309 ' 24 The Return of Morality............................................................317 References and Acknowledgements................................... 333 Foucault Live 1 The Order of Things Q: How is The Order of Things related to Madness and Civilization? MF: Madness and Civilization, roughly speaking, was the history of a division, the history above all of a certain break that every society found itself obliged to install. On the other hand, in this book I wanted to write a history of order, to state how a society reflects upon resemblances among things and how differences between things can be mastered, organ ized into networks, sketched out according to rational schemes. Madness and Civilization is the history of difference. The Order of Things the history of resemblance, sameness, and identity. Q: In the sub-title that you have given the book one again encounters this word “archeology,” which appeared in the sub-title of The Birth of the Clinic and again in the Preface to Madness and Civilization. MF; By archeology I would like to designate not exactly a discipline, but a domain of research, which would be the following: 2 The Order of Things In a society, different bodies of learning, philosophi cal ideas, everyday opinions, but also institutions, commercial practices and police activities, mores—all refer to a certain implicit knowledge (savoir) special to this society.' This knowledge is profoundly different from the bodies of learning that one can find in scientific books, philosophical theories, and religious justifications, but it is what makes possible at a given moment the appearance of a theory, an opinion, a prac tice. Thus, in order for the big centers of internment to be opened at the end of the 17th century, it was necessary that a certain knowledge of madness be opposed to non-madness, of order to disorder, and it’s this knowledge (savoir) that I wanted to investigate, as the condition of possibility of knowl edge (connaissance), of institutions, of practices. This style of research has for me the following inter est: it permits me to avoid every problem concerning the an teriority of theory in relation to practice, and the inverse. In fact, I deal with practices, institutions and theories on the same plane and according to the same isomorphisms, and I look for the underlying knowledge (savoir) that makes them possible, the stratum of knowledge that constitutes them historically. Rather than try to explain this knowledge from the point of view of the practico-inert, I try to formulate an analysis from the position of what one could call the “theoretico-active.”^ Q: You find yourself therefore confronting a double problem; of history and formalization. MF; All these practices, then, thèse institutions and theories, I take at the level of traces, that is, almost always at the level of verbal traces. The ensemble of these traces consti tutes a sort of domain considered to be homogeneous; one doesn’t establish any differences a priori. The problem is to find common traits between these traces of sufficiently The Order of Things 3 different orders in order to constitute what logicians call classes, aestheticians call forms, men of science call struc tures, and which are the invariants common to a certain num ber of traces. Q: How have you posed the problem of choice and non-choice? MF: I will respond by saying that in fact there must not be any privileged choice. One must be able to read every thing, to know all the institutions and all the practices. None of the values traditionally recognized in the history of ideas and philosophy must be accepted as such. One is dealing with a field that will ignore the differences and traditionally impor tant things. Which means that one will take up Don Quixote, Descartes, and a decree by Pomponne de Belierre about houses of internment in the same stroke. One will perceive that the grammarians of the 18 th century have as much impor tance as the recognized philosphers of the same period. Q; It is in this sense that you say, for example, that Curier and Ricardo have taught you as much or more than Kant and Hegel. But then the question of information becomes the pressing one: how do you read everything? MF: One can read all the grammarians, and all the economists. For The Birth of the Clinic I read every medical work of importance for methodology of the period 1780-1820. The choices that one could make are inadmissable, and shouldn’t exist. One ought to read everything, study every thing. In other words, one must have at one’s disposal the general archive of a period at a given moment. And archeol ogy is, in a strict sense, the science of this archive. 4 The Order of Things Q: What determines the choice of historic period (here, as in Madness and Civilization, it’s from the Renais sance to the present), and its relationship with the “archeologi cal” perspective that you adopt? MF: This kind of research is only possible as the analysis of our own sub-soil. It’s not a defect of these retro spective disciplines to find their point of departure in our own actuality. There can be no doubt that the problem of the divi sion between reason and unreason became possible only with Nietzsche and Artaud. And it’s the sub-soil of our modem consciousness of madness that I have wanted to investigate. If there were not something like a fault line in this soil archeol ogy would not have been possible or necessary. In the same way, if the question of meaning and of the relation between meaning and the sign had not appeared in European culture with Freud, Saussure^ and Husserl, it is obvious that it would not have been necessary to investigate the sub-soil of our con sciousness of meaning. In the two cases these are the critical analyses of our own condition. Q; What has pushed you to adopt the three axes that orient your whole analysis? MF; Roughly this. The human sciences that have appeared since the end of the 19th century are caught as it were in a double obligation, a double and simultaneous postu lation: that of hermeneutics, interpretation, or exegesis: one must understand a hidden meaning; and the other: one must formalize, discover the system, the structural invariant, the network