Foucault, Affect, History: on the Art of Feeling
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Western University Scholarship@Western Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository 8-21-2020 3:30 PM Foucault, Affect, History: On the Art of Feeling Austin Chisholm, The University of Western Ontario Supervisor: Faflak, Joel, The University of Western Ontario A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the equirr ements for the Master of Arts degree in Theory and Criticism © Austin Chisholm 2020 Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd Part of the Continental Philosophy Commons, and the Intellectual History Commons Recommended Citation Chisholm, Austin, "Foucault, Affect, History: On the Art of Feeling" (2020). Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository. 7293. https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd/7293 This Dissertation/Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by Scholarship@Western. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository by an authorized administrator of Scholarship@Western. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Abstract While the work of Michel Foucault has not generally been thought to engage in questions of affect, I argue that his work entails a meaningful engagement with such questions but in a way that challenges how we tend to think about affect. Drawing from Foucault’s oeuvre, I enter a series of dialogues with thinkers of affect, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Brian Massumi, in order to understand to what extent the turn to affect—especially for Sedgwick and Massumi—represents an attempt to work through a number of difficulties and tensions in Foucault’s thought and writing. I argue that Foucault is an insightful yet challenging interlocutor for affect theorists because of his understanding of the ethical dimensions of affect, and his historicization of separate modalities of relating to those areas of life and experience that belong to affect, emotion, and feeling. In this thesis, I aim to tease out that historicization in the form of two key historical modalities belonging to modern and ancient technologies of the self: the scientia affectus, which endeavours to decipher truth in emotion or affect, and the ars pathetica, which derives truth from feeling itself. Keywords Foucault, affect theory, genealogy, archaeology, ethics, philosophy of emotion, Sedgwick, Massumi. ii Summary for Lay Audience For the past two centuries, the philosophy and science of emotion has been divided by two dominant approaches. The first approach argues that emotions are rooted in physiological responses and biological mechanisms of the body. This is the physicalist approach. The second attempts to show how emotions are involved in cognitive processes, as expressions of conscious or unconscious intentions, judgements, and evaluations. This is the cognitivist approach. Both approaches tend to imply separate assumptions about differences between individuals and cultures across time and geography. The first approach has often been committed to universalist theories of emotion, which argues that emotions are comprised by a handful of basic emotional registers or affects, such as sadness, joy, fear, or anger, believed to be essentially the same experiences across all human cultures throughout history. The second approach tends to entail a social constructionist view, which argues that both the experience and expression of emotion varies between cultures and through history. While there have been more recent efforts to synthesize these different approaches and sets of assumptions, I argue that there are indeed two ways of experiencing and relating to one’s emotions that have been predominant in the history of Western civilization. One, which I call the scientia affectus (or the science of affect/emotion), views emotions as substances or objects that can be known, measured, disciplined, and optimized. This generally includes all of the previously mentioned approaches (i.e., physicalist, universalist, cognitivist, and social constructionist approaches), and has represented the dominant way of thinking about emotion for the past two centuries. The second, which I call the ars pathetica (or the art of feeling), instead views emotions as practices that give truth, meaning, and style to one’s existence. This ars pathetica was dominant in the ancient cultures of Greece and Rome but today mostly exists as a memory. In this thesis I draw from the work of French philosopher Michel Foucault to show the ethical, political, and historical importance of these two ways of relating to feelings, and to try to understand the large mutation in Western civilization that has led to this transformation of an ars pathetica into a scientia affectus. iii Acknowledgments I would like to thank my supervisor Dr. Joel Faflak for his support, encouragement, and feedback over our many discussions, email correspondences, and video calls. Many thanks also to Dr. Tilottama Rajan, for re-igniting my interest in Foucault; to my second reader, Dr. Tom Carmichael, for his insightful comments; to Dr. Charles Stocking, for taking me back to school; and to all the teachers, professors, and mentors over the years who have offered their kindness and encouragement. Mom, Dad—thank you for your patience. And Kayla, for much more than I am able to say here. iv Table of Contents Abstract ................................................................................................................................ii Summary for Lay Audience ...............................................................................................iii Acknowledgments ..............................................................................................................iv Table of Contents .................................................................................................................v Abbreviations ......................................................................................................................vi Introduction ..........................................................................................................................1 Chapter One: Ars Pathetica and Ethics ..............................................................................18 1.1: The Gravity of Feeling ...........................................................................................18 1.2: Ancient Ars Pathetica: Eros, Epimeleia, and Parrhēsia .........................................27 1.3: Feeling, Freedom, Power .......................................................................................37 Chapter Two: Power and the Government of Feeling .......................................................42 2.1: Affect, Power, Refusal ...........................................................................................42 2.2: On the Government of Feeling ..............................................................................52 2.3: Iran, 1978 ...............................................................................................................65 Chapter Three: History and Scientia Affectus ...................................................................70 3.1: Innovation, Style, and the Historical Mutability of Feeling ..................................70 3.2: An Archaeology of Feeling ....................................................................................82 3.3: Conclusion .............................................................................................................91 Bibliography ......................................................................................................................94 Curriculum Vitae ................................................................................................................99 v Abbreviations Some of Foucault’s major books and lectures have been abbreviated as follows: BC The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception. Translated by A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Vintage, 1990. CS The Care of the Self. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage, 1986. CT The Courage of the Truth (Government of the Self and Others II): Lectures at the Collège de France 1983-1984. Edited by Frédéric Gros. Translated by Graham Burchell. New York: Palgrave, 2011. DP Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage, 1995. GL On the Government of the Living: Lecture at the Collège de France 1979-1980. Edited by Michel Senellart. Translated by Graham Burchell. New York: Palgrave, 2014. HM History of Madness. Edited by Jean Khalfa. Translated by Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa. London: Routledge, 2006. HS The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France 1981-1982. Edited by Frédéric Gros. Translated by Graham Burchell. New York: Palgrave, 2005. OT The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage Books, 1994. STP Security, Territory, Population Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977-1978. Edited by Michel Senellart. Translated by Graham Burchell. New York: Palgrave, 2009. UP The Use of Pleasure. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York, Vintage, 1990. vi WK The History of Sexuality Volume 1: An Introduction. New York: Vintage Books, 1990 vii Introduction Michel Foucault is not generally thought of as a thinker of affect. For example, Nigel Thrift has commented on Foucault’s “seeming aversion to discussing affect explicitly” and his neglect of the “affective relays in the precognitive realm.”1 Additionally, Foucault featured as what Lauren Guilmette has called a “paranoid