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The Last Lesson of Michel Foucault: a Vitalism for a Future Philosophy

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Athenea Digital - 19(2): e2207 (julio 2019) -ARTÍCULOS- ISSN: 1578-8946 THE LAST LESSON OF MICHEL FOUCAULT: A VITALISM FOR A FUTURE PHILOSOPHY LA ÚLTIMA LECCIÓN DE MICHEL FOUCAULT: UN VITALISMO PARA LA FILOSOFÍA DEL FUTURO Marco Maureira Velásquez*; Francisco Tirado Serrano** * Universitat de Barcelona; **Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona; [email protected]; [email protected] Historia editorial Abstract Recibido: 15-06-2017 We propose a vitalist reading of Michel Foucault’s work going beyond the main- Aceptado: 12-01-2019 stream interpretation that divides his proposals into three dimensions: knowledge, Publicado: 17-05-2019 power and subjectivation. We will start our interpretation with her last text: “Life: Experience and Science”. This text contains three important elements. First, it of- fers a deep reflection about the meaning of ‘life’ in the work of one of Foucault’s Keywords Masters, Georges Canguilhem. Second, it pays tribute to the value of his work in Foucault the transformation of philosophy. Finally, it offers reinterpretation of Foucault’s Vitalism own work. We will sustain that the last lesson of Foucault is to propose vitalism Life as the key way of thinking for a future philosophy. To put this forward, we should Canguilhem first direct our attention to the work of Canguilhem, and then we will explain how the dynamics of knowledge, power and subjectification can be read from a vitalist approach. Resumen Palabras clave El presente artículo propone una lectura vitalista del trabajo de Foucault, la cual Foucault conjuga las tres dimensiones tradicionales con que se suele aprehender su trabajo: Vitalismo saber, poder y subjetivación. Nuestra interpretación comienza por su último texto: Canguilhem “La vida: la experiencia y la ciencia”. En este, podemos encontrar tres importantes Vida elementos. Primero: ofrece una reflexión sobre la “vida” en la obra de Canguilhem. Segundo: se rinde tributo a la importancia que tuvo su trabajo en la transforma- ción de la filosofía. Por último, el texto aporta una reinterpretación del propio tra- bajo de Foucault. De este modo, sostendremos que la última lección de Foucault es proponer un enfoque vitalista como desafío para la filosofía del futuro. Para expo- ner esto, comenzaremos por dirigir nuestra atención sobre el trabajo de Can- guilhem. Una vez hecho esto, explicaremos cómo las dinámicas de saber, poder y subjetivación pueden ser leídas desde un enfoque vitalista. Maureira Velásquez, Marco & Tirado Serrano, Francisco (2019). The last lesson of Michel Foucault: a vitalism for a future philosophy. Athenea Digital, 19(2), e2207. https://doi.org/10.5565/rev/athenea.2207 As living beings, we are the effect of the very laws of the multiplication of life. Georges Canguilhem (1966/1991, p. 278) Introduction Gilles Deleuze (1986/1988) established the canonical and most relevant interpretation of Michel Foucault’s work. The first put forward that the second articulated his reflec- tions around three central concepts: knowledge, power and subject. Nevertheless, Deleuze (2013, 2014, 2015), in his courses on Foucault, opened a new surprising read- 1 The last lesson of Michel Foucault: a vitalism for a future philosophy ing. He vindicated the existence of a secret vitalism as a common denominator in Fou- cault’s proposals: ‘There is in Foucault a kind of vitalism, and we will see that it is re- ally strange. Where does this vitalism come from?’ (Deleuze, 2014, p. 285). In this text we cover this statement and we propose a vitalist reading of Michel Foucault’s work going beyond the mainstream interpretation that divides his work into three questions: one about knowledge, the second about power and a final one about subjectivation (Veyne, 2008/2010). We will start our interpretation with the cul- minating point of Foucault’s work, that is, his text published just before his death: Life: Experience and Science (Foucault, 1985, in Rabinow and Rose, 2003). This text con- tains three important elements. First, it offers a deep reflection about the meaning of ‘life’ in the work of one of Foucault’s Masters, Georgue Canguilhem. Second, it pays tribute to the value of his work in the transformation of philosophy. Finally, it opens some essential key points not only on the intellectual implications of life science based on scientific epistemology offered to the debate between two irreconcilable traditions (on the one hand, the philosophy of experience, sense and the subject, embodied in the figures of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty and, on the other hand, the philosophy of knowl- edge, rationality and the concept, best represented by Cavaillès, Bachelard, Koyré and Canguilhem himself), but also, and more importantly, to the reinterpretation of Fou- cault’s own work. ‘Life’ is a relevant topic in our present. The interest in biosecurity, biosafety, bioe- conomy, bioengineering, and bioterrorism, by disciplines so diverse as medicine, econ- omy or ecology speaks volumes about this (Dobson, Barker and Taylor, 2013). In this vein, it is possible to say that in Sociology and Philosophy vitalism has been one of the main interests in the last decade (Caygill, 2007; Fraser, Kember and Lury, 2006; Laz- zarato, 2014/2015; Mullarkey, 2007; Olma and Koukouzelis, 2007; Parisi, 2007). The de- bates about ‘The posthuman’ (Cecchetto, 2013; Gray, 2001; Haney, 2006; Hayles, 1999) and the ‘new materialism’ (Barrett and Bolt, 2012; Coole and Frost, 2010; Crockett and Robbins, 2012; Lemke, 2014; Pfeifer, 2015) are directly linked with the discussion about vitalism and with the urgent process of reconceptualisation of living. To cite two sim- ple examples, Rosi Braidotti (2006, 2014) is an author that vindicates a posthuman con- dition based on a new conceptualization of living matter, and Karen Barad (2007, 2008) puts forward the notion of agential realism as a way of articulating vitalism and mate- rialism. Our vitalist reading of Michel Foucault connects with this general interest and it has the novelty of offering an interpretation from the point of view of life, a topic underpinning the proposals of one of the most quoted authors in the mentioned litera- ture. 2 Marco Maureira Velásquez; Francisco Tirado Serrano Foucault scarcely wrote about vitalism. It is possible to find a quote in The Order of Things (Foucault, 1966/1994) and in The Birth of Clinic (1963/1994). But he never put forward explicitly a definition or conception referring this idea. Nevertheless, he men- tioned profusely the word life through all his books (Foucault, 1963/1994, 1966/1994, 1975/1995, 2010…), and as we argue in the next sessions a question about this notion is present in all the stages of his work. What is life for Foucault? He reminds us that life is that which is capable of erring, with the shortcoming being the essential eventuality that passes through its biology and evolution from start to finish. In this sense, Can- guilhem declared in his Writings on medicine “Strictly speaking, nothing living has been completed” (Canguilhem, 2002/2012, p. 46), and it is in this erring and making mistakes, where Foucault visualizes the essential externality of life that leads him to put forward this unique and hereditary error that results in man being a dislocated and misplaced being. ‘And if we admit that the concept is the response that life is ran- dom, we should then agree that error is the basis of all human thought and history’ (Canguilhem, 2002/2012, pp. 55-56). Thus, life is that which is capable of erring and this is the basis and the condition allowing for all thought. Additionally, by declaring that the concept is the response to the fact that life is random, normativity, both social and individual, is conceived as the tool to create the manner in which life relates to its surroundings, with itself and with the contingency. In other words, through life, a bridge spans, at least potentially, the gap between a philosophy of experience and the subject which gravitates around ra- tionality and concept. Seen in this light, the three moments of Foucault’s work that so clearly describe and analyse Gilles Deleuze (1986/1988) take on another nuance and prominence. They are not merely three instances-plateaus that, while interconnected, possess a sort of autonomy and criteria of differentiation. What this philosophy of life does, rather, is to create the central coordinate of problematisation underlying Fou- cault’s thinking; the alternative being situated beyond the structuralism and the hermeneutics visualised by Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (1982). As posed by Georges Canguilhem (1966/1991), to live is to enter in the vital nor- mativity in response to the anomaly in a kind of unformed language that is character- istic of life. But, what are its characteristics? Specifically, how is the clarification process regarding the knowledge of life and its integral concepts produced? To answer this question, we should first direct our attention to the work of Canguilhem, to later analyse in the notions of knowledge, power and subjectivity our hypothesis: namely, that the vitality underlies as the main leitmotif and source of creation for Michel Fou- cault’s thinking. 3 The last lesson of Michel Foucault: a vitalism for a future philosophy The legacy of Georges Canguilhem In his prologue to The normal and the pathological, Dominique Lecourt (1971, p. XXIX), criticised Canguilhem’s position regarding information and communication as being biologically inherited, in that this ‘meant admitting that the individual has a logos that is inscribed, maintained and transferred (…) defining life as a sense that is inscribed within the matter, thus admitting to the existence of an a priori objective, of a material a priori and not only a formal one’1. What Lecourt failed to understand is the fact that this type of unformed language that is characteristic of life, to which we previously re- ferred, is not related to DNA sequencing as the writer suggested.
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