Interlude XLIV. Foucault - part 23

Into the labyrinth

Intro & Preface & Contents

Previous: Interlude XLIII. Foucault - part 22

From The Passion of Michel Foucault by James Miller...

Chapter 5 - In the Labyrinth cont...

The labyrinth is the central emblem of Foucault’s great Nietzschean quest in these years. In his book on Roussel and in his 1962 essay, “Such a Cruel Knowledge,” he elaborated his own, highly personal myth of death and rebirth, by giving a number of new twists to the original Greek story of the labyrinth.

Traditionally the labyrinth was considered to be the handiwork of paganism’s greatest inventor, Daedalus. Foucault, however, sees the labyrinth not simply as a testimony to the genius of its designer, but also as the disquieting symbol of a deeply mysterious sort of transcendence, indicating “the simultaneous presence and absence of Daedalus in the incomprehensible and dead sovereignty of his knowledge.”

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To enter the gate of the maze is to enter a theater of “Dionysian castration”; it is to undergo a “paradoxical initiation, not to a lost secret, but to all of the suffering of which man has never lost the memory,” the “oldest cruelties of the world.” Once caught in its winding corridors, “flight is not conceivable; there is no exit apart from this somber point that indicates the center, the infernal fire, the law of the image.”

The symbol of this “law” (a figure, therefore, of the synthetic power of freedom at play in imagination) is the Minotaur -- half man, half beast, the monster that Theseus slays in the Greek myth. 

Isn’t Frankenstein’s Creature also half man, half beast? I have to point out here, just in case you didn't follow the link above, that the Minotaur is, according to myth, the result of carnal bestiality. It was also unclear whether the Minotaur had the head or body of a man.

In Foucault’s retelling, however, Theseus does nothing of the sort: bewitched by the mystery of the Minotaur, the would-be conquering hero falls captive, captivated. 

I’ll bet. Bataille could have turned this into good porn.

Even Ariadne, a figure of reason and prudence who keeps a grip on the thread that might allow Theseus to escape, proves powerless: “one can miss Ariadne, one cannot miss the Minotaur. She is the uncertain, the improbable, the distant.” (Foucault in another context pictures Ariadne lost and dying -- strangled by her own thread.)

Again, I’ll bet he does.

The Minotaur alone “is the certain, the very near,” and yet also the “absolutely alien” -- an emblem of “the limits of the human and inhuman.”

Two great mythic spaces crisscross in Foucault’s retelling of the old story. The first space, of the labyrinth proper, is “rigid, forbidden, enveloping.” The second space, of the personal metamorphosis Foucault’s labyrinth makes possible, is “communicating, polymorphous, continuous, and irreversible.”

The two spaces intersect where the Minotaur hides. By “his very being,” Foucault writes, the Minotaur “opens a second labyrinth: the entrapment of man, of the beast, and of the gods, knot of appetites, mute thought. The winding of corridors begins again, unless perhaps it is the same one; and the mixed being refers to the inextricable geometry that leads to him; the labyrinth would then be simultaneously the truth and nature of the Minotaur, that which confines him externally, and that which brings him to light on the inside.”

Exploring the enigma of the new maze opened up by the nature of the monster within, fascinated by a rigorous yet elusive plan that seems to point toward an inescapable fusion of divine freedom with inhuman bestiality, the human being traverses time as well as space, as if spiraling back toward a “rediscovered origin.” “Chronos [but see also Chronus for the devouring bit that follows] is the time of becoming and beginning anew.” Foucault writes: “Chronos devours bit by bit that to which it gives birth and that which it causes to be reborn in its time. This monstrous and lawless becoming -- the great destruction of each instant, the gobbling up of all life, the scattering of its limbs -- is linked to the exactitude of a beginning anew: Becoming leads into this great, interior labyrinth” -- a labyrinth “no different in nature from the monster it contains.”

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Moving toward the core of this “great interior labyrinth,” trying to understand the monster that one has become, the captive pilgrim helplessly watches the “destiny of man... being spun before {his} very eyes, but being spun in reverse”; [So now we have Chronus and the Fates?] the threads of destiny lead into the past, taking the human being “back, by those strange bobbins, to the forms of its birth, to the homeland that made it possible.” To proceed, however, the prisoner of the passage must submit to the harshest and most agonizing of punishments, “a pure and simple duplication of the labyrinth constructed out of cruelty” to hide the innocence of being at birth (The maze here becomes a figure of the human being’s inescapable fate -- as if perhaps it was not Daedalus, but rather Time, congealed in the form of History, that has designed the inner labyrinth as this singular ordeal.” 

Just begging for Faust here with the use (misuse?) of Classical Greek myth.

His innocence painfully resurrected by the tortures suffered en route, the pilgrim finally arrives at the heart of the second maze, finding the “radiant light” of the “rediscovered origin.” At last he unriddles his daimon, learning that the “star” on his forehead [this was Roussel's personal emblem for his daimon, Note 80.] is “an image of metamorphosis where chance and repetition are united; the accident of the sign, thrown before every thing, initiates a time and a space in which each figure will echo itself.”

For all of its “teeming adventures, life will never be anything but the double of its star” -- the unique sign of a “higher necessity.”

At this “most enigmatic moment,” when “all paths break off and when one feels at a loss, or at the absolute origin, when one is on the threshold of something else, the labyrinth suddenly offers the Same: its last puzzle, the ruse hidden in the center -- the mirror behind which one finds the identical.”

Situated at the core of the maze within the maze, this “mirror, which reflects the unriddled birth, is reflected in the mirror where death sees itself, which in turn is reflected in it...” the labyrinth here reveals its deepest secret -- “the passage from life to death, and the maintenance of life in death.”

Moreover, the existence of this mysterious “inner labyrinth,” as Foucault imagines in another context, also suggests that behind the “deceptive surfaces” of modern society lurks a human “nature metamorphosized in depth by the powers of a counter-nature.” Containing, as it does, “the passage from life to death,” the “great interior labyrinth,” like Sade’s Castle of Murders, organizes a space proper to “modern perversity.” “A cage,” the labyrinth “makes of man a beast of desire”; “a tomb,” it “weaves beneath states a counter-city”; a diabolically clever invention, it is designed to unleash “all the volcanoes of madness” -- threatening to “destroy the oldest laws and pacts.”

So, there’s that. 

Bestiality.

It wasn’t the smell but the grunting that distracted me from my writing, as I sat in the 2nd best French bakery cafe (the location closest to my house) having breakfast on a Sunday morning. When I finally left, I also noticed the dis-order at the various locations on the sidewalk, and in the entrances of buildings, where the people of the streets were nesting. As I’ve noticed in my alley, the places they bed down are always marked by trash and random personal belongs. It's like they are constantly coming apart, leaving signs of themselves behind.

Probably because the sidewalks are less crowded with workers, the semi-feral people living on the streets stand out even more on a Sunday.

All this brought to mind the way Foucault and Miller have used the word “bestiality”. I suppose you could look at a human devolving into an animal as transcending our individualized state, reunifying with nature. From this point of view, extinguishing the “divine spark” can be seen as a positive goal. To quote from page 101 of Miller’s book, where he quotes Foucault,

A bestiality formerly domesticated “by human symbols and values” stands revealed as “the secret nature of man,” exposing “the dark rage, the sterile madness that lie in men’s hearts.”

Hence the difficulty of expressing in human language the experience of not being human. Or as Miller puts in on page 106,

Madness shatters the singular compound of form and chaos that permits the “work” to exist: words fail, silence descends; the human being experiences the void. About this pure experience of madness, nothing, by definition, can be said.

I’m starting to be distracted by my feeling that this Cult of Death in Life is really just another manifestation of the old paternalistic loathing of this life, the age old desire of men in most all cultures to transcend Māyā, to return to the boring contemplation of pure mind that Devi interrupted.

But that distraction is itself being pushed to the side by yet another distraction: This weird-ass, faux-Classical (and I do mean Classical Greek not Classical Renaissance) opium dream of a myth retelling, compels me (I am not free in this instance) to recall Part 2 of Goethe’s Faust. 

I am so sorry.

Next: Interlude XLV. Faust.