Interlude XLIX. Foucault - part 26

Turning mankind into sand

Intro & Preface & Contents

Previous: Interlude XLVIII. Foucault - part 25

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

Chapter 5 - In the Labyrinth cont...

...The topic of Foucault’s essay [published in 1966, shortly after The Order of Things arrived in bookstores] is Blanchot’s work and “the breakthrough to a language from which the subject is excluded.” This breakthrough, Foucault concedes, is strange, mysterious, fraught with paradox; it reveals “an abyss that had long been invisible.” Yet it also renews an archaic “form of thought whose still vague possibility was sketched by Western culture on its margins.” This long-forgotten form --“the thought from outside,” he calls it -- stands “outside subjectivity.” A kind of “thinking that is shattered,” it lets thought “loom up suddenly as the exterior of limits, articulating its own end, making its dissipation scintillate”; at the same time, it lets the thinker behold “the threshold of all positivity,” rediscovering the space where thought unfolds. “the void that serves as its site.”

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As these formulations suggest, “the thought from outside” is a kind of rapture or ecstasy, “born of that tradition of mystical thinking which, from the time of Pseudo-Dionysius, has prowled the borderlands of Christianity: perhaps it survived for a millennium or so in the various forms of negative theology [One statement of negative theology, “We do not know what God is. God Himself does not know what He is because He is not anything. Literally God is not, because He transcends being.” - John Scotus Erigena],” only to go into eclipse at the dawn of the classical age.

But not for long. In our own age, a kind of mystical thinking again haunts the frontiers of philosophy, resurrected, “paradoxically,” in “the long-drawn monologue of the Marquis de Sade,” who “in the age of Kant and Hegel” gives voice “to the nakedness of desire as the lawless law of the world.”

“Sade constitutes a perfect example,” Foucault explained in a 1967 interview, “whether it is a question of renouncing the subject in eroticism, or of deploying structures in their most arithmetical positivity.” An insane yet rigorous expression of the confinement of unreason by reason, the work of “Sade is nothing but the development, up to the most extreme consequences, of every erotic combination, from that which evinces the most logic to that which is a kind of exaltation (at least in the case of Juliette) of the subject itself -- an exaltation that leads to its complete explosion.”

It’s taken me this long to finally research Sade’s writing. According to Wiki, Justine’s sister...“ Juliette is an amoral nymphomaniac murderer who is successful and happy. The full title of the novel in the original French is Histoire de Juliette ou les Prospérités du vice, and the English title is ‘Juliette, or Vice Amply Rewarded’...” From the Wiki description of the novel, it would seem to be the defense of a sociopathic lifestyle. If you accept that Nature is basically amoral and, in human terms, sociopathic, you can understand where Sade was probably coming from. Even Wiki makes it sound like Juliette is a novel of ideas. Here is Wiki’s description of the book’s themes. It’s probably a good thing I don’t have time for another digression before I resume Henry Ryecroft... poor Henry must be doing Pilates in his grave.

It is not surprising, given sentiments like this, to find Sade’s thought standing in The Order of Things just where it stood in Madness and Civilization -- at the threshold to a new way of thinking: “After him, violence, life and death, desire and sexuality will extend, below the level of representation, an immense expanse of shade which we are now attempting to recover, as far as we can, in our discourse, in our freedom” -- a rare appearance of Kant’s transcendental idea in Foucault’s work in these years -- “in our thought.”

The erotic “experience” first articulated by Sade has remained “not exactly hidden” (since anyone can now read Sade) “but afloat, foreign, exterior to our interiority,” [this is the best I can do for "interiority"] to the type of “subjectivity” and conscience that the modern human sciences define. The locus of this way of thinking in our own day therefore becomes not science (and certainly not politics, where it is taboo), but “literature”: in “The Thought from Outside” alone, Foucault mentions Holderlin, Nietzsche, Mallarme, Heidegger, Artaud, Bataille, Klossowski, and, of course, Blanchot himself.

...”Discontinuity -- the fact that within the space of a few years a culture sometimes cease to think as it had been thinking up till then and begins to think other things in a new way -- probably begins with an erosion from outside.”

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The singular value of Blanchot’s work, however, lies neither in his appreciation of ecstasy nor in his understanding of “the outside” -- it lies, rather, in his use of language. Outwardly flat, affectless, even (as Sade had counseled) “apathetic,” his prose is invariably precise. It is geometric. It is rigorous. Like the language of Robbe-Grillet after him, it communicates “in the gray tones of everyday life and the anonymous.” When it provokes “wonderment,” it is not by directing attention to the author, or even to specific words, “but rather to the void that surrounds them, to the space where they are set, rootless and baseless.”

The virtual invisibility of Blanchot’s artistic touch makes him “perhaps more than just another witness” to a long tradition of ecstatic thinking, Foucault concludes: “So far has he withdrawn into the manifestation of his work, so completely is he, not hidden by his texts, but absent from their existence and absent by virtue of the marvelous force of their existence, that for us he is that thought itself” -- the thought from outside -- “its real, absolutely distant, shimmering, invisible presence, its inevitable law, its calm, infinite measured strength.”

I keep wanting to read Blanchot and Robbe-Grillet for myself (I know I’ve read Robbe-Grillet but long ago and I don’t remember him at all) but, again, I face the problem of reading in translation. Will the quality of prose that Foucault is so smitten with be captured by the translators? That would seem to be asking for a lot. Also, I must confess that I have no clue what Foucault is talking about here. Maybe if he threw in some Sanskrit it would help me understand. Or maybe I do have just a clue: I think he's talking about disturbing the dharmic harmony of everyday culture with ideas from outside that order. Celebrating, in a very confused way, Kali in her Tantra manifestation.

To evoke, not through a novel, but rather through the prose of the world, “the thought from outside” -- as Foucault tries to do in The Order of Things -- would be, in effect, just as he promises, to restore “to our silent and apparently immobile soil its rifts its instability, its flaws.” It would be to remind ourselves “that we are bound to the back of a tiger.” It would finally be to conjure up, from every angle, an “essential void” -- that formless vortex of animal energies that Nietzsche called the Dionysian.

“Those thinkers in whom all stars move in cyclic orbits are not the most profound,” Nietzsche once wrote, casting aspersions [perhaps not the best choice of words given the personalities involved. Perhaps they were unholy aspersions] on the dream of a mathesis universalis [casting anything at Descartes is fine in my blog] characteristic of Plato and those modern rationalists who have tried to follow in his footsteps: “Whoever looks into himself as into vast space, and carries galaxies in himself, also knows how irregular all galaxies are; they lead into the chaos and labyrinth of existence.”

To the extent that the human being still had access to this chaos within, Nietzsche supposed that a man might “give birth to a star” -- something singular, unique, unmistakably creative, the sign, in Foucault’s own myth of the labyrinth, of an individual’s “higher necessity.”

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But “the time of the most despicable man” was coming, Nietzsche warned: “Behold, I show you the last man.” Docile and oblivious, this “man” was a stranger to animal energy, unable to take flight, unwilling to be different: “What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star? thus asks the last man, and he blinks.”

By recounting “the wandering of the last man,” Foucault remarks in The Order of Things, Nietzsche “took up anthropological finitude once more,” examining again those hybrid historical a prioris already laid bare by Kant in his Anthropology. Nietzsche did this, however, not in an effort to demonstrate the normative limits of the idea of “man.” Instead he fashioned a critique of morality -- and an attack on the “last man” -- as “a basis for the prodigious leap of the overman,” sending “all these stable forms up in flames.”

“We must be prepared to state our choice,” Nietzsche declared, in an aphorism Foucault cites elsewhere: “Do we wish humanity to end in fire and light or to end in the sands?”

“Are we not,” wondered Nietzsche, “with this tremendous objective of obliterating all the sharp edges of life, well on the way to turning mankind into sand?”

From this Nietzschean perspective, it is no wonder that Foucault, in his famous conclusion to The Order of Things, eagerly wagers that the normative ideal of “man” will soon be “effaced, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.” Wiped clean by the waves, pulverized by the ocean, Kant’s anthropological ideal (“less cruelty, less pain, more kindness, more respect, more ‘humanity’”) will be washed away by the sea: Nietzsche’s symbol of the overman -- Foucault’s old emblem of unreason, a formless and uncertain element that, according to the aquatic allegory of Madness and Civilization, purifies and carries off.

To traverse this “bottomless sea” would be to navigate in new ways the chaos of existence. It would be to brave the hazards of an uncertain voyage to an uncertain destination. It would be to explore the shadowy expanse first plumbed by Sade. [*snort laugh*]

As Foucault elliptically explains [isn’t that understood by now? He is always either elliptical or oblique] in the final pages of The Order of Things, an analysis of the human being only truly “‘recognizes itself’ when it is confronted with those very psychoses that nevertheless (or rather for that very reason) it has scarcely any means of reaching; as if psychosis were displaying in a savage illumination, and offering in a mode not too distant but precisely too close, that toward which analysis must slowly make its way.” Following in the footsteps of Sade and Nietzsche as well as Kant and Freud, the analyst must take up “a practice in which it is not only the understanding one has of man that is involved, but man himself -- man together with this Death that is at work in his suffering, this Desire that has lost its object, and this language by means of which, and through which, his Law is silently articulated. All analytic knowledge is thus invincibly linked to a practice, to a strangulation produced by the relationship between two individuals, one of whom is listening to the other’s language, thus freeing his desire from the object it has lost (making him understand he has lost it), liberating him from the ever-repeated proximity to death (making him understand that one day he will die).”

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Suspended over an “infinite void that opens beneath the feet of the person it attracts,” rising in rapture above “the Death that is at work in his suffering,” the human being might then (having at last arrived at the heart of the great interior labyrinth of The Order of Things) discover what Nietzsche’s thought, in Foucault’s view, portends: not only “the death of man,” but also the appearance of “new gods, the same gods,” that “are swelling the future Ocean.” Far from simply announcing “the death of God,” explains Foucault -- “or, rather in the wake of that death and in a profound correlation with it” -- what Nietzsche’s thought heralds is the “Perfect Likeness,” the daimon, the “Identical”: “the Return of the Same” through “the absolute dissipation of man.”

“What returns,” as Nietzsche himself puts it, “what finally comes home to me, is my own self.”

...The Order of Things by contrast [with Madness and Civilization] is awkward, disjointed, elliptical to a fault. In its eccentricity, it calls to mind its original pretext, Kant’s Anthropology; yet Foucault’s pivotal conclusions about Kant, apart from a few scattered passages, are conveyed largely through the needlessly mystifying idea that the human being is an “empirico-transcendental doublet.” ...

In the end, even Foucault wasn’t happy with the book.

Next: Interlude L. Foucault - part 27.