Interlude LII. Foucault - part 29a.

Gilles Deleuze

Intro & Preface & Contents

Previous: Interlude LI. Foucault - part 28

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

Chapter 6 - BE CRUEL! cont...

p183

...On December 2, 1970, famous peers, old friends, and a delegation of young admirers crowded into the Collège de France to hear Foucault deliver his inaugural lecture. Before an audience “waiting to be enchanted,” as Jean Lacouture described the scene for Le Monde, there appeared “a hairless personage, of ivory tint, Buddhist in demeanor, Mephistophelean in his gaze [I’m not making this up], undeterred by the gravity of the occasion from expressing an irrepressible irony.”

...“In typical fashion,” as one discerning critic summed up the text, “he addressed his audience across the centuries, as it were, outlining projects on nothing less than truth, rationality, and normality in a voice that was simultaneously Beckettian in its gnomic ellipses and Renanian in its portentous sonority.”

p185

...in February 1971, just two months after giving his inaugural lecture at the College de France, he announced with some fanfare that he was launching a political initiative... the “Groupe d’information sur les prisons.” [GIP]

The idea for this initiative had been worked out by Foucault in conjunction with Daniel Defert, who now emerged as his key political collaborator...

p186

...”I have lived for eighteen years in a state of passion towards someone [Defert],” Foucault remarked in a 1981 interview. “At some moments, this passion has the form of love. But in truth, it is a matter of a state of passion between the two of us.” A “state of passion,” as Foucault described it in this interview, was a state beyond love, beyond reason, beyond even a focused desire for another person; it was rather an oceanic and dissociative state, destroying “the sense of being oneself,” creating instead an intense, fused feeling of “suffering-pleasure,” enabling one to “see things entirely differently.” “Completely invested” as he was in exploring this “state of passion between the two of us,” Foucault confided that “I think that there is nothing in the world -- nothing at all -- that could stop me when it comes to finding him, and speaking to him.”

...Shortly after the group [Gauche Proletarienne] was officially outlawed in 1970, Defert himself became a clandestine member: “I entered,” as he recalls, “because it had been banned and outlawed, because it was dangerous.”

...Foucault was also now keen to explore for himself new forms of political action; and he, too, had been drawn, for this reason, to the  Gauche Proletarienne.

...For the Gauche Proletarienne, as Defert recalls, the object was simply to forge “an alliance with the College de France,” and form, in Marxist jargon, a kind of “popular front” with bourgeois intellectuals. For Foucault, as Defert recalls , the aim was slightly different: he wanted to find some way “to extend the project announced in Madness and Civilization” by exploring politics as a field of “limit-experience.”

p187

...Though some members of the Gauche Proletarienne were opposed to Defert’s idea [for the GIP], on the grounds that common criminals and the “lumpen-proletariat” were (just as Marx had argued) unfit agents of social change, Defert carried the day...

p188

Above all, the GIP was meant to be a testing ground for a new type of intellectual -- self-effacing yet subversive, modest yet cunning.

The target, as always, was Jean-Paul Sartre -- the world’s most famous living intellectual, and the very embodiment of France’s venerable tradition of moral dissent. Within this tradition, as Foucault once summed it up, “the intellectual spoke the truth to those who had yet to see it, in the name of those who were forbidden to speak the truth: he was conscience, consciousness, and eloquence.” It was in this Olympian spirit that the postwar existentialists had told people, as Foucault sarcastically put it, “what freedom consisted of, what one had to do in political life, how to behave in regards to others, and so forth.” These were just the sort of overweening claims to moral authority that Foucault was determined to renounce for himself, and to undermine in society as a whole...

p193

“The GIP was a kind of experiment in thinking,” Gilles Deleuze recalled in an interview after Foucault’s death. “Michel always considered the process of thinking to be an experiment; this was his Nietzschean heritage. In this case the point was not to experiment with prisons, but to comprehend the prison as a place where a certain experience is lived by prisoners, an experience that intellectuals -- or at least intellectuals as conceived by Foucault-- should also think about.”

p194

That Deleuze in these years should have become Foucault’s closest philosophical companion seems only fitting: for if any French thinker of his generation grasped the implications of Foucault’s singular genius -- including his unrelenting preoccupation with suicide and death -- it was surely Gilles Deleuze.

Born in 1925, Deleuze studied philosophy at the Sorbonne... Like Foucault, he developed a youthful passion for Artaud, and a lifelong aversion to the Sartre of “Existentialism is a Humanism.” Unlike Foucault (and most other students of his generation), he never joined the Communist Party; and he exhibited only a passing interest in Heidegger, though he absorbed a good many of his key ideas indirectly, through Maurice Blanchot.

...Deleuze developed... an idiosyncratic expertise in Anglo-American literature and philosophy. His first book, Empiricism and Subjectivity, was about David Hume, whose skeptical critique of the reality of the self and unity of consciousness became one premise of Deleuze’s thought. “The mind is a kind of theater,” Hume had written, developing an image that Deleuze would take to heart. “There is properly no simplicity in it at one time, nor identity in different,” only “a perpetual flux and movement,” a constant variation, in which “several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, re-pass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations.”

This picture of perpetual flux Deleuze reiterated and elaborated in the early sixties in a series of brilliantly original historical studies on Kant, Spinoza, and the vitalist philosopher Henri Bergson; on the erotic author Leopold von Scher-Masoch; on Marcel Proust; and above all, on Friederich Nietzsche -- the writer who changed his life.

“I for a long time ‘did’ the history of philosophy,” Deleuze once explained. “It was Nietzsche, whom I read late, who pulled me out of all this. . . . he gives you a perverse inclination (which neither Marx nor Freud has ever given anyone. . .): the inclination to say simple things in your own proper name, to speak through effects, intensities, experiences, experiments. To say something in one’s own name is very curious; for it is not at all when one takes one’s self as an ‘I,’ a person or subject, that one speaks in one’s name. On the contrary, an individual acquires a real proper name only through the most severe exercise in depersonalization, when he opens himself to the multiplicities that traverse him from head to toe, to the intensities that flow through him,” letting himself explore without inhibition an “infinite variety of postures and situations.”

p195

When Foucault read Deleuze’s Nietzsche and Philosophy, he was naturally struck by the similarities of their philosophical interests... the two met and became fast friends. “It was not simply a question of {mutual} understanding or intellectual accord,” Deleuze later recalled, “but of intensity, of resonance, of a musical accord.”

Together, they probed the limits of reason in their writing, expressing pleasure in “amorphous fluidity,” seeking the right words to evoke “an irreality that communicates itself,” like a cognitive virus, “to understanding and people through language.” After 1962, each closely followed the other’s work, reading each new book carefully, commenting on it, finding in it a challenge and inspiration to dig deeper and go further, making a concerted effort to destroy “common sense as the assignation of fixed identities,” as Deleuze put it...

p196

Ironically, Deleuze himself... betrayed little visible interest in actually doing many of the daring and risky things he so vividly conjured up in his lectures and writings... Despite his fascination with wandering tribes (he fancied himself a “nomad” thinker), he rarely traveled. As had happened with Hume, the apparent discrepancy between the boldness of his beliefs and the mild equanimity of his personal existence aroused hostile criticism... “What difference is my relationship with homosexuals, alcoholics, or drug addicts if I obtain for myself similar effects with different means?”

Perhaps the most important of these “different means” was his increasingly unbuttoned approach to writing: after 1968, Deleuze’s style grew ever more delirious, reaching a new pitch of incandescent “irrealism” in The Logic of Sense, published in 1969. This is arguably Deleuze’s greatest single work, a summum of everything he had learned so far, and the beginning of his adventures in “wonderland.” Despite its sober title, The Logic of Sense is no conventional treatise: inspired by Lewis Carroll’s “Alice” books, it is rather a sequence of thought-experiments, in which philosophy disappears down a rabbit hole, growing (like Alice) simultaneously [alternately?] bigger and smaller. Abandoning its old territorial claims to logical rigor and the orderly demonstration of reasonable propositions, philosophy is transformed, as if by magic, into a mobile army of metaphors. By following in Alice’s footsteps, Deleuze hoped to give fresh voice to “rebel becomings,” showing how the production of “sense” was a function, paradoxically, of “nonsense” -- and how new ideas grew out of “phantasms” and corporeal dissipation. Though carefully defining all his terms, Deleuze plunged the reader into perplexity, making the mind reel and the skin crawl, tracing an intricate and bewildering zigzag line of creative discovery -- the image of a “great, interior labyrinth,” as Foucault enthusiastically summed up Deleuze’s book. [“White Rabbit” came out in 1967. Perhaps Deleuze shared my crush on Grace Slick.]

p197

But a Nietzschean passion for labyrinths was by no means the only thing Foucault shared with Deleuze. For at the inner core of the labyrinth of language, both philosophers (like Blanchot before them) discovered death -- the “event of events,” as Foucault glossed Deleuze’s conception.

The reiterated “will to nothingness” -- what Freud had called “the death instinct” -- “is not only a will to power, a quality of the will to power,” Deleuze declared at the climax of Nietzsche and Philosophy, “but the ratio cognoscendi ["the ground of knowledge: something through or by means of which a thing is known"] of the will to power in general” -- the only way in which we moderns may come to know the will to power as such. Under the impact of civilization, the will to power has been driven inward and turned against itself -- creating within the human being “a new inclination: to destroy himself.” It was precisely this inclination, formed by Western asceticism and issuing in modern nihilism, that led to “the focal point” -- and central puzzle -- of Deleuze’s “Dionysian philosophy.” For how could the will to power, by Nietzsche’s account an impulse to live, possibly surmount its own historically constituted inclination to self-destruction?

The solution, according to Deleuze, was both simple and fraught with paradox. To recover his health, the Dionysian must exploit his will to nothingness. Exercising his power to destroy, he would destroy himself actively, obliterating whatever shackled his power, rediscovering a host of unfamiliar impulses. Deleuze himself was particularly interested in the shattering transmutation of pain into pleasure produced by masochistic eroticism; in the hallucinations set loose by drugs and alcohol (in this regard he discussed the English novelist Malcolm Lowry); in the disorder wrought by guerrilla warfare; in the psychological disintegration of schizophrenia; and -- at the ultimate limit -- in the deliberate embrace of death in suicide.

Yet stopping short of madness, murder, and suicide, von Sacher-Masoch and Lowry, like the students in May ’68, and like Artaud (another of Deleuze’s heroes), had each shown how the will to nothingness, when seized actively and applied creatively, might be transformed into its opposite -- an energetic (re)affirmation of the will to power in its (uncivilized) vital essence. “each one risked something,” noted Deleuze, be it healthy, sanity, or life; yet, “each one drew from it an imprescriptible right,” passing beyond fixed limits, blasting open a “hole”: BENEATH THE PAVEMENT, THE BEACH. Through such cracks in the social and psychological monuments erected by civilization, one might glimpse “a pure becoming without measure” (a “monstrous and lawless becoming,” as Foucault commented). Emboldened by such glimpses, one might then be able to go “farther than one would have believed possible,” elaborating new images, new ideas, “new forms of life,” beyond good, beyond evil, beyond “the will to nothingness” as well. Only then, taught Deleuze, could “the ’great politics’ begin.”

p198

Deleuze nevertheless had to admit that grave dangers lurked down this particular rabbit hole. While convulsively unburdening oneself -- of pain, of guilt, of pity; of reason, of logic, of laws -- one might lose all sense of order, plummeting uncontrollably into a void. “This is the ’black hole’ phenomenon,” Deleuze once explained: an individual “rushes into a black hole from which it will not be able to extricate itself.” Deleuze took seriously the likelihood of a “crack-up,” quoting F. Scott Fitzgerald’s rueful observation: “Of course, all life is a process of breaking down.” Those who fell into the catatonia of madness, or became addicted to drugs, or surrendered to the “micro-fascism” of political violence and terrorism, provoked “a slight horror,” Deleuze once confided: “in any case, they scare me.”

Still, Deleuze managed to conquer his fears and all-too-sensible misgivings. “Anything that is good and great in humanity,” he declared with icy resolve in The Logic of Sense, can arise only “in people ready to destroy themselves -- better death than the health which we are given.”

Or, as Nietzsche’s Zarathustra put it, in a passage that Deleuze knew well: “I love all those who are heavy drops, falling one by one out of the dark cloud that hangs over men: they herald the advent of lightning, and, as heralds, they perish.”

Foucault of course agreed. Besides, as he said in a 1971 interview, referring to May ’68 and its aftermath, “the system is being shattered” -- and there was a world to win.

Apart from his agitation with the... [GIP], Foucault elaborated his own political views in these years in a series of public appearances and interviews, repeatedly expressing his own interest in what Nietzsche called the “joy in destroying.”

In the middle of 1971, for example, Foucault sat down with a group of militant young lycee students, to discuss the movement and its direction. The tape-recorded conversation appeared in Actuel...

The conversation began with Foucault turning the tables. He asked the students about “the most intolerable forms of repression” they suffered. But soon enough the questions circled back to the philosopher himself, who responded by offering a primer on his political views.

p199

...in French history texts, “popular movements. . . are said to arise from famines, taxes, or unemployment; and they never appear as the result of a struggle for power, as if the masses could dream of a full stomach but never of exercising power.” Power was simply disregarded. At the same time, by employing a host of reassuring categories -- “truth, man, culture, writing, etc.” -- the books tried “to dispel the shock of daily occurrences,” to dissolve “the radical break introduced by events,” to smooth out and cover up the Deleuzian “holes” blown open by such eruptions as the Night of the Barricades.

The crux of the problem, Foucault suggested, was quite simple: it was “humanism.” And the problem with humanism, it turned out, was also quite simple: at least, it was more baldly stated here than anywhere else in Foucault’s work:

“Humanism is everything in Western civilization that restricts the desire for power.”

Nietzsche’s central concept -- power -- here, finally, claimed its rightful place as a central term in Foucault’s own vocabulary: his political goal, as he now explained it, was “a ‘desubjectification’ of the will to power.”

To reach this goal required “revolutionary action” -- a “simultaneous agitation of consciousness and institutions.”

The institutional objective, as he stressed, was sweeping: it was, indeed, nothing less than the demolition of modern society as a cohesive, integrated totality. “‘The unity of society’ is precisely that which should not be considered except as something to be destroyed. And then, it must be hoped that there will no longer be anything resembling the unity of society.” In waging such an unconditional war against the oldest laws and pacts, it might well happen (as it usually did in wartime) that traditional moral beliefs restraining the will to power melted away. From a Nietzschean point of view, this was good. But short of a bloody civil war, these beliefs might also be usefully weakened by the more pacific and local agitation of groups like Foucault’s own GIP: “The ultimate goal of its interventions,” as the philosopher told the students, “was not to extend the visiting rights of prisoners to thirty minutes or to procure flush toilets for the cells, but to question the social and moral distinction between the innocent and the guilty.” If successful, the GIP would destroy “a simple, basic ideology” -- the “ideology of good and evil.” Hence the title of this conversation: “Beyond Good and Evil.”

p200

At the same time, insofar as the crux of the political problem was “subjectification,” a human being could always engage the enemy at close quarters -- and approach “consciousness” itself as a field of combat in which to overthrow “the subject as a pseudosovereign.”

At times, his young interlocutors had a hard time following Foucault’s logic. “Does this mean,” asked one, “that your primary objective is to modify consciousness and that you can neglect for the moment the struggle against political and economic institutions?”

No, responded Foucault, “you have badly misunderstood me.” It was a question, after all, not simply of changing consciousness, but of transforming institutions as well.

Both goals might be approached simultaneously, Foucault suggested, through a kind of “‘cultural’ attack” that would threaten old institutions by experimenting with new practices” the suppression of sexual taboos, limitations, and divisions; the exploration of communal existence’ the loosening of inhibitions with regard to drugs; the breaking of all the prohibitions that form and guide the development of the normal individual.” (In endorsing such acts of transgression, Foucault was taking anything but an orthodox Maoist line: the committed militants were expected to swear off drugs, which were regarded as a “petty-bourgeois” vice.)

“I am referring to all those experiences that have been rejected by our civilization,” Foucault explained, “or which it accepts only within literature.” ...

p201

The most vivid (and amusing) example of the sort of reaction Foucault could provoke [among political activists and intellectuals outside France] may be his debate with the American linguist Noam Chomsky. Staged for Dutch television, the meeting took place in November, 1971 -- and Chomsky still remembers it well. “He struck me as completely amoral,” says Chomsky. “I’d never met anyone who was so totally amoral.”

...they met and spent several hours together before the program was taped... They exchanged political small talk, and discussed the Port-Royal grammarians, one of their shared scholarly interests.

The television program itself began placidly enough: Chomsky defended the idea of “a biologically given, unchangeable” foundation to human nature, and Foucault raised some doubts. Chomsky summarized his ideas about generative grammar, and Foucault briefly explained why historiography for him required “effacing the dilemma of the knowing subject.”...

p202

Chomsky laid out his own anarchist utopia “of a federated, decentralized system of free associations.” Foucault, by contrast, refused, as he consistently did, to elaborate any “ideal social model.”

Chomsky then spoke of the need for “some firm and humane concept of the human essence or human nature.” Foucault, again, disagreed: “Isn’t there a risk that we will be led into error? Mao Tse-tung spoke of bourgeois human nature and proletarian human nature, and he considers that they are not the same thing.”

p 202

...Chomsky was stunned by... [Foucault’s] line of questioning. He had read The Order of Things, and knew Foucault’s work on eighteenth-century linguistics. But here Foucault was, invoking Mao Tse-tung and denying the need for even the most rudimentary principle of justice! Perhaps he had misunderstood.

Maintaining his composure, Chomsky answered earnestly: yes, he, too, as a conscientious objector sometimes regarded the state as criminal, and its laws as null and void; but that certainly did not mean that the principle of justice ought to be abandoned; on the contrary. His own resistance to laws he perceives as unjust in fact required some principle of justice. Concluded Chomsky: “We must act as sensitive and responsible human beings.”

That might seem a banal sentiment; in this context, it was anything but.

Foucault in fact would have none of it: responsibility, sensitivity, justice, law -- these were all empty ideas, tokens of ideology, repressive, misleading, pernicious. “The proletariat doesn't wage war against the ruling class because it considers such a war to be just,” he declared. “The proletariat makes war with the ruling class because, for the first time in history, it wants to take power.”

Chomsky was taken aback: “I don’t agree,” he stammered.

Foucault: “One makes war to win, not because it’s just.”

Once again, I can't really disagree with Foucault here. The stories we tell ourselves about power and revolution and governance are often myths. There really isn't much difference between the Teutonic Tribes conquering Europe, Rome conquering Italy, or the U.S.A's Manifest Destiny being realized in the American West.

p203

Chomsky: “I don’t, personally, agree with that. . . .”

Foucault: “When the proletariat takes power, it may be quite possible that the proletariat will exert toward the classes over which it has triumphed, a violent, dictatorial, and even bloody power. I can’t see what objection one could make to this.”

“Usually, when you talk to someone, you take for granted that you share some moral territory,” Chomsky says, looking back. “Usually, what you find is self-justification in terms of shared moral criteria; in that case, you can have an argument, you can pursue it, you can find out what’s right and what’s wrong about the position. with him, though, I felt like I was talking to someone who didn't inhabit the same moral universe.

“I mean, I liked him personally. It’s just that I couldn't make sense of him. It’s as if he was from a different species, or something.”

The nonchalant savagery of Foucault’s political views in these years startled not only radical humanists like Chomsky, it also dumbfounded some of the philosopher’s young Maoist allies, who were then in the midst of debating the scope and meaning of “popular justice.”

In these months, Pierre Victor (a.k.a. Benny Levy) had become an ardent proponent of creating “popular tribunals.” These were public forums in which people organized by the Maoist left would form a kind of “court,” passing judgement on crimes and misdemeanors otherwise ignored or covered up by the state’s courts. In December of 1970, Sartre had presided over the first such “popular tribunal” in the northern mining town of Lens, where sixteen workers had died in a mine explosion...

...as the months went by, and rank-and-file enthusiasm for the idea of popular justice began to grow, the slogans grew increasingly ominous: “A boss can be imprisoned.” “The struggle for freedom should be waged in anger.” “A deputy can be lynched.”...

p204

On February 5, 1972, Foucault sat down with Pierre Victor to debate the meaning of “popular justice” for a special issue of Sartre’s magazine, Les temps modernes. By then, Victor’s sanguinary zeal had begun to alarm a growing number of his allies and intellectual fellow-travellers, who, as Glucksmann recalls, hoped to clip his wings by subjecting his position to sustained criticism.

In their debate, Foucault in fact cast a jaundiced eye on Victor’s enthusiasm for popular tribunals. Rejecting the very “form of the court,” Foucault criticized any attempt, whether in the name of the state or in the name of the people, to seize an individual who might otherwise go unpunished, bring him before a court, persuade a jury to judge him “by reference to certain forms of equity,” and then force the individual judged guilty to undergo punishment.

Instead, Foucault proposed starting, not with the form of the court, but with “acts of justice by the people. . . . Now my hypothesis is not so much that the court is the natural expression of popular justice, but rather that its historical function is to ensnare it, to master it and to repress it, by reinscribing it within institutions that are typical of the machinery of the state.”

For “the natural expression of popular justice,” Foucault suggested, we must look not to the courts, but to the streets -- for example, to the September Massacres of 1792!

Bloody minded though Victor was, he was obviously taken aback by the implications of the example...

Baffled to discover himself outflanked on the left but quickly recovering his wits, Victor hastened to agree with Foucault: of course, the masses at the start of any revolution would rise up and slaughter their enemies. Yes, “executions of despots, all sorts of reprisals for all the extortions suffered over the centuries” will naturally take place, Victor said. “All this is fine.” Still, he added defensively, before such bloodletting became routine, surely it was essential to reestablish the rule of law; surely it was crucial to create new courts -- precisely in order to decide whether or not “this particular execution or that particular act of vengeance is not simply a matter of an individual settling of accounts, that is, purely and simply an egotistical revenge.”

Foucault disagreed.

Popular justice would best be served, he countered, by throwing open every prison and shutting down every court. Instead of instituting a process of “normalization,” and rendering judgement according to laws, it would be better simply to relay fresh information to the masses (as had happened at the tribunal at Lens) -- and then let the popular “need for retaliation” run its course. Exercising their power without inhibitions, the masses might resurrect “a certain number of ancient rites which were features of ‘prejudicial’ justice.” [I'm fairly certain that by "prejudicial" Foucault (or Miller) means pre-judicial, not "detrimental"]

In this context, Foucault mentions the “old German custom” of putting “the head of an enemy on a stake, for public viewing, when he had been killed... a popular practice which does not recognize itself in any judicial proceedings.”

p206

For Foucault, who was in the midst of writing a book on crime and punishment, this [where was the limit of acceptable action? after French Maoists had held back from political murder] had to be a difficult, and perhaps intractable question...

p207

It is not surprising then, that issues of “hate and aggression” should play a critical and tortuously complex role in the next phase of Foucault’s life, and, above all, in the most influential of his works -- the “genealogy of modern morals” he would call Discipline and Punish.

Chapter 7 - An Art of Unbearable Sensations

I’ll admit that I was sorely tempted to continue into chapter 7 and the discussion of Discipline and Punish. You should not be surprised to hear that Miller almost immediately launches into a discussion of still more Nietzsche books, in this case The Genealogy of Morals and The Gay Science. This is clearly a stealth book on Nietzsche, with Foucault as the barker, or window dressing. I suppose it would be still better to say that this is a book about 18th-20th century philosophy. And as such I may want to come back to it later, at least for myself. But I think we now have a good idea where Foucault is coming from.

And I continue to think that my jump to Kali and Tantra was inspired. In the context of Hindu culture, people like Foucault would actually have a social and philosophical structure to latch onto. In the secular/Christian West, they fall into madness... a wild dance that threatens the world. I think it is good to know that such people are out there and how they think. I think Chomsky is better off for his run-in with Foucault, because now he knows that you can’t assume “you share some moral territory” with everyone around you.  

But, the weather is getting wet and colder, and I’m ready to get back to Henry Ryecroft.

Next: Winter I.