French Nietzscheanism

Foucault

The Hegel renaissance in France was short-lived, however. Indeed, by the late 1950s and early ’60s, Hegelianism had become an object of scorn among many French philosophers, who regarded it as a paradigm of what contemporary philosophy needed to overcome or negate—namely, subjectivism (the theoretical emphasis on subjective experience), metaphysics, and reason. Influenced by new developments in the social sciences (especially linguistics and anthropology) and by the antimetaphysical doctrines of Nietzsche and the later Heidegger, a new generation of philosophers set out to overthrow Sartrean existential humanism—in their view, the most recent incarnation of subjectivist and metaphysical excess.

In 1945 Sartre published an influential pamphlet, “Existentialism Is a Humanism.” For the young generation of French philosophers after Sartre, however, humanism—which they understood as the 19th-century celebration of “man” originating with Auguste Comte—was an antiquated concept that merited consignment to history’s dustbin. An important precedent for the debate that began in the early 1960s had been set by Heidegger’s 1947 “Letter on Humanism,” which the German philosopher intended as a rejoinder to French existential humanism as represented by Sartre. Whereas Sartre stressed the dignity of human existence as embodied in the For-itself, Heidegger emphasized the primacy of being—and thus, by implication, the derivative or subaltern status of human being. Hence, whereas Sartre had observed that the current historical situation was one in which “there are only human beings,” Heidegger insisted that “we are precisely in a situation where there is principally being.” It was in this new spirit of philosophical antihumanism that Michel Foucault (1926–84) triumphantly declared, in The Order of Things (1965), that “man is only a recent invention…[that] will disappear again as soon as our knowledge has discovered a new form.”

This momentous reappraisal of the French humanist tradition was propelled by larger historical and intellectual developments. As an aspect of the intellectual culture of the Third Republic, humanism suffered from its association with the ignominious surrender of France to Hitler and Nazism in 1940. Its reputation also was tarnished by the role historically played by Western philosophy in the legitimation of imperialism. In addition, the structuralist movement in cultural anthropology, which conceived cultures as systematic reflections of human mental structures, stimulated a new appreciation for non-Western cultures and values and a corresponding skepticism vis-à-vis Western ones. As pioneered by Claude Lévi-Strauss, structural anthropology helped to inspire critical reflection on European culture itself: its legacy of two devastating world wars, as well as the ever-present risk of nuclear annihilation, led many scholars to view it with suspicion and mistrust. Last, both anthropological and linguistic structuralism exhibited a scientific rigour that made the humanistic disciplines—including philosophy—seem both unrigorous and mired in the past.

Many of these critical themes were implicit in Foucault’s early works Madness and Civilization (1961) and The Order of Things (1966). In the former, he attempted to show how the notion of reason in Western philosophy and science had been defined and applied in terms of the beings—the “other”—it was thought to exclude. In this respect, reason lent itself to the mistreatment and oppression of whomever society happened to classify as “devoid of reason” (the insane) in prisonlike asylums and later, in the 20th century, in tortuous psychological treatments. Madness and Civilization appropriately concluded with an homage to “the sovereign enterprise of unreason…forever irreducible to those alienations that can be cured, resisting by [its] own strength that gigantic moral imprisonment which we are in the habit of calling…the liberation of the insane.”

Foucault began The Order of Things by memorably citing an ancient Chinese scheme of classification, which Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) had used in his essay “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins” (1941):

Animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies.

The epistemological implications of this amusing parable seemed clear enough to Foucault: the conceptual schemes of Western philosophy and science, which generations of thinkers had laboured to create and justify, were no less arbitrary, no more “true.” The schemes of any age, what Foucault called “epistemes” or “discursive regimes,” strictly determine the extent of what can be said and what can be thought. Escape from their iron-clad rule is possible only in literature, or “writing” (écriture), and only during the brief periods, or “interstices,” when one set of epistemes shifts or gives way to another. (During his structuralist phase, Foucault frequently employed geological metaphors.) The shift, at about the turn of the 19th century, from the episteme of “representation” to the episteme of “man” was one such period. At these times, a “pure” kind of writing, unsullied by governing conceptual schemes, is possible, resulting in the well-known intellectual breakthroughs of figures such as the Marquis de Sade (1740–1814), Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–98), Nietzsche, Antonin Artaud (1896–1948), and others.

Eventually, Foucault came to recognize that the structuralism by which he was influenced imposed its own conceptual constraints. According to the standard account, in his later work he shifted the focus of his analysis from language to power. In fact, however, he concentrated on a dual concept of his own devising, “power-knowledge” (pouvoir-savoir), by which he meant to indicate the myriad ways in which, in any age, structures of social power and governing epistemes reinforce and legitimate each other. (The integral relationship between psychiatry and mental asylums is one example of such mutual legitimation; the relationship between surveillance or discipline and the organization of prisons is another.) Foucault came to accept Nietzsche’s skeptical claim that “truth is the kind of error without which a certain species of life could not live.” But this ready embrace of Nietzsche’s cynicism naturally raised questions about the status of Foucault’s own discourse: in what sense could one say that his analysis of pouvoir-savoir was not simply one more discursive regime in the service of power? The problem of “peformative contradiction”—of a discourse that, while denying the existence of truth, implicitly claims truth for itself—was the basis of later critiques of post-structuralism (also called postmodernism) in philosophy by Jürgen Habermas and his followers (see below Habermas and critical theory).