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François Ewald

Foucault and the contemporary scene

Abstract What relevance does Foucault have, more than a decade after his death? Foucault was a sort of philosophical journalist – continually concerned with what is happening in the present. And it is here that we find one of the guiding threads of Foucault’s ethics: we must be constantly vigilant in ensuring that the present does not become a mere repetition of the past. Philosophy must produce events that can act to disrupt this repetition. This is the task of judgment, confronted by the question of power. We can recognize four points on which Foucault has continuing relevance. First, Foucault diagnosed the end of revolution, the consequences of which we are now living. Further, Foucault’s work on truth-telling and norms and measures, the heart of the question of justice, is still significant. Foucault’s work on medicine, and in particular ancient Greek medicine, will also play a critical role if we are to successfully navigate the myriad problems posed by a new form of medicine, genetic medicine – a medicine of predispositions rather than therapy, similar to the medicine practiced by the Greeks. Fourth and finally, Foucault has a continuing relevance for problems of decision-making, responsibility and care. We can think about responsibility, for Foucault, through the question of care – and thus will avoid reducing responsibility to a merely juridical notion. Key words care · Foucault · medicine · norms · present · repetition · responsibility · revolution

I would like to speak about the relationship between Foucault and actuality.1 This is a question which can be taken in two ways. Those familiar with Foucault know that he has extensively treated the notion of actuality, the notion of presence, the notion of event. In its first sense, ‘Foucault and actuality’ could consist in examining the manner in which Michel Foucault thought about the question of actuality and the PHILOSOPHY & SOCIAL CRITICISM • vol 25 no 3 • pp. 81–91 Copyright © 1999 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) [0191-4537(199905)25:3;81–91;007859]

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82 Philosophy & Social Criticism 25 (3) question of the present. But there is another side to this question, perhaps more interesting, which is the actuality of Foucault. Is Foucault still a relevant [actuel] philosopher? Are the themes that Foucault put on the agenda still current? Do they still have actuality, do they still have force, do they still have energy? Are they still useful for anything? I believe that these are questions that one can, and indeed must, ask, because it is not at all obvious that these questions, more than ten years after his death, are still current. What indications does Foucault give us for thinking about actuality? I will start with a citation: [I]n my books, I try to grasp an event which appeared to me, which appears to me important for our actuality, even while being an anterior event. . . . It seems to me that we repeat all these events . . . in our actuality, and I try to grasp which one is the event under whose sign we are born and which still continues to pass through us.2

There is a connection between the present, actuality and event in this quote. The present is characterized by Foucault as that which is born, which begins, in a particular event. This event is anterior and is characterized by the fact that it is repeated in the present. The present is marked by the repetition of an anterior event, and actuality, our actuality, is marked by the recurrence of this event, which is at the same time past and, past, remains present – in any case still guides us. This event, which inaugurates the present, which constitutes an actuality, has by the same token a non-factual [non événementielle] dimension, which is without a surface, but is a properly ontological dimension. The event with which he is concerned is an event in being, i.e. an event that can only escape the perspicuity of psychologists, sociologists and other historians. It is given to philosophers – and not the human sciences – to know it, to identify it. To be more precise, an event would be, for example, the birth of the human sciences. In the 1970s, Foucault rightly explained that, in order to comprehend what could have made this ontological dimension of an event, he established a grid around knowledge and power. The event concerns a formation, a form of relation between knowledge and power. All this has consequences for philosophy and for the philosopher: to establish herself or himself as being destined to understand actuality, the philosopher will establish herself or himself as a journalist. There is a long series of citations in which Foucault says, ‘for me, philosophy is a species of radical journalism.’3 Maurice Clavel said of Foucault that he was a transcendental journalist. Philosopher and journalist: ‘I consider myself’, Foucault also said, ‘as a journalist, insofar as what interests me is actuality, what happens around us, what we are, what occurs in the world.’4 And he specifies, ‘The future is the manner in which we transform a movement, a doubt, into truth. If we want to be

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83 Ewald: Foucault and the contemporary scene masters of our future, we must fundamentally pose the question of today.’5 The work of this philosophico-journalistic question consists in asking what is happening today, what is occurring to us. Foucault used a fetish text to pose this question of actuality, Kant’s ‘Was ist Aufklärung?’, and he often repeated, at least at the end of his life, that it was precisely this philosophical question which remained the order of the day. Foucault’s philosophical actuality starts, in a certain manner, with ‘Was ist Aufklärung?’: Foucault is a contemporary of the Kant of 1784. At the same time, the citations which I have just recalled indicate that the present is that which doesn’t change, which is fundamentally linked with repetition. One cannot help but think – I open a parenthesis here – of a relationship between Foucault and psychoanalysis, since this identification of the present as the recurrence of an event which repeats itself in actuality is in any case very close to what Freud described as the unconscious. The problem with the present is that it recurs indefinitely. Foucault will very often designate this repetition as a danger (without this danger being defined, in the texts in which he speaks of it, as other than the very repetition of the present itself); and Foucault posed the combat of this danger as a moral, or ethical, imperative. If there is an ethical line in Foucault – and there is one – it is fundamentally tied to the idea that one must combat this danger of repetition. The problem of actuality is posed because actuality is, in this sense, from the moment that one could identify the present, the position of an act which is capable of disrupting the present. This is something fundamental, very present in Foucault: the present is what must be interrupted. This is a formula of the Foucauldian ethic: it is what must be split up, divided. To divide the present is to create a past and a future [avenir], whence comes the notion itself of the future [futur]. The future [avenir],6 he said, is the manner in which we transform a movement, a doubt, into truth. I believe that there are numerous senses of the word ‘truth’ in Foucault; I believe that Foucault was a philosopher entirely dedicated to the truth, but according to a plurality of meanings: the sense which he is using here is the strongest – the truth is the possibility to produce as a rupture, as an interruption of the present, an other form of being. This is certainly not what one would call ‘truth’ in relation to thought, to language, or to their objects; this is the capacity to produce being. This possibility to produce being is tied at the same time to the notion of danger, which has rather a negative sense, and to the notion of risk, which itself has a positive sense. This truth, which is productive of being or which is capable of making being happen, evidently supposes a risk – that of limited experiences; which is also political risk, the risk that so fascinated Foucault in the political movements that he could encounter, of people who risked their lives, who made a commitment to something in risking their lives; and which he fundamentally thought was inexpressible. But

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84 Philosophy & Social Criticism 25 (3) precisely, if this inexpressible was qualified, if it was so inexpressible, that is because being was what was in question. Finally, one last thing, if the philosopher takes the form of a journalist, the journalist has a particular aim, that of diagnosis. Diagnosis, precisely, consists in knowing what is happening, which event dominates us. Genealogy, diagnosis, is always the question of an event, this event which repeats itself, and which must be transformed in the past, this present which must be interrupted through acts, which are interesting and important insofar as they are philosophical acts. Or more exactly, philosophy has an important role in human history to the extent that it is capable of producing events which have the value of acts concerning being. We know that Foucault himself described the production of his books, as well as his political activity, through the notion of the philosophical act. What interested Foucault in the history of prisons was that it was the site for a philosophical act; in the same fashion, when he wrote Discipline and Punish or The History of Sexuality, it was with the idea that a book was capable of being an act, not a discourse. Foucault was horrified by discourses which were not acts; he had a clear commitment to make each word an act, which was probably the constitution itself of his style of writing: how, in a given circumstance, could one render a word, a spoken word, something not merely spoken but also always an act. Foucault explained that in the 20th century, philosophical acts were not performed by philosophers, insofar as they surrendered or devoted themselves to commentary. Commentary is rarely an act; philosophical acts are elsewhere, to be found in linguistics with Ferdinand de Saussure, in psychoanalysis with Freud, in logic with Bertrand Russell. The philosophical act, which is capable of interrupting the present and thus of opening the present at the same time to the past and the future, is the very act which speaks the present. One of Foucault’s most celebrated formulas, that of the death of man, is a diagnostic formula; and at the same time what is formulated is the very act that interrupts the present, because it introduces precisely that opening between a past and a future. Foucault always maintains a very complicated balance: this sort of permanent interweaving between the act that designates something, that is, something that can be objective, but whose objectivity is nonetheless entirely tied to its enunciation. Whence comes a proximity between Foucault and a certain Anglo-Saxon philosophy. A second remark: this act of nomination, which is at the same time an act of rupture, is an eminently philosophical, eminently juridical act; it is the very act itself of judgment. The Greek word for judgment is krinein, which gives us both krisis, crisis, rupture [coupure], and decision. A decision, precisely, is that which interrupts. It is very difficult to have the right conditions for making a decision; one does not make a decision easily, in particular, one cannot make a decision as long

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85 Ewald: Foucault and the contemporary scene as one is thinking within a given framework. A decision is always outside of a framework, it always interrupts the framework in which one is thinking. If one is within a given frame of thought, one applies, one deduces, but one does not decide. A decision liberates one from the selfevident, not from theorems, not from deduction. What, then, is my view of Foucault’s actuality? Foucault has a very important actuality, which might surprise him, in contemporary feminism. But I know very little about this, and so I will not discuss it here. It is certainly one of the most active sites of Foucauldian reflection – this question of minorities (or majorities), of rights, of discrimination. I imagine that Foucault would have been very interested by the phenomenon of the ‘politically correct’ in the United States. But what remains today of the themes that Foucault made so important – like exclusion, power, the death of man, sexuality? Does the exclusion which one discusses so much today have anything to do with that which Foucault discussed? Does the exclusion which was tied to philosophical divisions, ontological divisions, like the exclusion of madness, still have anything to do with our own political and social exclusions? What philosophical stakes are at play in today’s exclusions? The question of power: is the question of power one that still really moves us, when one hardly sees any resistance any more, or when one does not see any openings for resistance? Does it still make sense to speak of the ‘death of man’ in an era of such intense activity with regard to human rights? I would like to specify four points of Foucault’s contemporary relevance. The first actuality of Foucault, at least for myself, is the actuality of diagnosis in the prospective sense of the term. Foucault described, ten years in advance, the world that would be our own, which is ours right now. Foucault recognized this actuality in the abandonment of the theme of revolution. As early as the late 1970s, Foucault posited that our current situation [actualité] is very fundamentally post-revolutionary: if there was an event in the 1970s, it was the disappearance of revolution. This is a significant event, first of all because we can say that it has been finally realized ten years later (since Foucault’s reflections date from 1977–8) with the fall of the Berlin Wall. This end of revolution is a significant event because it signifies a radical transformation in our consciousness of time, such that a sort of inflation was produced at that moment: up to the end of the 1970s, we had a manner of experiencing time that granted a very great privilege to change – the concern was always to be new, and everything was valorized insofar as it was new. Among the numerous ends which have been observed or described, there is the famous end of History. It is clear that the end of revolution and the end of History represent the same event: it is an event in our consciousness of time. Time transforms itself into a sort of infinite space,

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86 Philosophy & Social Criticism 25 (3) becomes an eternal present. When one experiences time according to a revolutionary model, one understands it as something that can be essentially changed, something that can be essentially interrupted, split. When one lives through the end of revolution, time adopts a kind of calm, of terrifying immobility, and leads toward an activity which tends to be only of the order of administration, of management – one experiences the end of time, and then one just keeps oneself busy, because nothing more can happen. We are profoundly marked – this is a fundamental philosophical difficulty today, I believe – by this idea that nothing more can happen. It is the idea that it seems that one can no longer bring about an event, that things and time are constituted in such a manner that, no matter what one does, it can no longer be an event because, somehow, time and meaning are immobilized. Everything has already been said, there is nothing left but to put it into play. Of course, we should compare this consciousness of time with that which someone like Alexandre Kojève could bring into play for himself, at the end of the war, and which led him from philosophy to the administration of international relations. Still, he had some remaining passions, like the Japanese tea ceremony. It is terrible that someone who in 1945 had seen some significant events could think that everything was already said, already accomplished, and that, henceforth, one could take interest only in things as profound and, at the same time, perhaps as futile as a tea ceremony. I ask myself if, today, one of our difficulties is not precisely to be confronted, to be tested as we have not been in 10 or 15 years, by this impossibility to be able to do something. To really do something is to inaugurate something. This impossibility which is ours today is a question which is extremely, fundamentally Foucauldian. Foucault identified this fundamental displacement with respect to revolution. Something that was not understood – probably also because one did not want to see it – is that he had identified this in paying attention to events in Iran. It was with respect to Iran that Foucault realized that our time was finally no longer the same as before. This is interesting because one can recognize today – leaving to one side the nonsense about whether or not Foucault was for the Ayatollah Khomeini – that Foucault was certainly fascinated by what happened in Iran because he asked himself what was happening elsewhere. He had a great intelligence and a certain insight, illustrated in the discovery that henceforth events happen elsewhere and not here with us. In sum, we had a very imperialist colonial attitude to think that the only events were European, or in that space between Europe, the United States and the Soviet Union. But in 1978, Foucault was thinking that, if there are events, they are somewhere else. And Foucault gives us an indication as to where an event is situated in these circumstances. The fundamental division is the distinction between the state and power. Foucault explained that there are not any events to be anticipated with respect to

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87 Ewald: Foucault and the contemporary scene the state: the state, in a certain manner, is no longer a philosophical concern – which does not mean that one must not continue to critique the state, etc. The stakes are with respect to power, and this is a totally different location, a totally different zone, a totally different type of reality. The second point of Foucault’s actuality, his contemporary relevance, is concerned with norms, or, perhaps more precisely, measures. One of the questions with respect to which Foucault has an actuality is the crisis of the sciences, the crisis of knowledges. We are in the middle of a fundamental crisis tied to the crisis of the sciences, which is the crisis of valuation [expertise]. Foucault was very much interested in valuation, especially in psychiatric appraisals; but in fact, he was always interested in valuation when he was interested in criminal investigations, examinations, in all the forms of production of knowledge. Today’s question – which Foucault noted – is that these forms of valuation apparently inscribe themselves in forms of domination and at the same time have a kind of utility in producing common measures. The norm in Discipline and Punish is the description of a common measure in a given group, which allows one to say, ‘Here is the instrument with which we moderns measure ourselves, as we render ourselves comparable, commensurable.’ But this question – how can one man be commensurable with another? – is a philosophically difficult one. It is the very question of justice. One can only speak about justice, that is to say, equality, starting from the moment that one introduces a measure, a principle of commensurability. The question of the norm, for Foucault, was always very closely tied to this idea of the production of a common measure. Today, and I believe that this is one of our present difficulties, we are precisely experiencing an unprecedented crisis of the measure. We no longer have a common measure and we no longer know if we can have one. This is extremely worrying. Because, on the one side, it means that truth-speaking [dire vrai] is impossible: every valuation, today, is opposed by an equal and opposite valuation. Science is presented in the form of controversies. This is serious because our ethic, in a sense equally moral as political, since we have known democracy, has been fundamentally tied to the idea that the only valid ethic is a scientific one. If we give up this idea, many questions will be opened. One example of this difficulty was given at the Rio summit, with the conflict between the signatories of the ‘Heidelberg declaration’ and their colleagues.7 The difference between frankly saying everything and saying just anything at all has a fundamental importance for Foucault. In the measure that we have to admit today that one can say anything at all and that just anything merits being said or considered (this is a certain manner of exercising the right to free speech), we are effecting the return of something whose disappearance marked in a certain way for Foucault the beginning of the modern age: the return of

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88 Philosophy & Social Criticism 25 (3) the evil genius. We are in a rather fascinating age where we are no longer exactly the interlocutors or the contemporaries of an infinite and unknowable God that aids us through the stabilities that he offers, but we are again confronted by an evil genius, by the possibility of extending doubt to infinity, precisely because of the plurality of undecidable questions among valuations. We are in an world where one is invited to doubt everything, without having the possibility of discovering a cogito, nor the possibility of escaping from this infinite logic. I believe that this fundamental difficulty concerning truth-speaking [dire vrai],which is at the same time a fundamental requirement to introduce a true speech [dire vrai], is another point where Foucault’s work is important. The third actuality revolves around medicine and medicalization. Foucault described, with Georges Canguilhem (unfortunately, the texts have never been assembled together – they are in Dits et Ecrits, but could be collected in a separate volume), the processes at work in our societies as processes of medicalization. We must note that medicalization has never been as strong or as extensive as it is today. Health is, in the Aristotelian sense of the term, our common good. One could perhaps even say that medicalization has replaced socialization: we no longer go on strike, we go to the doctor. We give medical care to everything, and this tendency will continue to develop into an ever more extensive medicalization of all our questions and all our problems. Which means that it is at the heart of medical practice that the most serious, the most fundamental stakes of power are to be found today. There is in the present conjunction of medical power an absolutely gigantic normative capacity and, at the same time, a formidable philosophical destabilization. The coming medicine, genetic medicine, heralds a terrible empire. It is dangerous because it is a medicine with a predictive character: the possibility will henceforth exist, in any case potentially, to know of each one of us, before we are even born, our predispositions toward the diseases that we will have. This poses an entire series of questions. The first concerns the status of this information. Is someone who is known to be predisposed to suffer such and such disease, sick or healthy? A first difficulty concerns the division between the sick and the healthy, between the normal and the abnormal. This division is in the process of being completely redistributed. A second consequence concerns medical activity itself: this genetic medicine is not characteristically therapeutic. Foucault does not leave us without aid for thinking about this, precisely because he explained that ancient Greek medicine was not therapeutic, but was rather a medicine of care [soin], a preventative medicine, exactly like genetic medicine today. One will not be told to go to the hospital, one will be told, ‘Here’s how to conduct yourself, here’s how to live if you are destined to have such or such predicted disease.’ This has a consequence whose extent must be measured. Up until then, disease had

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89 Ewald: Foucault and the contemporary scene been something that we could suffer, but it was also something comfortable, because we remained ignorant of it. This comfort had several aspects: first, sickness was experienced as a misfortune and, as you know, misfortune engenders compassion. Confronted by the new medicine and by our medical predispositions, we have a responsibility to see that these possibilities are or are not realized as a function of our choice of life. If we are responsible, disease no longer becomes an object of compassion; on the contrary, it is one of accusation. Medicine, as a result of this medicalization as well as all of the new discoveries and techniques, gives or is capable of giving a considerable power to the doctor. This poses the problem of knowing what kind of resistance the patient, who is not even sick, is capable of bringing against this knowledge, in order to exist as a subject and not simply as subjugated. On the other hand, what is truth-telling [dire vrai] within a therapeutic relationship? It is speech such that the patient emerges from the relationship as a subject, and not as an object. And this is precisely what Foucault was trying to formulate. The last area of Foucault’s continuing relevance concerns decisionmaking, responsibility and care [souci]. Since the beginning of this paper, my discussion has revolved around decisions, for Foucault is certainly, in any case for me, a philosopher of the decision. In the beginning, there is always a decision. It is indeed a question of beginnings for Foucault: the decision that divided madness and reason, or that of a subject who decides to no longer obey. For Foucault, there could be nothing but decisions, nothing but a valorization of the decision, precisely because it is the decision that cuts, that is capable of introducing a rupture. The entire problem is to know in which conditions it is possible to have a true decision, a genuine decision. The decision, which can only be an act without reference, cannot be an act of application, but on the contrary, an act in which a subject asserts herself or himself in a total risk of the self, facing the results, clearly taking responsibility – a genuine responsibility, since it does not have a reference, is not tied to a moral. This is exactly why, for Foucault, responsibility is tied to an ethic: ethics begins when morality is no longer possible. Today, what are called ethical questions constitute a domain which is born of a sort of moral silence: if we had a norm, rules of division, we would not need an ethic. But then why do this rather than something else? This is the question of responsibility. For Foucault, it is possible to think about responsibility through the question of care. The entire discussion with respect to care in Foucault’s last book is a reflection upon responsibility in the ethical sense, that is, upon responsibility which is no longer tied to moral norms. But care, as you know, bears upon power; care bears on the other and on the power that one exercises. Foucault’s notion of responsibility is certainly more interesting than the juridical notion, insofar as the latter is always a

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90 Philosophy & Social Criticism 25 (3) responsibility for self, or that which one takes vis-a-vis others, but only to the extent that the other is capable of attacking us. On the contrary, for Foucault, it is a responsibility which is only defined in consideration of the other: I am only responsible in my relations with another, and this question bears on the power that I exercise and which must give rise to a reflection in terms of care. To conclude, I would say that we are perhaps at a moment in our European history which is surprising because it can be experienced either as a repetition or, on the contrary, as an extraordinary suspension. We are waiting, finally, for the precipitation of things; time has come to a standstill, things have become petrified; and we do not know what can precipitate out from this, but at the same time, everything can emerge out of this, as if everything, at the limit, was opened. Which thus poses the fundamental question of the decision, and thus also the question of responsibility, and, in the end, with it, the question of care. Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers, Paris, France [Translated by Richard A. Lynch, Boston College, Department of Philosophy, Chestnut Hill, MA, USA]

PSC

Notes Originally published as ‘Foucault et l’actualité’ in Au risque du Foucault (Paris: Editions du Centre Pompidou, 1997), pp. 203–12. Permission to publish this translation has been granted by M. Ewald and Editions du Centre Pompidou. [Trans.: My thanks to François Ewald, Jim Bernauer, Louise Burchill, and especially Kevin Olson.] 1

2 3 4 5 6

[Trans.: ‘L’actualité’ is difficult to translate concisely. It can mean ‘that which is real or actual’ in a philosophical sense, as does the English cognate ‘actuality’, but it also – and more commonly – means the present time, current affairs, the state of things at the present moment, events in the contemporary scene. Ewald exploits this polyvalence, and the English term ‘actuality’ will be used in this idiosyncratic French sense.] Michel Foucault, ‘La scène de la philosophie’, Dits et Ecrits (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), Vol. III, p. 574; originally published in 1978. Michel Foucault, ‘Le monde est un grand asile’, Dits et Ecrits (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), Vol. II, p. 434; originally published in 1973. ibid. ibid. [Trans.: Though the English translation is the same, Ewald has slightly changed Foucault’s statement here, replacing ‘futur’ in the quotation above (n. 5) with ‘avenir’.]

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91 Ewald: Foucault and the contemporary scene 7

[Trans.: The United Nations Conference on the Environment and Development, 3–14 June 1992, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. About 200 scientists and intellectuals signed a statement in Heidelberg, Germany, termed the ‘Heidelberg declaration’, which was presented to the heads of state at the Rio conference. This declaration, raising alarm at the ‘emergence of an irrational ideology against industrial development’, prompted many counter-appeals.]