Lilti contra Gordon

I want to tackle the next two pieces in RMEIH as a pair. They are, in order, Peter Gordon on “Contextualism and Criticism in the History of Ideas” and Antoine Lilti’s “Does Intellectual History Exist in France?” At the end of Lilti’s text, he responds to Gordon’s essay. (I am, incidentally, curious about how this sort of exchange is managed practically speaking). Gordon, Lilti writes,

defends the idea of approaching philosophical texts of the past with present-day preoccupations in mind, and he cautions against he danger of excessive contextualization. By contrast, the whole tradition of cultural history in France was built upon the premise...that an insurmountable distance separates the present of the historian from the past found in sources...This commitment to contextualization is what distinguishes the historian’s approach, and it cannot be abandoned without sacrificing the specific contributions that historians make to our understanding of cultural objects. (69)

Now, Lilti agrees with Gordon that “attentiveness to the temporality of knowledge is especially important for intellectual history,” and certainly also agrees that when confronting a given object, the intellectual historian must bear in mind what has become of this object between its initial creation and the historian’s engagement with it. Lilti’s example is Lucien Febvre’s classic account of Rabelais. Febvre’s work there is a pradigmatic insistence on the alterity of the past. But it was also premised on the continual presence of Rabelais in French cultural life between his 16^th century and Febvre’s 20^th. But, at least this is my reading, Lilti will not follow Gordon onto what looks to Lilti like philosophical, rather than historical terrain.

           

The two essays contrast in many ways. Lilti, although of course he generalizes and makes conceptual points, is basically concerned to synthesize historiography. He answers the question posed by his title in the affirmative, but explains why and how this is only relatively recently true. Gordon, in contrast, cites very few works of historiography. The essay is ostensibly primed by Skinner’s 1969 “Meaning and Understanding,” but the real interlocutor is German critical theory.

I may be projecting, but my sense is that Lilti is somewhat taken about by Gordon. The latter maintains, in his own words, that “intellectual historians should not endorse contextualism as a global and exhaustive theory of meaning, that is, the view that a specific context can fully account for all the potentialities of an idea” (33). Gordon insists that what he is against is contextualism understood as “the epistemological and normative (and implicitly metaphysical) premise that ideas are properly understood only if they are studied within the context of their initial articulation. This idea has for some time enjoyed a default status that quite often passes without argument or defense, since it is presumed to be merely the common sense of the profession at large” (36). Gordon proceeds to destroy this idea. And I entirely agree with him that it is debilitating in a number of ways, limiting and simply bad practice, to make such assumptions. I agree that the original temporally and geographically proximal context of articulation is not the exclusive or exhaustive bearer of meaning for an idea. On the other hand, I am not convinced that historians have ever seriously maintained that it was, or—and here Gordon agrees—acted like it was. Indeed I vividly retain the impression (if not exactly the memory) of reading Dominic LaCapra’s classic (anticontextualist?) extended list of possible contextualizations for a given text. That was written 30 years ago. And I am puzzled by Gordon’s use of the term “idea.” His essay is after all about the history of ideas, but it seems to me straightfowardly the case that intellectual historians work with many objects that they would not describe as “ideas,” a term that many, although of course not all, would regard with suspicion. In short, it seems to me that Gordon waves his hand over the gathered masses of intellectual historians to abstract from their practice a disavowed appalling metaphysics, but then, having dismantled this metaphysics, he admits that actually historians also do not act as though they believe it: “the irony is that, whenever they venture into a more critical style of analysis, intellectual historians typically violate the principles of exhaustive contextualism to which they claim allegiance” (51). No evidence is ever offered for such allegiance—unless the mere reference to Skinner’s programmatic essay. Perhaps if I went back and re-read Skinner, the objections would seem more just. As it is, I am somewhat at a loss. I am perhaps missing something. 

There is nonetheless much that is interesting in the way Gordon stages his argument. Particularly the issue of temporality. For Gordon, the strong contextualist (bad) position amounts to a containment and a slowing down. It finds its ultimate model in a Hegelian system, a closed system of Geist with its own logic, the spirit of the age. There may be events, but the flow of time itself is not disruptive. The critical perspective that Gordon wants to endorse is eruptive. It is a differential time, as opposed to a punctual one (the reference here is to Benjamin). I tend toward skepticism of temporality-talk. And yet reading Gordon made me want to go back and pick up the work of a philosopher radically at odds with the tradition on which Gordon relies: Herni Bergson. Bergson, after all, in a much more sustained way than Benjamin, attempted to think about a mode of temporality—la durée—that would be different from the regularized, essentially spatialized, time of the natural sciences. Indeed one might—I won’t here—juxtapose Gordon’s Benjaminian distinction between punctual and differential time to a Bergsonian one between duration and extension.

This brings us back to Lilti. He explains, in the broadest terms, why there isn’t anything like ‘intellectual history’ among the French academic disciplines. Startlingly for me—but sensibly—Lilti begins by pointing out that there was nothing comparable to the Italian and the German traditions of philology in France. So that “In France, the theory and practice of history has not been guided by a science of texts so much as by the tension between narrative and knowledge, and between literature and social science” (57). Parenthetically, I’ll point out that here we have Lilti speaking of texts, lamenting the epochal failure of French historians to attend to them as such, where Gordon spoke of ideas, drawing on an absolutely philosophical German tradition—not the philological one. However that may be, Lilti goes on to point out that, in France, the history of philosophy belonged fully to the philosophers, and so was carried out in a radically non-historical way (that is, decontextualized). It is not entirely wrong, although also not entirely fair, to lay all the blame at the feet of the Annales—Febvre, mentioned above, is an example of the potential openness of this tradition. In any case, most of what looks and feels like intellectual history in French has been written not by historians tout court, but by historians of literature. Standouts here include Daniel Mornet and Paul Hazard.

Far be it from me to argue with Antoine Lilti, but. I think it is telling that Foucault turns out to be unavoidable for Gordon as well as Lilti. Was Foucault merely an intellectual historian? I would suggest that it is more interesting to ask what traditions Foucault was drawing on to do whatever it was he was doing. At least part of this is the French tradition of philosophical engagement with science. This might be said to have begun in the later 19^th century (and Bergson was an enemy for this tendency). In order to take the claims of science seriously, philosophers found that they had also to take seriously the historically variable nature of scientific truth. Variable according to what? At least sometimes, the rest of society. And in fact, even outside this subdiscipline, there were scholars trained as philosophers writings things that are very like intellectual history around 1900—I’m thinking of Élie Halévy on English Radicalism and Henry Michel’s L’Idée de l’État.  

Needless to say, I’m leaving aside much that is valuable here from both Gordon and Lilti. That Gordon has encouraged me to go back and read Bergson again (which actually I’m going to have to do for other reasons) is, according to some people, a terrible condemnation—but it pleases me. And Lilti’s essay—which, as all good historiographical/methodological essays should, has in its final footnote a citation for Lilti’s own brilliant reading of Rousseau—is one I would have liked to read perhaps before setting my prelim lists.

SFHS 2015. Part Two of Two.

Here is the promised second post on the SFHS. I’ve delayed long enough that these papers aren’t really fresh in my mind any longer, but I want to get this off my plate. Apologies for any misrepresentations! I’ll say only that these papers deserve a more thoroughgoing treatment than I’m able to give them here.   

Saturday morning, at a little after 8:30, the panel “Beyond Determinism: Rethinking the Philosophy of History and Political Economy in Postwar France” got underway. Presenters included, in order, Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins, Alexander Arnold, and Aner Barzilay, with comment from Michael Behrent. All three papers were excellent and, at least for me, educational. Behrent’s comment was exemplary—at least what I heard of it. Since I had to leave part way through I won’t have anything to say about it here.   

Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins (hereafter: DSJ) delivered a paper on Raymond Aron entitled (I think) “Liberal Dictatorship, Aron’s Critique of Hayek’s Concept of Liberty,” drawn from his dissertation in progress on Aron. DSJ framed his project broadly as rescuing Aron from the historiographical box of ‘lonely liberal critic of Marxism.’ Aron was more than just a critic of Marxism, and engaged in a fruitful way with many different intellectuals (as it happens I posted some notes on one of DSJ’s earlier papers about Aron and Schmitt here). In particular, Aron leveled his critical fire at various forms of ideology that found material support in the United States—development theory, realist IR, etc—that made universalizing claims something like Marxism. DSJ’s goal in this particular paper is to argue against the understanding of Aron as a neo-liberal, as someone who walked the now-famous road to Mont Pelerin, who was influenced by Hayek especially after a wartime stay in London. It isn’t so, DSJ says.

DSJ develops his critique of the neo-liberal Aron first by criticizing or “mitigating” the moment of sociability, the networks, that have been pointed to in linking Aron to neo-liberalism. The heart of the paper, though, is an archival record of a talk Aron gave in 1955 at a conference in Milan (sponsored by the CCF, and in their archive). The context of this talk was Aron’s new prominence as the author of The Opium of the Intellectuals and especially the “end of ideology” thesis found in its last chapter. This is great material, and  DSJ contextualizes the debate in an exemplary way—this, really, is the paper. The point for DSJ’s larger argument is that Aron describes Hayekian liberalism as ideological in the same way as Marxism—indeed he apparently said there that “at the end of the day, what the liberalism of Hayek constitutes is inverted Marxism.” Economic inevitability ruled both vision of the future, although they pointed in different directions. Hayek would require, as in the title of the talk, a “liberal dictator” to get his system off the ground. Well, Rousseau needed his legislator, so perhaps this isn’t so unreasonable. I’d be interested, in light of this discussion, to go back and re-read Aron’s “États democratiques et états totalitaires” (June 1939).

As is sometimes the case with this sort of argument, by the end I wondered how anyone could possibly have ever thought of Aron as a neoliberal. Perhaps this was clarified in the Q&A. My guess would be that this label is as much an artifact of the polemical theater of French intellectual politics as anything else. DSJ did not spend very much time establishing the definition of neoliberalism according to which Aron would be one, and it seems to me that in fact Aron was a liberal, not a neoliberal. DSJ makes the case (I think convincingly) that a key difference between him and Hayek was that the latter never really accepted the legitimacy of democracy, while Aron did. Having spent some time reading Élie Halévy, Aron now sounds to me more and more like his student, or, conversely, as though Halévy really was Aron’s maître-penseur. The talk mentioned above was, after all, delivered on the heels of an extremely pessimistic survey of the field by Halévy. Perhaps we can say that Aron’s liberalism was, at first, anti-totalitarian, but that he learned to shed this fear as Hayek did not? In any case, a great presentation from DSJ.

Next up was Alexander Arnold, whose dissertation concerns postwar (up to 80s) French political economy, and who spoke about Rosanvallon and economic determinism. This paper was also great, the product of lots of reading of Rosanvallon. I myself make use of Rosanvallon’s work, but I read him first as a historian (the book on Guizot, for instance)—so this paper was particularly interesting for me. Essentially, Arnold reconstructs Rosanvallon’s political economy as he developed it over the course of the 1970s, in his writings as an autogestionnaire. An important climax is the critique of Marx offered in Le capitalisme utopique. I’m not certain that I’m reconstructing Arnold’s reading correctly here, but the idea seems to be that Rosanvallon believes we should read classical political economy as philosophy, not really as a description of economic reality. At its base is an utopique description of the subject, for instance. Nonetheless, Adam Smith—and here, can this really be what Rosanvallon thinks? It’s been some time since I looked at that book—allows us for the first time to philosophically grasp both the institution and the continuity of society. But this is not a description of the world. Marx, however, took the writings of liberal political economy for such a description, and his critique is principally a critique of that economic (in fact philosophical) writing, not of the real economy. “There is enormous distance between concrete society and the discourse of political economy.” Capitalism, in reality, should be understood in a minimal way, which allows for the construction of democratic—autogestionnaire—alternatives, or really reforms.  

This account of political economy, Arnold argues, or really this inattention to it, left Rosanvallon and the deuxième gauche more generally unprepared to meet the challenges of austerity that emerged in the Mitterand years. My central question here is not so much about the reconstruction of Rosanvallon—although I would be interested to see this story extended into his much deeper engagement with the French liberal tradition as the 80s wore on—but about this ‘response.’ Who has been able to meet these challenges? As far as I can tell no one really offers a really compelling account of what is to be done (at least no one who isn’t on the side of austerity). The best Marxisant analyses I’ve seen are rather grim. So what does Arnold want Rosanvallon to have done? To have occupied a more intransigent oppositional position? I’m not sure. In any case, to have avoided advocating “d’apprentissage collectif d’austérité...”

I’m leaving out here a number of things: especially Arnold’s nuanced discussion of the merits of Rosanvallon’s self-description of autogestion as ‘realist,’ and Daniel Lindberg’s criticisms of this; and then the larger framing of the paper in the history of liberalism, and adjudication between the political and the economic aspects of this. I look forward to reading more.

Finally, there was Aner Barzilay, whose talk was “Foucault and Deleuze’s Hidden Debate about Nietzsche” [paraphrase!], and whose dissertation is on Foucault’s Nietzsche. The larger project is to emphasize the continuities on the level of philosophy in Foucault’s oeuvre. This is in reaction to an over-emphasis on the late lectures and on Foucault as a theorist of something called ‘neoliberalism.’ The larger context is above all the question of the transcendental and the subject—trying to keep the two apart. Nietzsche is the most important reference for Foucault, the actuator of the whole project. Barsilay’s talk here is a reconstruction of a (largely implied) dialogue between Foucault and Deleuze, and it is built around Barzilay’s archival discovery of a 1977 note from Deleuze to Foucault discussing just these issues. The exchange and the moment are fascinating. This period, and the political break between the two philosophers, has now received a certain amount of attention. So it is remarkable and much to be appreciated that Barzilay can still bring something new to that table.

I cannot do justice to Barzilay’s talk, so I won’t try to report its details. Delicate questions regarding the nature of the transcendental, the plaisir/desire distinction, and power as Kantian schematization of the subject, were all dissected. Neither Deleuze nor Foucault is to be taken lightly, and Barzilay approaches at a level of textual involvement but also abstraction that makes summary difficult. Again, I’d like to read. 

I agree broadly that we should take Foucault’s earlier work more seriously when thinking about the later lectures. The problem of the subject—historical, transcendental, prison, etc—is indeed clearly a central one for Foucault (and the career-long circling around Kant is unsurprising). I’m less convinced by the centrality of Nietzsche for Foucault generally, but I think this is mostly because I’m skeptical that there’s much of a ‘there’—what did Nietzsche mean, really? To what extent did Foucault take what he needed to take from this corpus? The reference seems constantly to be to the Genealogy, which isn’t the same thing as Nietzsche. But, after all, the point of the larger project is presumably to argue this point. My larger concern with the paper is, I’m sure, not really justified, but here it goes. This paper is, almost, saying: ‘hey, I know you think that the late Foucault is about investigating the actual conditions in which living human beings are made to suffer, but no, in fact it’s about the far more important question of avoiding the transcendental subject!’ I suppose what I want from Barzilay is an account of how the political thought of this newly continuous philosopher-Foucault looks different, or should be appreciated differently, from the less-continuous version of Foucault against which Barzilay is arguing.

I think this is a legitimate question (despite everything) because all three of these papers were about attempts to grapple with the nature of the State. [I'd have liked, also, to hear more explicitly about the question of determinism--although perhaps the originally-planned fourth paper would have helped with this focus]. This common problem was of course clear. Barzilay mentioned, at the end of his talk—and I’ve lost track of in precisely what register, and would like to know—that to refer to the state is to bring a knife to the gunfight of modern politics. There is also Foucault’s famous remark from the lectures about cutting off the head of the State, as well as that of the King. But at issue between Aron and Hayek was interpretation of the nature of the State; and Rosanvallon’s political economy seems also to have turned on the capacity of a subject—a State? A syndicat?—to intervene in the economy. Now, this was self-consciously a panel of intellectual historians, so it is a little pedantic to call on them to be more contextual. And probably Michael Behrent did (some version of) that in his comment. Certainly his work on Foucault and the Foucaultians makes me think him likely to have done so. But how to create this context? Here the panel turns back on itself—intellectual history often does—because, I think, the central question is how we, here today, understand the changing nature of state power in the face of economic imperatives in the postwar world. This is after all the problem all the subjects discussed by the panel were interested in.

That closing is not too coherent, and not too clear, but perhaps I’ll manage to follow it up with an eventual post on essays from the no-longer-so-new Rethinking Modern European Intellectual History (2014).

Foucault on Nietzsche (with or without Hegel)

For some time now I have wanted to sit down and read Nietzsche with an eye to forming an opinion about his work for myself. To do this properly is clearly a long term project. I have recently got a start on it. It comes on the heels of reading Hegel, and it has been suggested to me that Nietzsche should be read as reacting deeply against Hegel and Hegelianism generally. Further, that his long-term reception has been as an arch anti-Hegelian, an anti-dialectical war machine. Foucault, I have been told, is crucial here.

So what I want to do here is think through what I am prepared to say about The Genealogy of Morals, thinking of Nietzsche as at least a surface anti-Hegelian (whatever that may mean), but also contextually, in as much as I am able. Then I want to look at how Foucault presents Nietzsche in “Nietzsche, la généalogie, l’histoire,” an essay that I had not read in some years. Foucault himself is generally regarded as antithetical to Marx, Marxism, and all the more so to Hegel. I have long been skeptical of this view. Calling Marx a ‘minor Ricardian’ in Paris in, I think, 1966, is it seems to me to protest too much. Given that I have been encouraged to think of Nietzsche, and in particular Foucault’s Nietzsche as anti-Hegelian, I was all the more surprised to see that Foucault’s essay was first published in a collective volume, Hommage à Jean Hyppolite. Hyppolite, after all, is the individual most responsible for re-introducing Hegel into France in the 1940s and 50s. Which is enough on its own to suggest that we’re dealing here with two distinct Hegels. There is the Kojevian, ‘existentialist’ Hegel, drawn from the Phenomenology, which had to be painfully excavated again in the early, and perhaps later Marx in the second half of the 20^th century. Then there is the Hegel of the Philosophy of Right, a philosopher of history, of world history, and of modernity as a collective condition. Not that the two don’t fit together in various ways, but it is not hard to see that different lessons, different readings of Marx, fit together with different approaches to Hegel.

From the beginning, I am hesitant to say what Nietzsche is ‘up to’ in the Genealogy. To dive right in: Nietzsche wants to consider the way in which morals, moral evaluation, changes, and the consequences of this instability. I want to focus on Hegelian resonances and conflicts here, but it seems to me clear that Nietzsche’s 19^th century was at least as post-Kantian as post-Hegelian. Morality is a major contender in this world for a stable point around which to orient human life. Over and against the idealist impulse (variously debased) is materialism (also, of course, variously debased). In a sense, this materialism is simply the continuation of 18^th century materialism: there is only matter in motion. It has become more sophisticated, and has been applied more aggressively to biology and thence to society (a transformation that Foucault, as a student of Canguilhem, certainly spent a long time thinking about, by the by). 19^th century racism, of the sort that at least seems to be everywhere rearing its head in Nietzsche, fits in here. The most intellectually interesting thing to happen here, however, is the renewal of attempts to draw philosophical lessons from the undeniable practical success of science. This is the tradition from which, ultimately, Foucault himself will come.

Nietzsche was by training a philologist. It has been pointed out that Renan makes a very interesting comparison to Nietzsche, and I think this is so. Philology was one of the great intellectual projects, whose massive promises (on plain display in Renan’s youthful confession, L’Avenir de la science) turned out to be nothing other than dust glued together with the blood of others. Philology as practical science has its origin in the search for textual originals. Its method is to compare languages across time and space. Language slides into society, society into the material being of the human—which is to say into race. This could only happen because science moved forward on the biological front as well. Objects had to be defined, slow changes and also continuities accounted for, physical inheritance presented itself as an obviously true hypothesis. Languages evolve together with the peoples to which they are attached. The two are tied together by a sort of essence, and this is what the philologist is ultimately after. Nietzsche reacted to this, and I think the slow-motion decomposition of Renan’s ‘faith in science’ is instructive here.

Given all this, I want to say that Nietzsche is manifestly arguing, in The Genealogy of Morals, that moral evaluations can be traced, through that great archive language itself, to social conflict. His argument is schematic and so simplified that its precise status and objective should be considered carefully. He is not, I think, exactly making an historical argument. But he does say that, historically, at one time the word ‘good,’ for instance, applied not to acts, but to people ($4-6). The conquering race, as individuals but also as a group, simply was the good, and those conquered the bad. The ‘revolt of the slaves’ was responsible for ‘transvaluing’ this situation, shifting first the ‘good’ not to the individuals who suffered domination themselves, but to their state, and therefore their actions ($10). Good became to turn the other cheek, as an abstract quality. What matters is what to do with this historico-philosophical observation. Nietzsche is always saying that he “has much to be silent about.” Indeed, ‘wovon Nietzsche nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen.’

It has been suggested that Nietzsche’s ‘slave morality’ in its historical victory over nobility is somehow a refiguring of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic. Although I suppose this is possible, it doesn’t seem likely to me. First, this is for all the same reasons that it is unlikely any particular person in the late 19^th century would have been drawn to this particular ‘moment’ of the Hegelian dialectic when there are so many from which to choose. It simply didn’t occur to most people as the most important part of Hegel (although perhaps it seemed important to some: Royce? Et alia?) Further, Hegel’s pair is Herr and Knecht, while Nietzsche’s is Vornehmen and Sklave. The bundles of associations are quite different, and the shift from singular to plural should not be overlooked. Now, perhaps all this should just be taken as evidence that Nietzsche meant to radically re-stage Hegel’s drama. I am not so sure. Anyway, this would assimilate Nietzsche still more closely to the ‘existentialist’ Hegel(ian tradition) and so retain him as a terrible critic of the Marxist/world-historical tradition.

The fundamental objection to Nietzsche, it seems to me, is that he is basically a racist and elitist aesthete. Certainly he is an elitist. At many places, in particularly in the way he talks so scornfully about democratic leveling, he echoes what I take to be a capacious 19^th century tradition of aristocratic liberalism associated most famously with Tocqueville, but also, it is my ill-informed understanding, with Jacob Burkhardt, a not-unimportant figure for Nietzsche. Although perhaps it would be better to assert that this sort of liberalism was a very broad and generalized orientation at this dawning moment of mass democracy—in the air, as it were, rather than passed from hand to hand.

Race is a major sticking point in any attempt to ‘revive’ Nietzsche or even to read him productively. Just as one must ask with Hegel how much of his system would unravel and collapse if one insisted that the nation-state—keystone of the archway to the world spirit—be removed from it, or if we prefer to keep it intact but properly interpreted, so we must ask with Nietzsche how much of his work implies or depends upon a notion of the self tied intimately to a collective biological destiny always articulate at the level of the individual, but essentially of a historical nature but. That is, is race essential to Nietzsche’s notion of the individual, and if so, can we accept, or find an acceptable version of, his notion of race?

It should be said clearly that ‘no’ seems like a plausible, although not a necessary, answer. Nietzsche, I understand, like many in the 19^th century, was Lamarkian rather than Darwinian. The terms of the debate are confused by an ambiguous vitalism that penetrates 19^th century thought at every level. No doubt much has been said about Nietzsche and vitalism, but from my own perspective it is obvious that he is negotiating between a Spencerian ‘struggle for life’ notion of vitalism and a subtly different and more idealist vitalism of the sort represented by Jean-Marie Guyau—that which is life is good, and therefore that which increases life is good. This is the principle of Esquisse d’une morale sans sanction ni obligation, published in1884, which I mention because Nietzsche read it and knew it. Henri Bergson fits, in a sense, into this line, which goes back to Ravaisson. The story is complicated because it involves a series of borrowings (perhaps mutual) between quite different French and German philosophical lines of thought. My sense is that it should be possible to tell a single story as a sort of oblique dialog that would include Cousin and Ravaisson, the German Idealists after Kant, and would run up through the Heideggerian exchange of the pre and post 1945 years—but this is the kind of nationalizing historiography that, even when practiced in its most deconstructive mode (Ethan Kleinberg) is, I think, always telling the same story again and again—in that way, maybe, we can say that history in a deconstructive mode is very like history in a Hegelian mode, the movement and the answer is always the same, but it seems always to take a long time to figure it out.

Nietzsche, it seems to me, is really pursuing a very different project than Bergson. Bergson is absolutely interested in the natural sciences, in the physiology of the human, but it seems to me that his whole way of proceeding through the physical, as much as it deposits there, is quite abstracted. One could talk a great deal about the way Bergson dealt with the issue, of which he was acutely aware, that he understands language to be conceptual, and the durée to non-conceptual and therefore non-linguistic (although it would be wrong, I think, to say that it is what escapes language), but that Bergson could only discuss durée in language. Nietzsche, on the other hand, I think is attempting in his discussion of ‘morals’ to work the ideal directly out of physical, tactile, reality. This is why race matters to him, but also why he brings up the ancients’ practice of reading out loud, the ideal determination of the sentence by the breath and so the body. The latter seems clear enough, and not too problematic. But race? The point, I think, is that there are bundles of characteristics, wills, that cannot be dissociated from their material foundation. This is race. It is exactly an incarnated concept, a Hegelian idea. To the degree that the European ‘nations’ are young and undefined, they are not yet races (I’m thinking of $251 in Beyond Good and Evil). There is no hint, so far as I can see, of the Hegelian teleology of freedom in Nietzsche. True, Nietzsche, like Hegel, like Spinoza, and many others, finds a way to identify freedom and necessity. This is not, however, transformed into an historical principle as it arguably is in Hegel. The reason is, it seems to me, that Nietzsche’s attitude to history is, for all his biologism, enormously voluntaristic.

This is where Foucault comes in. The vulgar version of Nietzsche, or racial thinking, is a sort of biologized Marxism. Indeed, the argument has explicitly been made that the intellectual roots of Nazism are to be found in a revisionist Marxism that, essentially, transformed classes into races (I’m getting this argument from James Gregor, but not endorsing it). Marxist historiography has often handled superstructural elements like morals through reference, with varying degrees of sophistication, to structural facts, including structural conflict. The Hegelian heritage in Marxism is supposed to mean that this conflict, the many generations of superstructural chaff, all fit into a total picture. The unfolding logic of productive forces in conflict with social relations comes to an impasse, there is not just a revolution, but the Revolution. Nietzsche may retain teleology, but it is not a pre-given teleology as in the vulgar version of Marx. Life, in its breadth and depth, is the teleological goal, but can itself be understood only genealogically, which is to say retroactively (how far from Hegel are we here, really?)

And this is the Nietzsche that Foucault gives us. He is above all an anti-Platonist. The ‘origin’ in which he is interested is in no way a philological essence, but rather a contingent and tainted thing recognized. Genealogy is a way of doing history against history, which is taken to be obsessed with origins in the Platonist sense of essence. Foucault says that the genealogists does not look for the Ursprung,

Parce que d’abord on s’efforce d’y recueillir l’essence de la chose, sa possibilité la plus pure, son identité soigneusement repliée sur elle-même, sa forme immobile et antérieure à tout ce qui est externe, accidentel et successif. Rechercher une telle origine, c’est essayer de retrouver ‘ce qui était déjà’, le ‘cela même’ d’une image exactement adéquate à soi…Si le généalogiste prend soin d’écouter l’histoire plutôt que d’ajouter foi à la métaphysique, qu’apprend-il ? Que derrière les choses il y a ‘tout autre chose’ …le secret qu’elles sont sans essence, ou que leur essence fut construit pièce à pièce à partir de figures qui lui étaient étrangères (148).

Genealogy is thus against both philology and Hegelian or other idealist ways of writing history. What emerges is a frankly materialist conception of history. For Nietszche, channels Foucault,

« La vérité et son règne originaire ont eu leur histoire dans l’histoire…L’histoire, avec ses intensités, ses défaillances, ses fureurs secrètes, ses grandes agitations fiévreuses comme ses syncopes, c’est le corps même du devenir.» (150-151). Rather than Ursprung, the genealogist is interested in Herkunf and Entstehung. The former Foucault renders as ‘provenance’ and the latter as ‘emergence.’ Of the first, he says, “La généalogie, comme analyse de la provenance, est doc à l’articulation du corps et de l’histoire. Elle doit montrer le corps tout imprimé d’histoire, et l’histoire ruinant le corps. » (154). This, I think, is how Foucault would want to say Nietzsche deals with race—race is history marking the body. Of the second,

L’émergence, c’est donc l’entrée en scène des forces; c’est leur irruption, le bond par lequel sautent de la coulisse sur le théâtre, chacune avec sa vigueur, la juvénilité qui est la sienne. Ce que Nietzsche appelle l’Entstehungsherd du concept de bon, ce n’est exactement ni l’énergie des forts, ni la réaction des faibles ; mais bien cette scène où ils se distribuent les uns en face des autres. (156)

This begins to sound to my ears a great deal like Badiou. Take for instance this, “Nul n’est doc responsable d’une émergence, nul ne peut s’en faire gloire ; elle se produit toujours dans l’interstice.” (156) Of course Badiou has an explicitly worked-out metaphysics to go with his notion of the event, while Foucault certainly does not—but still I would be surprised if it wasn’t, on investigation, very clear that Badiou is working on Foucault’s notion of history and historical change. Or perhaps Althusser and Spinozan Marxism are really the important things here? (The answer seems increasingly often to be ‘Althusser’ when the question is about the French 1960s and 70s).

Although I would resist the notion that we should read Foucault’s Nietzsche as simply endorsed by Foucault, there is clearly overlap. For instance, “L’humanité ne progresse pas lentement de combat en combat jusqu’à une réciprocité universelle, où les règles se substitueront, pour toujours, à la guerre; elle installe chacune de ces violences dans un système de règles, et va ainsi de domination en domination” (157). That is, as they say, a strong reading. Yet stronger and more clearly self-referential is the discussion of ‘interpretation,’

Si interpréter, c’était mettre lentement en lumière une signification enfouie dans l’origine seule la métaphysique pourrait interpréter le devenir de l’humanité. Mais si interpréter, c’est s’emparer, par violence ou subreption, d’un système de règles qui n’a pas en soi de signification essentielle, et lui imposer une direction, le ployer à une volonté nouvelle, le faire entrer dans un autre jeu et le soumettre à des règles secondes, alors le devenir de l‘humanité est une série d’interprétations. Et la généalogie doit en être l’histoire : histoire des morales, des idéaux, des concepts métaphysiques, histoire du concept de liberté ou de la vie ascétique, comme émergences d’interprétations différentes. Il s’agit de les faire apparaître comme des événements au théâtre des procédures. (158)

The broader point of Foucault’s reading of Nietzsche is that the past does not give us meaning in the form of history, but rather just the other way around, we put meaning into the past ourselves. We believe in general that " notre présent prend appui sur des intentions profondes, des nécessités stables; nous demandons aux historiens de nous en convaincre. Mais le vrai sens historique reconnaît que nous vivons, sans repères ni coordonnée originaires, dans des myriades d’événements perdus” (162). Foucault walks the reader through a genealogy of history itself and concludes that Nietzsche’s ‘true historical sense’ is a point by point rejection of Plato’s concept of history. In a nicely surrealist phrase, Foucault says, « La généalogie, c’est l’histoire comme carnaval concerté. » (168). All of this comes down to an analysis of the Will to Truth, closely related to the Will to Power. Historical analysis shows that, “il n’y a pas de connaissance qui ne repose sur l’injustice (qu’il n’y a donc pas, dans la connaissance même, un droit à la vérité ou un fondement du vrai) et que l’instinct de connaissance est mauvais…” (170). Truth, this is to say, does not set you free, it simply enslaves you yet the tighter. This is the anti-enlightenment turn everyone is always talking about in Foucault. There is no truth, because truth is slavery, there are only strong interpretations, which is to say autonomous self-creation. That is Foucault’s Nietzsche.

All of this is possible only in a world in which historical meaning is generated subjectively, in the moment. The material reality of the world must be scratched clean of the accretions of valuation that are history in order to make a different meaning. Meaning is not intersubjective. Nor is it present but unavailable as a sort of transcendentally necessary object. Essence has fled history, and given way entirely to existence. Sound familiar? It seems to me that Foucault is here basically getting from Nietzsche the propositions of Sartrean existentialism while avoiding Sartre, and the requisite encounter with Hegel’s Phenomenology. It was surely not as a matter of convenience that Foucault published the Nietzsche essay in a volume for the translator of the Phenomenology.

It would be wrong, I think, to assume that Foucault’s Nietzsche is the same as Foucault. Here there is a complication, a significant complication. Foucault’s fundamental rhetorical mode is that of world history. It is deeply marked by Marx and conceptual tools forged in the Marxist tradition. Althusser is obviously unavoidable here. How does this kind of ghostly Marxism (borrowing, perhaps unwisely, the idea) fit with the thrown, existentialist-Heideggerian Hegelianism I am arguing we see Foucault find (and that he must, in some sense, in some context, endorse) in Nietzsche? Without pushing the point too much, this is exactly Sartre’s problem in Search for a Method and then The Critique of Dialectical Reason.

Perhaps the conclusion here is that we might take Foucault’s essay on Nietzsche as evidence, or a starting point for arguing, that Foucault in particular and his generation in general were deeply engaged in playing out and refiguring the wars of their older brothers. It has been said that when Foucault and Barthes ceremoniously removed the head of the Author, they really were decapitating Sartre. The argument has again drifted into a kind of schematism that I don’t think can be sustained.

Echoes of Bergson

Biopolitics, in contrast to biopower, has the character of an event first of all in the sense that the “intransigence of freedom” disrupts the normative system. The biopolitical event comes from the outside insofar as it ruptures the continuity of history and the existing order, but it should be understood not only negatively, as rupture, but also as innovation, which emerges, so to speak, from the inside. Foucault grasps the creative character of the event in his earlier work on linguistics: la parole intervenes in and disrupts la langue as an event that also extends beyond it as a moment of linguistic invention. For the biopolitical context, though, we need to understand the event on not only the linguistic and epistemological but also the anthropological and ontological terrain, as an act of freedom. In this context the event marked by the innovative disruption of la parole beyond la langue translates to an intervention in the field of subjectivity, with its accumulation of norms and modes of life, by a force of subjectification, a new production of subjectivity. This irrpution of the biopolitical event is the source of innovation and also the criterion of truth. A materialist teleology, that is, a conception of history that emerges from below guided by the desires of those who make it and their search for freedom, connects here, paradoxically, with a Nietzschean idea of eternal return. The singularity of the event, driven by the will to power, demonstrates the truth of the eternal; the event, and the subjectivity that animates it, constructs and gives meaning to history, displacing any notion of history as a linear progression defined by determinate causes. Grasping this relation between the event and truth allows us to cast aside the accusation of relativism that is too often lodged against Foucault’s biopolitics. And recognizing biopolitics as an event allows us both to understand life as a fabric woven by constitutive actions and to comprehend time in terms of strategy.

Foucault’s notion of the event is at this point easily distinguishable from the one proposed by Alain Badiou. Badiou has done a great service by posing the event as the central question of contemporary philosophy, proposing it as the locus of truth. The event, with its irreducible multiplicity, that is, its “equivocal” nature subtracts, according to Badiou, the examination of truths from the mere form of judgment. The difference between Badiou and Foucault in this respect is most clearly revealed by looking at where, temporally, each author focuses attention with respect to the event. In Badiou an event—such as Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection, the French Revolution, or the Chinese Cultural Revolution, to cite his most frequent examples—acquires value and meaning primarily after it takes place. He thus concentrates on the intervention that retrospectively gives meaning to the event and the fidelity and generic procedures that continually refer to it. Foucault, in contrast, emphasizes the production and productivity of the event, which requires a forward- rather than backward-looking gaze. The event is, so to speak, inside existence and the strategies that traverse it. What Badiou’s approach to the event fails to grasp, in other words, is the link between freedom and power that Foucault emphasizes from within the event. A retrospective approach to the event in fact does not give us access to the rationality of insurrectional activity, which must strive within the historical process to create revolutionary events and break from the dominant political subjectivities. Without the internal logic of making events, one can only affirm them from the outside as a matter of faith repeating the paradox commonly attributed to Tertullian, credo quia absurdum, “I believe because it is absurd.”

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth [2009], pgs 59-61.

These are two paragraphs, about a one and a half pages, from Hardt and Negri’s new book. I read Empire a few months ago, and have just run through Multitude, and begun on this. This particular passage is from the “concluding discussion” of the first part of the book. The section generally is concerned to elaborate the authors’ reading of Foucault, in particular the distinction between biopower and biopolitics that they believe Foucault ultimately makes, even if his usage doesn’t reflect it. Biopower is the power to ‘make live’ that Foucault spent much of the 1970s discussing. Biopolitics is the resistance to this power. But, as this passage makes plain, it is more than that. I wonder to what purpose the authors have decided to enter into a discussion of the event. Although one would need more textual support (and perhaps this will be clearer when I have read the next 300 pages of the book), it seems to me that this is a turn back to Bergson. Biopolitics is the counter to biopower in the same way that the élan vital is a counter to simple matière. The first is innovation and freedom (literally) incarnate, while the second is predictability and fatality. I paused over this because they criticize Badiou for what I found the single most compelling schema presented in Being and Event. Subjectivity as fidelity to an event is interesting only because the event is past, and the conflict—and for Badiou this conflict is legitimate—is over what it means to practice fidelity to this event. This conflict is what constitutes the event as an event. It is wrong to say, as Hardt and Negri do, that meaning is given to the event retrospectively. It seems to me that the event exists only retrospectively. Hardt and Negri seek to avoid relativism. I applaud Badiou most for what is in fact a courageous head-on admission of a certain kind of relativism. Oddly for an engagé (but perhaps not for a Sartrean engagé), Badiou’s relativism is political—ontic—while his metaphysics, his ontology, are not relativistic. Hardt and Negri base their politics in the same way, it seems to me, that Marx did. They have performed an empirical analysis of the world, guided by a certain critical-philosophical perspective, and made a judgment about what the past and contemporary world means will happen in the future. There is great value in this. But it is not what Badiou is about. Certainly Badiou does not grasp the link between freedom and power, but Badiou at no point, as far as I know, even attempts such an analysis. In my no doubt partial and impoverished reading, Badiou has provided us with a way to think about the nature of the subjectivities to which some people still aspire, although they often are not able to explain why.

Again, it seems to me that Hardt and Negri have reproduced here (and perhaps more broadly) the conceptual scheme Bergson presents in which, in a sense, freedom is the force that rises against the falling force of material. The forms of life, constantly diversifying, are like the spray of a fountain, always reaching up. Except that Hardt and Negri do not see a contradiction, as Bergson so clearly did, between the radical freedom of the élan vital (the biopolitics of the multitude) and any kind of rationality. Perhaps, for Hardt and Negri, the material against which life moves is already cracked and grooved in ways that make it possible to predict to some extent the form that new subjectivities will take as they break it apart. It might be that this cracking-apart constitutes a biopolitical event; and certainly their perspective on it differs from Badiou’s. I would, myself, call Hardt and Negri’s approach historical and objectivist in a way that Badiou’s is not. But I do not see the contradiction suggested by these paragraphs between the two ways of thinking. This is perhaps because of how broadly Hardt and Negri are using the term ‘event,’ and how muddled may be my recollections of Badiou. I will end recklessly: Hardt and Negri must accuse Badiou’s event of constituting a credo quia absurdum because their perspective of immanence does not allow what seems to me one of Badiou’s basic principles: we are always outside ourselves.