The Gift of Power:

Foucault, Derrida, and Normalization

A Thesis Presented to the Faculty of

the Department of Philosophy
Villanova University

In Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy
in
Philosophy

by

P. Taylor Trussell

January 2009

Under the Direction of

John M. Carvalho
 UMI Number: 3352258

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 2009, P. Taylor Trussell
Table of Contents
Abstract........................................................................................................................................1
Synoptic Introduction ...............................................................................................................2
Chapter 1: The Derrida-Foucault Debate ............................................................................9
MadnessandtheProcessofExclusion ....................................................................................11
TheEarlyTreatmentoftheMad................................................................................................16
TheGreatConfinementandtheInstitutionalSilencingofMadness .............................17
FoucaultsCritiqueofDescartes ................................................................................................22
DerridasCritiqueofFoucault ....................................................................................................24
FoucaultsResponsetoDerrida .................................................................................................30
Chapter 2: Foucaults Methods ........................................................................................... 36
Archeology ........................................................................................................................................38
Genealogy ..........................................................................................................................................46
TheUnionofEruditeKnowledgeandLocalMemories ............................................................... 47
EstablishinganHistoricalKnowledgeofStruggles....................................................................... 49
UsingThisKnowledgeTacticallyToday ............................................................................................ 53
WhatisEnlightenment? ............................................................................................................55
Chapter 3: The Method of Deconstruction: Derrida on Marx ..................................... 62
TheDeconstructiveApproach....................................................................................................63
SpectersofMarx...............................................................................................................................68
TheMetaphoroftheSpecter................................................................................................................... 69
TheTwoVoicesofMarx ............................................................................................................................ 72
TheMessianic ................................................................................................................................................ 77
Justice .................................................................................................................................................82
Chapter 4: Foucaults Shifting Conception of Normalization ...................................... 87
TheAnalysisofTukeandPinel..................................................................................................87
TheLecturesonPsychiatricPower ..........................................................................................94
TheEmergenceofDisciplinaryPower ....................................................................................97
DisciplinaryPower.........................................................................................................................99
DisciplinaryPowerIndividualizes......................................................................................................103
DisciplinaryPowerisContinuous.......................................................................................................106
DisciplinaryPowersEffectontheSubject......................................................................................109
DisciplinaryPowerisComprehensiveandUbiquitous .............................................................111
Chapter 5: Intersubjective Economies of Power and Resistance...............................115
TheFamily...................................................................................................................................... 117
PowerandResistance ................................................................................................................ 124
TheEconomyofPower .............................................................................................................. 135
Chapter 6: The Madness of the Gift .................................................................................139
TheSociologyoftheGift ............................................................................................................ 140
ThePhenomenologyoftheGift............................................................................................... 145
TheGiftasLiteraryTheory ...................................................................................................... 152
TheImpossibilityoftheGift..................................................................................................... 157

ii
Chapter 7: Everyday Madness: The Gift in The Gift of Death ..................................162
AbrahaminFearandTrembling............................................................................................. 164
GodandtheOther:DerridaonKierkegaardandLevinas ............................................. 170
TheSacrificeofEthics ................................................................................................................ 175
Chapter 8: The Gift of Power ............................................................................................182
FreudandtheQuestionofMastery ....................................................................................... 182
SelfMasteryinLateFoucault .................................................................................................. 191
PowerandtheGift....................................................................................................................... 198
Conclusion ..............................................................................................................................206
Works Cited ...........................................................................................................................211

iii
 Abstract

The goal of this dissertation is to show the concerns Derrida and Foucault share

about normalization. Reading Foucault and Derrida together and against each other

provides us with a more complete understanding of the dynamics of normalization:

Derrida calls our attention to the inexorability of my normalizing the other; Foucault

details the subtle normalizing impact of the other on me.

To show these similarities, I draw out the parallels in the philosophical projects of

Foucault and Derrida that illustrate the different ways each man approaches the limited

emancipatory possibilities found within normalizing frameworks. This leads to a

comparison of Derridas phenomenology of the gift with Foucaults analytics of power. I

argue that the criteria of the gift articulated in Derridas analysis in Given Time and the

continuous structural giving he locates in The Gift of Death reflect the fundamental

characteristics of normalizing power.

Reading Foucaults analytics of power against Derridas analysis of the gift, and

vice versa, provides a more comprehensive awareness of the nature of normalization.

Together, these two philosophical projects make us more attentive to how we are

simultaneously shaped by and shaping those around us. Such awareness instills a sense

of responsibility not dictated by obedience to a universal law or adherence to a rational

principle but a responsibility that arises out of seeing the other and ourselves differently.

It is an awareness in which we pay greater attention to ourselves as sources of creativity

and to the other as an impetus to that creativity. Conversely, there is greater attention

paid to letting the other be and to ourselves as the inhibitors of the other.

1
 Synoptic Introduction

This dissertation is an attempt to read Foucault and Derrida together and against

each other and, in doing so, identify those points where their two projects make fruitful

contact. Despite their different vocabularies and different philosophical trajectories, there

are significant thematic overlaps that have been ignored or disregarded by Foucauldians

and Derrideans. Ultimately, I try to bring these projects to touch by linking Foucaults

conception of power with Derridas analysis of the gift. Normalizing power, I argue,

fulfills the Derridean criteria of a gift; we dwell in a general economy of power that is

given and received by us without ever being manifest. This reading also combines the

two differing concerns with the other that we find in Foucault and Derrida. Whereas for

Derrida the issue is always how we render the other the same in order to recognize the

other, for Foucault, the other is the source of our own normalization.

I begin by examining the initial debate between Derrida and Foucault over

Foucaults reading of Descartes. Within this debate, we can see the dissertations central

themes of normalization and the impossibility of transcending the system of thought in

which we find ourselves. To establish the framework of the debate, I first look at

Foucaults analysis of the rise of institutions in the Classical Age, which finds shifting

social attitudes concerning the mad. Where they had been largely left alone, new

perceptions emerged; they were regarded as useless and confined to asylums. This

marginalization reflects the larger social dynamic of defining the other as a way of

establishing a we. Who we are is directly impacted by who we are not. Foucaults

analysis explores how institutions and technologies modify this dynamic by

simultaneously marginalizing this other and keeping the other within the sphere of the

2
we: once institutionalized, the mad are wholly defined by the institution but with the

larger goal of eradicating the madness that defines them. The effect is to silence

madness, either by curing it or by locking it away. Foucaults project aims to understand

that silencing and let madness speak.

Derrida takes issue with the premises of this project, arguing that any archeology

of madness would be a further imposition of reason on madnessin trying to speak for

madness, Foucault is forced to bring madness into the sphere of reason, which means

repeating the very dynamic he is critical of.

My focus here is on the implications of this debate. The first implication is the

greater attention to domination and mastery. Derrida makes clear that even the best

intentions to address the plight of the marginalized only reinforce their marginalization.

These themes of domination and mastery also play themselves out in the debate itself.

Both Derridas attack and Foucaults response are motivated by a desire to show

themselves as free of stale philosophical traditions and the other as embedded in the

normalized system of philosophical thought: for Derrida, Foucault fails to extricate

himself from the totalizing effects of reason; for Foucault, Derrida clings to the idea of

language as a rational unity. But, and this is the second implication, the domination and

mastery are more structural and deeper. As both Foucault and Derrida recognize, the

possibility of freeing oneself from the system of thought one inhabits is an impossibility.

There is no transcendental position from which to view things anew.

How do we then find the possibility of thinking differently? How can we avoid

domination by the systems in which we find ourselves? Foucault and Derrida look in

opposite directions and construct their own particular methods in order to answer these

3
questions. We may not be able to break free of the current systems of thought that define

us, but both men locate resources and approaches that open up the present to questioning

and provide new avenues for thought. Chapter 2 presents the historical methodologies

Foucault uses to articulate a history of the present. Through these methodologies, he

shows first that this history is not the seamless unfolding of past events; the history of

various fields and concepts comprises discontinuities and inconsistencies that the usual

historical methods paper over. Second, Foucault shows us that this new understanding of

the past reveals the contingency of the present and affords us a perspective on where we

currently are and how we got here.

If Foucault looks to the past to understand how the present came to be the way it

is, Derrida looks to the futurealbeit a very specific idea of the futureas offering the

best hope for wrenching open the sphere of sameness that defines the present. To

understand what Derrida means by this future, as the to-come, in chapter 3 I first explain

deconstruction as the form of critical engagement that underlies Derridas thinking. To

illustrate this method of reading and to introduce the radical ideas of the

undeconstructible elements that drive us forward in the hopes of these possibilities to

come, I look at Derridas reading of Marx in which he deconstructs Marx and unleashes a

radical, messianic Marx. Within this secondary, heretofore unnoticed Marx, Derrida

hears a call of justice for and responsibility to the other.

These two methodological chapters provide key background to both mens

thinking that will frame the discussions to come. They also show a shared interest in

trying to break free of the current modes of thinking that are geared to reproducing only

4
themselves. The next several chapters will look more deeply at how the systems of

thought that define the present maintain their grip on us.

We start with an examination of Foucaults analytics of power. Chapters 4 and 5

follow the theme of madness in Foucault and track how Foucaults understanding of

power and its product, normalization, shift throughout Foucaults works. Beginning with

the implicit concerns about normalization operating in History of Madness, we will see

the issue of normalization become more central to Foucaults thinking andbeginning

with the lectures on psychiatric power and carrying through his final works on

sexualitymore conceptually refined.

My central argument in these two chapters is that the evolution of Foucaults

thinking about normalization reveals the gradually deepening grip that normalizing power

has on us. Foucaults analytics initially present power as a repressive force operating

within institutions. As his thinking matures, Foucault recognizes the productive nature of

powerand its drive to expand. Over the course of his career, he illustrates how power

works its way into smaller and smaller regions of subjectivity, most noticeably the

bourgeois family. I argue that the medicalized family gives us a model for how power

breaks free of the institutional realm and infiltrates the intersubjective level as parents

become sources of normalization for their children.

In chapter 6, I leave Foucault aside and turn to Derridas study of the gift in Given

Time. It is here that Derrida presents us with a formal analysis of the gifts aporetic

nature and its impossibility. Our ordinary understanding of what it means to give gifts

conceals a profound conceptual instability: a gift, whether given or received, sets off a

chain of effectsa sense of self-satisfaction, a sense of obligationthat entail a form of

5
exchange nullify the gift. Making an anonymous donation, I purchase a good feeling

about myself. Receiving a gift, I feel obliged to reciprocate. With these types of

exchanges, the giftthe unexpected and unforeseen, the chance elementis precluded.

The gift relationship becomes an economy, which requires the reduction of everything to

rational principles. It forces everything into the constraints imposed by the sphere of

sameness and its accompanying characteristics of predictability, stability, regularity, all

which facilitate economic processes. So the gift becomes an auto-deconstructing concept

and a limit case for phenomenology: we cannot know the gift without its ceasing to be a

gift. The conditions that make the gift possible are the conditions that make it

impossible.

Impossible, but necessary. An economy cannot grow without gifts since a gift

momentarily ruptures the otherwise totalizing system. Because a gift is given without

reason or hope for any return, because it goes beyond the economic terms of the

contractual relationship, it does not fit within the rational principles. This rupture only

lasts for a moment, though, as the economy expands to recoup the gift and bring it back

inside the system.

Continuing the examination of the gift, chapter 7 looks at Derridas

deconstructive reading of Fear and Trembling, which turns the story of Abrahams

sacrifice of Isaac into an analogy of our own ethical obligations. Where Kierkegaard

took the knight of faith, that individual who stands in absolute relation to the absolute, to

be a rarity, Derrida shows that the very structure of ethical obligation requires us all to

face the absolutely other. And like Abraham, we are all required to make a sacrifice to

this other. The other entails the gift of the deaththe sacrificeof other others to whom

6
we are equally obligated. This analysis marks an expansion in Derridas thinking about

the gift than that found in Given Time. Here we find a general economy of giving rather

than giving as an individual act. The sacrifice of other others is a structural giving that

takes place constantly and continually and by the very nature of our existence. It is what

makes our ethical obligation and our responsibility to the other an irresponsible act.

Chapter 8 brings together the Foucauldian and Derridean threads we have been

following. Returning to the earlier debate between Foucault and Derrida, I look at

Derridas final response to Foucault, which highlights Foucaults ambivalence in History

of Madness toward Freud and which re-opens the debate about mastery. Foucault first

credits Freud with letting madness speak only to then criticize psychoanalysis for trying

to speak for madnessthe very criticism Derrida initially leveled at Foucault. Derrida

argues that Foucault suppresses his obligations to Freud in an attempt to master the ghost

of Freud that haunts his work. But mastery always carries with it the threat of

domination, as Foucault himself is well aware. To show this careful attunement to

domination, I look briefly at Foucaults late studies of classical ethics, which posit a

relationship to the self that provides for techniques and games of power that avoid

domination.

Even the aesthetics of the self that was once a model for avoiding normalization

has become normalizing as self-creation has become a mantra for consumer capitalism.

This poses the additional dilemma that resistance via self-creation is now simply part of

the normalizing system it was intended to resist. This creates a crisis for those

Foucauldians who argue that resistance is a rarity: how can we possibly resist

normalizing power when resistance is itself normalized behavior?

7
 To address this crisis, we must recognize normalizing power as the gift. Using

Derridas characteristics of the gift, I argue that Foucaults conceptualization of power is

a structural giving that meets Derridas criteriait is given and received by individuals,

yet each individuals roles as giver and receiver are unrecognized; and power itself is

never manifest. Any awareness we have of powers effect on us is after the fact, when it

is already altered by its interaction with our own particular configuration of normalizing

forces. Taking this a step further, I build on my argument from chapter five that shows

normalizing power operating at the intersubjective level and make the case that power is

constantly circulated between individuals as a continuous and structural giving. Like the

gift of death, power is given with every encounter. By understanding power as a general

economy, the crisis of resistance fades: if power and resistance arise simultaneously, any

general economy of power posits a general economy of resistance. We are surrounded by

the resources of resistance even as we are caught up in totalizing systems of power.

8
 Chapter 1: The Derrida-Foucault Debate

The Derrida-Foucault debateostensibly a debate about Descarteshas been a

source of interest for numerous commentators. Most often this debate is presented as the

embodiment of two fundamentally different post-structuralist approaches to texts.1 More

recent commentators, however, have chosen to look beyond the strategic differences in

these approaches. Michael Naas points out that this dialogue is itself marked by the

very things at issue in the dialogue, that is, by exclusion and inclusion, mastery, control,

communication with the other, and silence.2 This auseinandersetzung, in other words, is

really about something more fundamental than how to read Descartes or how Descartes

views the place of madness in his search for certainty. At the heart of this debate are two

themes: the question of normalization, i.e., how systems of thought turn what is other into

the same, and the impossibility of transcending those systems of thought.

Normalization, admittedly, is not a stated theme of the debate. Foucault had not

yet articulated the effects of disciplinary systems in terms of normalization, and Derrida

is not yet questioning the possibility of the coming of the other. But normalization does

frame the dialogue. The debate in fact revolves around the question of who is more

normalized: Foucault and Derrida each accuse the other of failing to break free of the

philosophical tradition; and, in the process of accusing the other, each tries to present

himself as no longer held in thrall by the tradition and thus able to say something new.

First, we have the question of mastery. Derrida raises the issue of mastery in his

1
See Soshana Felman, Madness and Philosophy or Literatures Reason, Yale French Studies 52 (1975):
206-228. Jeffrey T. Nealon, Exteriority and Appropriation: Foucault, Derrida, and the Discipline of
Literary Criticism, Cultural Critique 21 (Spring 1992): 97-119. Edward Said, The Problem of
Textuality: Two Exemplary Positions, Critical Inquiry 4 (1978): 673-714. Michael Sprinker, Textual
Politics: Foucault and Derrida, boundary 2 8.3 (Spring 1980): 75-98.
2
Michael Naas, Taking on the Tradition: Jacques Derrida and the Legacies of Deconstruction (Stanford:
Stanford University, 2003) 59.

9
introductory remarks where he admits that the disciple finds a voice, but not without

trepidation: [A]s a disciple, he is challenged by the master who speaks within him and

before him, to reproach him for making this challenge and to reject it in advance, having

elaborated it before him; and having interiorized the master, he is also challenged by the

disciple that he himself is.3 The disciple is an unhappy conscious, torn between his

infinite speculation on the master and his own need to speak. The pain of the disciple

is one of resistance, of overcoming the normalizing and homogenizing influence of the

master. Second, what Derrida says as enacts his own overcoming of Foucaults influence

is that Foucault himself remains embedded in metaphysics in History of Madness.

Derrida concludes that Foucault, one of the foremost avant-garde philosophers in France

at the time, had failed to extract himself from traditional philosophical thinking.

According to accounts of conference attendees, Foucault, who was in the

audience when Derrida presented Cogito and the History of Madness, remained silent.

Some ten years later, however, he presented his rebuttal and in it argued that Derridas

reading of Descartesthe crux of his critiquewas flawed. Foucault ends his remarks

in My Body, This Paper, This Fire by declaring that he would refrain from accusing

Derrida of engaging in metaphysics; instead he dismissed Derridas reading as a

historically well-determined little pedagogy.4 As Eribon notes, Foucaults

counterattacka delayed explosionwas itself an attempt to reduce deconstruction

to functioning as the restoration of tradition and authority.5 Derrida is only the

3
Jacques Derrida, Cogito and the History of Madness, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass
(Chicago: Univ of Chicago, 1978) 31-32. Hereafter abbreviated in the text as CHM.
4
This debate is punctuated by several instances of refraining. As we will see in chapter 8, Derrida returns
the courtesy by expressing his desire to refrain from reigniting the debate after Foucaults death.
5
Didier Eribon, Michel Foucault, trans. Betsy Wing (Cambridge: Harvard, 1991) 121.

10
representative of a system, a pedagogy that gives conversely to the masters voice the

limitless sovereignty that allows it to restate the text indefinitely.6

Intellectual one-upmanship aside, the debate raises a second theme, the

impossibility of transcendence. We are always already in an inescapable system; not

only can we not get at what is outside the system, any attempt to understand what is

outside necessarily brings what is outside into the system, rendering it normal. This is

the crux of Derridas critique of Foucault; and it is a point Foucault acknowledges, if only

tacitly, in his response to Derridanot the explicit response of My Body, this Paper,

this Fire, but the response developed in A Preface to Transgression.7

This chapter will trace the progression of these themes by first discussing

Foucaults analysis of madness, its social exclusion during the Great Confinement, and

the implicit function normalization plays in it. I will then turn to Derridas critique,

where we will see the issues of normalization and totalization raised more explicitly.

Finally, I will argue that A Preface to Transgression can be read as Foucaults first

reply to Derrida. These nascent themes will shape the philosophical projects of both

Derrida and Foucault, themes they will continue to revisit, each in his own way, long

after their philosophical paths diverged.

Madness and the Process of Exclusion

Foucaults early studies of madness already hint at the question of normalization, which

will become thematic in his later work. These studies show society operating through a

6
Michel Foucault, My Body, This Paper, This Fire, Foucault: Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, ed.
James Faubion, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (New York: New Press, 1998) 416. Hereafter abbreviated in
the text as BPF.
7
Michel Foucault, Preface to Transgression, Language, Counter-memory, Practice: Selected Essays and
Interviews by Michel Foucault, trans. and ed. Donald Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell, 1977). Hereafter
abbreviated in the text as PT.

11
series of distinctions: it is always determining who does and does not belong to it; it then

works to annul those distinctions by extending its homogeneity in the belief that its

defining elements are more desirable, more beneficial, and, particularly for the West,

healthier.

At its most basic level, this constitutive ethnocentrism is universal. Pierre

Clastres remarks that even so-called primitive societies establish themselves as a

totality by contrasting themselves to those outside the community. All cultures divide

humanity into themselves (as paradigms of human beings) and others (who are lesser)

cultural alterity is always characterized as a negative difference, an inferiority. There is a

we because there exists an Other, and sustaining the identity of the we requires clear and

constant separation from the Other. This externally defined identity creates tension

within society: the we must exercise is power externally to keep itself separate and

isolated in order to remain a totality, and it must exercise its power internally to maintain

total homogeneity.8

The history of madness that Foucault presents illustrates exactly this tension.

What Foucault sees emerging in the Classical Age is a societal and systematic

segregation between those forms of life society recognizes as belonging to itself, as what

we do, and those forms of life that are inferior or dangerous or not what we do. Setting

aside the retrospective analyses offered by the human sciences themselves, Foucault

uncovers the repeated movement by which society dissociates itself from what it

considers to be other and, after identifying this other, works to reestablish its hold over

the other. But this rejection of what is different or abnormal is not a form of social

8
Pierre Clastres, Archeology of Violence, trans. Jeanine Herman (New York: Semiotext(e), 1994). See
chapters 1 and 4.

12
repression la Durkheim. Foucault disagrees with the anthropological or sociological

idea that society excludes the patient because it refuses to recognize itself in him or her.

Instead, he thinks that by rejecting the abnormal, society reassures itself about who it is.9

Rejecting the abnormal is not repressive; it is the way society defines itself.10 The

dynamic at work here is the same dynamic Nietzsche articulates in the first book of

Toward a Genealogy of Morals and his discussion of the slave revolt there: according to

Nietzsche, the slaves see the cruel nobles as evil and are able to tell themselves that,

because they are not like the nobles, they must be good. Society develops a concept of

itself, it defines itself, by identifying what it is not. It locates the other; and, knowing

who that other is, society identifies its own characteristics.

We could write a history of limitsof those obscure gestures, necessarily

forgotten as soon as they are accomplished, through which a culture
rejects something which for it will be the Exterior; and throughout its
history, this hollowed-out void, this white space by means of which it
isolates itself, identifies it as clearly as its values. For those values are
received, and maintained in the continuity of history; but in the region of
which we would speak, it makes its essential choices, operating the
division which gives a culture the face of its positivity: this is the originary
thickness in which a culture takes shape.11

What is at work is a societal or cultural nominalism. As a history of limits,

History of Madness is built around a series of segregations. It follows the way in which

society organizes itself to indicate who belongs to it and who must be set apart. In this

study, the most prominent distinction divides the rational from the irrational, but the

opening chapter begins with another segregated population: the lepers. Foucault begins

9
Michel Foucault, Mental Illness & Psychology, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Harper & Row, 1976)
63.
10
Herbert Dreyfus notes that in an anticipation of a theme that only emerges fully in his later work,
Foucault already holds in his first book that the conditions of the possibility of pathology lie in the social
world. See Foucaults Critique of Psychiatric Medicine, The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 12.4
(1987): 329.
11
Michel Foucault, History of Madness, trans. Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa (London: Routledge,
2006) xxix. Hereafter abbreviated in the text as HM.

13
here because the leper illustrates the paradoxical duality of social exclusion: rejected by

their actual community and confined to lazar houses, lepers were simultaneously

embraced as members of the Christian community. Leprosy was a menace to society and

therefore the afflicted had to be isolated. But the lepers also bore witness to Gods grace:

the disease signaled the individuals sinful nature and was Gods punishment. Those

suffering were fortunate enough to receive their punishment in this world. Exclusion,

society reasoned, was part of this punishment and thus becomes a means of their

salvation.

Once leprosy disappeared, the mad came to replace the lepers as the object of

social exclusion. Their confinement differed from the confinement of the lepers because

they were saddled with a new moral characterization. The lepers were not confined

because they were sinners but because they were unclean. The confinement of the mad,

however, is based purely on what they represent, viz. a rejection of rational normality.

Foucaults goal is to understand how madness as a concept comes to be

constructed through societys interaction with the mad and how, as a consequence of the

construction of this concept, society designates those belonging to the category of

madness as other. In other words, the myth that positivist psychiatry tells itself (and us)

is this: the mad existed, they were grouped together and categorized, and the experts who

treated them were able to extrapolate a general notion of madness. The concept follows

from the identification of those who fell under the concept. Foucaults contention is that

this myth reverses the actual process by which society develops the concept and then

populates that category of being. Mental illness can only exist in a culture that

recognizes it as an illness, which means it exists only in a culture that perceives it as a

14
form of deviance.12 Those deemed mad are those who could be deemed other. Thus the

history of madness becomes a history of the exclusion of the other.

Madness cannot be found in a primitive state. Madness exists only in a

society; it does not exist outside the forms of sensibility that isolate it and
the forms of repulsion that exclude or capture it. Thus, one can say that in
the Middle Ages, and then in the Renaissance, madness was present in the
social horizon as an aesthetic or quotidian fact; and then in the 17th
centurywith the beginning of internmentmadness went through a
period of silence, of exclusion.13

What Foucault shows is that from the Middle Ages through the Classical Age, there was

a shift in societys attitude toward the other: the other becomes a problem, a negative

presence that must be eliminatedas much for societys sake as for those afflicted with

the defining condition of otherness. The attempts to eliminate madness succeed only in

silencing it:

[T]he constitution of madness as a mental illness, at the end of the

eighteenth century, expels from the memory all those imperfect words
in which the exchange between madness and reason was carried out.
The language of psychiatry, which is a monologue of reason about
madness, could only have come into existence in such a silence (HM,
xxviii).

Foucaults task is to produce what he calls an archeology of silence to understand what

has been silenced and how, and to locate the structure of the experience of madness in a

schema of social segregation.

12
Madness for Foucault is not some given behavioral or biological fact, it is a category, the product of
civilization and its institutions. The very idea that madness is individual pathology, a negative
phenomenon, a defect to be remedied, is his object of investigation. This conception of madness is not the
achievement of psychiatric rationality. Rather it is a complex and non-intentional social product, which
formed the basis of psychiatry. Paul Hirst and Penny Wooley, Social Relations and Human Attributes
(London: Tavistock, 1982) 165.
13
Michel Foucault, La folie nexiste que dans une socit, Dits et ecrits I, 1954-1975 (Paris: Gallimard,
2001) 197; my translation.

15
The Early Treatment of the Mad

As the Middle Ages gave way to the Renaissance, the madman received only a modicum

of attention. Madness was not regarded as the opposite of sanity: rather than being an

abnormal or pathological condition, it was viewed as an extension of normality.14 It was

understood as a different way of seeing the world, one that could be problematic and

disruptive, but not one wholly dismissed. This is not to imply that the mad were well

treated or that they lived a life blissfully oblivious to the reality around them. Some were

shut away, but such confinement was used when it was necessary for their own protection

or for the protection of those around them, and such confinement was entirely custodial

no effort was made to treat them medically because no one approached madness as a

medical condition. Many of the mad, however, were simply allowed to roam free.

Generally speaking, madness circulated throughout society, it formed part of the

background and language of everyday life, it was for everyone an everyday experience

that one sought neither to exalt nor to control.15 The mad were often sent on

pilgrimages, either as a means of expelling them or in the belief that a particular shrine

might right them. Other towns would hand them over to sailors. Whether real or merely

allegorical, the Narrenschiff, the proverbial ship of fools, highlights the liminal position

the mad occupied in society. They existed at the threshold of society. The madmen

traveling up and down the rivers of Europe are the quintessential passengers, passengers

relegated to the passage itself. Thus the mad are metaphorically excluded, but not wholly

so. Society has not yet drawn a bright line separating the mad from everyone else; they

remain within the orbit of society.

14
Carol Thomas Neely, Recent Work in Renaissance Studies: Psychology: Did Madness Have a
Renaissance? Renaissance Quarterly 44.4 (Winter 1991): 778.
15
Foucault, Mental Illness & Psychology, 67.

16
 With the Renaissance, societys attitude toward madness shifts, and behind this

shift was the widespread belief that the end of the world was imminent. In the Middle

Ages, the end of the world was thought to show the foolishness of humankind, it is now

believed that such foolishness will bring about the end of the world. [W]isdom meant

denouncing folly wherever it was to be found, and teaching men that they were already

no more than the legions of the dead, and that if the end of life was approaching, it was

merely a reminder that a universal madness would soon unite with death (HM, 15). But

this universal madness does not hold. Where once it was an eschatological sign for

society as a whole, portending an end to the world brought on by humanitys follies, at

the end of the Renaissance madness is only a problem for the mad individual. It is

reduced to an ironic sign blurring the distinction between the real and the chimerical, but

with barely a memory of the great tragic threat. More a cause of hesitation than genuine

confusion, a derisory agitation in society, mobility of reason (HM, 42-43). The madman

no longer has anything to tell society about itself; rather, as we will see, society assumes

the task of telling the madman about himself. If, by the end of the Renaissance, the

madman was reduced to speaking without being heard, in the classical age he will be

silenced altogether.

The Great Confinement and the Institutional Silencing of Madness

The founding of the Hpital Gnral in Paris in 1656 inaugurates the era of confinement,

which denotes a significant shift in the treatment of the mad. Confinement differs from

exclusion, in part because confinement is an institutional creation (HM, 77). It needed

a framework of social institutions, and it needed to displace a competing understanding of

madness (HM, 120). Foucault shows how the practices of confinement challenge and

17
ultimately supplant the power of medicine to treat the mad. By doing so, confinement

dictates the manner in which the mad are excluded in the classical age and subsequently

reintegrated through normalizing practices in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth

centuries.

For Foucault, the modern concept of psychological alienation arises out of the

conflation of two distinct modes of understanding madness: the juridico-medical mode

and the mode of confinement. These two conceptions of madness entail two very

different ways of making the mad into an other. The former mode saw the person

escorted into the world of madness; the latter mode exiled the person to the world of

madness (HM, 131). This divided understanding provides the conditions of possibility

for the shift in focus regarding the mad. During the first half of the seventeenth century,

the mad individual was the locus of juridical and medical interaction. The madman was a

subject with legal obligations and rights; madness was analyzed in terms of the

individuals ability to fulfill those obligations. A person found to be mad was released

from certain responsibilities based on his or her degree of madness: the highest order,

fools, for example, could legally marry and make a will but not hold office;

imbeciles had fewer legal responsibilities; and the stupid could not participate in any

judicial act. A judge might suspect a person was mad, but it was left to the discretion of

doctors to determine whether a person was actually mad and, if so, where he or she fell in

the order of unreason. The physician had the authority to determine if a mad individual

was capable of being judged. Thus the doctor determined who entered the world of

18
madness (HM, 124).16 Because of the influence of medicine in judging madness, the law

was forever refining its understanding of madness in order to make better judgments.

By the early eighteenth century, the practice of confinement was ascendant and

medical judgment ignored. Confinement co-opted the juridical practices and outflanked

the medical authority on the insane. The nuanced medical assessment of madness was

replaced with a completely different sensitivity, viz. sensitivity to scandal.

But the change was not introduced to transfer the balance of power to the
more objective world of medicine: in fact the aim was that the power of
decision should pass to a judicial authority that had no recourse to medical
expertise. Interdiction required no medical expertise, and was a matter to
be agreed between the families and the judicial authorities (HM, 126).

Medicine, in its role in determining the status of the madman as a juridical subject, was

silenced. What emerged was an understanding of the madman as a failed social

individual: [Confinement] measures social behavior, and paves the way for a dualist

pathology that will divide everything into binary oppositionsnormal and abnormal,

healthy and sickto create two radically different domains separated by the simple

formula good for confinement (HM, 128). With the treatment of the madman as a

social subject, we see the first stirrings of normalization. His behavior is judged

according to wider social expectations and is found wanting; his presence disturbs and

disrupts society. Confinement turned the madman into a stranger: madness was not a

release from responsibilities; it only furthered ones association with other madmen,

which only increased ones guilt. Madness thus becomes a category encompassing all the

moral relationships that justified the individuals exclusion from society.17

16
This gate-keeping role will be reversed once the physician assumes his role in the asylum. Then it will
be physician who determines which patients are able to return to the world of the sane.
17
The asylum, like the prison, emerged as the reciprocal of these projects that recast the questions of
public tranquility, wealth, and happiness as problems of the moral constitution of free citizens: the mad

19
 Segregation of the other in the seventeenth century represents an inventiveness

and an institutionalization of power not present in the Middle Ages. It now takes on the

function of assigning meanings and value to the excluded. And, in the history of

madness more specifically, this is the period when madness will become part of the nexus

of emerging problems confronting growing urban centers and, consequently, the target of

new responses to these problems. In the sensibility that organizes the Hpital Gnral,

madness confronts a new form of power that has no truck with what cannot or will not

abide by reason. The point is to dominate and subdue unruly and potentially

unmanageable sectors of the population, viz. those with no resources and no social

moorings, an underclass that had been abandoned, displaced against its will due to

economic change (HM, 64). Domination of these sectors takes the form of physical

restraint and coercion: quarantining, isolation, deprivation, and torture. These people

pose a threat to society, so they are locked up.

The Hpital Gnral exemplifies the policing role of the houses of confinement.

Part asylum, part prison, part old peoples home, this remarkable hybrid institution

housed for over two centuries every imaginable form of social and medical misfit from

the lowliest sectors of Parisian life.18 The hospital functioned as an extra-judicial

structure with its own powers, a third order of repression occupying a space somewhere

between the police and the courts. The purpose of confinement was to punish and

reform, but release from the houses of confinement did not indicate that one was cured.

Release only indicated that one had repented and had learned to be docile (HM, 113). In

would be those who could not operate that regulated freedom that made up society, who could not bear
their obligations as social citizens. Nikolaus Rose, Of madness itself: Histoire de la folie and the object
of psychiatric history, History of the Human Sciences 3.3 (Feb. 1990): 377.
18
Mark S. Micale, The Salptri in the Age of Charcot: An Institutional Perspective on Medical History in
the Late Nineteenth Century, Journal of Contemporary History 20 (1985): 706.

20
actual practice, confinement established and maintained monarchical and bourgeois order

by rounding up the idle, the morally reprobate, the mad. It is an instantiation of

repressive power enacting the bourgeois ideal in which order equals virtue (HM, 76).

What is remarkable to our sensibilities is the heterogeneity of those confined. And what,

Foucault asks, is the common denominator? What was the sensibility driving this new

form of exclusion, a form far more promiscuous than that experienced by the lepers? A

new perception of poverty, he thinks.

Poverty is now understood to be the result of idleness and idleness is rebellion; it

is a sign of pride, which, in the classical age, is the greatest fault. Poverty, therefore, is a

product of weak morals. Labor, on the other hand, is the opposite of poverty: it is our

moral obligation, and it will be rewarded by God. The confined populations of the idle

would be forced to worknot for profit or utility, but for its purely ethical value. A

willingness to work indicated an acceptance of this moral order. Labor thus represents a

mode of normalization, a recognition that one must behave in a prescribed way. Those

who worked would be released to rejoin society, not because they were useful but

because their willingness to work signified that they renewed their allegiance to the

great ethical pact that underpinned human existence (HM, 73). Those who could not, or

would not, work would remain confined. One of the groups that failed to fit with this

bourgeois ethic was the mad. Unable to labor, the mad are socially useless. If in the

classic form of madness there is an element that speaks of an elsewhere, of something

else, it is not because the mad do come from a different heaven, that of the meaningless,

still bearing its signs, it is simply that they have crossed the frontiers of the bourgeois

order, and become alien to the sacred limits of its ethics (HM, 72). The mad are left

21
with nowhere to go. Their violations of and inability to conform to the bourgeois ethic

meant that they were condemned to remain confined. They were further relegated to the

space of confinement and the order that reason imposed.

Foucaults Critique of Descartes

The Great Confinement was not only a societal effort to silence madness. It was part of a

general shift in how the mad were viewed. The division of reason and madness that

occurred at the societal level also occurs within the subject. It produces in a person a

powerful forgetting; he was to learn to dominate that great division, and

bring it down to his own level; and make in himself the day and the night
[] Having mastered his madness, and having freed it by capturing it in
the gaols of his gaze and his morality, having disarmed it by pushing it
into a corner of himself finally allowed man to establish that sort of
relation to the self that is known as psychology (HM, xxxiv).

Psychiatry will not emerge for sometime after the Great Confinement, but the harbinger

of the inner domination of reason characteristic of modern psychiatry is Descartes. To

understand the radicality of his philosophical approach and the shift in thinking he

represents, one must compare him to Montaigne. Speaking from the perspective or

Renaissance humanism, Montaigne warns against Descartess very project: it is

unreasonable to assume that our minds occupy a privileged position and that they are

capable of measuring the truth and falsity of the world. However, Foucault tells us,

between Montaigne and Descartes an event has taken place, which concerns the advent

of a ratio (HM, 47). Cartesian ratio grants us a privileged position, but to do so it relies

on the silencing of madness and banishes the possibility of madness from the reasonable

person.

22
 In trying to establish the absolutely certain foundations of reason, Descartes

questions sense perception and finds it prone to error. But, he asks, how could he

possibly doubt his immediate experiences? How could he doubt that his hands and body

were his own? There are cases in which people do doubt the nature of their own bodies,

he reminds us. There are those among the insane whose brains are so impaired that they

steadfastly insist that they are kings when they are utter paupers, or that they are arrayed

in purple robes when they are naked, or that they have heads made of clay, or that they

are gourds, or that they are made of glass.19 Descartes, however, rejects this avenue for

his own doubt: But such people are mad, and I would appear no less mad, were I to take

their behavior as an example for myself.20 Instead of taking madness as a precedent for

his doubt, he turns to dreaming; it affords equally implausible experiences but without the

danger of madness.

On Foucaults reading, Descartess methodological doubt simply dismisses the

possibility of madness. The exclusion of madness from reason and from his project is

seen in how Descartes treats it differently.

In the economy of doubt, there is a fundamental disequilibrium between

on the one hand madness, and dreams and errors on the other. Their
position is quite different where truth and the seeker of truth are
concerned. Dreams and illusions are overcome by the very structure of
truth, but madness is simply excluded by the doubting subject, in the same
manner that it will soon be excluded that he is not thinking or that he does
not exist (HM, 45).

Dreams and sensory errors maintain a connection, however tenuous, to the truth.

Madness and truth, on the other hand, are incompatible. Descartes takes it as axiomatic

that madness is an impossibility for the thinking subject: he will work through the other

19
Ren Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, 3rd ed., trans. Donald Cress (Indianopolis: Hackett,
1993) 14.
20
Ibid.

23
two possibilities and consider their illusory nature; madness is simply set aside and

considered unworthy of any consideration. Those people are mad, and if I thought like

them, I would be mad too. But because I think, I cannot be mad. Madness for Descartes

rules out the possibility of certainty because it rules out the possibility of the very search

for certainty, which demands a rational subject (HM, 45).

While Descartes is merely the clearest articulation of this new philosophical

conception of reason, the ramifications of his philosophical exclusion of madness mirror

the larger social exclusion that would take place with the Great Confinement. Madness,

Descartes shows us, can serve no purpose: it does no work, whether that work is physical

labor or the intellectual labor required by the search for certainty. Just as the mad were

dominated and subordinated by societys normalizing forces, madness within the

individual must be dominated by reason.

Derridas Critique of Foucault

Foucaults brief analysis of Descartes occupies only three pages in the nearly six-

hundred-page History of Madness. It is an aside meant to introduce his finely detailed

study of the Great Confinement. Yet for Derrida, this three-page analysis encapsulates

the books entire problematic: the intention Foucault ascribes to Descartes, viz. the

exclusion of madness from reason, is the same intention he analyzes in the society of the

Classical Age. However, Derrida argues, the instability of this reading of Descartes

points up the problems with Foucaults broader conclusions about the archeology of that

silence to which madness has been relegated.

Derridas critique revolves around two different sets of questions. The first set

addresses Foucaults particular reading of Descartes. That is, does he accurately

24
understand those passages in which Descartes deals with the Cogito and madness? Is his

interpretation reflective of the historical and classical readings? At issue is Foucaults

reading of the Meditations as an act of internment. As we have seen, Foucault reads

Descartes as treating dreams and sensory errors in parallel fashion; madness is treated

differently. This is because dreams and errors can be dealt with from within the truth;

madness, however, is inadmissible. For Derrida, separating madness from sensory errors

and dreams is a deviation from the classical reading of Descartes. He shows this with

two observations. First, Descartes does not circumvent errors or dreams; pace Foucault,

these are not overcome within truth. If I am dreaming, everything I believe I am

experiencing at this momentsitting in my chair, typing at my computeris not true.

Dreams radicalize sensory error because they render all sensory experience false.

Therefore, dreams readmit the experience in which everything I perceive is falsethe

very experience of madness Descartes had supposedly rejected.21 On the classical

reading, madness is only a particular instance of sensory error; it is rejected by Descartes,

but only insofar as he rejects all ideas originating in the senses.

Derridas second observation is that the hypothesis of madness receives no special

treatment in Descartes. Derrida is adamant about this:

What is significant is that Descartes, at bottom, never speaks of madness

itself in this text. Madness is not his theme. He treats it as the index of a
question of principle, that is, of epistemological value. It will be said,
perhaps, that this is the sign of a profound exclusion. But this silence on
madness itself simultaneously signifies the opposite of an exclusion, since

21
Derridas claim relies not on the particular terms in which doubt is presented but on considering its
function that is its economic and totalizing character. He understands madness to be merely one term, in a
constellation of terms that include dreams and error, necessary to interrogate the totality of ideas of sensory
origin. Descartess reference to madness is thus framed by the larger question regarding the danger of
deception that the subject experiences in dreams. Dalia Judovitz, Derrida and Descartes: Economizing
Thought, Derrida and Deconstruction, ed. Hugh Silverman (London: Routledge, 1989) 44.

25
 it is not a question of madness in this text, if only to exclude it (CHM,
308, fn 15).

Madness is not silenced. If Descartes no longer talks about it after briefly mentioning it,

it is only because there is no reason to talk specifically about it. He includes it in the

larger issue of sensory error. When he does speak of madness, it is only in a pedagogical

and rhetorical sense. Far from introducing madness itself as a theme, he is imagining a

dialogue between himself and a non-philosopher. He pretends to put to himself the

astonished objection of an imaginary non-philosopher who is frightened by such audacity

and says: no, not all sensory knowledge, for then you would be mad and it would be

unreasonable to follow the example of madmen, to put forth the ideas of madmen

(CHM, 50). The example of the madman is introduced and quickly set aside not because

Descartes is dismissing madness, but to appease the natural resistance of Descartess non-

philosopher interlocutor. Descartes can give up the possibility of madness easily because

it is not necessary for his doubting. In fact, he overcomes the interlocutors resistance

with the more radical hypothesis of dreams, which are a hyperbolic version of madness.

Derrida contends that Foucault could accept this reading and still maintain his

overall point. After all, on this reading, madness remains the other of the Cogito: clear

and distinct ideas require being not mad. At the same time, Derrida concedes that

Descartess linking of madness and error neutralizes the originality of madness and

turns it into nothing more than a moral failing. But the separation of madness and

knowledge does not last: Foucaults claim that Descartes dismisses madness makes sense

only at the nave stage of doubt. As the Meditations shift from natural doubt to

metaphysical doubt, total madness takes hold. With the evil genius, Descartes determines

26
that everything related to insanity is admissible. Knowledge can no longer escape

madness.

The second set of questions Derrida puts to Foucault challenges the philosophical

and methodological presuppositions that are at work in History of Madness. What

Derrida finds is that Foucault fundamentally misunderstands the nature of his own

project, and inadvertently turns History of Madness into a contradiction of the archeology

of silence. Foucault wants to write a history of madness itself. But such an undertaking,

Derrida warns, is itself mad: who could write such a history? Who could read it? And

how does Foucault avoid speaking for madness from within reason? Any effort to

express or communicate the silence of madness has to come from the sphere of reason

and language and order. Language has started without us, in us and before us. [] In

order to elude this responsibility, to deny it and try to efface it through an absolute

regression, it is still or already necessary for me to endorse or countersign it.22 This is

why, Derrida notes, the best spokesmen of the mad inevitably and necessarily betray

them. Language imposes order, and we can only abandon that order if we abandon

language. Reason, therefore, is not just structure alongside others. It is unsurpassable,

unique, and imperial in its grandeur (CHM, 36). Even when one is against it, one is still

caught up within it.

But the problems facing Foucaults analysis run deeper, right to the very heart of

Foucaults notion of archeology. He wants to develop an archeology of silence, but any

archeology is an order. It is a logic, a work. If madness is the absence of work, as

Foucault says it is, must it not necessarily stand opposed to any archeology? For Derrida,

22
Jacques Derrida, How to Avoid Speaking: Denials, trans. Ken Frieden, Derrida and Negative
Theology, ed. Harold Coward and Toby Foshay (Albany: SUNY, 1992) 99.

27
archeology is history, and history is a rational concept. Is not subjecting madness to

archeology merely a repetition of reasons violence against madness?

In any event, the silence imposed on madness by reason, the silence that

Foucaults archeology studies, is only a secondary and subsequent silence. Derrida

argues that according to Foucault, madness and reason have not always represented two

fundamentally opposed states; there was a time prior to the split between madness and

reason when the two were unified. Derrida is following the logic established at the outset

of History of Madness when Foucault writes in the preface that we need to try to

recapture, in history, this degree zero of the history of madness, when it was

undifferentiated experience, the still undivided experience of the division itself (HM,

xxvii).23 According to the logic of this passage and of Foucaults entire book, there must

be a founding unity of reason. Derrida wants Foucault to go back to that zero point and

find the logos that preceded the split between reason and madness. He claims that any

attempt to write a history of the split runs the risk of construing the division as an event

or a structure subsequent to the unity of an original presence, thereby confirming

metaphysics in its fundamental operation (CHM, 40). Trying to place the split between

reason and madness within history presupposes a virgin and unitary ground (CHM, 39)

that we have lost and can hope to retrieve.24

Derrida argues that not only does any attempt to recover the lost origin throw us

back into metaphysics, it is impossible and unnecessary. We cannot get outside of reason

to this prior moment, but we do not have to. The divisionwhat Foucault calls the

23
Note that in the original preface, Foucault is much more careful about his use of the word history and
appears to anticipate Derridas critique of history as a rational structure.
24
Foucaults affirmation of the division of reason from madness involves upholding its status as an event,
one which reinforces an originary ahistorical interpretation of the meaning of reason as an undivided unity,
whose coherence predates any oppositions (Judovitz, 49).

28
Decision and what Derrida prefers to call dissensionmay be found within reason,

interior to logos in general (CHM, 38). The discovery of the Cogito takes us to the

zero point, the impenetrable point of certainty in which the possibility of Foucaults

narration, as well as of the narration of the totality, or rather of all the determined forms

of the exchanges between reason and madness are embedded (CHM, 56). On Derridas

reading, the Cogito is a moment found within reason that precedes the separation of

reason and madness. It is a moment of certainty that escapes the threat of madnessnot

because it is rational enough to overcome and exclude madness, but because it is true

even if I am completely mad.

The Cogito is not hostile to madness. It simply avoids the dilemma of madness

and reason. As the zero point, the Cogito is the ungraspable moment, valid only in the

instant of intuition. Thus, the unity of reason and madness exists only at the instant; as

soon as there is any reflection, the Cogito becomes inserted into temporality, which

requires reason. That, according to Derrida, is when we find the internment of madness

in Descartes. Foucault fails to recognize the Cogito as the instant of the Decision because

he takes hold of Descartes either too early (before the shift to radical doubt) or too late

(after the intuitive experience of the Cogito has passed). By limiting it to an historical

structure, he misses the point of the Cogito and does violence to Descartess project. In

fact, Foucaults project threatens Descartes with the same kind of totalitarianism he finds

in the classical treatment of madness.

Derrida maintains that his reading aligns with Foucaults. The difference is that

he separates the historical from the hyperbolic within the Cogito. He finds the historicity

of Descartess philosophy situated within the structural gap between the finitethe

29
ongoing intellectual exercise of which the Cogito is a partand the hyperbolicthe

moment in which the fundamental truth of the Cogito is intuitively grasped. The

hyperbolic is the absolute opening, the uneconomic expenditure, that is always overcome

by economy. Descartes can throw himself into a state of total madness, but the state

cannot last.

Foucaults Response to Derrida

Foucaults explicit response to Derrida, the essay My Body, This Paper, This Fire, was

not published until 1972. However, about six months after Derrida delivered his paper at

the Sorbonne, Foucault published A Preface to Transgression in which he examines

Batailles attempts to undermine the Hegelian dialectic. For Bataille, the act of

transgression replaces the movement of the dialectic and the question of the limit replaces

the search for totality. The interaction between a transgressive act and its limits is never

dialectical. The clearest instance of this for Bataille is eroticism: sexuality is an inventive

response to the restrictions placed on our own animal instincts. Taboos impose

restrictions; they organize a form of behavior while at the same time restricting it. Even

as an act transgresses a taboo, it reinforces that limit and makes it more prominent.

Rather than shattering the limits, subsuming what is there, and producing a synthesis of

taboo and transgression, transgression leaves the limit intact, which allows for the

repeated pleasure of transgression.

Transgressive acts allow us to experience limits, but such acts are not the opposite

of or victory over limits. Limits are the space in which transgression can occur; without

the limit, there would be nothing to transgress. Transgression is what Foucault calls a

30
nonpositive affirmation (PT, 36). It is the affirmation of difference qua division. It

affirms what lies on both sides of the limitbeing and the unlimited, the permitted and

the forbiddenwhile establishing the interplay of being and its limit. It is non-positive

because no value is given to the limited or unlimited; all that remains is the limit as the

sign of difference that is the transgressive element.

While not mentioning Descartes (or Derrida) explicitly, Foucaults analysis

presents Batailles thinking as both a foil to Hegel and as a rebuttal to the Cartesian

project. As such, one can see Foucault using Bataille as a stalking horse for his response

to Derrida.25 Non-positive affirmation is the experience of the immediacy of being, and

nothing is more alien to the experience of the demonic character who, true to his being,

denies everything (PT, 37). The obvious reference to Descartess evil genius recalls

Derridas telling us that Descartess project is mad, not human, but is rather

metaphysical and demonic: it first awakens to itself in its war with the demon, the evil

genius of nonmeaning (CHM, 56). By avoiding the universal negation of hyperbolic

doubt, Bataille constantly affirms existence and values, not by positing them, but by

taking them to their limits. This experience is beyond the reach of dialectical thinking

and its reliance on contradiction. But we have been lulled into dialectical thinking, which

confines us to questioning the movement between contradiction and totality; it takes our

attention away from the interplay of being and its limits. Nietzsche has already called our

attention to the inherent problems and limitations of dialectical thinking; so why,

Foucault asks, is it so hard for us to maintain this attention?

25
Batailles anti-Hegelianism is certainly not beside the point. Derrida characterizes History of Madness as
operating according to a Hegelian law (CHM, 36).

31
 Foucault claims that it is because we cling to the idea that language must be

rational. In discussing Batailles writing, Foucault argues that language becomes

unhinged and loses its discursive function. It has no center and is meant only for

pleasure. It is a language in direct contrast to the language of philosophy, which is

dialectical language. Where the dialectic is the form and interior movement of

philosophy, nondialectical language is language we cant fully inhabit.

This experience forms the exact reversal of the movement which has
sustained the wisdom of the West at least since the time of Socrates, that
is, the wisdom to which philosophical language promised the serene unity
of a subjectivity which would triumph in it, having been fully constituted
by it and through it. But if the language of philosophy is one in which the
philosophers torments are tirelessly repeated and his subjectivity is
discarded, then not only is wisdom meaningless as the philosophers form
of composition and reward, but in the expiration of philosophical language
a possibility inevitably arises: the possibility of the mad philosopher. In
short, the experience of the philosopher who finds, not outside his
language (the result of an external accident or imaginary exercise), but at
the inner core of its possibilities, the transgression of his philosophical
being; and thus the non-dialectical language of the limit which only arises
in transgressing the one who speaks (PT, 43-44).

Language, pace Derrida, is not always already rational. Philosophical language claims

access to wisdom for itself; but if we push this language to its limits, we find that it

breaks down. The subject constituted by this language transgresses his own limits and

finds madness. While in Derridas reading, Descartes finds the madness of the Cogito at

the inner core of his language, this language remains firmly within the subject whose

subjectivity is never discarded, only reinforced. Foucault will argue in My Body, This

Paper, This Fire that the meditating subject never succumbs to the madness of the

Cogito. Descartess text themselves [show] that the episode of the evil genius is a

voluntary, controlled exercise, mastered and carried out from start to finish by a

meditating subject who never lets himself be surprised (BPF, 414). Everything that

32
could be other is rendered the same by the rational and equally cunning subject. Madness

and philosophy do not merge with Descartes. He is too embedded in the philosophical

tradition that ascribes authority and sovereignty to the subject. It will only be with

Bataille that madness and philosophy become linked, and this is only because Bataille is

willing to give up the unity of philosophical language. Bataille illustrates for us a

shattering of the subject, not merely the collapse of the subjects world la Descartes.

On this reading, one can see Foucaults challenge to Derrida directly. Derrida

argues that the hyperbolic nature of Descartess project resists totality; Foucaults

mistake was to ignore the hyperbolic and focus only on the historical. For Foucault, this

hyperbolic doubt remains within the totalizing sphere of the subject. Derrida fails to

recognize this because he belongs to this tradition of the unity of language. Derridas

reading is a

pedagogy that teaches the pupil there is nothing outside the text, but that in
it, in its gaps, its blanks and its silences, there reigns the reserve of the
origin; that it is therefore unnecessary to search elsewhere, but that here,
not in the words, certainly, but in the words under erasure, in their grid,
the sense of being is said. A pedagogy that gives conversely to the
masters voice the limitless sovereignty that allows it to restate the text
indefinitely (BPF, 416).

Derrida has not yet given up the dream of sovereignty, even if the sovereignty he posits

opens up infinite possibilities. The master remains in control of language. The need for

this control is why classical readings of Descartes fail to grasp the significance of the

passage on madness, and it is why Derrida fails to grasp it. It is not a lack of attention.

The commentators have not simply skipped it in their haste to get to the discussion of

dreams. It is systemic (BPF, 416). The classical tradition systematically reduces events

in a text to textual traces; it silences voices even as it invents voices behind texts to

33
avoid having to analyze the modes of implication of the subject in discourses (BPF,

416). It is Derrida and his much-vaunted deconstructive reading that imposes

normalization. Foucault allows for greater freedom because he recognizes the lack of

sovereignty over language. In his description of Batailles non-dialectical language,

Foucault could easily be describing his own understanding of madness:

In a language stripped of dialectics, at the heart of what it says but also at

the root of its possibilities, the philosopher is aware that we are not
everything; he learns as well that even the philosopher does not inhabit
the whole of his language like a secret and perfectly fluent god. Next to
himself, he discovers the existence of another language that also speaks
and that he is unable to dominate, one that strives, fails, and falls silent
and that he cannot manipulate, the language he spoke at one time and that
now has separated itself from him, now gravitating in a space increasingly
silent. Most of all, he discovers that he is not always lodged in his
language in the same fashion and that in the location from which a subject
had traditionally spoken in philosophya void has been hollowed out in
which a multiplicity of speaking subjects are joined and severed,
combined and excluded (PT, 41-42).

A non-dialectical language allows for divisions within the subject, for multiple voices

that cannot be dominated and silenced. These voices are allowed to continue speaking.

They cannot be overcome the way the disciple overcomes the inner voice of the master;

they cannot be manipulated the way Descartes (on Derridas reading) placates the voice

of the nonphilosopher within his meditation by appearing to put aside madness. Non-

dialectical language forces us to confront these other, problematic voices.

Transgression provides Foucault a way of acknowledging the limits of being

without having to succumb to the totality of reason. In fact, it allows him to turn the

charge of totalizing thought back on Derrida and to argue that Derridas reading of

Descartes (and of himself) is merely symptomatic of a normalized and normalizing

approach. But he has not addressed the more methodological issues that Derrida raises

34
concerning archeology. In the next chapter, we will take a closer look at Foucaults

methods and his own attempts to explain them. We will then turn to Derridas own

methods to show that Foucaults charges of normalization are unfounded, and that both

men are developing forms of thought that consciously struggle against the inherent

closure of any system.

35
 Chapter 2: Foucaults Methods

The archeology of silence Foucault produces in History of Madness appears at

first glance to be structured around binary divisionsinclusion and exclusion, the mad

and the rational, the same and the other. But Foucaults writings on transgression show

that he was clearly aware such dualisms are not so neatly delimited. Transgression

introduces an element that alters this structure, presenting us with the ternary schema

governing archeology: inclusion/exclusion/transgression. Transgression was the

irreducible third element that, while refusing accommodation within the structure of

inclusion, was unable to be banished from the territory which that structure enclosed.1 It

is what allows for the possibility of dialogue between these two realms even as it affirms

their separation. In History of Madness, the artist who moves between reason and

madness is the transgressive figure. Nietzsche, Artaud, Goya, Sade, Van Goghthese

artists ultimately succumb to madness and silence, but prior to that moment, they are able

to stand within the space of the limit separating reason and madness. This is what allows

them to speak in a new way. But it is also what threatens their work: There is only

madness as the last instant of the uvrefor the uvre indefinitely repels madness to its

outer limits. Where there is an uvre, there is no madness: and yet madness is

contemporaneous with the uvre, as it is the harbinger of the time of its truth (HM,

537). Once madness takes hold, these artists find themselves on the other side of the

limit, cut off from reason, and therefore no longer artists.2 Transgression has then given

way to exclusion.

1
Todd May, Between Genealogy and Epistemology: Psychology, Politics, and Knowledge in the Thought
of Michel Foucault (University Park: Pennsylvania State University, 1993) 13-14.
2
Caputo points out that Foucaults claim that madness produces only silence intimates an awareness on his
part that there is no access to a pure madness or unreason, to a pure, ante-historical essence of

36
 Transgression allows one to break free of the sphere of repetition, to walk up to

the very edge of the horizon of experience. However, we cannot step outside of our

fundamental horizon and see the world sub specie aeternitatis. There is no Cartesian

Archimedean point from which to move the world. More problematic, not only can we

not step outside of our fundamental horizon, but in trying to do so, we bring what was

outside into that horizon of experience. In showing us something new, the artist, for

example, consigns that experience to the sphere of the same. And as Derrida shows, the

rational person trying to understand the experience of the mad cannot extricate herself

from rationality and in trying to do so draws madness into the sphere of reason.

The challenge for both Foucault and Derrida is to think otherwise by transgressing

the totalizing systems of thought and thereby to discover what has remained unthought,

all while remaining within the confines and limits of our constructed forms of life. We

have to begin where we are and with a careful examination of the limits of our

experience. Both Foucault and Derrida begin with critiques of the present in order to

understand what options it makes available, what kinds of limits it imposes, and how

those limits may be transgressed. Their critiques illustrate the fundamental differences in

their strategies, but the goal of these strategies is the same: to understand the inherent

possibilities of the present and to uncover ways of thinking that are not (yet) part of the

present systems of thought.

This chapter will examine the methods comprising Foucaults history of the

present and his strategies for tracing the contingencies and sudden shifts that have led to

the current systems in which we find ourselves. This history is not a conventional history

madness. John D. Caputo, More Radical Hermeneutics: On Not Knowing Who We Are (Bloomington:
Indiana University, 2000) 25. The resources for a different response to Derridas critique are, in other
words, already present in History of Madness.

37
because such an approach, Foucault shows, is fraught with normalizing and metaphysical

baggage. Nor is this history a hermeneutics (especially after History of Madness): the

past is not the key unlocking the presents secrets. Studying the past reveals the

contingent nature of the present, and Foucaults history of the present offers us no origins

or teleologies, only endless possibility; what we learn from this history is that the present

is not an historical inevitability. These methods also lay the groundwork for

transgressing the dominant systems of thought without succumbing to the illusory

promises of transcendence. This realization affords us a perspective on the limitations of

the presenton what has been sacrificed for this present and on the possibilities inherent

in it. Without studying the past, these limitations would be otherwise unrecognizable to

us since we are produced by and embedded in those limitations.

To explicate Foucaults methodological approach, I will first explain archeology,

the method that informs Foucaults earlier work and provides the conceptual tools for

understanding the rules and practices that define a field of knowledge. I will then turn to

an explanation of the genealogical method, which runs counter to traditional history and,

in so doing, manifests the possibilities of endless interpretation. Finally, I will look at the

later essay What is Enlightenment? in which Foucault succinctly thematizes the nature

of critical ontology. With this as our foundation, we will be prepared for the examination

of Foucaults analytics of power that will come in part 2.

Archeology

In History of Madness, Foucault examines the etiologies of madness offered up by

doctors in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.3 These accounts relied on humors

3
See History of Madness, part 2, chapter 3.

38
and nervous diseases to explain madness, but these explanations are not simply early,

cruder versions of what we now understand as psychiatry. Psychiatric discourse as it

appears in the nineteenth century had neither the same content, nor the same internal

organization, nor the same place in medicine, nor the same practical function, nor the

same methods as the traditional chapter on diseases of the head or nervous diseases to

be found in eighteenth-century medical treatises.4 Psychiatry is not the result of an

evolving medical knowledge borne out of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In

fact, psychiatry lacked the elements necessary to be considered valid during these earlier

periods. Willis and Dufour would have seen no line of descent between their accounts of

brains dried and desiccated by mania and the diagnoses psychiatry offers. So where did

psychiatrys validity come from? What changed so that this discourse could emerge? As

Foucault shows, what changed were the configurations in which medical discourse was

situated:

[W]hat brought about this great change in the economy of concepts,

analyses, and demonstrations, was a whole set of relations between
hospitalization, internment, the conditions and procedures of social
exclusion, the rules of jurisprudence, the norms of industrial labor and
bourgeois morality, in short a whole group of relations that characterized
for this discursive practice the formation of its statements; but this practice
is not only manifested in a discipline possessing a scientific status and
scientific pretensions; it is also found in operation in legal texts, in
literature, in philosophy, in political decisions, and in the statements made
and the opinions expressed in daily life. The discursive formation whose
existence was mapped by the psychiatric discipline was not coextensive
with it, far from it: it went well beyond the boundaries of psychiatry (AK,
179).

Psychiatry only emerges when various practices and conceptssome seemingly

unrelated to psychiatrycome into contact and create the right conditions for such a

4
Michel Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. Alan Sheridan
(New York: Pantheon, 1972) 179. Hereafter abbreviated in the text as AK.

39
discourse. The legal, moral, social, and medical forms of knowledge create the

possibility of a psychiatric discourse in the same way that the Great Confinement came

about when various social forces combined and focused their attention on the mad.

Foucaults archeological method traces these points of contact and shows the relative

beginnings, the accidental and unnoticed (but not invisible) relationssuch as the

relations between labor, hospitalization, and jurisprudence in the case of psychiatrythat

transform thinking and practices and produce new social institutions.5

What differentiates archeology from a traditional history of ideas is its object.6

Intellectual history as it is typically practiced is retrodictive, focusing on a particular idea

and examining its previous manifestations in order to track down its historical sources.

An intellectual historian interested in particle physics, for example, might work her way

back to Democritus speculations about atoms. A study of musical tuning systems might

compare contemporary systems with the varied efforts of Renaissance and Classical

composers. Archeology, on the other hand, has as its object not the progression of a

specific idea, but the space in which ideas appear.

Foucaults historiesare histories of events understood by means of

restructurings of the archeological layers of society which, in their
relationships to each other, regulate practices. Foucaults histories, hence,
are histories explaining the birth of new practices: the confinement of the
mad, psychiatry, the observation of the patients body, morbid anatomy,
the human sciences .7

Understanding how new ideas and practices appear requires an analytical distance that

erases certain distinctions: theory and practice are treated equally; the traditional
5
Michel Foucault. Foucault Live, trans. John Johnston, ed. Sylvre Lotringer (New York: Semiotext(e),
1989) 46. Hereafter abbreviated in the text as FL.
6
Shumway describes archeologyglibly, perhaps, but not incorrectlyas the history of ideas without
ideas and without history. David Shumway, Michel Foucault, (Charlottesville: University of Virginia,
1989) 98.
7
Charles C. Lemert and Garth Gillan, Michel Foucault: Social Theory and Transgression (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1982) 43.

40
boundaries between disciplines break down (FL, 3, 18). Archeology thus treats specific

forms of thought, from the most abstract idea to the most unreflective and inarticulate

practice, only as discursive formations. While at first blush this seems reductive,

Foucaults purpose here is to pre-empt our tendency to focus on the meaning of a

discourse.

The question What is the meaning of the statement? instantly ontologizes

the statementit is reduced to a given containing a secret. The question
Why this statement? reduces the statement to its cause. Only questions
of how the statement appears grant full attention to the statement, only
how does not immediately shift the attention away from the statement
itself to that which could possibly provide the statement with a meaning or
an explanation.8

Rejecting the idea that background practices and beliefs make linguistic practices

intelligible, archeology shifts the focus away from why those in a given field said or did

something; it focuses solely on what they said and did (FL, 46).9 It simply analyzes

statements as statements, rendering the languages and practices within them meaningless

and thus enabling us to see fields of knowledge in descriptive terms.

But the goal of archeology is not pure description. Specific forms of thinking,

e.g., psychiatry, appear within a larger system of thought; archeological analysis

uncovers the historical conditions that produce this system. These historical conditions,

which Foucault calls savoir, are the unconscious laws underlying all social practices and

making particular forms of knowledge (connaissance) possible (FL, 2). These

8
Niels kerstrm Andersen, Discursive Analytical Strategies: Understanding Foucault, Koselleck, Laclau,
Luhmann (Bristol: Policy Press, 2003) 10-11.
9
Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 2nd ed (Chicago:
University of Chicago, 1983) 57.

41
unconscious laws are the rules of formation that determine the validity of a given

discourse within a given order of knowledge.10

The organization of knowledgeour own as well as the knowledge of other

historical periodsis based on formal atemporal structures, what Foucault calls the

archive:

[T]he mass of things spoken in a culture, conserved, valorized, re-used,

repeated and transformed. In brief, this whole verbal mass that has been
fashioned by men, invested in their techniques and in the institutions and
woven into their existence and their history. I envisage this mass of things
said not on the side of language and the linguistic system that they put to
work, but on the side of the operations which give it birth (FL, 58).

The archive defines the system and space in which a given statement can function. It

determines how what is said and done gets organized; it establishes the relations and

regularities surrounding various discursive practices. In examining a given archive,

Foucault tries to determine the types of discursive practices that appear, the relationships

that exist between different discursive practices, the relationships between discursive and

nondiscursive practices, and the transformations these practices undergo. (We cannot

describe our own archive because it is governing the way in which we could describe it; it

makes what we can say possible and therefore cannot be gotten outside of to see it in its

totality.) So, for example, no discourse about mentally ill persons could have appeared

during the Middle Ages (because there were no mentally ill persons), just as there

could be no psychiatric discourse until the nineteenth century (because there were no

conditions to allow for such a discourse).

The archive also determines how what is said withdraws from use, i.e., how

certain forms of discourse lose their explanatory power and give way to new forms.

10
May, 29.

42
Once a system is altered, a discourse ceases to be meaningful. It might certainly be

repeated, but it no longer has any function. In The Birth of the Clinic, Foucault repeats

Pommes description of his cure for a hysterical woman, but because it no longer

operates in a functioning discursive system, the description simply makes no sense to us;

we do not know what to do with it.11 The rules of formation governing medical discourse

have changed, and changed so radically that there is no longer any commonality between

Pommes forms of thought and our own.

Here we see another crucial difference between history and archeology. For

conventional history, gaps and differences suggest an error in the historical account; they

imply that something has not been accounted for. And if there is no historical continuity,

there can be no teleology. Archeology accepts the discontinuity of the past: gaps suggest

something else, viz. the contingency of historical events. Rejecting teleological and

continuous history, archeology seeks rather to untie all those knots that historians have

patiently tied; it increases differences, blurs the lines of communication, and tries to make

it more difficult to pass from one thing to another (AK, 170). Whiggish histories find

foreshadows of some particular transformation in ways of thinking: Pinel marked the

turning point in the treatment of the insane and introduced modern psychiatry; the

Physiocratic analyses of production paved the way for Ricardo. But this approach works

only by ignoring gaps and differences. As Foucault shows in The Birth of the Clinic,

tremendous changes appear in the course of a hundred years, but it was really only in the

space of twenty-five years (1790-1815) that medical discourse changed more than it ever

had in its prior manifestations. Obviously, the practice of medicine changes quickly and

11
Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archeology of Medical Perception, trans. A.M. Sheridan
Smith (New York: Vintage, 1994) ix-x.

43
dramatically as medical science introduces new technology. But what Foucault is

describing is more fundamental: what changed during this twenty-five year period was

the very way nature of medical perception, a change that ushered in a new perceptual

grid, and an almost entirely new descriptive vocabulary; new sets of concepts and

nosographical distributions (AK, 170). The entire field was transformed, and it is the

task of the archeologist to understand and describe these differences, not describe them

away.

The outcome of this archeological approach, then, is the loss of our own

complacent belief that our understanding of the world is objectively true and that this

understanding is the pinnacle of an inexorable drive to the truth. Dreyfus and Rabinow

point out that while we might find Pommes description of his cure bizarre and risible, we

must also confront the fact that Pomme was convinced of the objective truth of his

description. He was as sure of the truth of his observation as todays doctors are of

theirs. But if Pommes view was at one time regarded as a serious, viable, and objective

account, we must question the seriousness, viability, and objectivity of the truths that

current medical science provides us. This is the effect of archeology: Foucaults strategy

forces us take an ironic position toward our own belief.12 We begin to see the historical

nature of our knowledge.

By taking this ironic position, by recognizing the constructed and contingent

nature of the present, we begin to realize that other forms of the present were possible.

Different combinations of practices would have produced different forms of life; there is

nothing necessary about the one we have. By rejecting continuous history, by accepting

the gaps and sudden shifts, archeology is able to open up regions of interpositivity,
12
Dreyfus and Rabinow, ibid., 13.

44
those points of contact between disparate fields and practices. We are no longer confined

to one particular account but can connect disparate discourses. Moreover, every

discursive formation does not belong (necessarily, at least) to only one of these systems,

but enters simultaneously into several fields of relations, in which it does not occupy the

same place, or exercise the same function (AK, 159).

Archeology shows that there is no common element linking statements in a

particular field. The problem with the view that events comprise a continuous and

teleological flow is that it presupposes an inherent unity to events, but this requires some

kind of transcendental guarantee for this unity. For modernity, that guarantee has been

the subject:

Continuous history is the indispensable correlative of the founding

function of the subject; the guarantee that everything that has eluded him
will be restored to him. Making historical analysis the discourse of the
continuous and making human consciousness the original subject of all
historical development and all action are two sides of the same system of
thought (AK, 12).

In this case, the teleological understanding of history and the transcendentalism of the

subject operate in a mutually supportive relationship. But the subject is incapable of

providing the unifying function for a field of knowledge: the speaker is only part of the

system of discursive practice.13 Instead, only the rules of formation unify statements by

determining how and what statements can be formed within a field, and as Foucaults

genealogical analyses make clear, subjectivity is a product of the dominant regimes of

truth.

13
From an archaeological vantage point, the subjectis itself no more than an historical product of
discourse and can no longer hide the perpetually moving discursive dimension that both founds it and
disperses it. Karlis Racevskis, Michel Foucault and the Subversion of the Intellect (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1983) 80.

45
Genealogy

As Foucault becomes less interested in attacking humanist histories, he shifts his focus to

emphasizing the role of power within forms of life, be they discursive formations or

practices. An understanding of power was not absent in his archeological work, but it

was not thematized. However, by the time he wrote the Archaeology of Knowledge, he

saw that power and knowledge were inherently related (AK, 27). The shift, therefore,

from archeology to genealogy is not a methodological break but the introduction of a set

of tactics. [A]rcheology would be the appropriate methodology of this analysis of

local discursivities, and genealogy would be the tactics whereby, on the basis of the

descriptions of these local discursivities, the subjected knowledges which were thus

released would be brought into play.14

Whereas archeology describes new combinations and arrangements of discursive

and non-discursive practices, genealogy provides a method grounded in infinite

reinterpretation. Consequently, it destabilizes the conventional histories that we use to

explain our practices and forms of life and reveals their contingency. Genealogy, like

archeology, sees history as constituted by gaps and disruptions, but it uses these

discontinuities strategically: by examining the discontinuities, it undercuts the totalizing

narratives that proclaim the inevitability of their subject and reveals points of weakness

or areas that allow for reinterpretation.15 What one finds are other forms of knowledge

and other forms of life that have hitherto been subjugated. In liberating these subjugated

knowledges, we discover new ways of understanding ourselves. Genealogy provides us

14
Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings (1972-1977), ed. Colin
Gordon, trans. Colin Gordon, et al (New York: Pantheon, 1980) 85. Hereafter abbreviated in the text as
PK.
15
John S. Ransom, Foucaults Discipline: The Politics of Subjectivity (Durham: Duke University Press,
1997) 87.

46
with the perspective necessary to bring the power relations that have thus far constituted

us as subjects into relief (although such awareness, as we will see in subsequent chapters,

is only temporary). The difficulty of genealogical accounts is that while we are to make

use of this newly liberated knowledge, genealogy provides us with neither the

foundational elements of our current condition nor recommendations for using this

knowledge: The scope of genealogy is simultaneously more modest and profound, it is

to disrupt commonly held conceptions about events and social practices rather than to

proffer, from on high, proposals for reform.16

So how does the genealogical method work? Foucault defines genealogy as the

union of erudite knowledge and local memories which allows us to establish a historical

knowledge of struggles and to make use of this knowledge tactically today (PK, 83). By

breaking this definition up into its three major components, we will be able to get a clear

understanding of how genealogical analyses operate.

The Union of Erudite Knowledge and Local Memories

History is supposed to provide us with a causal account of the forces that shape our

present forms of life. We look to it for an understanding of how we have come to be

what we are. This is what Nietzsche called monumental historyhistory that confirms

progressive development by establishing the perpetual presence and the recovery of

works, actions, and creations through the monogram of their personal essence.17 These

causal accounts can and do disagree over the weight and import of particular forces and

their outcomes, but the role of historyto tell us the story of ourselves (or of other

16
Barry Smart, Michel Foucault (London: Routledge, 2002) 62.
17
Michel Foucault, Nietzsche, Genealogy, History, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected
Essays and Interviews, 161. Hereafter abbreviated in the text as NGH.

47
cultures or practices)is understood as a given: it offers a suprahistorical perspective.

The traditional historian believes he stands outside of time and views history in its totality

from an objective perspective. Monumental history thus constructs a continuous and

seamless account because it relies on constant elements that persist even as things appear

to change. But such a perspective is achieved only by reducing the differences and

diversity of time into a totality fully closed upon itself (NGH, 152). As Foucault

showed in his discussion of archeology, if history is to provide a continuous and cohesive

narrative, differences have to be suppressed; gaps and outliers threaten any account.

The genealogist gives up the possibility of an objective or suprahistorical

perspective, recognizing that his approach is based on his own perspective. This

perspective shows that there are no absolutes or constants obtaining throughout history:

history is a process of development, dispersal, and separation. Nothing in mannot

even his bodyis sufficiently stable to serve as the basis for self-recognition or for

understanding other men (NGH, 153). History for the genealogist becomes effective

rather than monumental. By focusing on and accepting the role of the unstable and

discontinuous, genealogy liberates forms of knowledge overlooked or dismissed by

monumental history as too trivialtoo incapable of unanimityto be of any historical

significance. The genealogist examines singular events, things that appear to be without

history, such as feelings or instincts, or things that have been approached in prescribed

ways, e.g. the body. Foucault acknowledges in Discipline and Punish that there have

been histories of the body written, but no one has paid attention to the political

investment of the body.18 The events the genealogist studies are not unities; they are a

18 18
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York:
Vintage, 1979) 25-26. Hereafter abbreviated in the text as DP.

48
series of positions that change over time. And their continual development precludes any

possibility of stability in the self or in a life (NGH, 154). But these elements comprise

subjugated knowledges that are the latent historical contents in a system of thought and

that when found reveal the struggles and conflicts masked by that system (PK, 81-82).

They are the marginal elements that genealogy fastens onto to show the inhibiting effects

of totalizing theories (PK, 80).

Establishing an Historical Knowledge of Struggles

With its emphasis on seeking out and highlighting these marginal elements, genealogy

recognizes the randomness of and the forces at work within an event. An event is not

a decision, a treaty, a reign, or a battle, but the reversal of a relationship of forces, the

usurpation of power, the appropriation of a vocabulary turned against those who had once

used it, a feeble domination that poisons itself as it grows lax, the entry of a masked

other (NGH, 154). Monumental history remains fixated on such phenomenal

elements, believing that things such as treaties or decisions made by actors tell us

something about origins, and that we can trace the progressive movement of history back

by following these elements. But this misses the true nature of historical events. An

event is a shift in power relations that occasions discontinuity at various levels and allows

a new form of life or set of practices to emerge. It is the advent of something new: new

statements, new objects, new rules.

For the genealogist, the search for origins constitutes a search for essences with its

concomitant assumption that one can uncover the apriori fixed form of things. The idea

of origins clings to the idea of a primordial truth. The genealogist, on the other hand,

discovers that there is no essence to things; there is no primordial truth. Nor are there any

49
pure origins. Monumental history presents origins as all-too-fleeting moments of pristine

existenceAdam and Eve communing with God in the garden, the souls direct contact

with the Forms. In these myths, the origin is the site of truth and purity that cannot hold:

it is invariably lost. The soul forgets its encounter with the Forms. Adam and Eve are

banished. Consequently, the origin produces the task of recovering itself. Retrieving this

lost origin, we believe, will get us back to the truth. But this is, Foucault tells us, just a

myth. In fact, historical beginnings are lowly: not in the sense of modest or discreet like

the steps of a dove, but derisive and ironic, capable of undoing every infatuation (NGH,

143). Far from being pure, the beginnings of things are always out of disparity (NGH,

142). The essence of things is, it turns out, nothing more than a conglomeration of alien

forms. Genealogy uses history, then, not to retrieve this past but to undermine the myth

of origins and to show these lowly and modest beginnings (NGH, 143-144).

Rejecting any pure origin or essence as its object, genealogy takes Herkunft,

descent, and Entstehung, emergence, as its objects. The first, Herkunft, is the group or

type one is bound to, whether through blood relations or class relations. Far from

dwelling on the common denominators of those falling into a specific type, the study of

descent ignores generic traits and seeks out the intersection of individual characteristics.

In doing so, it undercuts the claims to a unified and coherent identity by showing that any

such identity is only the synthesis of disparate events. The search for descent is not the

erecting of foundations: on the contrary, it disturbs what was previously considered

immobile; it fragments what was thought unified; it shows the heterogeneity of what was

imagined consistent with itself (NGH, 147). The object of descent is the body because it

is the body, after all, that records events on its surface. But it is also the body that acts as

50
the point of unity for the self, even as it is a volume of perpetual disintegration, and

remains linked to its origin (NGH, 145-148). The soul, the modern self, Foucault tells us

in Discipline and Punish, is produced permanently around, on, within the body by the

functioning of a power that is exercised on those punished (DP, 29). The micro-physics

of power operate on the body, producing a specific type of body, which in turn produces

the self.19

The second object for genealogy is Entstehung, emergence or what Foucault calls

the singular law of an apparition. Studying emergence, genealogy examines what

appears in history. The development of humanity, Foucault tells us, is only a series of

interpretations, and the role of genealogy is to record its history: the history of morals,

ideals, and metaphysical concepts []; as they stand for the emergence of different

interpretations, they must be made to appear as events on the stage of historical process

(NGH, 152). The genealogy of emergence focuses on these emerging interpretations and

their associated forms of domination within history. However, this emergence must not

be mistaken for the telos of historical development: to claim that our purposes are the true

purposes of what has emerged presupposes a metaphysical claim about the origins of

things, viz. that those purposes have always been latent and were present at the origin,

and only now are those purposes being realized. In fact, what appears has had other

purposes and intentions that at other times appeared equally final. What has developed

may appear as a culmination, but they are merely the current episodes in a series of

subjugations (NGH, 148). Instead of any culmination, the genealogist sees a

progression of systems of domination: what emerges does so solely as the product of a

play of forces or an eruption of forces.

19
This theme will be developed in chapter 5.

51
 By analyzing emergence, genealogy analyzes how forces interact and what these

forces give rise to. So, for example, a certain practice emerges only after struggling

against other practices. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault traces the shifting attitudes

toward punishment, showing how imprisonment, which had been considered only a

minor and infrequently used tool of punishment, gradually became the universal practice

in punitive systems. Other methods were proposed and tried but failed to get established.

Entstehung, then, designates a site of confrontation between forms of life, although this is

not a balanced struggle between equally matched adversaries. This site is a non-place,

i.e., it is merely the distance between combatants, and the site of perpetual, and

perpetually shifting, domination. Therefore, what emerges in this confrontation is not the

result of any intentional or conscious direction; the struggle for domination is merely a

series of chance confrontations. There is no grand design at work. Nor can anyone claim

responsibility for the forms of life that appear.

While these confrontations are the products of chance, they are always between

forms of domination that rely on rituals and rules to fix their position. But these rules are

not laws that govern or temper the violence inherent in confrontations (NGH, 151).

Violence exists within a system of rules that are impersonal and adaptable; successthe

establishment of a new form of lifelies in seizing the rules and using them against the

previous ruling forms. The Reformation, for example, originated in sixteenth-century

German Catholicism because it was there that the people had the strength to turn the rules

of the Church on itself and harness its own internal forces to spiritualize itself into a

pure religion of conscience (NGH, 149). Tracing the emergence of dominant

configurations requires interpreting the reversals and victories in these confrontations. In

52
this way, interpretation itself becomes the appropriation of a system of rules, not the

revelation of what is latent in the origin.

Using This Knowledge Tactically Today

Foucault identifies three tactical uses of genealogy. The first is parody. Amidst

confusion about who we are supposed to be, history has always been called on to supply

prototypes for us to identify with and substitute identities for us to assume: the leaders of

the American Revolution saw themselves in Roman figures; current historians draw

parallels between America in the twenty-first century and Athens in the Periclean Age.

But monumental history can provide these prototypes and substitutions only by

presupposing and appealing to constant elements: feelings, for instance, are assumed to

be immutable; instincts are supposed to operate according to a dull constancy that

influences the present just as it did the past; the body is believed to obey exclusive laws

of physiology and therefore be unaffected by history (NGH, 153). We need these

constants if we are to take historical figures as sources of self-understanding. George

Washington and Nathan Hale believed they recognized themselves in Cato since,

knowing what they felt and what their instincts told them, they could be certain Catos

feelings and instincts were analogous.

The genealogist does not simply dismiss these substitute identities. Rather, he

shows them for what they are, viz. disguises, ephemeral props that point to our own

unreality (NGH, 160). The problem with monumental history is not that it misleads us

into accepting inauthentic identities; it is that it limits the identities available to us and

presents us with only a few select and appropriate options. This approach is perhaps

most clearly seen in History of Madness: modern psychiatry tries to locate itself in the

53
history of psychiatric treatment, but it can do so only by ignoring alternative

interpretations and alternative identities. What Foucault shows is that the historical

progenitors psychiatrists lay claim to are only one set of identities that could be

assumed.20 The genealogist views these identities ironically, pushing the substitutions

further and thus undermining the recollective power of history. If we have limitless

possibilities and countless identities to choose from, if genealogy is history in the form

of a concerted carnival, why should we believe there are true historical precedents

(NGH, 161)?

The second use of genealogy is the systematic dissociation of identity. In the

course of providing us with identities and analogies with which we can define ourselves,

history is also understood to be providing us with a tradition that establishes a clear idea

about who we are and where we have come from. This is antiquarian history, which

seeks out continuities of soil, language, and urban life in which our present is rooted

(NGH, 162). These continuities pre-empt any attempts to create or re-create ourselves

because they impose on us notions of fidelity and obligations to venerate this origin and

call on us to return to this origin.

For the genealogist, once history becomes parody, identity loses its veneer of

unity, and what is revealed is a plurality of constituting elements, the heterogeneous

systems which, masked by the self, inhibit the formation of any form of identity (NGH,

162). We discover that our identities are not coherent and seamless wholes; were

constituted by discontinuous elements. These elements each have their own history, and

each one comprises numerous intersecting and competing systems. Thus genealogy

20
Andersen, 19.

54
destroys not only the reality of our historically formed identity; it destroys the notion of

identity entirely.

The third use of genealogy is the sacrifice of the subject of knowledge.

Traditional history appeals to a dispassionate commitment to the truth: it is guided, we

are told, by a scientific consciousness striving to remain neutral. However, the truth

history uncovers is not an objective or universal truth, despite its claims to be so. Far

from being neutral, the will to knowledge drives traditional history; consequently, this

history is guided by

instinct, passion, the inquisitors devotion, cruel subtlety, and malice. It

discovers the violence of a position that sides against those who are happy
in their ignorance, against the effective illusions by which humanity
protects itself, a position that encourages the dangers of research and
delights in disturbing discoveries (NGH, 162).

The truth and knowledge history discovers, and the subject this knowledge produces, are

products of this will to knowledge. Genealogy, on the other hand, teaches us that,

without any tradition to define us and without any coherent identity to preserve, we are

free to experiment on ourselves. We must forgo the critique of past injustices by some

present truth. And it is genealogy that offers us the tools to undercut the notions of truth

and knowledge that persist through the injustice of the will to knowledge. Genealogy

resists the totalizing tendency that accompanies any efforts to hierarchize and centralize

knowledge (PK, 83-84).

What is Enlightenment?

Archeology and genealogy give us ways to approach the past in ways that avoid the

totalizing thinking of traditional history. What they reveal is the contingency of the

present, and this revelation opens up new possibilities of thinking about ourselves. We

55
do not have to simply accept modernity as the necessary consequence of the past, nor do

we have to subscribe to the view that there is some authentic way of being we must

discover and remain true to. Instead, thought is able to question itself, its origins, and its

possibilities. The ability to reconceptualize where we are and where we are going is

always available. In fact, what Foucault discovers is that far from being a rejection of the

traditional Enlightenment view of modernity and reason, this understanding is implicit in

it. As he shows in What is Enlightenment?, Kant was already asking these very

questions.21

In 1784, Kant wrote a response to the question What is Enlightenment? for the

Berlinische Monatschrift. In this short piece, Kant poses a new problem by turning the

question into a reflection on the present. This certainly was not unique to Kant, but his

approach was different: this is the first time anyone questioned rational thought about not

just its nature and foundation, but also about its immediate past and its present reality; as

to its time and its place.22 Foucault points out that this kind of philosophical work aims

for two mutually reinforcing objectives: it is the search for the point at which Western

rationality becomes autonomous and sovereign; and it is an analysis of the present and its

relation to the founding act, whether that relation is one of rediscovery, taking up a

forgotten direction, completion or rupture, return to an earlier moment, etc.23 Kants

response marks a shift in philosophy insofar as it assumes a historico-critical dimension.

This text is both a critical reflection and a reflection on history. What Kant offers us is a

21
What is Enlightenment? tracks a ragged line of descent from Kant to all of Foucaults own themes: a
mode of relationship that has to be established with oneself, what the Greeks called an ethos, a
desperate eagerness to imagine [the present] otherwise than it is, and to transform itall these, Foucault
asserts, are firmly rooted in the Enlightenment. Geoffrey Galt Harpham, SoWhat is
Enlightenment? An Inquisition into Modernity, Critical Inquiry 20.3 (Spring, 1994): 533.
22
Michel Foucault, Introduction to The Normal and the Pathological, by Georges Canguilheim, trans.
Carolyn R. Fawcett (New York: Zone Books, 1989) 9.
23
Ibid., 10.

56
critical ontology, a way of responding to ones time. He questions the possibility of

thinking about the present when we are part of that present ourselves. This way of

approaching the present had not yet been addressed in philosophical reflection. Until

Kant, some special trait or event differentiated the present from other eras; or the present

was a hermeneutical principle, enabling us to foresee what is to come; or it was the

transition to a new world. Kants view of the present bypasses these forms and asks how

the present introduces difference; it is this that makes Kants effort unique: It is in the

reflection on today as difference in history and as motive for a particular philosophical

task that the novelty of this text appears to me to lie.24

Presenting a new problem, Kant casts the question in an original, albeit negative,

way: he defines Enlightenment as an Ausgang, as an escape from the present. The escape

from the present is necessary because we are in a state of immaturity: we accept external

authority when we should use our own reason. Instead of relying on our own

understanding, we rely on a book. Instead of listening to our own conscience, we rely on

a spiritual director. Kantian maturity does not entail the wholesale rejection of external

authority. The problem is not with books or spiritual directors, but with our blind

obedience to them. Maturity for Kant is both obedience and the use of reason.

Enlightenment as Ausgang, as the release from immaturity, requires modifying the

relations between our will, our use of reason, and external authority. Kant believes that

we are responsible for our immaturity; therefore, we are responsible for extricating

ourselves from it. In this way, finding our way out of immaturity is both an ongoing

process and an obligation for us.

24
Michel Foucault, What is Enlightenment? Ethics : Subjectivity and Truth, Essential Works of Foucault,
1954-1984, Volume 1., ed. Paul Rabinow, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: New Press, 1998) 309.
Hereafter abbreviated in the text as WIE.

57
 Kant delineates two conditions for escaping immaturity. First, we must

distinguish the realm of obedience from the realm of the use of reason. Properly

distinguishing these two realms allows us to perform our specific duties while reasoning

freely about the larger contexts in which we perform those duties. If we were in a state of

maturity, we would pay our taxes because it is our duty, but we would also argue about

the inequities of the tax code. We would abstain from using illegal drugs while being

critical of the governments drug policy. Second, we must distinguish between the public

use of reason and private use of reason. By adding this distinction to the first, Kant is

differentiating his view from traditional arguments for freedom of conscience that argue

one should be able to think what one wants provided one does what one must. In fact, he

is arguing the opposite. In our private use of reason, Kant tells us, we must act as a cog

in a machine: particular rules and particular ends circumscribe our social roles, and our

use of reason must be directed toward these ends. In our private affairs, then, reason

cannot be free. In the public use of reason, however, we should be able to reason freely,

i.e., as a reasonable being; we should not be constrained by particulars.

Enlightenment, therefore, entails the conflation of the universal, the free, and the

public use of reason. But ensuring the public use of reason turns Enlightenment into a

political problem: if it is the moment when humanity puts its reason to use without

subjecting itself to authority, it is also the moment of critique because it is necessary to

define the legitimate uses of reason in determining what can be known and what must be

done. Such legitimate uses of reason ensure reasons autonomy.

And it is in the struggle to resolve this problem, that modernity produces its ethos.

Part of this ethos of modernity is the mode of relation with oneself. There is within

58
modernity an attitude of asceticism that denies the view of the self as being at the mercy

of constant temporal flux. Instead, the self is an object of elaboration; the goal is to

invent oneself, not discover hidden truths. By shifting his focus away from the use of

reason and toward the self, Foucault is emphasizing not the Kant of the three Critiques,

the Kant who questions the conditions of the possibility of knowledge, but the Kant of the

so-called Fourth Critique who undertakes an ontology of the present, an ontology of

ourselves.25 Baudelaire exemplifies this attitude and presents a figure that is

simultaneously a continuation of the Kantian project and a break with it. He captures this

side of Kant by thematizing the historical subject while rejecting the question of the

transcendental subject. He sees modernity as an acceptance of the contingency and flux

of the present, not merely to be sensitive to it but to heroize it.

Such heroization does not make the present something sacred or to be preserved;

nor does it reduce our stance toward it to that of the spectator. The spectator, the easily

satisfied and complacent flaneur, is nothing more than an aesthete passively collecting

the curiosities and novelties produced by the fleeting moment. Baudelaire contrasts such

a person with the man of modernity who engages the present by heroizing it ironically.

By taking an ironic stance toward the present, an individual is able to find the poetic in it.

Thus is the individual capable of transforming the world:

For the attitude of modernity, the high value of the present is indissociable
from a desperate eagerness to imagine it, to imagine it otherwise than it is,
and to transform it not by destroying it but by grasping it in what it is.
Baudelairean modernity is an exercise in which extreme attention to what
is real is confronted with the practice of a liberty that simultaneously
respects this reality and violates it (WIE, 311).

25
Harpham, 532-533.

59
The spectator is satisfied with looking; he is a pure aesthete. The man of modernity

contrarily transfigures the world while at the same time respecting it. Modernity grasps

the present even as it imagines it otherwise. This is most obvious in modernist painters

such as Manet and Courbet who heroized the ordinary, not out of some sentimental belief

in the common person but out of a recognition that art had the power to transform the

ordinary.

Baudelairean modernity is also a form of self-constitution. Modernity views the

self as an object of elaboration, which requires inventing oneself rather than discovering

some hidden true self. With modernity, there is no true self to be liberated; there is only a

self to be produced. The recognition of our ability to transform the present moment is

integral to escaping the social immaturity that Foucault sees plaguing our age, viz. our

inability to shape our subjectivities in the face of disciplinary power. We believe

subjectivity is a given, not something that must be attained. Maturity for Foucault can be

achieved only through this heroic and ironic stance toward ones present; the modern

ethos is not yet mature, nor was Kant. Irony

is an abandonment of traditional seriousness while preserving active

engagement in the concerns of the present. It seeks to avoid preserving
some special status for truth which grounds serious involvement, and also
to avoid the frivolity which arises when one abandons all seriousness to
dance on the grave of god, or logos, or phallo-centrism, etc. [] The
ironic stance results in seeking in the present those practices which offer
the possibility of a new way of acting.26

Archeology and genealogy, as we have noted, provide ways of turning this ironic

stance into methods by which we can engage the present. They also provide us

the tools necessary to navigate between the competing attitudes of a single-

26
Herbert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, What is Maturity? Habermas and Foucault on What is
Enlightenment? Foucault: A Critical Reader, ed. David Couzens Hoy (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1996) 117.

60
minded seriousness that is in sole possession of the truth and an anything-goes

irrationalism. This critical task Foucault sees in the Enlightenmentthe

historical investigation into the ways in which we constitute ourselvesbrings

together these methods: archeological because it treats discourse as an historical

event, genealogical because it locates the possibility of becoming other.

What Foucault wants to show in this quick sketch is that the Enlightenment is a

source of interrogation or permanent critique of our own era. It provides a philosophical

ethos that endures today. This ethos is a limit-attitude, and criticism gives us the tools to

reflect upon those limits. Kants critique sought the necessary limits of knowledge and

found them in the universal and obligatory. Foucault is working from the transformative

ethos described by Baudelaire and the critical reflection of Kant to produce a more

practical critique, a transgressive critique. For Foucault, the goal of criticism is

transgression: I shall thus characterize the philosophical ethos appropriate to the critical

ontology of ourselves as a historico-practical test of the limits we may go beyond, and

thus as work carried out by ourselves upon ourselves as free beings (WIE, 316).

Criticism is no longer to be understood as a search for formal and universal structures; it

is an historical investigation into the ways in which we constitute ourselves. The critique

of the present shows us that the modes of domination that govern our self-creation are

contingent; we are therefore able to go beyond the limits. But doing so requires a careful

and thorough analytic of power. The analytics Foucault proffers will show just how the

subject is constituted as a subject of knowledge caught up in power relations and how

these relations organize practices and forms of life in rational and homogeneous ways.

We will look at the analytics of power in part two.

61
 Chapter 3: The Method of Deconstruction: Derrida on Marx

Like Foucault, Derrida sees in the Enlightenment the resources of emancipation.

And like Foucault, he thinks that the hallmarks of the Enlightenmentprivileging reason,

focusing on the autonomous subject, searching for Truthhave thus far led us down

blind alleys. Like Foucault, Derrida is not an anti-Enlightenment figure. Rather, he

wants to move beyond the Enlightenment critique by turning its critical methods back

onto the Enlightenment itself. The Enlightenment accorded reason pride of place;

Derrida wants to show that such privileging suppresses other forms of thought. The

Enlightenment posited the idea of natural rights grounded in a rational subjectan idea

still with us; Derrida wants to show that our right is the right to respond to the other. The

Enlightenment viewed reason and faith as mutually exclusive categories of experience;

Derrida wants to show that these two forms of thought are necessarily intermingled.

Re-styling the Enlightenment does not entail giving up the Enlightenment ideals:

Derrida is not renouncing the ideal of democracy and emancipation. He is, he tells us,

trying to think it and put it to work otherwise.1 This critique is meant to unleash those

elements the Enlightenment repressed and thus re-animate the Enlightenment desire for

emancipation. In doing so, Derrida advocates a new Enlightenment, one in which the

emancipatory desire is more rigorous and consistent. But the emancipation Derrida

strives for is not an empirical emancipation that will come in some future time. It is a

structural openness to what is to come, an openness that prevents a system from closing

in on itself.

1
Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New
International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994) 90. Hereafter abbreviated in the text as
SM.

62
 Derridas analysis of Marx seizes upon a critical spirit that is heir to the

Enlightenment and pushes it, radicalizing Marxism (SM, 88-89, 92). His analysis also

reveals deconstruction to be an heir to Marxism; in fact, his analysis shows that we are all

heirs to Marxism, and as heirs we have a responsibility to radicalize. Inheritance is

never a given, it is always a task. It remains before us just as unquestionably as we are

heirs of Marxism, even before wanting or refusing to be, and, like all inheritors, we are in

mourning (SM, 54). An inheritance places us in the position of debt. We are indebted

to the tradition that we have inherited, but this debt is not necessarily bad for Derrida. It

only becomes so when it becomes confining, when the debt becomes so overwhelming

that the inheritance closes us off to new possibilities. We must honor our inheritance and

the debt we owe to those who are dead by taking that inheritancewhether its money or

a traditionand using it to create new possibilities. Such an approach and attitude is

how one honors ones tradition.

Derridas analysis of Marx also shows us a clear example of deconstruction at

work. Reading Marx, Derrida uncovers multiple voices that bespeak the tension in

Marxs thought. By following Derridas reading, we will gain a clear understanding of

how deconstruction operates on a text; this reading will also introduce the themes of his

later work, which we will be developing over the course of the following chapters.

The Deconstructive Approach

At the heart of Derridas critique of the Enlightenment is the belief that the best legacy of

the Enlightenment is the priority it gave questioning and critique; this is precisely the

correct use of philosophy. It is this very right to ask any question that animates

deconstruction. This is why Derrida will argue that deconstruction is in keeping with

63
much of the Western canon: as Socrates showed us, philosophy is supposed to unsettle,

individuals as well as society. It is supposed to disrupt the comfortable and the

complacent. Deconstruction acknowledges and respects the need to keep open the

possibility of questioning, and it does this by showing that there are too many meanings

within any text to grasp it in its entirety. Reading and interpreting are endless tasks.

This points up the fundamental tension in Derridas approach to philosophy:

deconstruction unleashes the possibilities buried and unnoticed in texts; at the same time

it demands a careful, detailed, and classical understanding of the canon. This centralif

often overlookedtenet of deconstruction requires familiarizing oneself with the

classical readings of a text before undertaking a critical reading, otherwise one risks

imposing a reading arbitrarily. Without this recognition and this respect, critical

production would risk developing in any direction at all and authorize itself to say almost

anything.2 Commentary, for this reason, is useful and necessary: standard

interpretations serve as an indispensable guardrail since they offer multiple

perspectives on a text.3 It is a repetitive reading that adheres to the conventional

understanding of a particular text, but only by beginning with the conventional can we

safely begin to push a text in new directions. So while Derrida rejects the view that

philosophy is a purely academic discipline and wants to open philosophy up to new

horizons, he believes that it still requires technical training. We have already seen

Derrida appeal to this tenet in his challenge to Foucaults reading of Descartes: he

criticizes Foucault for deviating from classical commentary. Foucault is the first, to my

knowledge, to have isolated delirium and madness from sensation and dreams in this first

2
Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1998) 158.
3
Ibid.

64
Meditation. The first to have isolated them in their philosophical sense and their

methodological function. Such is the originality of his reading (CHM, 47). Originality

is not a problem for Derrida; Foucaults originality, however, certainly in this case, gives

pause. It is a cause for suspicion, and one must ask why Foucault is the first to read

Descartes as he does. But if the classical interpreters did not deem this dissociation

auspicious, is it because of their inattentiveness? (CHM, 47). Have all of Descartess

commentators failed to recognize the separation of madness and dreams? For Derrida,

Foucault should have taken the lack of supporting commentary as a sign that his reading

was problematic.

While commentary is necessary as a starting point, it is ultimately limited. Its

purposeclarifying authorial intentions, filling in the gaps, reproducing the arguments of

a text in an accessible waymakes the author the voice of authority that governs the text:

an accurate and effective commentary hews closely to what the text means to say, i.e.,

what the author means to say in it. Commentary is thus constrained by its inherent

logocentrism. Logocentrism orients the text around the argument the author intends. A

logocentric reading presumes the author transcends the text and serves as its omnipresent

voice of truth. Accurately understanding a text requires accurately receiving or

uncovering the meaning the author wants to convey.

Deconstruction resists such logocentrism. Rather than reproduce a reading that

merely clarifies the authors intentions, deconstructions goal is to root out those textual

elements that differ and oppose what the author intended to say, those elements the

author (consciously or unconsciously) suppresses. In its close readings of texts, it

focuses on the literality and textuality of the text, slowly, scrupulously, seriously, in

65
releasing the still-stirring forces that philosophy and logocentrism strive to contain.4

Derrida does not ignore authorial intentions, but he rejects the idea that those intentions

should determine every reading of a text. The author is not a point of origin for the text

to which readings must return. The text exists apart from the author and is ungovernable:

the author cannot govern the text because the text is a system within which the author

operates.

[T]he writer writes in a language and in a logic whose proper system,

laws, and life his discourse by definition cannot dominate absolutely. He
uses them only by letting himself, after a fashion and up to a point, be
governed by the system. And the reading must always aim at a certain
relationship, unperceived by the writer, between what he commands and
what he does not command of the patterns of the language that he uses.5

In any text, there is a structural blindness the writer cannot dominate. Words are English

words, not the writers; and a grammatical logic dictates how words can sensibly be

strung together. It is only by submitting to these structural dictates that the author

produces a particular text. But because of this tension, every text is shot through with

fundamental differences between its rhetoric and its logic; what is said is not always

consonant with the logic that structures the text. In fact, these two things sometimes

conflict, and it is this conflict that deconstruction draws out.

Deconstruction, therefore, is about reading faithfully. It is about finding that

which regulates the text, its internal logic, and developing a reading that adheres strictly

to it. At the same time, deconstruction demands that the text itself remain true to this

logic as well. It seeks out those points in the text where the logic has been forgotten; and,

then, re-imposing this logic on those textual blind spots, sees what effects are produced.

4
John D. Caputo, Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida (New York:
Fordham University Press, 1997) 83.
5
Derrida, Of Grammatology, 158.

66
 [B]y means of this double play, marked in certain decisive places by an
erasure which allows what it obliterates to be read, violently inscribing
within the text that which attempted to govern it from without, I try to
respect as rigorously as possible the internal, regulated play of
philosophemes and epistimemes by making them slidewithout
mistreating themto the point of their nonpertinence, their exhaustion,
their closure.6

It is this respectful pushing of textual elements that makes deconstruction, despite the

allegations made by its critics, more than simply destructive. The purpose is not simply

to tear down a text by pointing out its inherent contradictions. Nor is it an irrational and

anarchistic free-for-all in which every reading is equally plausible. In fact, as Derrida

continually strives to make clear, deconstruction is rigorously rational. What it offers is a

style of critical reading that relies on the internal logic of the text itself to dictate what the

reading will uncover. This is not a method or system that imposes meaning from

without. Doing so would be to repeat the violence of metaphysical thinking:

It is an undoing from the inside, at the surface of the text, not beyond its
limits, which may provoke a (self-) implosion of the said text. The
violence that deconstruction brings to the fore is that of the text itself, not
the reappropriative and super-imposed violence of logic, metaphysics,
logocentrism, or criticism, which always operate from outside the text.
The deconstructed text falls prey to its own violence, according to its own
laws, which are allowed by the deconstructive reading to resurface or
return7

Deconstructive focuses on the internal structure of the text and cannot transgress the text

toward something other than it, toward a referent or toward a signified outside the text

whose content could take place, could have taken place outside of language, that is to say,

in the sense that we give to that word, outside of writing in general. [] There is nothing

6
Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1981) 6.
7
Francois Debrix, Specters of postmodernism: Derridas Marx, the New International and the return of
situationism, Philosophy and Social Criticism 25.1 (1999): 11. See also Richard Beardsworths
explication of Derridas reading of Saussure in Derrida and the Political (London: Routledge, 1996) 10-11.

67
outside of the text.8 To claim that there is nothing outside the text is to claim there is no

meta-thesis or authorial intention beyond the text itself that would provide textual

stability. We must confine ourselves and our reading to the internal logic and uncover

new possibilities for reading. Deconstruction is clearly a technique that enables us to

think otherwise about a text (and, as we will see, about our most fundamental concepts)

without imposing or importing something from beyond.

In the rest of this chapter, we will examine Derridas deconstructive reading of

Marx to show how deconstruction operates and how the technique that Derrida brings to

bear on texts is also applied to our experiences, thereby putting into practice the desire for

emancipation without the possibility of transcendence.

Specters of Marx

In a brilliant and subversive reading of Marx, Derrida argues against the end or death of

Marxism.9 Having eschewed communism and the Communist Party when it was at its

height in 1960s France, in 1994with the Cold War over and the former communist

governments dismantled, with capitalism and democracy triumphantDerrida claims

that Marx has assumed not just a new relevance, but a new urgency: because Marx

anticipated the transformations of his own theses and forms of knowledge itself, the

specter of Marx (if not the specter of communism) continues to haunt Europe; and not

reading Marx is a failure of political responsibility. There will be no future without this

[responsibility]. Not without Marx, no future without Marx, without the memory and the

8
Derrida, Of Grammatology, 158.
9
Subversive yet, in accordance with the methodological strictures mentioned above, grounded in an
orthodox reading. Ironically, it is his orthodox reading that leads many Marxists to take Derrida to task.
See Moishe Postone, Deconstruction as Social Critique: Derrida on Marx and the New World Order,
History and Theory, 37.3 (Oct., 1998): 370-387; and the critiques in Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium
on Jacques Derridas Specters of Marx, ed. Michael Sprinker (London: Verso, 1999).

68
inheritance of Marx: in any case of a certain Marx, of his genius, of at least one of his

spirits (SM 13). To understand what Derrida means by the future and why it is so

crucial to keep Marx, we must first understand the metaphorical role of the specters that

haunt Marxs own thinking. Along the way, what we will also see the emergence of

themes and elements that will be central to our larger question of normalization.

The Metaphor of the Specter

The specter is a fascinating entity for Derrida: it is at once corporeal and incorporeal,

spirit but also flesh.10 It is, Derrida tells us, the carnal apparition of the spirit, its

phenomenal body (SM, 136), yet that flesh and phenomenality that give to the spirit its

spectral apparitiondisappear right away in that apparation (SM, 6). The specter is

somewhere between spirit and body; it is where these two seemingly distinct modes of

being intermingle and where the very distinction becomes unstable. What I want to do

here is present quickly a schematic view of the specter that I will then flesh outpardon

the punin detail throughout the chapter.

1. The specter presents challenges to ontological thinking, the thinking that thinks in

terms of closure or what Laclau calls full reconciliation.11 Playing off the

homonymous relationship with ontology, where presence and absence are clearly

differentiated, Derrida describes his project as a hauntology, in which being and non-

being are no longer easily distinguished. (Derrida illustrates this in his reading of

Hamlet: Hamlets dilemmato be or not to becannot be understood as a simple either-

or; the ghost of Hamlets father collapses this distinction.) This hauntology shows how

10
While Derrida is thematizing the ghost for the first time here, the intermingling of body and spirit goes
back to some of his earliest writings on Husserl, especially Speech and Phenomena, trans. David Allison
(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973) 81.
11
Ernesto Laclau, Time is Out of Joint, Diacritics 25.2 (Summer, 1995): 88.

69
the specter undermines the categories of being and non-being by both existing and not

existing. Consequently, it undermines any conceptual order by remaining both

unknowable and yet present: One does not know: not out of ignorance, but because this

non-object, this non-present present, this being-there of an absent or departed one no

longer belongs to knowledge. At least no longer to that which one thinks one knows by

the name of knowledge (SM, 6). The figure of the specter is a counter to the onto-theo-

archeo-teleology that characterizes Western thinking (SM, 74).

2. As that which one cannot know, the specter emphasize the egos experience of the

other: it sees us, yet we cannot see it. We cannot make out who or what this thing is.

The ghost comes to us in an asymmetrical relation. We can feel it looking at us. But we

are seen by a look we cannot return: we are looked at from outside of any synchrony,

even before and beyond any look on our part, according to an absolute anteriority and

asymmetry, according to an absolutely unmasterable disproportion (SM, 7). With the

specter, there is no give and take; there is no synchronous relation. This is a

radicalization of the Husserlian apperception of the other: no longer can I know the other

only analogically; the specter, like the other in Levinas, is always already confronting me

and confronting me in a way that pre-empts the autonomy of the egological subject.12

3. The specter continues Derridas critique of phenomenology and the metaphysics of

presence: by hovering on the horizon of experience, it undermines phenomenology; it

undoes the priority of the present as a series of now-points because it continues to linger

on and haunt the present when it should have passed on. But the ghost is not only a

12
See Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingus (Dordrecht:
Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991) 9-11, 99-102; and Ethics and Infinity, trans. Richard Cohen
(Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985) 95-101.

70
lingering presence; it is also something one waits for.13 The specter haunting Europe in

the opening sentence of the Communist Manifesto is on its way; in the opening scene of

Hamlet, Horatio and Marcellus are waiting for the ghost of Hamlet to re-appear. The

ghost, this thing that should have passed on, is now on its way back: the revenant is an

arrivant. The revenant is going to come (SM, 4). The specter is not confined to the

now, to the moment of the living-present. It disrupts time itself, and through this

disruption, it breaches in the sphere of sameness that circumscribes the present. Within

the phenomenological concept of time, the present appears within my horizon of

expectation, which means what exists within time is already defined by that horizon.

Nothing new is going to appear in the living present. In breaching the living present, the

specter opens the present, and with that opening, extends the principle of responsibility

beyond the present. The specter recalls us to our responsibility and the justice owed to

those who lie outside the present to the possibility of justice by, the ghosts of those who

are not yet born or who are already dead (SM, xix).

4. The specterwhat is there and not there at the same timeis what spooks. It is the es

spucht, literally, it ghosts (SM, 172). The it here, like that in its raining, does not

refer to anything specific, even something as nebulous as an apparition; rather, it ghosts

is used in the same impersonal verbal form as the es gibt. The spooking of the specter

is a passive movement of apprehension (SM, 172); it is a stirring of the spirit that

comes upon us, not an intentional act of the ego. What spooks us is the strange, the

Unheimlich; spooking is an effect of the responding to the stranger. Simply looking at

13
Derridas characterization of the specter as the no-longer and yet-to-be that infiltrates and opens up the
now clearly recalls his deconstructive reading of Husserls theory of internal time consciousness. See
Speech and Phenomena, 60-69.

71
the ghost, standing back and coldly analyzing it, developing theories about it, will never

let us know the specter. One has to speak to it despite the uneasiness and apprehension it

engenders. And this is precisely what Marx understood: the scholar does not believe in

ghosts and therefore seeks always to maintain a strict division between the real and unreal

with the hope of stabilizing what tries to slip between these categories. Marxat least a

certain MarxDerrida tells us, was a scholar willing to be spooked. He knew how to

speak to ghosts and was mad enough to unlock the possibilities offered by addressing

ghosts. Being spooked, being unsettled, is the state in which we experience the opening

to what is coming but what cannot be expected.

The Two Voices of Marx

The specter is more than an irreducible element. [T]he figure of the ghost is not just one

figure among others. It is perhaps the hidden figure of all figures (SM, 120). The title

of Derridas book and recurring phrase the specters of Marx follows the logic of the

double genitive: the specters it refers to are the ghosts that haunted Marx and the

remnants of Marx that continue to haunt us. This amphiboly provides the fulcrum for the

deconstructive reading of Marx; it hints at Marxs relationship to ghosts, a relationship

that points up two different voices in his writings. The first is the voice of Wissenschaft,

dialectical materialism, etc., that is heard in the capitalist critiques of Marxism that seeks

to drive out the ghosts contaminating the concrete world. The second is a messianic

voice that hears the call of those specters to whom responsibility is owed. It is this latter

voice that Derrida will draw out through his deconstructive reading.14

14
As always, Derrida reads with two hands, following assiduously and indefatigably the unstable limit
that divides what we might call the logic of a textits fundamentally aporetic or undecidable basic
concepts and distinctionsfrom the intentions that attempt to govern that text, the author-ity that tries to
dissolve or control those aporias. As is so often the case, Derrida focuses this double gesture in the

72
 Marx believed the world contained too many ghosts: ghosts of religion, ghosts of

commodity fetishism, even the ghost of Communism. His task was to drive out these

ghosts or, in the case of Communism, turn it into concrete reality, which is another way

of driving it out. In this first, most readily apparent voice, Marx speaks as the heir to the

philosophical tradition, despite his efforts to free himself of it. He is, for example,

critical of the Young Hegelians for failing to exorcise the ghost of Hegel. One of these,

Max Stirner, shares Marxs goal: both men want to replace the abstract with the concrete;

they want to avoid speculation and get down to what is real. Stirner argues that

exorcising the ghosts produced by abstract thought requires the individual to appropriate

these ideas. There must be an egological conversion in which I as a living ego

overcome these ghosts that haunt me. It is my individual body that allows me to

appropriate these abstractions and make them mine. I, in turn, can appropriate my own

physical existence (SM, 128). For Marx, this approach to exorcism is misconceived:

Stirner turns the living body into nothing but a space for ghosts; in other words, the

ghosts remain, inhabiting the body. The living body is now infected by what is not real,

by death. And for Marx, this points to Stirners larger problem: for all of his desire to get

free of ghosts, he remains haunted by them. Stirner wants to get out from under Hegels

shadow, but fails to understand Hegel well enough to extricate himself from it:

[T]he reproach against Stirner is both that he does not understand Hegel
andthis is not necessarily a contradictionthat he is too Hegelian in his
genealogy of the ghost. This bad brother sees himself accused at once of
being the too filial son and bad son of Hegel. A docile son listens to his
father, he mimes him but does not understand him at all, implies Marx
who would have liked to do not the opposite, that is, become another bad
son, but something else by interrupting filiation (SM, 122).

ambivalent usage of a specific word by the author he is considering, in this case Spectre, Gespenst. Simon
Critchley, Ethics-Politics-Subjectivty: Essays on Derrida, Levinas, and Contemporary French Thought
(London: Verso, 1999) 145.

73
Marx thinks Stirner remains too embedded in the tradition he is trying to critique.

Consequently, he cannot transform it; he can only replicate it in disguised forms (SM,

133).15

By rejecting Stirner, Marx presents himself as a better exorcist. Like Stirner, he

wants to purify life of death, i.e., of spirits, and keep the two realms separate. But where

Stirner tries to subsume Hegelian Geist in the ego of the single individual, Marx thinks

we need to exorcise the ghost of absolute spirit and replace it with economic reality, i.e.

with presence. Instead of the body, Marx turns to work. It is through workreal work

on real objectsthat we drive out speculative philosophy.

One scene of Marxs attempts at exorcism is in his analysis of the fetishization of

commodities. Once an object becomes a commodity, it is animated by something beyond

the physical reality of the thing; a spirit hovers around it. [The commoditys] analysis

brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and

theological niceties.16 The objects in the market assume a spectral quality (as opposed

to the qualities found in objects of use); exchange value is a ghostly quality that haunts an

object that initially possessed only use value. To explain this characteristic of

commodities, Marx compares it to religion: religion ascribes independence and autonomy

to human creations in the same way the market gives artifacts independence.

[Exchange value] is nothing but the definite social relation between men
themselves which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation
between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy we must take flight
into the misty realm of religion. There the products of the human brain

15
I am focusing here only on the deconstructive analysis of Marxs own analysis of Stirner. For criticisms
of Derridas overlooking of the historical aspects that were at work in Marxs reading of Stirner, see
Ghostly Demarcations, 140-144.
16
Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin
Books, 1990) 163.

74
 appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own, which
enter into relations both with each other and with the human race.17

Religion thus becomes a paradigm of the object of ideological critique because it gives

corporeal form to ghosts. Only the end of capitalistic modes of production and the

elimination of market forces will exorcise these ghosts. The whole mystery of

commodities, all the magic and necromancy [Spuk] that surrounds the products of labour

on the basis of commodity production, vanishes therefore as soon as we come to other

forms of production.18 Marxs critique of the fetishization of commodities, Derrida

argues, is an effort to keep use-value pure; and this purity is reached once the ghostly

quality of exchange value is purged from it.

This, then, is the operative logic of the first Marxian voice: the real can be

purified, and it can be purified through a critical ontology. This critical ontology means

to deploy the possibility of dissipating the phantom, let us venture to say again of

conjuring it away as representative consciousness of a subject, and of bringing this

representation back to the world of labor, production, and exchange, so as to reduce it to

its conditions (SM, 170). Marx believes his ontology allows him to draw a bright line

between the ghostly and the concrete, the spectral and the ontological, life and death. He

believes he can do it by critiquing the philosophical tradition. As Derridas reading

shows, however, it is precisely this desire for a bright line that draws Marx into the very

tradition he sought to criticize and subjects him to the very criticism he leveled at Stirner.

Marx is equally hostile to ghosts, andlike Stirnerit is all he thinks about. Marx

loved the figure of the ghost, he detested it, he called it to witness his contestation, he was

haunted by it, harassed, besieged, obsessed by it. [] More than others, perhaps, Marx

17
Ibid., 165.
18
Ibid., 169. Quoted in SM, 164.

75
had ghosts in his head and knew without knowing what he was talking about (SM,

106). The specter is a pervasive trope that appears throughout Marxs writings, from his

dissertation on the philosophy of nature in Democritus and Epicurus to The German

Ideology to The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. His entire project, Derrida

claims, is an irresistible but interminable hunt for ghosts, which reappears constantly in

his efforts to drive out the ghosts inherited from German idealism.

But Derrida pushes the logic of purity further. In examining Marxs distinction of

use and exchange value in which use grants a pure value to the object that is then infected

with the impure value of exchange, Derrida shows that use value is not evidently

different from exchange value. The distinction between use and value is an artificial one:

the thing is already structured as an artifact, and it gains exchange value as soon as it

comes to be and is useful; anything can be traded. The ghost of the market, in other

words, always already inhabits the things of use. Derrida shows that there is a need for a

new logic, one that abandons the search for some purely real thing since nothing is free of

ghosts.

What Derrida discovers within Marxs critical ontology, is a second voice, one

operating unbeknownst to Marx and at cross-purposes with this quest for purity. This

voice

calls for questions more radical than the critique itself and than the
ontology that grounds the critique. These questions are not destabilizing
as the effect of some theoretico-speculative subversion. They are not
evenquestions but seismic events. [] These seismic events come from
the future, they are given from out of the unstable chaotic, and dis-located
ground of the times. A disjointed or dis-adjusted time without which there
would be neither history, nor event, nor promise of justice (SM, 170).

This is the voice of the messianic.

76
The Messianic
The Marx signified by the first voice is finished: communisms collapse ended any

dreams of overturning the modes of production and abolishing private property. But for

Derrida, now is exactly the time that Marx cannot be ignored. The second voice is the

one that remains relevant to and critical of todays political conditions. We have

difficulty hearing it because it has been so thoroughly forced into the background.

Marxists have ignored it in their eagerness to implement Marxs theories in and through

rigorous programs. Capitalisms triumphalists have drowned it out with their

proclamations of the death of communism and their dismissals of Marxism as nothing

more than a failed economic theory. Even Marx himself resisted it and sought to bury it

beneath his philosophical or ontological project (SM, 29-30). But it is precisely this

suppressed voice that Derrida will bring to the surface. What he hears in it is an ethical

and political injunction to resist totalization, an imperative to deconstruct the forms of

thinking that preclude possibilities (SM, 30). The Marxism articulated in this voice is not

deconstruction, nor is deconstruction Marxism (SM, 68); but like deconstruction, it

strives to dislodge any onto-theological program and offers us, as we will see, the

possibility of emancipation (SM, 31, 75).

In this second Marxian voice, Derrida hears the murmurings of a messianic spirit.

To understand what Derrida means by the messianic, we have to understand the

distinction between the messianic and messianisms. Messianisms are concrete

teleologies and eschatologies; they are those systems of belief directed at some utopian

future that will eventually become the present. These may be religious messianisms like

those found in the religions of the Book, but they may also be philosophical or

77
political.19 The common element these systems share is the idea of a determinate future

state held out as the goal toward which everything is moving; it is up to the particular

group privileged in the systeme.g., the Christians, the Jews, al Qaida, the

Republicansto bring it to fruition. For Derrida, messianisms are dangerous and scary

because of the willingness of a systems adherents to crush anyone and everyone standing

in the way of their goal. And they justify crushing their opponents on the grounds that it

is for the greater good: they are in effect killing their opponents in order to save them.

Derrida wants to bracket the content of these messianisms in order to get at the

structure of the messianic, which exceeds the specific promises messianisms make. The

messianic, unlike messianisms, has no determinate content.20 This messianic dimension

does not depend upon any messianism, it follows no determinate revelation, it belongs

properly to no Abrahamic religion.21 Lacking determinable content, the messianic is

not a possible future that will come someday if we can only remove the obstacles. It

offers no future state of affairs that we should be preparing for or working toward. It is a

structural future or an absolute future, and this future is indeterminate:

[T]he messianic promise is directed toward the utterly indeterminable

aspect of the future beyond horizons of expectation, planning, or awaiting.
[] The alterity and nonpresence of this future is so radical that it cannot
be restricted to a particular domain of beings or appearances, nor can it be
conceptualized. It is not a horizon of expectation or of possibilities
19
Derrida acknowledges that messianism carries with it religious connotations, but he stresses that his
religious language is used only for its essentially strategic and merely rhetorical or pedagogical value.
See his Marx & Sons in Ghostly Demarcations, 254.
20
Derrida has in the past hesitated over the idea of the messianic out of concern that any horizon defines
expectations and pre-empts the coming of the other. In the first version of The Force of Law he equated
the messianic with a regulative idea, if only in terms of their risks. But by 1994 he makes a distinction
between messianic content and messianic form, which is the form of any promise. The form of the
messianic, i.e., messianicity, has no determinable content and thus is not restricted to determinable
horizons. See Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion Without Religion
(Bloomington: Indiana University, 1997) 117-118, 134-143. Hereafter abbreviated in the text as PTJD.
21
Jacques Derrida, Faith and Knowledge: the Two Sources of Religion at the Limits of Reason Alone
in Religion, ed. by Derrida and Gianni Vattimo, trans. Samuel Weber (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1998) 18.

78
 projected onto the future (such as a utopia), but precisely names what I
would call the blind spot in any horizon whereby it gives way to other
horizons, other hopes and interpretations.22

This future remains out in front of us, a promise we cannot hope to fulfill. But the

structure of the avenirthe future, but literally the a-venir, the to comeis not a

perpetual lack of actualization; it is an open-endedness that disrupts the present, forcing it

to remain open to new and unforeseen possibilities. It shows us that things could be

otherwise; but because these possibilities are unforeseen, they cannot be planned for or

outlined. Messianicity itself opens horizons to the promise of something new.

To illustrate the difference between the messianic and concrete messianisms,

Derrida offers a reading of Fukuyamas The End of History and the Last Man, a new

gospel, the noisiest, the most mediatized, the most successful one on the subject of the

death of Marxism as the end of history (SM, 56). Fukuyama argues that with the

collapse of communism, democracy and the free market are now able to usher in the

future Reagan and Milton Friedman predicted. Operating out of a Hegelian/Kojevian

conception of the end of history, Fukuyama proclaims the triumph of liberal democracy:

the threatening ghost of communism has been exorcised, and now we can get down to the

real business at hand, viz. spreading the good news of democracy and capitalism.

Fukuyamas text is a gospel insofar as it responds to a question it never questions. His

stance is not critical; it is evangelical. He embraces fully the flow of events that point to

the dawning of a new political day in which freedom is a universal condition. This

freedom is only possible because of the alliance of democracy and the free market, and

22
Matthias Fritsch, The Promise of Memory: History and Politics in Marx, Benjamin, and Derrida
(Albany: SUNY, 2005) 71.

79
this alliance is responsible for the progress of the last twenty-five years of the 20th

century.

The problem with such a view of democracy is that it relies on a set of

unconsidered metaphysical distinctions, viz. ideal/real, essence/fact, concept/reality.

Fukuyama admits that the progress toward this utopian future has not been consistent.

No one can deny that the history of the twentieth century has been marked by evils: the

rise of genocidal, technologically advanced regimes; the widening gap between rich and

poor; environmental degradation. But, Fukuyama assures us, these evils are merely

empirical phenomena; they do not and cannot refute the ideal history is realizing. Of

course we still have poverty, but demanding more social welfare to correct market

inequalities is only going to prevent the free market from doing what it does best, viz.

delivering goods and services in the most efficient way. We may not be there yet, but

someday all of this injustice will be a thing of the past. This is Fukuyamas standard

response: when the news is good, it is because liberal democracy is with us and bringing

about a harmonious order; when concrete objections to the triumph of democracy arise,

liberal democracy is an ideal that, once we get there, will set all things right. Depending

on how it works to his advantage and serves his thesis, Fukuyama defines liberal

democracy here as an actual reality and there as a simple ideal (SM, 62). He

simultaneously treats the ideal as both finite (because it has already been realized) and

infinite (because differs from empirical reality and because it remains at the end of our

long-term struggle) (SM, 66).

Derridas critique of Fukuyama draws out the same struggle to maintain the strict

division found in Marxs first voice: the real and the ideal, actuality and ideality keep

80
bleeding into each other. This division creates a fundamental contradiction in

Fukuyamas thinking, but it is only by keeping these realms separate that Fukuyama is

able to turn democracy into a regulative idea that allows us to tolerate injustice in the

belief that it will eventually right itself. The ideals of Fukuyamas, and those of any other

messianism, operate as formed horizons we can determine and use to measure our

progress.

To Fukuyamas ideal democracy Derrida opposes the idea of democracy to come.

The difference is this: Fukuyama understands democracy as a concrete, possible future

we can make into reality; Derrida understands democracy as a promise that keeps the

future structurally open. In other words, democracy to come does not afford us the

luxury of a messianism. It does not provide a set program of action and clear goalposts

by which we can measure our progress toward utopia. It is not the democracy Fukuyama

trumpets because democracy to come cannot become a regulative ideal; it is completely

open-ended. To this extent, the effectivity or actuality of the democratic promise, like

that of the communist promise, will always keep within it, and it must do so, this

absolutely undetermined messianic hope at its heart, this eschatological relation to the to-

come of an event and of a singularity, of an alterity that cannot be anticipated (SM, 65).

When messianisms close off this openness in expectation of their particular future, they

no longer allow for the possibility of anything new appearing: what does not fit their

ideal must be eliminated. The democracy to come, however, is absolute hospitality, an

openness to what we cannot expect. It retains the structure of the emancipatory promise,

and thereby keeps the present structurally open to the future and to justice. Injustice is no

81
longer a temporary shortcoming of the system; it is simply intolerable. To understand

why, we need to look briefly at the role of justice in deconstruction.

Justice

In Force of Law: The Mystical Foundation of Authority, Derrida argues that there is

something undeconstructible, which is justice.23 As an undeconstructible element, it is

what he calls a quasi-transcendental structure. It is not real, but it is not ideal either. It

is not present, but neither is it part of a future present. It is always just out of our

conceptual and actual grasp, which drives us to seek it further. And because it is

unknowable, it cannot function as a foundation; but the undeconstructible is not for all

that an anti-foundationalist concept, either: while it is unknowable, it is operating in and

on deconstruction.

Derridas analysis of justice reveals a structural gap between the law and justice,

between the universal and the singular, and it is here deconstruction takes place. The law

is schematic and universal: it is responsible for all and therefore cannot attend to the

singular. It applies to everyone in the same way because it is a pre-programmed set of

rules that must be obeyed; this is why it works as a means of establishing social order.

Justice, on the other hand, is concerned with the singular, which exists as an exception to

the systematic workings of the law. It pertains to the unique and particular case that must

be examined in its singularity rather than ignored in the universal schema of the law.

Where there are no proper names for the law, justice is all about proper names. Without
23
This was a very striking claim for Derrida to make; at the time, it was assumed that nothing was
undeconstructible. He will go on to develop this idea and eventually argue that behind any deconstructive
analysis there is an affirmation of something undeconstructible; it is precisely the undeconstructible that
provokes and drives the deconstructive analyses of various concepts and structures. Derrida, Force of
Law: The Mystical Foundation of Authority. Trans. Mary Quaintance. In Deconstruction and the
Possibility of Justice, ed. Drucilla Cornell et al. (New York: Routledge, 1992) 14. Hereafter abbreviated in
the text as MFA.

82
this singularity, justice becomes nothing more than juridical-moral rules, norms everyone

must follow. It slips back into the totalizing horizons of equivalence and calculation one

finds with the law (SM, p. 28). It is this focus on singularity that makes justice

undeconstructible; it requires knowing what is just in every circumstance.

Deconstruction makes justice possible because it opens the law to the possibility

of justice. At the same time, justice qua the undeconstructible sets deconstruction in

motion. Derridas analysis of justice is useful here because it illustrates how

deconstruction operates by locating aporiasthe inherent paradoxes contained and, all

too often, concealed in a conceptand by pushing them further to show the instability of

our most fundamental ideas. Such aporias are crucial to justice because they slow down,

or even temporarily stop, the machinations of the law. Law is the element of

calculation, and it is just that there be law, but justice is incalculable, it requires us to

calculate with the incalculable; and aporetic experiences are the experiences, as

improbable as they are necessary, of justice, that is to say of moments in which the

decision between just and unjust is never insured by a rule (MFA, 16). Without these

aporias that demand attention to the singular, the law would simply function as a

programmable system; there would be no need for judgment. Derrida uncovers three

such aporias in which the law and justice intermingle.

(1) The aporia of the rule and its suspension. A rule operates through regularity: it

imposes structure and control only through repetition, which means that it must apply

consistently in every case. To do so, it has to operate blindly. We cannot follow or

impose a rule on a case-by-case basis; doing so renders the rule arbitrary. But the

demand for justice is what is required here and now and with an eye to the particulars of

83
every case (SM, 31). Justice must suspend and reinvent the law with every decision. A

just decision is reached only when the judge re-invents the law by judging its proper

application to a particular situation. Such a decision is both regulated and unregulated; it

operates within the law and responds to justice. The decision, then, is not completely

arbitrary or based on the whim of the judge, but neither is it totally bound by the legal

system (MFA, 23).

(2) Undecidability. A decision is truly possible only at the moment of undecidability. At

such moments, we lose the rules or algorithms we normally rely on when we act.

Undecidability is the opposite of such programmability: with the undecidable, there is no

pattern or program to follow; we are completely on our own. The undecidable is not

merely the oscillation or the tension between two decisions; it is the experience of that

which, though heterogeneous, foreign to the order of the calculable and the rule, is still

obligedto give itself up to the impossible decision, while taking account of law and

rules (MFA, 24). All judgment depends upon undecidability. Justice comes only in the

instant of decision, in the moment of action in response to a singular situation. This

means, of course, that it cannot last because the decision, once made, reintroduces the

system of the law. Undecidability persists, though; it is a ghost in the haunting sense of

unease that follows my decision and action.

(3) Urgency. The final aporia arises from the realization that justice cannot be deferred;

we must respond now. But if we are not simply applying a rule in a fashion we are

familiar with, if we are reinventing the rule for the particular case before us, then justice

also precedes knowledge. Deliberation no longer gets us to a decision. We are acting

84
without certainty and without total knowledge. We cannot wait until we have all the

factsthat would mean never making a decision since gathering all the necessary

information would take an infinite amount of time.24 But this also means that the instant

of decision is madness. Justice and its demand for a decision leads us to a gap that

requires a leap, that is, a non-cognitive move. My decision does not belong to the order

of knowledge because it is not the product of a deliberative process.25

These aporias reveal justice to be a momentary opening up of the homogenizing and

normalizing structures of the law that allows the singularity and the otherness of the

individual be recognized (SM, 29). As soon as a decision is made, the homogenizing and

normalizing systems enclose the individual once again. Here we find the link between

the messianic and justice: as a structural openness to the future, the messianic is an

openness in which justice is the coming of the other. The movement beyond the law to

the other is a movement that disrupts the law and our own self-possession and self-

presence. It is a disjoining of the present; it pulls the self-presence of the present open so

that the other may appear (SM, 22, 28). But this openness and this coming occur without

any horizon of expectation. This means that the other is not appearing as an other I am

expecting; such an other would be already reduced to what I know. The expected other

24
Derrida alluded to this dilemma as early as Cogito and the History of Madness: I do not know to what
extent Foucault would agree that the prerequisite for a response to such questions is first of all the internal
and autonomous analysis of the philosophical content of philosophical discourse. Only when the totality of
this content will have become manifest in its meaning for me (but this is impossible) will I rigorously be
able to situate it in its total historical form. It is only then that its reinsertion will not do violence, that there
will be a legitimate reinsertions of this philosophical meaning itself (CHM, 44). Karin De Boer brings this
question of acting in spite of ones undecidability back to Hamlet: The difference betweenHamlet and
Laertes resides exclusively in the fact that Hamlet cannot but let his acting be haunted by the unsettling
insight into the utter precariousness of any effort to let justice prevail. Enter the Ghost/Exit the Ghost/Re-
enter the Ghost: Derridas Reading of Hamlet in Specters of Marx, Journal of the British Society for
Phenomenology 33.1 (January 2002): 31.
25
For an interesting application of these notions of justice to Latin American politics, see Diane Enns,
Emancipatory Desire and the Messianic Promise, Philosophy Today 44 (2000): 175-186. Enns also
offers a clear response to Critchleys conflation of undecidability with indecision.

85
would thus already be the same and would already fit within my realm of experience.

But justice demands hospitality to the other, which means allowing the other to appear as

other. The spirit of hospitality, the spectrality of welcoming power, is a messianic

opening to what is coming, to what cannot be awaited or recognized in advance, for

whom one leaves a completely open, empty place. The spectral arrivant does not

confirm the horizon of the same (PTJD, 130). The other is something radically

different, something new. This makes the other something to welcome, but also a

potential threat: The messianic exposes itself to absolute surprise and, even if it always

takes the phenomenal form of peace or of justice, it ought, exposing itself so abstractly, to

be prepared (waiting without awaiting itself) for the best as for the worst, the one never

coming without opening the possibility of the other.26 Derrida recognizes that opening

up normalizing systems and allowing the other to come means opening ourselves up to

the possibility of evil. It unsettles; it spooks us. But the alternativethe closing off of

all possibility within a totalizing systemis worse. How we should welcome the other,

how we can allow the other to appear without normalizing the other is what we must

examine next.

26
Derrida, Faith and Knowledge, 17.

86
 Chapter 4: Foucaults Shifting Conception of Normalization

So far, what we have seen in Foucaults early writings on madness is an account

of how society generates the other. But his analysis of Tuke and Pinel, two pioneers of

modern psychiatry, reveals Foucaults implicit recognition that the generation of the other

produces a concomitant drive to reclaim that other. The system, the economy, that is

created is always re-appropriating that which it marginalizes so that liberationeven if it

is liberation by exileis impossible.

This chapter follows Foucaults critique of institutional normalization, first by

looking at Foucaults archeology of Tuke and Pinel from History of Madness, and then

by examining his lectures on psychiatry from 1973. What these lectures show is

Foucaults evolving understanding of the role that power plays within institutions and a

clearer conception of just how power constitutes and reclaims the other.

The Analysis of Tuke and Pinel

Whiggish histories of psychiatry herald the arrival of physicians such as Tuke and Pinel

as liberators of the mad. Until their arrival, these histories claim, madness was simply

unrecognized mental illness; it took a new, more objective, and more rational approach to

medicine to understand the true nature of the mad.1 Pinel, the story goes, inaugurated the

new asylum when he entered Bictre and courageously ordered the chains removed from

those imprisoned there.2 From that moment on, the old, repressive methods of

confinement gave way to revolutionary treatments designed not simply to warehouse the

1
Foucault, Mental Illness & Psychology, 64.
2
The legend ignores a deeper, more telling irony: Pinels assistant, Pussin, did, in fact, order the chains
removed from about forty patientsbut promptly had the patients placed in camisoles de force, or
straitjackets. See Jill Harsin, Gender, Class, and Madness in Nineteenth-Century France, French
Historical Studies 17.4 (Fall 1992): 1050.

87
mad, but to cure them. In these histories, Tuke and Pinel are humane pioneers, ushering

in the modern era of positivist psychiatry.

The end of the eighteenth century did see a shifting attitude among physicians

throughout Europe, as well as in England and the United States, regarding the treatment

of madness. What was new to this attitude was not the view that madness was curable;

by this time, many traditional therapies, such as bleedings and purgings, were meant to

cure madness. What was newand what is so important for Foucaultwas the idea that

confinement could do more than just remove a nuisance from polite society; institutions

themselves, it was believed, could be instrumental in making patients better. The asylum

was to become a machine gurir, in the words of Dr. Jacques Tenon.3 It is within

these healing machines, within the asylum, that the space of confinement became

productive, but such changes, Foucault reminds us, were gradual and, more importantly,

unintentional:

Without anything in the institutions really changing, a slow modification

in the meaning of exclusion and of confinement was beginning to appear.
It was beginning to take on positive values, and the empty, colourless and
nocturnal space where unreason had previously been returned to its
nothingness was slowly being peopled with a nature to which this newly
liberated madness was obliged to submit. Confinement, as the separation
of reason and unreason, was not suppressed, but at the heart of its
intentions, the space that it occupied allowed natural powers to appear,
which were more constricting to madness, and more fitted to subjugating it
in its essence than all the repressions and limitations of the previous
system. Madness was to be liberated from this system, so that inside the
space of confinement, now charged with a positive efficacy, it might be
free to cast off its savage liberty, and welcome instead the commands of
nature, which had the force of both truth and law (HM, 337).

This new space of confinement will come to represent the institutionalized space where

patients are returned to their natural state. Psychiatry will accept wholesale the notion of

3
Quoted in Harsin, 1053.

88
normality first enacted by confinement. One of Foucaults criticisms of psychiatry is its

failure to recognize normality as a social construct: The psychopathology of the

nineteenth century (and perhaps our own, too, even now) believes that it orients itself and

takes its bearings in relation to a homo natura, or a normal man pre-existing all

experience of mental illness. Such a man is in fact an invention (HM, 129).

Operating under the belief that there is indeed a natural mental state, the early

practitioners of psychiatry relied heavily on a new approach to return patients to this

state. The organization of the physical space of the asylum provided greater freedom in

the sense that patients were no longer chained to walls or locked in cages. But this

physical freedom was quietly offset by a new organization of interior space. Within the

asylums, moral therapy becomes the basic model for treating the insane. The goal was

to return the madman to the truth; madness, in other words, was an error that could be

righted. But it could only be righted if the patient submitted to the doctor because it was

the doctor and his therapeutic methods that could restore the patient to the proper

relations with the truth.4

Moral therapy, for all of its advantages over previous forms of treatment, is not

innocuous. Once we bracket the hagiographies of the typical histoire hospitalire, the

practices of moral therapy begin to look more and more subtlyand more and more

thoroughlycoercive. Beneath the rhetoric of liberation, one finds the actual liberation

of the mad rife with ironies and contradictions: madness is freed, but only after being

4
The division of reason and madness that occurred at the societal level also occurs within the individual. It
produces in humans a powerful forgetting; he was to learn to dominate that great division, and bring it
down to his own level; and make in himself the day and the night . Having mastered his madness, and
having freed it by capturing it in the gaols of his gaze and his morality, having disarmed it by pushing it
into a corner of himself finally allowed man to establish that sort of relation to the self that is known as
psychology (HM, xxxiv).

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situated in a space more rigid and more closed than the original space of confinement; no

longer chained up, the mad are now able to use their free will, except their free will has

been transferred to the will of the physician. The mad are physically free, but they are

simultaneously denied that freedom. This is the central irony for Foucault: the liberation

of the mad comes only with their increased alienation.

[M]adness [after Tuke and Pinel] no longer indicated a certain relation

between men and the trutha relation which, silently at least, always
implied freedom; what it indicated instead was a relation between man and
his own truth. [] While previously he was a Stranger to Being now
he was held trapped in his own truth and thus exiled from it. A Stranger to
himself, Alienated (HM, 516).5

The truth of the individual becomes manifest only in its alienation from the individual.

And it is moral therapy that imposes this alienation. It is the supposition that there is an

essence and a truth that makes moral therapy more insidiously coercive.6

Moral treatment therefore relies on a misconception of the naturalness of

normality and transforms this misconception into a practical and therapeutic concept. It

is an instantiation of normalizing power, shifting the emphasis away from the physical to

the moral and, in doing so, defining a moral space that organizes the guilt of the madman:

Through this guilt, the madman became an object of punishment always

offered to himself and the other; and from that recognition of his status as
object, and his consciousness of his own guilt, the madman was to return
to his consciousness as a free, responsible subject, thereby regaining
reason (HM, 485).

5
[Foucault] uses the terms alienated and alienation in three allied senses. The first derives from the Latin
root alienare, which simply means to make other. The second is that preserved in the English term
alienist, and refers to mental illness or insanity. The third is a complex renversement of the Marxist use
of the term. These three uses of the term govern Foucaults description of the emergence of madness as
mental illness. Eve Tavor Bannet, Structuralism and the Logic of Dissent: Barthes, Derrida, Foucault,
Lacan (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989) 116.
6
The goal was to move beyond controlling the patients simply through threats of physical force; moral
therapy aimed to fundamentally alter the patients relationship with himself. See Andrew Scull, The Most
Solitary of Afflictions: Madness and Society in Britain, 1700-1900 (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1993) 99-100.

90
As Foucault shows, patients were no longer made to feel guilty for being mad; they were

made to feel guilty for disrupting and disturbing society and for failing to act in

accordance with social norms. The policy of kindness and gentleness so apparent in

moral therapy thus relies upon a contractual relationship between the keepers of the

asylum and those housed there that is predicated on punishment: act rationally and

normally, and you may act freely; indulge your madness, engage in abnormal behavior,

and there will be repercussions. In other words, as long as patients adhered to socially

accepted forms of behavior, they would be rewarded. Foucault cites a passage from Tuke

that recounts the introduction of a new patient to the Retreat: the patient was told there

would be no constraints, provided the patient obeyed the rules. As Tuke points out, The

maniac was sensible of the kindness of his treatment. He promised to restrain himself

(HM, 484; Foucaults emphasis). The patients had to learn to restrain themselves, to

conform to expected ways of behaving.

In place of the pathological passions, the forms of treatment used within the

asylums developed by Tuke and Pinel not only organized the fear and guilt of the mad,

but they also instilled new means to treat them. Segregation at Tukes Retreat served two

purposes. On the one hand, it took the patient out of harmful circumstances. Being

surrounded by evil endangered sensitive souls by producing untoward passions such as

hate and disgust, passions that lead to madness. But the real purpose of segregation was

to clear a space in which religion can serve as the controlling force in daily life.

Removing the individual from her own environment meant situating her in a space where

religion could serve as the Law. Religion provided the foundation for controlling

madness because religion represented what cannot go mad; it was understood to be the

91
unassailable core of reason. As such, it served as a principle of coercion. Religious

beliefs and principles were used to force the individual to behave in proper ways:

transgression became a constant threat, and anxiety and fear became perpetual. Guilt

became the madmans relation to his own madness; fear was instilled in his conscience.

The relationship between fear and madness is thus reversed: whereas before, the rational

feared the specter of madness, now madness is what becomes afraid. Fear of violating

the rules, fear of being guilty, fear of transgression becomes the overriding imperative for

the patients. And such fear, it was believed, is therapeutic: it has the power of

disalienation. However, Foucault points out, the religious and moral milieu was

imposed from without, so that madness, without ever being cured, had a restraint placed

upon it (HM, 483).

At the same time, in France, Pinels asylum was imposing these values as law.

In the first case, the asylum was to act as an awakening and a reminder, invoking a

forgotten nature; in the second, it was to act as social displacement, to uproot individuals

from their condition (HM, 495). Pinels asylum operated on the belief that the madman

violated the moral standards of humanity; treatment in the forms of retraining and bodily

and psychic discipline must lead to an affirming of social standards. He saw the asylum

as continuous with social morality and bourgeois values, but affirmation of these

standards required a shift in the patients social situation. Madness for Pinel was a social

failing: environmental conditions produced the moral laxity that gave rise to madness,

and it was the role of the doctor to correct this failing. Unlike Tuke, Pinel regarded

religion as dangerous and believed that excessive religiosity would lead to madness. He

wanted the moral truth of religion but without the iconography. He believed that social

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values provided the bedrock of humanity: A primitive form of morality remained,

ordinarily untouched even by the most extreme forms of dementia (HM, 493). Under

Pinel, the asylum became a neutralized space (HM, 495).

The close contact between the doctor and the patient meant that patients were

subjected to constant observation, and this observation was pervasive and non-reciprocal.

It sought out any and all signs of madness in the behavior of the patients. Tuke held

social gatherings, such as tea parties, for the patients that were really nothing more than

exercises in observation: rather than a simple social event, it is the organization around

the madman of a whole world where everything seems similar and accessible, but to

which he is a perpetual outsider, the Stranger par excellence judged not only on

appearances, but on all that they might reveal and betray despite themselves (HM, 487).

In the houses of confinement, the mad had been subjected to observation, but there they

were objects of spectacle; in the asylum, observation was meant to discern the nature of

the patient. And what the physicians in charge of the asylums realized was that continual

observation, observation of which the patient is aware, forced the mad to objectify

themselves, to see themselves through the eyes of reason. Pinel employed a similar tactic

by which the madman is shown the madness in others, where it appears absurd. This

recognition was then used as a mirror turned back on the madman himself. The madman

was forced to observe himself, thus dissolving his own subjectivity. Realization, or

gaining consciousness was now linked to the shame of being identical to that other,

compromised in him and scorned by oneself even before reaching recognition and

knowledge of oneself (HM, 499-500).

93
 Despite their differences, both Tuke and Pinel turned their patients into objects of

their own judgment. For both, madness was a form of immorality and a condition to be

silenced; the cure for insanity required only the patients that they were responsible for

their own cure. The ultimate goal was to overcome the patients alienation, restore him

to his social instincts, and return him to society as a productive member capable of

joining the work force.7

The Lectures on Psychiatric Power

Given his later analysis, History of Madness certainly has a conceptual crudeness, but

even here we can see the implicit recognition that normalization is at work in institutions.

Foucaults analyses of psychiatry reveal a normalizing tendency in society, but he

approaches this tendency from the standpoint of a general, undifferentiated population

the focus was on the madman caught in the mechanisms of the modern asylum. While he

highlighted certain examples, he was unconcerned with carrying the analysis to the

individual level: the normalizing practices were institutional practices imposed on those

relegated to the asylums. The role of power remained implicit, and Foucault more or less

assumed the connection between power and those subjected to it to be one of domination.

The discussion of confinement presents Foucaults understanding of power as primarily

repressive, as he acknowledged in a later interview with Lucette Finas:

[I]t seems to me, I accepted the traditional conception of power as an

essentially judicial mechanism, as that which lays down the law, which
prohibits, which refuses, and which has a whole range of negative effects:
exclusion, rejection, denial, obstruction, occultation, etc. Now I believe
that conception to be inadequate. It had, however, been adequate to my
purpose in [History of Madness]since madness is a special caseduring
the Classical age power over madness was, in its most important

7
Joseph Cronin, Foucaults Antihumanist Historiography (Lewiston: E. Mellen Press, 2001) 118.

94
 manifestation at least, exercised in the form of exclusion; thus one sees
madness caught up in a great movement of rejection (PK, 183-184).

The conception of power he used, Foucault claims, was a purely negative one: power is

primarily the control and direction of individuals.

In Psychiatric Power, Foucaults lectures of 1972-1973, Foucault begins to

articulate a new understanding of power, and it is here in these lectures that we see the

emergence of disciplinary power.8 In these lectures, Foucault takes up his analysis of

Pinel again. He points to two scenes of healing described by Pinel that provide a more

accurate portrait of how power functions. In the first, a patient who refuses to eat

because he believes he must emulate the practices of anchorites and hermits, not only in

denying himself the pleasures of the flesh but also food. Pussin, Pinels assistant,

confronts the young man, telling him that if he does not eat, he will be severely punished.

The patient is then left in the most painful state, wavering between the idea of the

threatened punishment and the terrifying perspective of the other life (PP, 10). After

several hours, the patient capitulated and ate; he submitted to the treatment and gradually

his condition improved.

The elements of this scene are very important. First, Foucault notes, the

therapeutic act is not directed at the actual cause of the illness. Instead, Pussins actions

focus on the patients behavior. Second, these actions are not forms of medical treatment

for pathological behavior; instead, what we have here is a contest of wills. Third, this

battle of wills initiates a second force relation, one that is internal to the patient, viz. the

patients ide fixe and his fear of punishment. And, when the scene succeeds, there must
8
Michel Foucault, Psychiatric Power: Lectures at the Collge de France, 1973-1974, trans. Graham
Burchell, ed. Jacques Lagrange (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). Hereafter abbreviated in the text
as PP. The lectures contained in this volume, most notably the lecture of November 21, 1973, are
invaluable for tracing the development of Foucaults understanding of power.

95
be a victory in both struggles, the victory of one idea over another, which must be at the

same time the victory of the doctors will over that the patients will (PP, 11). The

fourth aspect of this scene is the production of a moment where the truth appears, where

the patient sees his original belief as erroneous. Consequently, and this is the fifth aspect,

truth no longer requires medical knowledge; it requires the consent of the patient. So

there is a distribution of force, power, the event, and truth here, which is unlike anything

in what could be called the medical model being constructed in clinical medicine in the

same period (PP, 11).

The second scene Pinel recounts is one that Foucault says presents psychiatry as

the regular and concerted manipulation of relations of power. This scene has to do with

the confinement of George III on the advice of Willis. Isolated in a chamber of a remote

palace, George is told that he is no longer the king and that he must submit to his

treatment. Two of his old pages, whom Pinel describes as being of a Herculean stature,

attend him, and yet he must obey them. During a visit from his old doctor, the king

smears feces on the doctor and himself. The pages then enter, seize the king, and

promptly wash his clothes and body. This scene was repeated until the king returned to

health (PP, 20).

George IIIs treatment is what Foucault calls a ceremony of destitution in which

the king is rendered powerless. The signs of the monarchy are stripped away, and he is

reduced to only his body. It is his pages whom Pinel describes as Herculean, which

Foucault regards as an important iconographic point: historically, it was the king who

was described in heroic terms; now the king is described in the language of submission.

And, where a king typically appeared accoutered with the visible and immediate signs of

96
power, we have the pages exercising power over the king. The servants still serve the

king, but they now serve in a disciplinary relation and are no longer serving at the will of

the king (because the king has no will); instead they serve the mechanics of the body.

There is, then, a disconnect between Georges will and his needs, between the law and

the state. Finally, George marks a complete reversal of sovereignty when he covers

himself with feces and throws it at his physician. Throwing feces, Foucault remarks, is

an action of the poor, of those with nothing else to use against the powerful. The pages

intervene and render the body proper and true. What is crucial in this scene is the fact

that the doctor no longer embodies authority: the doctor becomes the watcher; it is the

servants who are the relay of power.9 The pages are not agents of repression; they are not

dominating the king. Instead, they are ensuring that the king maintain some semblance of

normality. The role of the pages and the doctor and the destitution of George illustrate a

fundamental shift in the functioning of power, viz. the shift from sovereign power to

disciplinary power.

The Emergence of Disciplinary Power

Power has typically been thought of in terms of what Foucault calls the repressive

hypothesis, which presents power as a centralized force capable of stifling any and all

opposition. On this model, power maintains itself through the constant repression of the

masses and the continual suppression of the truth. It is a hierarchized and dominating

relationship in which one party commands another; a ruler, even a democratically elected

one, holds power over the ruled. Power, whatever its political form, flows from the top

of the pyramid to the masses below; those found among the masses are purely recipients

9
See Anne Digby, Changes in the Asylum: The Case of York, 1777-1815, The Economic History Review,
New Series 36.2 (May 1983): 218-239.

97
of it. This understanding of power is a holdover from the days when the king personified

power. Power resided in the sovereign, the locus of all power relations, and these

relations were absolute and overwhelming and based on overt domination: displays of

political strength reinforced the understanding among the common people that the

sovereign was the highest earthly power.

Disciplinary power emerged with the establishment of religious institutions and

their role in the management of individuals. Only gradually did it move to society at

large (PP, 41). But as it did, the masses slowly came to be regarded as populations that

required careful and constant control. Power in this form diverges from other forms

theorized by political philosophers such as Aristotle and Machiavelli.

Power would no longer be dealing simply with legal subjects over whom
the ultimate dominion was death, but with living beings, and the mastery it
would be able to exercise over them would have to be applied at the level
of life itself; it was the taking charge of life, more than the threat of death,
that gave power its access even to the body.10

The questions it addresses are no longer broad moral issues or overarching strategies; this

power is focused on the administration and application of various techniques that produce

specific types of subjects. Discipline may be identified neither with an institution nor

with an apparatus; it is a type of power, a modality for its exercise, comprising a whole

set of instruments, techniques, procedures, levels of application, targets; it is a physics

or an anatomy of power, a technology (DP, 215). During the Enlightenment, the task

was no longer to make citizens into juridical subjects, i.e. those who obey the laws

because they were forced to do so; instead, the goal was to produce subjects who were

obedient because they embodied the laws and norms. To achieve this goal, the very

10
Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York:
Vintage, 1990) 142-143. Hereafter abbreviated in the text as HS1.

98
nature of the subjectwho he was and not simply what he didhad to be altered.

Foucault illustrates this shift by pointing to new forms and techniques of discipline that

emerged in various fields throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth century. Concern

over prison reform shifted the focus away from physical pain and torture to rehabilitation.

Punishment was no longer about the criminal act, but about the criminal: prisoners were

subjected to various techniques designed to inculcate personal responsibility, such as

disciplinary regimens that instilled the habits and behaviors that were considered

acceptable to society. Once prisoners were sufficiently disciplined, they would be

obedient, not because they were forced to be but because they had acquired the forms of

behavior that made them into these types of subjects.11

Disciplinary Power

To understand the nature of disciplinary power, it is helpful to contrast it with sovereign

power. Perhaps the most fundamental difference is that disciplinary power is productive

whereas sovereign power is a zero-sum game. Sovereign power appears as an

asymmetric relationship of giving and taking: subjects gave their labor or their service to

the king, and in return the king ensured their protection, for example. During the Thirty

Years War, the army operated according to sovereign power: men gave a certain amount

of time and resources in return for the spoils of war. Elsewhere, people labored for the

Church, and the Church provided religious services. In these operations of power, a

11
What Foucaults writing struggles against is that system of truth wherein the human individual is
constituted as a subject. This subjection has two aspects: on the one hand, the human being is subjected to
the ideology of the universal individual and, thereby, subjects and is subjected by others to the technology
of normalcy. On the other, he is subjected to the ideology of the selftied to his own identity by itand,
thereby, subjected to multiple technologies for its care and development, including techniques of self-
knowledge, conscience, and confession. Mary Rawlinson, Foucault's Strategy: Knowledge, Power, and
the Specificity of Truth, The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 12.4 (1987): 391.

99
contractual relationship is at work, even if the parties are not equals. The kings

geopolitical agenda is met, and the soldiers receive remuneration for their efforts (PP, 42-

43).

Disciplinary power obviates such relations because it has a different object: it

seizes the body of the soldier, not its results. In other words, where sovereign power

simply used the kings subjects as an ad hoc fighting force, disciplinary power makes the

subject into a soldier. For example, by the seventeenth century, the emergence of

standing armies necessitated a new management approach: one cannot have large

numbers of armed men sitting idle. So the time, bodies, and lives of these men were co-

opted; their days were spent training, marching, and maintaining themselves as a fighting

force. Consequently, a soldier became a soldier for life, during war and during peace,

even upon retiring.

Disciplinary power is thus capable of seizing every aspect of subjects. And this

domination is manifested on the individuals body: it is the body that is an object of

power (DP, 26-27). Of course, at one level the body has always been an object of power

since the sovereign always had the right to physically punish his subjects, but disciplinary

power represents something entirely new. The object of this power is the bodys

capabilities, its potential as a productive force. The goal is to render the body docile, to

make it something efficient, useful, and transformable. Thus the body receives training

that increases its efficiency and its ability to perform actions, not merely to signify power

relations.

Discipline increases the forces of the body (in economic terms of utility)
and diminishes these same forces (in political terms of obedience). In
short, it dissociates power from the body; on the one hand, it turns it into
an aptitude, a capacity, which it seeks to increase; on the other hand, it

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 reverses the course of energy, the power that might result from it, and
turns it into a relation of strict subjection. [] [D]isciplinary coercion
establishes in the body the constricting link between an increased aptitude
and an increased domination (DP, 138).

So we find a new form of power operating through disciplines whose purpose is to

produce specific qualities in individuals. Peasant boys, for example, could be turned into

soldiers with the qualities and capabilities necessary for engaging in modern warfare.

These qualities are not innate or pre-existing; disciplines do not draw out what was

already there. Instead, disciplines instill qualities by cultivating the body of the

individual.12

This new emphasis on efficiency and productivity meant greater attention was

paid to those receiving various training methods, particularly to their bodily

comportment. With the body as the focus, technicians and administrators are responsible

for this new form of power, not philosophers.13 What these technicians understood was

that the body is capable of incredible adaptation and greater manipulation. Given the

right practices and training regimens, it can be trained and reshaped. Through the

attention paid to an individuals form while she performs an action, her body is trained to

achieve specific goals (DP, 136). In acting on this realization, these administrators

developed a political technology of the body, i.e., a knowledge of the body that goes

beyond mere physiology (DP, 30). The regimens they designed comprised exercises that

imposed repetitive tasks on the body and introduced a whole other scale of attention:

12
Disciplines are to individuals what the individual in Lockes account is to the land cultivated by that
persona means of inculcating properties in the individual that were not there before (Ransom, 18).
13
[Foucaults] point is that these men, whose names are not familiar to most of us, laid down policies for
actual application. They elaborated precise techniques for ordering and disciplining individuals, while still
using the mainstream Western tradition of political thought to mask their particular tactics. [] For them,
political rationality no longer sought to achieve the good life nor merely to aid the prince, but to increase
the scope of power for its own sake by bringing the bodies of the states subjects under tighter discipline
(Dreyfus and Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 137).

101
there was a new focus on the smallest components. The most seemingly insignificant

gestures come into focus. Suddenly, for example, educators take notice of the proper

posture the student must take before practicing handwriting; attention is paid to how far

from the desk his torso is, how his hands are arranged. Military trainers show concern

over where a soldiers thumb should rest on his rifle. Discipline, in other words, attends

to details. For the disciplined man, as for the true believer, no detail is unimportant, but

not so much for the meaning that it conceals within it as for the hold it provides for the

power that wishes to seize it (DP, 140). The focus on details positions this micro-

physics of power to address hitherto unnoticed procedures and processes, and to exploit

them as the means by which power relations are invested in the body. By training (and

thereby enforcing) these particular postures, for example, the subjects body is reworked:

not only is it more obedient, but it is also more useful and efficient in the performance of

its operations. Thus, unlike sovereign power, this new power is a strategy of domination,

but domination without appropriation: disciplinary power does not seize the individual or

overtly force itself upon him. It creates or constitutes the individuals dispositions and

bodily movements by enacting a set of techniques for the individual to follow. One sees

how this form of power differs from that which came before: disciplinary power is

productive, not repressive. Rather than constraining subjects and restricting their actions,

it makes the subject more capable and more effective.14

14
As we will see, the process of instilling new capabilities imposes other costs: Normalizing disciplinary
practices may tremendously enhance a persons ability to perform certain kinds of functions or accomplish
certain kinds of tasks, but they decrease the number of different ways a person might be able to respond in
a given situation; they narrow behavioral options. Ladelle McWhorter, Bodies and Pleasures: Foucault
and the Politics of Sexual Normalization (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999) 179-180.

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Disciplinary Power Individualizes
As power takes on a more refined scale of control, it enacts a reversal of focus. Sovereign

relations individualize, but this individualization occurs at the summit of the hierarchy

and is only in relation to the sovereign himself. The king was the figure most readily

seen; his power was visibly manifest, whether in his actions, carried out directly or

indirectly, or in his person. The visible power of the sovereign was total, but it remained

at the surface: the everyday lives of the masses were not closely regulated; the only

intersection of an individual life and sovereign power came from violations of the law.

For the most part, the masses remained invisible and anonymous; they were insignificant

and unknown. All of this changes with disciplinary power: In a disciplinary regime,

individualization is descending: as power becomes more anonymous and more

functional, those on whom it is exercised tend to be more strongly individualized (DP,

193).

In a wide range of specific arease.g., penal reform, military training, psychiatric

medicine, and educationwhat took prominence was no longer the sovereign, but the

subject. It is the subject who will be known as completely and in as much detail as

possible, while the individuals running the particular system will remain anonymous,

hidden by the machinery of power. Disciplinary power reverses these relations. Now, it

is power itself which seeks invisibility and the objects of powerthose on whom it

operatesare made the most visible.15 In the case of King George, for instance, George

the patient usurps the position of object of visibility George the king once held, while

Willis remains in the background, letting the normalizing system run its course.

15
Dreyfus and Rabinow, ibid., 159.

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 The visibility imposed by the reversal of individualization does more than merely

allow for the observation of the subject. Because the system and the practitioners within

the system are explicit in their bringing the subject to the fore, it makes the subject aware

that she is the object of observation. The student knows both the school and her parents

are tracking her work. The employee knows his supervisors will evaluate his

performance in annual reviews. This awareness does more than produce an obedient

subject. It is more insidious than that. It is meant to produce a subject who imposes

disciplinary power on himself:

He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes

responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play
spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in
which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his
own subjection (DP, 202-203).

Nowhere is the constancy and force of this power so clearly seen as in Benthams

Panopticon. It is, Foucault says, the political and technical formulation of disciplinary

power (PP, 73).16 Bentham conceived an entirely new design for a prison in which

prisoners were confined to cells housed in a ring; at the center of this ring was a tower

that permitted a full view of every cell. Each cell had bars on one wall and, on the

opposite wall, a window that allowed light to pour into the cell. This backlighting made

it possible for authorities in the tower to see exactly what each prisoner was doing, but

the authorities themselves were hidden from view. This design produced a state of

16
Peter Dews maintains that the Panopticon encompasses the conception of power that Foucault has been
circling since his earliest works: It not only condenses the argument of Discipline and Punish, but may be
seen as a summation of the analysis of modern forms of social administration which Foucault has been
conducting ever since Madness and Civilization, combining the themes of a centralization, and increasing
efficiency of power with the theme of the replacement of overt violence by moralization. Peter Dews,
Power and Subjectivity in Foucault, New Left Review 144 (March-April 1984): 77.

104
permanent visibility for the prisoners; they never knew when they were being observed,

so they learned to act always as though they were. The brilliance of Benthams design

was its simplicity: discipline is imposed, but its only instrument is light (PP, 77-78). It is

their own permanent and absolute visibility that reforms prisoners.

The Panopticon epitomized Enlightenment institutional ideals: effective, but not

violent; permanent, but efficient. It was not merely a schema; it was a multiplier. It

intensified power and distributed it more efficiently while rendering its targets more exact

(PP, 74). Part of the efficiency of this power relation was due its anonymity: no one is

fully or completely in control. The power that is operating on the prisoners is completely

divorced from those who exercise it. Power has its principle not so much in a person as

in a certain concerted distribution of bodies, surfaces, lights, gazes; in an arrangement

whose internal mechanisms produce the relation in which individuals are caught up (DP,

202). While there are people sitting at the head of its organization, it is the apparatus, the

machinery of power, that is really at work. There is nothing special about the person in

the tower observing the prisoners; the power of the guards derives only from their

position in the institution.

This enables the disciplinary power to be both absolutely indiscreet, since

it is everywhere and always alert, since by its very principle it leaves no
zone of shade and constantly supervises the very individuals who are
entrusted with the task of supervising; and absolutely discreet, for it
functions permanently and largely in silence (DP, 177).

Power is no longer about who holds it, but where it functions. Anyone can assume the

supervisory role; it is just a matter of having the proper training. In fact, even the

watchers are watched, making power into a continuous and anonymous band.

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Disciplinary Power is Continuous
Sovereign power relies on a founding moment, which makes it susceptible to rupture. It

must be periodically reinforced through ritualized reactivations of that founding to

maintain itself, and because of this reinforcement, violence underlies it. Take for

example the violent spectacle of Damienss being drawn and quartered that opens

Discipline and Punish: the ostensible purpose of this barbarous execution was to deter

other would-be assassins, but its primary purpose was to exhibit Louis XVs power.

Through such a spectacle, the king reasserted his role as the ultimate power on earth.

Disciplinary power does not need such ritualized reactivation; it functions

continuously because it constitutes a system in which the individual remains always

already caught. The system relies on organized techniques that enhance the productivity

of individuals and, more importantly, remain apparently innocuous. These techniques

might be something as simple as alphabetization or as involved as developing new

architectural designs. But whatever their form, these technologies enable disciplinary

power to operate on four levels.

First, disciplinary power is cellular: it draws up tables and distributes space.

Disciplines control space in order to distribute subjects more effectively. In some cases,

this entails grouping people in an enclosed space, such as a workshop or college campus.

The goal is not to imprison, but to maximize advantages and minimize costs. Collecting

people in one location enables them to work more efficiently. And because many people

are living or working closely together in the same location, space has to be partitioned:

thus disciplinary space is divided up to distribute bodies and to facilitate the locating and

identifying of individuals. Each individual is given his or her own space because it

makes supervision easier. A second consequence of enclosing people is the development

106
of functional sites: space can no longer be undefined; to be useful, it must be designated

for certain purposes.

Second, it prescribes movements and controls activity. Disciplines aim at the

exhaustion of time: there is the need to make the most of time. There is a refinement of

time and daily life into its smallest increments. The timetable governs daily life as time

itself is reduced to minutes and seconds in order to make all time useful and to minimize

distractions. At the same time, time penetrates the body: the body is made to adhere to a

specific rhythm. Because time is best used when the body is used correctly, a new

emphasis is placed on the gesture. Frederick Taylors motion studies are a nice example

of this.17 With the analysis of the gesture, one begins to examine the bodys relation to

objects: there is what Foucault calls an instrumental coding of the body in which the

body is broken down into parts that correlate to parts of the object being used (DP, 153).

Learning to drive a stick shift, for example, demands the coordination of all four of limbs

as they perform specific and different actions simultaneouslythe right foot depresses

the gas pedal, the left foot releases the clutch, the right arm pushes the shifter into gear,

and the left arm steersall while navigating through traffic. We can do this only because

at an earlier point we practiced making our bodies perform each action. After trial and

error (and, perhaps, burning out a clutch or two), we work as one with car, and this new

body-object produces greater power and more efficiency.

Third, it imposes exercises and accumulates time. Disciplines capitalize time by

having it function as a series. Time is divided into specific segments and organized

according to an analytical plan: each segment employs various exercises appropriate to

17
For an examination of Taylorism in light of Foucault, see John ONeill, The Disciplinary Society: From
Weber to Foucault, The British Journal of Sociology 37.1 (Mar., 1986): 42-60.

107
ones place in the plan, and each segment concludes with an exam to determine the

individuals ability and to guarantee that the proper level of proficiency has been reached.

Exercises are graduated techniques that impose repetitive and varied tasks on the body.

They aim at a specific point that allows for assessment either in relation to that point or to

others. What develops is a series showing each individuals rank. All of this ensures the

control of individuals and an investment of power: it allows those supervising to

intervene at any point in the shaping of individuals.

Fourth, it employs tactics, which construct mechanisms that raise a disciplinary

practice to the highest level and composes forces. Disciplines bring individual bodies

together to function as a coherent force, e.g., armies, workers, sports teams. The

individual body is now understood as an element that can be moved about to other places.

Time is adjusted to form a whole: the time of each individual is incorporated into the

larger process, e.g., schools using students to tutor other students makes learning

permanent and continual. There is also a precise system of command: communication is

reduced to signals, e.g. bells signaling the time to change classes.

Every element has its place in the disciplinary system just as every individual has

his or her rank in the system. All movement within the system is thus clearly regulated.

Even movements between disciplinary systems are regulated since different systems

articulate power between them. Historically, there has been an interplay between the

courts and the military, for example, and between the educational system and factories.

Institutions of all types exist in a carceral web, that is, the growing continuum that

extends from prisons to any organization that employs disciplinary procedures in order to

correct or educate its members. These institutionse.g., charitable societies, moral

108
improvement associations, workers lodging housesare not prisons; rather, they

adopted some of the methods developed and perfected within prisons. In these cases,

however, the point is not to punish. This web is meant to prevent the downward slide

that now exists between minor offences, deviations from the norms of acceptable

behavior, and delinquency (DP, 299). By establishing this link and by presenting the role

of carceral institutions as preventative, the system succeeds in making the power to

punish natural and legitimate, in lowering at least the threshold of tolerance to penality

(DP, 301).

Disciplinary Powers Effect on the Subject

Just as we have moved away from power embodied by the sovereign, we have moved

away from the subject as sovereign. Concerns with domination and coercion must give

way since the consent of the subject, her willingness to be acted upon by power, is no

longer at issue. Disciplinary power operates beneath the level of coercion and consent.

Instead, it establishes a micro-economy in which individuals have exercised over them

a constant pressure to conform to the same model, so that they might all be subjected to

subordination, docility, attention in studies and exercises, and to the correct practice of

duties and all the parts of discipline. So that they might all be like one another (DP,

182). Consequently, there is a shift in the kinds of subjects that get produced: no longer

is the subject a juridical subject, i.e., one that obeys the laws because of societal pressures

to do so; one is now constituted as an obedient subject who embodies the laws and norms

because he has acquired the forms of behavior that make him so. Individuals existed

prior to disciplinary power, of course, but the mode of individualization was

fundamentally different. The modern individual qua subject does not pre-exist

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disciplinary power (PP, 56). By producing subjects, disciplinary power produces

particular types of subjects, viz. those who have been normalized.

This stands in marked opposition to the relations within sovereign power, which

are not isotopic: they do not constitute a unitary hierarchical table with the subordinate

elements and the superordinate elements (PP, 43). The relations of sovereign power are

heterogeneous: there are relations of sovereignty between the king and the subject,

between priest and the laity, and between landowner and the serf. But all these

relationships cannot be integrated within a genuinely single system (PP, 43-44). There

is no clear common denominator between the king, the priest, and the landowner, for

example. And without any common denominator, sovereign power becomes costly and

inefficient to scale.

Disciplinary power, on the other hand, allows for homogeneity because it posits a

common denominator, a norm by which individuals can be measured and ranked.

Norms homogenize the group by enabling all differences among its

members to be understood as deviations from a norm and therefore as
essentially related to it. No one stands outside of normalization; everyone
can be located with regard to the norms. There is no pure difference, only
measurable deviance. At the same time, norms individualize each member
of the group by enabling a precise characterization of that person (animal,
etc.) as a case history of particular, measurable degrees of deviation from
the set of norms.18

The norm is, Foucault says, one of the great instruments of power (DP, 184). It

imposes homogeneity while singling out individuals, and it does this through assessment.

Examinations, for instance, whether they are medical examinations, psychological tests,

or entrance exams, render a subject visible to those in positions of authority; in evaluating

his performance they determine how closely he approximates a norm and what further

18
McWhorter, 156.

110
training might be necessary. Those who fall outside the accepted parameters of what is

normal are subjected to forms of remediation and rehabilitation.

Norms show the ubiquity of power and its role in all forms of human relations.

All the training associated with disciplinary power requires a norm by which to judge

and rank those undergoing the regimen. While the training is directed at individuals, the

task is the conformity of those individuals to a specified, pre-established average. The

power to judge what is normal is no longer reserved for a select few; everyone is in a

position to judge: We are in the society of the teacher-judge, the doctor-judge, the

educator-judge, the social worker-judge; it is on them that the universal reign of the

normative is based; and each individual, wherever he may find himself, subjects it to his

body, his gestures, his behavior, his aptitudes, his achievements (DP, 304). These

judges, themselves already sufficiently normalized and part of the disciplinary apparatus,

establish the norms to be used for approval or disapproval. Such norms are not arbitrary

or permanent: the very individuals that are produced by the particular disciplines

establish them, and they change as the discipline and its training methods change.

Disciplinary Power is Comprehensive and Ubiquitous

A corollary of disciplinary power is the distinction between the normal and the abnormal.

While disciplinary power produces individuals who operate within the disciplinary

system, it also produces a residue, that which is unclassifiable (PP, 53). Disciplinary

power creates the very individuals it seeks to recoup: [A]s soon as you have a

disciplined army, that is to say people who join the army, make a career of it, follow a

certain track, and are supervised from end to end, then the deserter is someone who

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escapes this system and is irreducible to it (PP, 53).19 The formation of scholarly

discipline, for example, simultaneously produces the category of mental weakness.

Delinquents appear only with police discipline. And mental illness is the residue of all

disciplines (PP, 54).

The constant division between the normal and the abnormal, to which
every individual is subjected, brings us back to our own time, by applying
the binary branding and exile of the leper to quite different objects; the
existence of a whole set of techniques and institutions for measuring,
supervising and correcting the abnormal brings into play the disciplinary
mechanisms to which the fear of the plague gave rise. All the mechanisms
of power which, even today, are disposed around the abnormal individual,
to brand him and to alter him, are composed of those two forms from
which they distantly derive (DP, 199-200).

Foucault points out that within normalizing systems, greater attention is paid to that

which falls outside the norm.

In each case, it is towards the first of these pairs [child/adult,

patient/healthy, madman/normal, delinquent/non-delinquent] that all the
individualizing mechanisms are turned in our civilization; and when one
wishes to individualize the healthy, normal and law-abiding adult, it is
always by asking him how much of the child he has in him, what secret
madness lies within him, what fundamental crime he has dreamt of
committing (DP, 193).

While Foucault has ceased using the vocabulary of transgression, we can see that the

same logic of transgression discussed earlier operating within normalizing power.

Abnormal individuals transgress social and institutional norms; they exceed those limits,

but only momentarily before they are recovered by the normalizing systems. It is

impossible to remain beyond those limits indefinitely.

19
Rawlinson points out that this pattern is repeated throughout institutionalized systems, whether they are
aimed at social functions or academic knowledge of the natural world. There can be no truths or
falsehoods about quarks or schizophrenia outside of the sciences that posit them. The very discourse that is
supposed to discover the reality of the things being, the truth of disease itself or of physical space and time
in themselves, has always already actively contributed to the constitution of the object. This is the closure
of the system of truth (Rawlinson, 377).

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 [D]isciplinary power has this double property of being anomizing, that is
to say, always discarding certain individuals, bringing anomie, the
irreducible, to light, and of always being normalizing, that is to say,
inventing ever new recovery systems, always reestablishing the rule. What
characterizes disciplinary systems is the never-ending work of the norm in
the anomic (PP, 54).

As with the lepers, those deemed abnormal and exiled are not simply thrown out; they are

situated in a system that renders them other to solidify the realm of the same. But, as

Foucaults understanding of this dynamic developed, he recognized that an act of

normalization subjects the other to a process engineered to nullify that othernessthe

madman is trained to act sane, the criminal is conditioned to serve as his own warden, the

student is educated and rewarded for achieving the goals defined and set by the school.

These processes simultaneously identify the other as the subject who will not or cannot

accept the norms of the system: the delinquent is sent to the reformatory because he will

not adhere to the norms of general society; the worker is fired because she cannot alter

her behavior to meet the expectations of the workplace. Normalization constructs forms

of life, and it is the individuals ability to function within these forms that determine her

treatment by the system. The abnormal individual becomes the object of focus; we who

are not in asylums, who are not in prisons, who are not in hospitals are not because we

are sufficiently normalized. We belong to the sphere of the same determined by

disciplinary power; we do not simply live in it, we flourish in it according to the rules of

the system. As normalized individuals, we measure our success according to the

benchmarks given to us by other normalized individuals.

As we will see in the next chapter, this overarching economy of normalization is

not confined to the institutional level. Normalizing forces extend their reach into the

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intersubjective realm. At the same time, we will see how Foucaults developing

understanding of power reveals the subtle dynamics at work within this economy.

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 Chapter 5: Intersubjective Economies of Power and Resistance

In one of his final essays, Foucault defines relations of power as human

relations in which one directs or attempts to direct the behavior of the other. But,

he tells us, these relations are never fixed: they are not given once and for all.1

Rather, power relations remain always open, always modifiable; they occur at

different levels and assume different forms. These relations get modified

because, despite the ubiquity of normalizing power, the subject is not reduced to a

merely passive recipient. A mentally ill subject, for example, constitutes himself

as such within his relationship with the doctor who determines that he is mentally

ill. The practices through which this self-constitution occurs are patterns that he

finds in his culture and which are proposed, suggested and imposed on him by his

culture, his society and his social group (ECS, 11). Even with these imposed

patterns, docility is not to be confused with passivity. Within the disciplinary

system that produces the subject, she still constitutes herself freely; this freedom

is necessary for power relations to exist. Power without freedom is simply

domination or a force relation.2

Normalization, then, does not preclude freedom. It certainly imposes

options and patterns and recognizable forms of life, but it does not produce

mindless drones. In fact, the efforts at self-invention by the subject occur in

tension with the normalizing forces at work on the subject; they introduce

1
Michel Foucault, The Ethic of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom, in The Final
Foucault, ed. J. Bernauer and D. Rasmussen (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988) 12. Hereafter
abbreviated in the text as ECS.
2
On this difference between power and domination, see McWhorter, 146; and Jana Sawicki,
Disciplining Foucault: Feminism, Power, and the Body (New York: Routledge, 1991) 25.

115
uncertainty into the system. But it is through this tension that the system

develops.

In the last chapter, we saw how normalizing power supplanted sovereign

power, although the sovereign remains the model of our traditional understanding

of how power functions within society. This chapter will trace the development

of Foucaults understanding of normalization in his later work, where he

recognizes the nuanced interplay of power and subjects efforts to resist the

power. Far from being confined to the anonymous systems developed by

modernizers like Bentham, power extends to the intersubjective realm and flows

between individuals. To show the interpersonal nature of normalization, in this

chapter I will examine the refinement in Foucaults thinking about disciplinary

power, viz. the discovery that power is a developmental force that co-opts any

available form of life. One of the most apparent forms is the family. For

Foucault, the bourgeois family of the nineteenth century represents an object of

intense focus for normalizing forces; and, once normalizing power takes hold,

familial relationships opened channels that furthered its reach. In the process of

tracing this development, we will see how normalization operates at ever-smaller

scales and how efforts to avoid normalization invariably operate in the service of

it, thereby creating a positive feedback loop that mirrors the dynamic that we will

find in Derrida.

To see the developmental nature of normalization, we will continue

following Foucaults analysis of psychiatry. We have already seen how

psychiatry functions as the normalizing practice par excellence: From the little

116
sovereignty of the family up to the general and solemn form of the law, psychiatry

must now appear and function as a technology of the individual that is

indispensable to the functioning of the principal mechanisms of power.3 With

Foucaults lectures of the early 1970s, we see how psychiatry moves from the

government of the mad within the asylum to entirely new domains, such as the

family. By following this extension and by examining the psychiatrys effects on

the family, we can see an instance of how normalizing power operates in a fluid

and adaptive manner.

The Family

The family, even in contemporary society, retains forms of sovereign power.

There is, generally speaking, a hierarchical and repressive relationship between

parents and children. At the same time, the family is essential to any disciplinary

system because it is the family that introduces individuals into the system, e.g.

parents send their children to school.4 The family also serves as a point of contact

for different disciplinary systems: those deemed abnormal by one system are sent

back to their family, where they are then transferred to another system (PP, 82).

At the end of the eighteenth century, sex became a state concern and, as as

a result, the family began to play a new role in the management of society.

Techniques for governing sexuality had been the domain of ecclesiastical

3
Michel Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures at the Collge de France, 1974-1975, trans. G. Burchell,
eds. V. Marchetti and A. Salomoni (New York: Picador, 2003) 276. Hereafter abbreviated in the
text as A.
4
[Statistical] representations established population as a higher order phenomenon of which the
family constituted one aspect. An effect of this was a displacement of the family as a model of
government and its adoption instead as a privileged instrument for the regulation or management
of the population, the principal source of information and target for population campaigns (e.g.,
on mortality, marriage, vaccinations, etc.) (Smart, 129).

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institutions: sexual practices and desires were concerns for the Church, not the

state. Now, new technologies arose that assumed secular forms: these included

areas of pedagogy (which took one of its functions to be monitoring the sexuality

of children), medicine (which began dealing with the sexuality of women), and

demographics (which recognized the need to manage and regulate procreation).

These technologies turned the bodies of individuals into particular dispotifs, i.e.,

constructed unities. What gets unified are certain forms of knowledge and power.

In the case of children, for example, manifestations of sexuality were taken to be

both natural and unnatural and thus warranted constant supervision. For women,

repressed sexuality induced hysteria, which in turn situated the patient at the

intersection of the family and medical practices. The fertile couple became an

object of knowledge insofar is it played a central role in the economic and

political climate of a given society (HS1, 104-105).

Contrary to the standard histories of sexuality, normalizing forces of

power that congealed around sexuality did not aim at sublimating the sexual

energy of the working class into labor energy. The bourgeoisie was the object of

these new technologies designed to govern sexuality. In fact, these technologies

were not foisted upon them; the bourgeoisie willingly tried them on themselves.

Thus the deployment of sexuality became a form of self-affirmation for the

bourgeoisie (HS1, 127-128). They sought to create a class body or a sexuality of

their own. If ancestry and blood defined the body of the aristocracy, children and

sex would define the body of the bourgeoisie. The goal was to extend ones life

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and health indefinitely, which meant the health of ones family became socially

important.

The concern with genealogy became a preoccupation with

heredity; but included in bourgeois marriages were not only
economic imperatives and rules of social homogeneity, not only
the promises of inheritance, but the menaces of heredity; families
wore and concealed a sort of reversed and somber escutcheon
whose defamatory quarters were the diseases or defects of the
group of relatives (HS1, 124-125).

Poor health within the family led to perversions in ones offspring, the

degeneration of ones familial line. This heredity-perversion model required the

medicalization of sex: by ensuring ones sexual health, doctors ensured the health

of ones children and the future of ones family.

In conjunction with this hereditiy-perversion model, psychiatry and

psychoanalysis of the nineteenth century established a separate medical

technology for the sexual instinct. They turned the bourgeois family into a place

of sexual saturation: the family came to be regarded as harboring the potential for

sexual misfortune. Medicineespecially psychiatrystepped in, seeking to root

out any sexuality, making sexuality a concern for the family, and proclaiming

itself the final authority on the issue. The psychiatrist becomes the family doctor

in both senses of the term: He is the doctor who is called for by the family, who is

constituted as a doctor by the will of the family; but he is also the doctor who has

to treat something that takes place within the family (A, 146-147). This

interaction between psychiatry and the family, however, grew even closer once

psychiatry initiated a crusade to root out and eliminate masturbation in bourgeois

children. It is only within this bourgeois milieu, in educational establishments

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intended for these children or as instructions given to bourgeois families, that the

struggle against masturbation become the order of the day (A, 237). What

makes this crusade and the extensive medical discourses surrounding it especially

noteworthy is its departure from the preceding Christian discourse on the flesh: it

does not address the issues of desire or pleasure. The underlying motive for

medicine was not moral; the driving force behind this sudden attention was the

dire physical effects such practices had on children. Medicine somatized

masturbation, specifically in three ways. First, it linked masturbation was linked

to the fiction of total illness. Doctors warned that masturbation to an absolute

illness without remission that accumulates every symptom of every possible

illness or, at least, a considerable number of symptoms. All the signs of illness

are superimposed in the masturbators emaciated and ravaged body (A, 237-

238). It is all here: incontinence, lethargy, nauseating odors, ulcerated gums,

ashen complexion, loose teeth; other accounts tell of schoolboys turned

hunchbacks and one poor peasant woman who lost her nose.5 Death is

impending, which, the doctors tell us, will be a merciful end to so much suffering.

Second, general practitioners viewed masturbation as an explanation of the

otherwise inexplicable. It became the cause of every kind of illness, from

meningitis and encephalitis to heart disease and blindness. Third, doctors preyed

upon the hypochondria of young people, convincing them that any symptom they

experienced could be the result of masturbation.

5
Jean Stegners and Anne van Neck, Masturbation: The History of a Great Terror, trans. Kathryn
Hofmann (New York: Palgrave, 2001) 7 and 81.

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 This somatization established masturbation as an etiology linking

pathology and sexual prohibition. Masturbation is a universal cause; its

consequences are incalculable. But whatever the results, the responsibility fell on

the patient, even a child. The child thus became responsible for his or her whole

life. Responsible, not culpable: masturbation is not something a child would do

naturally; it is something a child learns. Doctors dismissed the idea that its

practice among prepubescent children marked it as a natural stage of maturation.

The importance attached to prepubescent masturbation is due precisely to the

desire to exonerate the child somehow, or at least the childs nature, from this

phenomenon of masturbation that nonetheless makes him responsible, in a sense,

for everything that will happen to him (A, 243). But if the child is not guilty,

who is? Children, the doctors tell us, learn to masturbate from two possible

sources: by chance stimuli or by an adult. It is the latter that became the target of

the crusade. The baleful influence was particularly troubling since it occurred

within the household: Servants, governesses, private tutors, uncles, aunts, and

cousins will all come between the parents virtue and the childs natural

innocence and introduce a dimension of perversion (A, 244). Adults living in

the home are the source of evil. They are certainly culpable, yet even they are not

the most blameworthy. So who is? The parents. Their laziness and inattention

have created an unhealthy home for their child: they have handed off their child to

others to raise; and it is precisely there, in the family space constituted by these

other adults, that the child learns a practice that will be his or her ruin.

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 The only solution to this was to reorganize the space of the family and

make it a space of constant surveillance. Domestic help should be eliminated or,

at the very least, closely watched. But the real object of supervision must be the

child: Parents must keep a lookout all around their children, over their clothes

and bodies. The childs body must be the object of their permanent attention.

[] Parents must read their childs body like a blazon or as the field of possible

signs of masturbation (A, 245). The body of the child becomes the locus of

concern for both parents and doctors. Numerous texts are written advising

parents on the management of their childs body to ensure health.

Recommendations were made regarding the choice of beds (no soft blankets or

feather mattressesthese only encourage lethargy), chairs (preferably of stone or

marble), baths, exercises (one doctor suggested keeping a set of parallel bars on

hand), and diet (avoid spices and rich meats and, at all costs, salty fish).6

The close supervision of the child by the parents marked a fundamental

shift in the family: until this point, the bourgeois family was a relational system

comprising myriad ancestors and kinship relations, all of which limned sexual

relations. What we have now is a cellular family replacing the relational family,

and its formative element is the sexuality of the child.

By highlighting the childs sexuality, or more exactly the childs

masturbatory activity, and by highlighting the body of the child in
sexual danger, parents were urgently enjoined to reduce the large
polymorphous and dangerous space of the household and to do no
more than forge with their children, their progeny, a sort of single
body bound together through a concern about infantile sexuality,
about infantile autoeroticism and masturbation (A, 248).

6
Stegners and van Neck, 10-11.

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The family becomes the agent of medicalization as it assumes the role of

producing healthy children and, therefore, healthy adults. Whereas the primary

function of marriage had previously been the intersection of two family lines, the

new role of the conjugal relation was the formation of a new adult individual (PK,

173). Childhood and their proper management became a central problem (PK,

172). Thus new obligations and duties within the family emerged; new norms

regarding nursing, physical hygiene, parental attention, and proper exercise were

put into place and governed the relations. The family is no longer to be just a

system of relations inscribed in a social status, a kinship system, a mechanism for

the transmission of property. It is to become a dense, saturated, permanent,

continuous physical environment which envelops, maintains and develops the

childs body (PK, 172-173).

Coincident with this cellular familial space is a sexually saturated space.

Within this new space, the parents have absolute control over the child, but the

parents are simultaneously connected with a system of medical control:

preventing masturbation is critical to preventing illness, so the close surveillance

of the child serves a medical purpose and medical knowledge serves as the model

for parental control. The parent-child relationship parallels the doctor-patient

relationship; in fact, Foucault says, the former extends the latter. Parental control

is subordinated to medical intervention and medical rationality. The sexualized

family is a medicalized family. Essentially, the family must function merely as a

relay or transmission belt between the childs body and the doctors technique

(A, 251-252). This medicalized family becomes a source of normalization:

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 It is this family that reveals, and which from the first decades of
the nineteenth century can reveal, the normal and the abnormal in
the sexual domain. The family becomes not only the basis for the
determination and distinction of sexuality but also for the
rectification of the abnormal (A, 254).

Power and Resistance

Controlling the sexuality of children was a fools errand: masturbation could not

be prevented. Nor was it ever going to be. Rejecting the Reichian claim that

forbidding childhood masturbation was necessary for a capitalist society to

develop, Foucault sees masturbation as a leverage point in the extension of

normalizing power that reorganized the relations between parents and children

and between parents and educators. A specific childrens sexuality was

established: it was precarious, dangerous, to be watched over constantly (FL,

141). The sexuality of children operated as both a target of power and as an

instrument for its expansion. The objective was not to forbid. It was to

constitute, through childhood sexuality suddenly become important and

mysterious, a network of power over children (FL, 141). The process and space

of normalization was refined, shifting from social institutions to interpersonal

spaces. Parental observation became part of the natural education of children, i.e.,

an education that conforms to a certain schema of rationality, to a number of

rules for securing the survival of the children on the one hand and their training

and normalized development on the other (A, 255). In the context of this natural

education, parents were asked to enter into a bargain: they were to be responsible

for the sexual development of their child, and in return, the State agreed to

oversee their instruction and training.

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 [A] process of exchange is called for: Take good care of your childrens
lives and health for us, of their physical strength, obedience, and ability, so
that we can put them through the machine of the system of State
education, instruction, and training over which you have no control (A,
257).

Both the State and parents needed normal children, but according to this

arrangement, the familial space would always retain the sexual body of the child

while the State took the childs abilities.

Since controlling their childrens sexuality was an impossibility, this

arrangement was a trap, a trick for parents (A, 257-258). They give up their

childrens abilities in exchange for the elusive guarantee of developing their

childrens sexuality within the safe confines of the family.7 In effect, they opened

the space of the family to the State. Rather than caricaturing these families as

prudes or bluenoses, we have to recognize that they were simply trying to ensure

their children remained healthy and grew into productive and successful

individuals. The case of childhood masturbation illustrates the alignment of

normalization with health and productivity. Power is not an evil. Power is

strategic games. [] I dont see where evil is in the practice of someone who, in a

given name of truth, knowing more than another, tells him what he must do,

teaches him, transmits knowledge to him, communicates skills to him. (ECS,

18). And this is the insidious nature of normalizing power: those with the most

direct influence over us and with our best intentions at heart are the primary

channels for normalizing power. We normalize those we care about precisely

7
Looking ahead to the chapter 6 and Derridas comparison of the gift with counterfeit money, we
should note here that Foucault refers to the idea of controlling the development of a childs
sexuality as a worthless fictional element, worthless money (A, 258). Parents hand over their
children to the State (and the sacrifice of ones child will be another Derridean theme examined in
chapter 7) only to receive a false ideal in return.

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because we care. Naturally, these relationships are supported and reinforced by

institutionalized norms, but the relationships themselves overshadow the

institutionalized relations even as they function as conduits of power. Is the

teacher who serves as mentor, who gives her time and energy far beyond what the

institution requires, functioning only as a part of the larger system? Certainly not.

Her motivation stems from a genuine interest in her student. But that genuine

interest and concern is still producing normalized behavior.

Driving home the intersubjective nature of normalizing power, Foucault

stresses that power relations are found at every point of human existence; they are

immanent in other types of relations.

[W]hen one speaks of 'power,' people think immediately of a

political structure, a government, a dominant social class, the
master facing the slave, and so on. That is not at all what I think
when I speak of 'relationships of power.' I mean that in human
relations, whatever they arewhether it be a question of
communicating verbally, as we are doing right now, or a question
of a love relationship, an institutional or economic relationship
power is always present: I mean the relationships in which one
wishes to direct the behavior of another (ECS, 11).

Individuals comprise the network of relations: they are points of contact of

powernot because they possess power as an object but because they

unknowingly and unwittingly reproduce normalized behavior.

Power is employed and exercised through a net-like organization.

And not only do individuals circulate between its threads; they are
always in the position of simultaneously undergoing and exercising
this power. They are not only its inert and consenting target; they
are always also the elements of its articulation. In other words,
individuals are the vehicles of power, not its points of application
(PK, 98).

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We are, then, all of us, simultaneously normalized and normalizing. Most of the

time, especially outside of institutional confines, the normalization we experience

is so banal that we fail to recognize it. When I bought my house, it needed a new

exterior; the old one was in bad condition compared to other houses on the street.

As the exterior was being replaced, a number of people stopped by to tell us how

great the house looked. This was not a conscious (or unconscious) effort at

positive reinforcement on their part; I was simply doing something everyone

approved of.8 Improving ones property is what is normally done. Norms are

communicated and enforced in this way, and we accept them because they have

an aura of naturalnessand because they work: if everyone maintains their

property, everyones property values go up.

This presents us with a new perspective on our relation to others. Other

people are normalizing forces acting on us, even if that normalization is

unintentional. This is a departure from the usual understanding of the other found

in ethical systems. Perhaps the clearest articulation of that understanding as it

pertains to Foucault is found in Oskalas Foucault on Freedom. There, she takes

Foucault to task for failing to develop an account of the interpersonal other,

arguing that this failing limits the ethical impact of his thought.

The other as radical alterity importantly opens the constituted

subject to what it is not, to what it cannot grasp, possess or know.
The arts of existence aiming to transgress normalized individuality
would succeed in opening up an ethical sphere exceeding totality
and determination because the other is capable of introducing
alterity to the constituted subject. The other makes ethical
subjectivity possible, but also breaks the totality of constituted
experience by introducing a plurality in being that resists all efforts

8
For a classic sociological study of such interaction, see George C. Homans, Social Behavior as
Exchange, American Journal of Sociology 63 (May 1958): 597-606.

127
 of totalization and normalization. Only the other ultimately reveals
the limits of subjectivity and gives the attempts to transgress them
an ethical meaning.9

Oskalas Levinasian model of the other simply gets Foucaults priorities

backwards. Foucault does not operate within a Husserlian framework and

therefore does not regard the other as a radical alterity. The other does not resist

or disrupt totalization; the others that I encounterbe they neighbors or parents or

my wifeembody the sphere of the same. They judge me sufficiently (or,

perhaps, insufficiently) normalized and reinforce my identity as a particular kind

of subject, e.g., as a homeowner; as a productive, well adjusted individual; as a

partner. This is the source of what Butler calls the inaugurative alienation:

The desire to persist in ones own being requires submitting to a

world of others that is fundamentally not ones own (a submission
that does not take place at a later date, but which frames and makes
possible the desire to be). Only by persisting in alterity does one
persist in ones own being. Vulnerable to terms that one never
made, one persists always, to some degree, through categories,
names, terms, and classifications that mark a primary and
inaugurative alienation in sociality.10

The subject is always already subjected to normalizing constitution that is not of

her own choosing. But for Foucault the subject is not relegated to a position of

pure passivity with regard to power. She has the ability to recognize these

normalizing forces and to resist them.

But if normalization produces and thus precedes the subject, and if there is

no way to step outside of power, how is resistance possible? How can the subject

9
Johanna Oskala, Foucault on Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005) 207.
10
Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1997) 28.

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recognize his own subjection to normalization? And, having recognized it, how

can he conceive of other forms of subjectivity?

Resistance is, first of all, not an escape from power. It remains within

power relations. And, like power, it is not a single, unified thing. Rather,

resistance appears within the network of power relations as points of resistance;

and like power, these points are fluid: the points, knots, or focuses of resistance

are spread over time and space at varying densities, at times mobilizing groups or

individuals in a definitive way, inflaming certain points of the body, certain

moments in life, certain types of behavior (HS1, 96). Resistance appears in

specific acts of refusing to accept or be reduced to a particular type of subject. In

an act of resistance similar to the anti-psychiatry movement of the 1970s, autistic

rights advocates are challenging the idea that autism is a developmental disorder;

for these individuals, autism is a fundamental part of their identity. These

individuals are resisting the imposition of a clinical norm that defines

neurotypical individuals and assesses autistic individuals on that basis.

Resistance arises even within the seemingly all-encompassing systems of

normalization because the docility these systems engender is never total.11 There

is always a structural freedom: the disciplines that inculcate capacities in the body

create the conditions that allow for the body to work against those disciplines,

especially since the body is never the target of only one discipline. The child

whose body is being disciplined to write is also being taught to kick a soccer ball

or play the piano. All of these normalizing practices create a body that is the

focus of multiple power relations and therefore the site of potential conflict.
11
Brent L. Pickett, Foucault & the Politics of Resistance, Polity 28.4 (Summer, 1996): 458.

129
 Mastery and awareness of ones own body can be acquired only
through the effect of an investment of power in the body. All of
this belongs to the pathway leading to the desire of ones own
body, by way of the insistent, persistent, meticulous work of power
on the bodies of children or soldiers, the healthy bodies. But once
power produces this effect, there inevitably emerge the responding
claims and affirmations, those of ones own body against power, of
health against the economic system, of pleasure against the moral
norms of sexuality, marriage, decency. Suddenly, what had made
power strong becomes used to attack it. Power, after investing
itself in the body, finds itself exposed to counterattack in that same
body (PK, 56).

By themselves, multiple and conflicting forms of disciplinary power are not

sufficient causes for resistance.12 Such conflicts require an effort on the part of

the subject to cultivate her own style. To do that, however, requires recognizing

that our heretofore-defining forms of subjectivity are historical contingencies.

Once I understand that my identity is constructed by normalizing systems, I can

choose how I fashion that identity. This is why genealogy is an effective

strategy.13

As we have seen in Foucaults genealogical analysis of sexuality in The

History of Sexuality, sexuality is not a natural given power represses and

knowledge ultimately uncovers. The ways in which we experience sexuality and

define ourselves as sexual beings are historical constructs. It is the form sex takes

within regimes of power, and as such sexuality functions as an internalization of

power. But its formation is more than just the internalization of power by the

12
On this view, Foucault avoids reifying resistance since it is nothing in itself; resistance is only a
singular configuration of forces of power. See John Muckelbauer, On Reading Differently:
Through Foucaults Resistance, College English 63.1 (September 2000): 79.
13
[F]reedom lies in our capacity to discover the historical inks between certain modes of self-
understanding and modes of domination, and to resist the ways in which we have already been
classified and identified by dominant discourses. This means discovering new ways of
understanding ourselves and each other, refusing to accept the dominant cultures
characterizations of our practices and desires, and redefining them from within resistant cultures
(Sawicki, 43-44).

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subject. It links tactics of power in accordance with strategies of knowledge and

power, thereby reinforcing what society needs to operate along normal lines of

institutionalized behavior. Finding and cultivating new forms of pleasure

becomes integral to resisting these normalized forms of sexuality, but that is only

possible if we realize that no form of pleasure is inherently natural or normal.

Even as it alters the existing power relations, resistance supports those

relations (HS1, 95). To see how this occurs, we can return to Foucaults

examination of Victorian sexuality. For childhood sexuality, the entire

normalizing process allows for the expansion of power that follows a circular

pattern: medical rationality instills fears about the childs sexuality; the parents

are blamed and enjoined to save their child. So they reorganize the family space

and open it up to medical rationality, which is now in a better position able to

instill fears about the childs sexuality and press for more access. A similar

dynamic appears in the emergence of sexual perversions. In the eighteenth

century, marital relations were the focus of sexual concern; issues of sexual

deviancy were problematic insofar as they violated the rules of marriage. Marked

by its stability, the married couple was the norm for sexual behavior. But by the

nineteenth century, there was a shift in focus as attention turned away from the

quiet and stable (and therefore uninteresting) married couple to what Foucault

calls peripheral sexualities. Perversions became objects of study. This is not to

imply that perversions were a creation of this historical period. There were

certainly those with unconventional sexual tastes prior to the nineteenth century.

But as with his study of madness, Foucaults claim here is that pervert was not a

131
form of subjectivity until perversions became autonomous and specified objects

within the field of sexuality. Once that shift occurred, perversions were implanted

in bodies, revealed by experts, and intensified by power. A perversion ceased to

refer to what one does; one now is a pervert. A consequent of this altered focus

was the penetration by both power and pleasure into these other forms of sexual

behavior: The implantation of perversions is an instrument-effect: it is through

the isolation, intensification, and consolidation of peripheral sexualities that the

relations of power to sex and pleasure branched out and multiplied, measured the

body, and penetrated modes of conduct (HS1, 48). This demonstrates the

productive rather than prohibitive nature of power. Power is not the power of a

taboo or law. In fact, it operates in just the opposite manner: rather than

prohibiting certain sexual behaviors, power multiplies sexualities.14 It does this

because it functions according to four different, but interrelated, operations.

First, power expands the lines of penetration through its very object. In

the case of childhood masturbation, the practice itself and the sexuality of

children are ostensibly the foci of power. Parents, teachers, doctorseveryone is

enlisted to monitor children and protect them from the dangers inherent in such

vices. But the truth is that this dangerous vice and the power that seeks to

eradicate it constitute a mutually beneficial relationship. The vice turns out to be

14
Deviant individuals help rather than hinder normalizations spread, even if they themselves
arent ever brought into conformity with the ideal, because they help disciplinary technicians learn
how development works and how to intervene in it. For normalizing disciplinarians, natural
bodies are a living resource that, theoretically at least, can be endlessly remade, but like nature
itself, natural bodies encountered first in their essential stubbornness, their resistance to the
projects of civilized man. Natures resistance doesnt frighten normalizing theoreticians; quite the
reverse. Resistance is exactly what excites and attracts them, because they seek to use the power
that expresses itself in that stubbornness (McWhorter, 203).

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an ineradicable enemy. Far from being a deterrent, however, it supports the

forces of normalization: Always relying on this support, power advanced,

multiplied its relays and effects, while its target expanded, subdivided, and

branched out, penetrating further into reality at the same pace (HS1, 42). The

medical forces arrayed against masturbation exploited their elusive target to

strengthen their hold on the family. Power relations come to depend upon this

support as a justification for their own continued existence. The Bush

Administrations Global War on Terror is a contemporary example of this same

dynamic: by constructing a campaign against a nebulous (and therefore

ubiquitous) foe like terror, the disciplinary political forces have created the very

means of their own expansion. Governmental powers can penetrate further into

the lives of civilians and undermine human rights and civil libertiesall in the

name of rooting out terrorism. In the process, more and more of the government

and the military-corporate complex rely on the continued threat (real or

manufactured) terrorists pose.

Second, power provides perversions with analytic and visible reality.

Where perversions had been regarded as mere variations on the sexual act, they

became symptomatic of entire sexual sensibilities that specify and define

individualsthe individual becomes his perversion. In The Use of Pleasure,

Foucault examines the moral questions the ancient Greeks raised about the love of

boys. For the Greeks, the issue was about maintaining a proper relationship to

pleasure: a man should always remain the active partner and never subordinate

himself. The mans identity, though, was never reduced to his sexual proclivities.

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In the mid-1800s, however, the individual was characterized by his sexual

sensibility; his homosexuality became the defining attribute by which all his other

actions and behavior can be understood. Nothing that went into his total

composition was unaffected by his sexuality. [] It was consubstantial with him,

less as a habitual sin than as a singular nature (HS1, 43). This was the case with

all perversions: aberrant sexualities formed particular species that psychiatrists

could study and catalog according to finer and finer distinctions. While on the

surface the goal was to cure individuals of these aberrant tastes, power was in fact

providing perversions with a visible and permanent existence supported by an

analytical framework. Normalizing power was creating a natural order of

disorder (HS1, 44).

Third, power and pleasure relate through a feedback loop in which they

reinforce each other. The attention and observation of bodies and practices by

power produces its own pleasure; it is a form of attraction that draws out the

perversions it is seeking. At the same time, there is pleasure in evading power, in

avoiding observation, and in concealing ones nature.

The pleasure that comes of exercising a power that questions,

monitors, watches, spies, searches out, palpates, brings to light;
and on the other hand, the pleasure that kindles at having to evade
this power, flee from it, fool it, or travesty it. [] These
attractions, these evasions, these circular incitements have traced
around bodies and sexes, not boundaries not to be crossed, but
perpetual spirals of power and pleasure (HS1, 45).

These spirals of pursuit and evasion lead power to dig deeper and extend its reach.

Fourth, power creates spaces saturated by sexuality. The bourgeois

family, for instance, comes to be understood as a site where children and parents

134
and servants intermingle; therefore, constant attention must be given to sexuality.

But this is the case for any space where interpersonal contact occurs. Power and

pleasure constitute a network, and this network infuses various relational spaces

(HS1, 46).

The Economy of Power

If resistance remains embedded within the networks of power, any act of

resistance can be only temporary. Eventually, any resistance to particular

normalizing forces is co-opted by those forces. What Foucault finds is that power

operates not only through its disciplinary applications to the body, but through the

efforts of subjects to refuse and block that power. It turns out that resisting power

is itself an intensification of power. In an effort to define himself, the subject

resists by creating forms of life and engaging in practices that either conceal or

advertise his abnormality. But these acts of resistance allow particular forces to

expand so that eventually the abnormality is rendered normal. Then the subject

will have to undertake new forms of resistance. So while resistance is productive,

insofar as it creates new forms of life and new ways of being a subject, it creates

the conditions that allow normalizing power to spread to new areas. The new

forms of subjectivity it gives rise to become material for new forms of

normalization. Resistance repeats the logic of transgression we have already

examined: it is a momentary breach that becomes a substrate of power. 15 Power

and resistance reinforce one another.

15
"The various rules, limits, and norms history has placed upon us, which are often seen as
natural, are the sources of exclusion, marginalization, and the resulting solidification of identity
for those who 'confine their neighbors.' Through transgression it is possible to undermine these

135
 The expansion of power via acts of resistance and the support that

resistance provides normalization are not conscious effects. The psychiatrists

who descended on the Victorian family did not orchestrate the situation to gain

greater influence over the family; this was not some grand conspiracy. Power

relations are intentionalthey operate according to specific objectivesbut they

are not directed. This cooperative relationship of power and pleasure is visible

only at a distance. At the local level, one might find explicitly articulated tactics

that link up with other tactics, and these organic structures create comprehensive

systems; but these systems are beyond anyones or any one groups control: the

logic is perfectly clear, the aims decipherable, and yet it is often the case that no

one is there to have invented them, and few who can be said to have formulated

them (HS1, 95). The fluidity of these systems, their ability to combine and

separate with each other as necessary, is what allows for their tolerance and

utilization of acts of resistance: because resistance takes place within power, these

acts are only reconfigurations of power relations.

The forms of subjectivity and the forms of life we create for ourselves are

always already potential resources for normalization. In other words, our acts of

resistance and our refusals to be who we are are only temporary. Those acts

themselves eventually become normalized and normalizing. Wont everything

that is said be inscribed in the very mechanisms we are trying to denounce? Well,

I think it is absolutely necessary that it should happen this way: if the discourse

can be co-opted, that is not because it is vitiated by nature, but because it is

limits, although new ones will always arise. This affirmation of difference is thus a permanent
agonistic stance" (Pickett, 450).

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inscribed in a process of struggle.16 Any resistance becomes a normalizing

system. Take for example the phenomenon of teenage girls and young women

who have embraced anorexia as a lifestyle choice. By refusing to identify

themselves as sufferers of a disorder, they are resisting the normalizing labels that

medical and psychological experts have ascribed to their condition. Of course,

these young women can only maintain this position outside the established norms

for a limited time; those same doctors and psychologists are now examining this

act of resistance and, in the process, expanding their normalizing reach. But there

is a deeper irony at work here: the ad hoc communities that emerge through these

acts of resistance impose their own forms of normalization, e.g., labeling as

wannarexics those who only want to lose weight and are not true believers.

Within this particular form of resistance, there are certain measures, certain ways

of defining oneself as a subject that must be adhered to.

In Saint Foucault, David Halperin presents another example of this

struggle and how power co-opts a discourse. Queer theory, Halperin points out,

was intended to serve as an alternative to the institutionalized (although not

necessarily mainstream) gay and lesbian formulation, to introduce into a

monolithic, homogenizing discourse of (homo) sexual difference a problematic of

multiple differences, and to highlight everything perverse about the project to

theorizing sexual pleasure and desire.17 The difficulty and the danger that queer

theory exemplifies is that it has itself become equally normalized. Signifying

little more than what used to be signified by lesbian and gay studies, queer

16
Michel Foucault, An Interview with Michel Foucault, in David Halperin, Saint Foucault:
Towards a Gay Hagiography (New York: Oxford, 1995) 114.
17
Ibid., 113.

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theory seems to have forfeited, in this process, much of its political utility [as a

form of resistance]. In any case, the more it verges on becoming a normative

academic discipline, the less queer queer theory can plausibly claim to be.18

With queer theory, that momentary act of resistance allowed power to spread:

there are now academic departments, degree programs, andthat most

normalizing task of alldissertations written in and on the discipline. That act of

resistance is no longer resisting; it promotes the very normalization it was created

to undermine. What Halperin shows is that we can create forms of life that resist

normalization, but these forms of life are always already providing for greater

normalization.

Foucault gives us a clearer understanding of why normalizing power is

inescapable by presenting it as an ever-expanding power operating through a

feedback loop: it is not merely the case that there is nothing outside of power;

power continually expands or reshapes itself with our efforts to escape it. In the

next two chapters, we will turn to Derrida where we will find the same logic

operating albeit in a very different context.

18
Ibid.

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 Chapter 6: The Madness of the Gift

In the next two chapters, I want to set aside the question of power and examine

the theme of the gift as it evolves in later Derrida. The gift was a long-standing theme in

Derridas work, going back to Glas. It is of interest because it is an auto-deconstructing

concept, i.e., it is a concept that undermines the very conditions of its own conceptual

nature and therefore introduces play into any system. For my purposes, the interplay of

gifts and economies provides us with a model for understanding Foucauldian power in a

new light.

In this chapter, I will focus on the analysis of the gift as it is developed in Given

Time, Derridas first sustained examination of the gift.1 In this text Derrida pulls together

two distinct but tightly interwoven threads: the sociological studies of gift exchange

developed in the works of Mauss, Levi-Strauss, and Bienveniste; and a

phenomenological analysis of the givenness of the gift. This twofold examination allows

him to draw out the structure of the gift, a structure Robyn Horner boils down to two

basic conditions. First, she says, the gift must be free: it must be a sacrifice given with no

thought of return. Second, the gift must be present: it must be recognizable as a gift.2 As

Derridas analyses show, these conditions are basic, but far from simple. They turn out to

be mutually exclusive and to constitute a fundamental aporia: a free gift always exacts a

cost, and a recognized gift necessitates a reciprocal and economic relationship that

nullifies the gift itself.

1
Jacques Derrida, Given Time: 1. Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1992). Hereafter abbreviated in the text as GT.
2
Robyn Horner, Rethinking God as Gift: Marion, Derrida, and the Limits of Phenomenology (New York:
Fordham University Press, 2001) 4.

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The Sociology of the Gift

On its face, giving a gift is a straightforward process. It is a relational dynamic we all

understand. I give a birthday present to my wife. A family gives a party for one of its

members. A village gives a herd of cattle to another village. Giving follows the simple

formula A gives X to C. A and C may be any agent, singular or collective. X may be

any object, physical or symbolic, singular or plural. Whoever gives, whoever receives,

and whatever is given, gifts are generally understood to be sacrifices: I give something up

in making a gift to the other.

The familiarity of this framework belies the complexities and consequences of

giving. The gift immediately thrusts A and C into a system of exchangedespite the

intentions of either party. When I give my wife a gift, I alsounknowingly and certainly

unwillinglyimpose upon her a debt that will remain until she reciprocates. We have all

had the experience of receiving a gift and feeling the obligation that we must get him (or

her or them) something. Any gift creates an imbalance that demands restoration. How

it is restored, the specifics of giving a counter-giftwhen to give it, how long to wait

before doing so, how much (or how little) to giveare all determined by more or less

strict social codes that vary from society to society. But regardless of the particulars, a

gift must be given in return. Failure to do so will have lasting effects: we might lose

status, lose a friend, orat the very leastlose a little sleep because of a vague sense of

obligation. The counter-gift eliminates these possibilities: upon reciprocation, the

psychic debt is paid, the relationship is balanced, and all accounts return to zero.

The gift became a prominent theme for sociologists and anthropologists with the

groundbreaking working of Marcel Mauss. In The Gift: The Form and Reason for

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Exchange in Archaic Societies, Mauss shows that the gift comprises a nexus of social

practices and establishes a bond between individuals that serves as the heart of

community formation; subsequent exchanges only strengthen that bond. 3 What Mauss

offers is an evolutionary account of how the exchange arising out of individual interests

develops into larger economic frameworks and broader-reaching circles of exchange.

In Given Time, Derrida turns his attention to Mauss and contends that his

evolutionary account points up a basic misunderstanding of the gift: One could go so far

as to say that a work as monumental as Marcel Mausss The Gift speaks of everything but

the gift: It deals with economy, exchange, contract, it speaks of raising the stakes,

sacrifice, gift and countergiftin short, everything that in the thing itself impels the gift

and the annulment of the gift (GT, 24). Mausss work, important as it is, never really

comes to grips with the gift. It never questions the concept of the gift itself. This is

important because a gift, Derrida will argue, is more problematic than Mauss assumes. A

gift, the very concept of a gift, turns out to be unstable. Derrida does not fault Mauss for

failing to recognize the problematic nature of the gift; he does, however, believe that we

need to think more carefully about what it means to give. What we find upon closer

inspection is that gifts are inextricably linked to economic relations. On the one hand,

Mauss reminds us that there is no gift without bond, without bind, without obligation or

ligature; but on the other hand, there is no gift that does not have to untie itself from

obligation, from debt, contract, exchange, and thus from the bind (GT, 27). These

3
Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. W. D. Halls (New York:
W.W. Norton, 1990). The literature on this issue is both vast and fascinating. See, for example, Annette B.
Weiner, Inalienable Possessions: The Paradox of Keeping-While-Giving (Berkeley: University of
California, 1992); Maurice Godelier, The Enigma of the Gift, trans. Nora Scott (Chicago: University of
Chicago, 1996); Barry Schwartz, The Social Psychology of the Gift, American Journal of Sociology 73.1
(July, 1967): 1-11; James Carrier, Gifts, Commodities, and Social Relations: A Maussian View of
Exchange, Sociological Forum 6.1 (1991): 119-136; Jonathan Parry, The Gift, the Indian Gift, and the
Indian Gift, Man, New Series 21.3 (Sept. 1986): 453-473.

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economic relations arise because of the two key dimensions of gift exchange Mauss

posits: obligatory transfer and mutually obligated individuals. Every gift creates an

obligation to reciprocate; therefore, every giver places every receiver in his or her debt.

For Mauss, these are still gifts. For Derrida, Mauss misses the way in which the counter-

gift instantaneously erases the gift and replaces it with exchange; he misses the necessary

(but impossible) distinction that must obtain between gifts and economic relationships.

Here, then, for Derrida, is the fundamental paradox of the gift: to truly give a gift,

there must be no debt or obligation or return whatsoever; but any giftno matter how

much we genuinely wish to give freelyobligates the other to give in return.

For there to be a gift, there must be no reciprocity, return, exchange,

countergift, or debt. If the other gives me back or owes me or has to give
me back what I gave him or her, there will not have been a gift, whether
this restitution is immediate or whether it is programmed by a complex
calculation of long-term deferral or differance (GT, 12).

Reciprocity produces an economic relationship, which nullifies the original gift. The gift

can have nothing to do with exchange, but the giftcounter-gift dynamic is precisely

that. In the end, my gift to you costs me nothing because I get something of equal value

in return. When I give my gift, I essentially buy your gratitude or your counter-gift or

your indebtedness. I have given nothing. The image of two people giving each other the

same DVD for Christmas illustrates just how exchange nullifies the gift: nothing has been

given because nothing has been lost; parity is restored instantly. The relationships Mauss

examines are, therefore, not gift relationships. Instead, they are essentially exchanges of

goods, and any such exchange creates an economy.

As Derrida shows, an economy is the antithesis of a gift. Economy, oikonomia,

consists of two elements: the oikos, the hearth or the home; and nomos, the law, the law

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of distribution (nemein), the law of sharing or partition, the law as partition (moira), the

given or assigned part, participation (GT, 6). As the law of the hearth, economy relates

to management of scarce resources. Economic thinking aims to ensure that nothing is

wasted and that expenses equal income. Any economy is directed with an eye toward a

return on investment that is at least equal to the resources that have been expended, if not

more. Within this restricted economic framework is the broader logic of lack and

demand: resources are limited and must therefore be utilized in an efficient and effective

manner; utility must be maximized. The figure of the economy is the circle: resources go

out and resources come in. It is the nature of an economy to seek closure. Sooner or

later, the books must balance, and all debits and credits must equal zero. The circle must

be complete; the system must find equilibrium. Such is the operative logic of quid pro

quo. We pay out with one hand while receiving with the other, which is precisely what is

wrong with the image of giving proffered by Mauss: whether it is gifts exchanged around

the Christmas tree or the movement of goods through the Kula Ring, giving as Mauss

perceives it always requires giving back.

There are systemic forces governing economies that must be obeyed, the most

basic of which is that what goes out must equal what comes in. Seeking a return on

expended resources requires prudence. For an economy to function, we must weigh our

options, allocate our assets carefully, and pursue the course of action that will maximize

our long-term return. In this way, an economy imposes order: no economy, be it a

household, a multi-national corporation, or a nation, can simply give things away and still

hope to succeed. This is why a gift flies in the face of economic order. It is counter to

moderation and rationality. To give a pure gift, one must forgo any weighing of options

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and give without any thought to long-term benefits or costs (GT, 38). This means giving

without hope or thought of return, which is, in the eyes of homo oeconomicusthe

calculating, rational subject posited by classical economicsan act of madness.

The gift is therefore excessive, and for Derrida this excess marks the supplanting

of reason altogether. An economy is inherently rational, and because it is rational,

economic thinking is discursive: we can explain why homo oeconomicus does what he

does and why an economic system behaves as it does. But the gift is beyond economic

thinking and, because it is outside of rationality, no explanation can be offered for it.4

[T]here can never be a reason for giving (if there were, once again the gift would no

longer be a gift but a calculation or an exchange) (GT, 91-92). Were I to justify my

giving by offering some sort of account, by trying to give reasons, I would have to drag

the act back into the realm of the rational. I would be situating the gift within an

economic framework since I would be giving for some reason. The gift is without why:

The gift would be that which does not obey the principle of reason: it is, it ought to be,

it owes itself to be without reason, without wherefore, and without foundation (GT,

156).

Without the principle of reason to govern it, the gift is irrational. It is also

irresponsible. Our economic relations impose a sense of duty and responsibility upon us

by reminding us what we owe to the other and how and when to distribute the goods we

have, as well as what the other owes us and how and when to collect. One should own up

to the gifts that one has given; or, one must respond to the gift one has received. This

responsibility is what makes the counter-gift necessary. It is necessary to answer for the

4
This dynamic recalls Derridas and Foucaults debate over articulating the experience of the mad
discussed in part 1.

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gift, the given, and the call to giving. It is necessary to answer to it and answer for it.

One must be responsible for what one gives and what one receives (GT, 62-63). The

gift must impose no responsibility upon the giver (since giving means to ignoring the

economically prudent course of action) or the receiver (since such a sense of

responsibility will lead to making a counter-gift).

The Phenomenology of the Gift

Derridas analysis of the sociological and economic nature of the gift shows us that the

true gift, i.e., the gift that breaks the rational, economic cycle of credit and debt, can

never be actually givenany gift imposes the obligation of the counter-gift.

Understanding why it does so requires examining the second basic condition of the gift

that Horner identifies: the gift must be recognizable as such. Derrida shows that meeting

this condition is an impossibility. A gift that is recognized as a gift ceases to be a gift.

This is because as soon as a gift is recognized, it imposes an economic relation. The very

phenomenological structure of the gift renders it impossible. Once it becomes an

intentional object, it is recognized as a gift, and the economy returns. This realization

ratchets up the gifts paradoxical nature: to give a pure gift, the giver can never be aware

that she has given a gift. Even if she gives the gift anonymously, she knows of it and

therefore gains a sense of self-satisfaction. She cannot have even the intention to give:

The simple intention to give, insofar as it carries the intentional meaning

of the gift, suffices to make a return payment to oneself. The simple
consciousness of the gift right away sends itself back the gratifying image
of goodness or generosity, of the giving-being who, knowing itself to be
such, recognizes itself in a circular, specular fashion, in a sort of auto-
recognition, self-approval, and narcissistic gratitude (GT, p. 23).

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The very awareness that she means to give is enough to produce a positive sense of

herself. She has then purchased that feeling with the gift.

At the same time, the receiver can never be aware that he has received a gift.

Knowledge of the givers identity is irrelevant: he might receive an anonymous gift, yet

the sense of obligation to repay the gift remains. I am an organ donor, and one of the

reasons is because when I was seven years old, I received a cornea transplant. I do not

know the identity of the child whose cornea I received. Even if I did, the child was killed

in a hunting accident, so there is no way I can repay him or her directly. What I can do,

though, is donate my own organs and, in doing so, pay back the gift.

This unknowability of the gift is grounded in phenomenology. In

phenomenology, objects are given to consciousness. The world as it appears to us does

so because the objects we encounter appear within our horizon of experience, and our

consciousness synthesizes their multiple appearances. My computer is in front of me,

and it gives itself to my intuition by appearing in a variety of ways. I can look at it from

different angles, viewing it from the front or the back. I can see it opened or closed. I

can see it in different contexts. While I can never perceive it from more than one angle at

a time, it still gives itself to me as a unity because my consciousness unifies all these

appearances to produce my full experience of the computer. The appearing becomes a

phenomenon only on account of intentionality reaching beyond it and setting it against a

horizon where its profile stands out and is finally filled in.5 For simple things like

computers, their givenness is not an issue. We see them from various perspectives, but

their identity is relatively stable. The gift, though, is not so stable, and this instability is

5
Jeffrey L. Kosky, The Disqualification of Intentionality: The Gift in Derrida, Levinas, and Michel
Henry, Philosophy Today (Supplement 1997): 188.

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the source of the phenomenological dilemma it presents: as soon as the gift appears to

consciousness, it is no longer what it appears to be. My very consciousness of the gift

alters its being so that what I perceive is no longer the gift. To understand this more

clearly, take the example of counterfeit money, which has a phenomenological structure

analogous to the gifts. A counterfeit $20 bill is what it is, a simulacrum of a genuine $20

bill, only as long as it remains unrecognized as a counterfeit. Once it is spotted as a fake,

that is, once it is given to my consciousness as a counterfeit bill, its nature is

fundamentally changed. And this change is a crisis for phenomenology. Within

phenomenology, what is absolute about [phenomena] is their status for consciousness as

intentional objects. [] Phenomenological certitude rests not only on the in-person

givenness of intentional objects but on the manner in which that givenness is secured.6

The gift, like the counterfeit bill, presents us with a phenomenon whose givenness

undermines its phenomenological presence. We cannot know it with any

phenomenological certitude. It cannot appear within our experiential horizon or as an

intentional object since the minute it enters our consciousness, it ceases to be the

phenomenon that was given. This can be expressed as a basic hypothetical syllogism:

consciousness of the gift instills consciousness of debt, and any consciousness of debt

initiates an economy; therefore, any consciousness of the gift (whether on the part of the

giver or the receiver) initiates an economy. In coming to consciousness as an intentional

object, the gift is annulled; what we are conscious of is a commodity, i.e., something with

exchange value. Much like the alter ego for Husserl in the Cartesian Meditations, the

gift is a limit case for phenomenology, preempting any phenomenological analysis

6
Maurice Natanson, Edmund Husserl: Philosopher of Infinite Tasks (Evanston: Northwestern University,
1973) 98.

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because it cannot enter the horizon of consciousness and therefore must remain

inaccessible.

The absence of the gift upon our experiential horizon makes the gift

unconditional. For Husserl, consciousness constitutes a unified experience by linking the

immediate experience with the experience that has just passed and the one that is about to

occur. My awareness of the computerthe computer as it is given to meis built up out

of the flow of experiences I have with it. If I pick it up and turn it over, my flow of

experiences includes the view of it right side up, rotating in space, and upside down. My

consciousness links these perspectives and these experiences into a unified experience by

retaining the just-passed senses of it and anticipating those to come. What I experience

and what I know are determined or conditioned by this experiential flow. For Derrida,

this means that presence, existence, determination regulate the economy of knowing,

experiencing, and living (GT, 29). Consciousness replicates an economic circle: the

computer gives itself to my consciousness and, in exchange, so to speak, I give it

experiential unity. As a knowing subject, my very subjectivity produces and is produced

by the circle of exchange. It is even a matter, in this circle, of the movement of

subjectivation, of the constitutive retention of the subject that identifies with itself. The

becoming-subject then reckons with itself, it enters into the realm of the calculable as

subject (GT, 24). What I know is caught up within this economy of calculation

precisely because whatever I know or experience has to be foreseeable and must

therefore have phenomenality. The gift, though, cannot be foreseeable because it is not

formed out of the flow of experience.

Unforeseeable and surprising, the gift strikes me without the possibility of

this blow being found already in the a priori of consciousness that has

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 prepared a place for it and can welcome it. Forgotten and so not to be
found in the past, surprising and so coming from an unanticipated future,
the gift thus appears without horizon. It does not arise within the
conscious flux of appearances just past and those yet to come.7

The gift, if there ever could be one, would have to exist prior to any form of subjectivity

since its relation to the subject nullifies its existence as a gift (GT, 24). This, again, is

part of what makes the gift impossible.

At the phenomenological level, then, the gift is opposed to consciousness. It can

never be given to consciousness. But what about unconscious gifts? Could a gift be

given (or received) and repressed simultaneously so that it was never known to us? What

if I repressed acts of generosity others performed for me? Repression is still a

psychological function of the subject: I might repress all knowledge or memories of a

particular gift, but I remain aware of it, if only at a very deep level that does not admit of

easy access. The awareness is still there, and repressed awareness of the gift undermines

the gift because it could potentially be uncovered since anything repressed remains buried

in the unconscious only to surface in a symbolic form (GT, 17).

Instead of mere repression, a gift requires an absolute forgetting, forgetting that

erases all trace of itself. This is a structural forgetting, a forgetting so radical that even

what was never present to the ego is forgotten (GT, 17). What would such a forgetting

look like? An example can be found in Heideggers notion of the es gibt, the process by

which time and being become manifest. Being and time present a curious form of

existence: they both exist, but neither is ever present as a thing. Being is not present as

being; time is not temporal.8 In On Time and Being, Heidegger notes that we say of

beings: they are. With regard to the matter Being and with regard to the matter time,

7
Kosky, ibid., 190.
8
Martin Heidegger, On Time and Being, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper & Row, 1972) 4.

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we remain cautious. We do not say: Being is, time is, but rather: there is Being and there

is time.9 The idiomatic expressions in German for there is Being and there is time

are es gibt Sein and es gibt Zeit. Playing with this idiom, Heidegger reads es gibt

literally as It gives: It gives Being and It gives time. For Heidegger, the task of

thinking is to think what this It and this giving are. The challenge for such thinking is

that the It that gives is not a thing or an entity; it is not something we can know or

identifyno more than we can know or identify the it referred to in the expression it

is raining. The es gibt is never known, and it is never known because there is nothing to

know: the es gibt is a subjectless and anonymous process in which time and Being are

given. This giving is a structural giving: there is no giver. It is the originary act of

giving.

[B]efore everything, before every determinable being, there is, there was,
there will have been the irruptive event of the gift. An event that no more
has any relation with what is currently designated under this word. Thus
giving can no longer be thought starting from Being. In Zeit und Sein,
the gift of the es gibt gives itself to be thought before the Sein in the es
gibt Sein and displaces all that is determined under the name Ereignis.10

This giving precedes Being and time. It is the condition for their possibility. Things

come into presence for a time and then pass out of presence, but the presencing itself, the

granting of beings and the giving of Being is never present to consciousness and therefore

avoids the economy of the subject.

The essential thing to grasp is this: just as time is not, so the event is
not. The event does not, and cannot, happen. The event is not governed
by an economythat is, by laws of ownership, distribution, mastery and
slavery, sharing, and participationbut is an-economic. It is that which

9
Ibid., 4-5.
10
Jacques Derrida, Glas, trans. John P. Leavey, Jr. and Richard Rand (Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 1990) 242.

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 makes possible giving, taking, receiving, withdrawing, holding back,
appropriating and expropriating11

The giving of Being is simultaneously a withdrawal in which beings manifest themselves

in Being. The es gibt withdraws so that particular beings might manifest themselves; at

the same time, their appearance conceals this withdrawal. This giving and withdrawal

occurs prior to our consciousness or our awareness, and our total inability to recover the

es gibt make it an absolute forgetting. It is a structural forgetting or a structural

inaccessibility, which is not a subjective structure. Herewhat gives is forgotten not

by slipping the mind of someones psyche, but by a structural withdrawal from the

phenomenal field, withdrawing in and through giving (PTJD, 164). Therefore, it does

not succumb to the same problems of conscious or unconscious giving.12

We can see in Heideggers conception of time and Being a structure that is

analogous to the gift:

It so happens that the structure of this impossible gift is also that of

Beingthat gives itself to be thought on the condition of being nothing
(no present-being, no being-present)and of time which is always
defined in the paradoxa or rather the aporia of what is without being, of
what is never present or what is only scarcely or dimly (GT, 27).

Being is without ever being something; it is not present as a being (das Seiende).

Similarly, the gift is without ever being present as presents (la cadeau). The comparison

between the gift and the Heideggerian es gibt breaks down, though. While the es gibt

does not earn our gratitude for what it gives (To what would we be grateful?), Heidegger

reinstates the circle of economy when he claims the es gibt gives things their essence and

11
Keith Ansell-Pearson, The An-Economy of Times Giving: Contributions to the Event of Heidegger,
Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology vol. 26.3 (October 1995): 273.
12
Just as there is no such thing then as a Being, there is also no such thing as an essence of the es gibt in
the es gibt Sein, that is, of Beings giving and gift. [] There is no such thing as a gift of Being from which
there might be apprehended and opposed to it something like a determined gift. Jacques Derrida, Spurs:
Nietzsches Styles, trans. Barbara Harlow (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1978) 121.

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truth. This implies that a logic of propriety is already at work in the giving of the es gibt.

This anonymous and subjectless giving turns out to be a process of engendering that

demands a return. And because of this logic, Heidegger reinstates an element of gratitude

through his notion that denken ist danken. He enjoins meditative thinking upon us: we

need to reestablish a genuine attentiveness to Being and the es gibt, an attentiveness lost

with the Greeks. At the same time, Heidegger tells us that we are indebted to the Greeks

since they have shown us the nature of Being and the way in which Being presences

itself. Not only does this sense of propriety and indebtedness to the Greeks exclude what

is not Greek, but it also puts Heidegger back into the transcendental tradition: by locating

the gift of Being in the originary Es, Heidegger gives us another concept that will

regulate the economy of thought and close off any effects of the gift. Derrida is looking

for something with this kind of structural forgetting, but the implications of Heideggers

fervor for a return to denken and its accompanying exclusionary rhetoric understandably

make Derrida nervous and cause him to distance himself from Heidegger (GT, 162). A

better example is found in literature.

The Gift as Literary Theory

Derrida locates another instance of structural givingone that avoids the Heideggerian

logic of property and proprietyin texts. The standard logocentric approach that we

examined earlier in chapter two understands texts in terms of the logic of exchange: the

author gives us the text and, in return, we give the author a reading true to his intentions.

On this model, an accurate or correct reading is one that completes the circle. But this

approach misunderstands the nature of texts and ascribes too much power to the author.

No one gives a text. Obviously the text must come from somewheresomeone has to

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produce itbut the author cannot give it as a gift to his readers because it is not his to

give. He has no authority over the text. Take Derridas example of Baudelaire:

Baudelaire dedicates his story Counterfeit Money to his friend, Houssaye. Regardless

of Baudelaires desire to give the story to his friend, the text itself disrupts the possibility

of exchange.

[F]rom the moment [Baudelaire] let [the story] constitute itself in a system
of traces, he destined it, gave it, not only to another or in general to others
than his dear friend Arsne Houssaye, but delivered itand that was
giving itabove and beyond any determined addressee . [] Whatever
return it could have made toward Baudelaire or whatever return he might
have counted on, the structure of the trace and legacy of this textas of
anything that can be in generalsurpasses the phantasm of return and
marks the death of the signatory or the non-return of the legacy, the non-
benefit, therefore a certain condition of the giftin the writing itself (GT,
100).

The text will not be constrained by the simple dyadic structure of exchange. This is

because a written text is structurally available to countless readers and these readers are

outside authorial control: texts operate indifferently to the authors intentions, which

means they can read against or differently from such intentions. The moment a text

appears, it cannot be confined. There is no inherent law or order to it; a text is always

capable of unforeseeable effects. It is thus the text that gives insofar as it opens itself to

infinite readings, but this giving is a quasi-transcendental giving, an impersonal and

structural feature. There is no intentionality or generosity behind the giving of a text.

Consequently, we it owe no gratitude.

How the author wants us to read the story no longer matters: the author is

structurally dead, and the text lives on without her. But why the text lives on and why the

authors intentions cease to matter get at something more fundamental about the nature of

texts. As we saw in chapter two, with deconstruction, authorial intentions are no longer a

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transcendental signified we must uncover to get at the truth of a text. The author has no

more special ties or privileged insight to the story than the reader, and just like the reader,

she is consigned to the phenomenal aspects of the story. Derrida points to the key

moment in Counterfeit Money as an illustration of this. In the story, the narrators

friend gives a beggar a two-franc piece and then tells the narrator that the coin was

counterfeit. Why does the friend admit this? We do not know. The story does not tell

us. Maybe it is boastful, puerile cynicism. Maybe he wants to avoid the sense of

superiority that would come from giving real money to the beggar. Maybe the friend is

simply lying to conceal his generosity. We simply do not know what really transpires

between the friend and the beggar, and the important point for Derrida is that we can

never know. The textlike all textsstructurally precludes any access to the thing

itself. What the friend was thinking and what he really did are completely inaccessible to

us. And they are not inaccessible just to us, the readers; they are inaccessible even to

Baudelaire (unless he decides to write a sequel or another version retelling the story from

the friends perspective).

Baudelaire does not know, cannot know, and does not have to know,
anymore than we do, what can be going through the mind of the friend,
and whether the latter finally wanted to give true or counterfeit money, or
even wanted to give anything at all (GT, 152).

No one can know because there is nothing to know. No amount of speculation will get us

further beneath the surface of the story because there is no interiority to the text: its

structure is pure phenomenality and pure surface. It is superficial, without substance,

infinitely private because public through and through (GT, 170). A text creates the

illusion of depth, like perspective in drawing, but any interiority is a projection on the

part of the reader. It is the reader who refuses to stop at the surface, who reads qualities

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and features into the story, and who adds dimensions to the characters they do not

otherwise possess. Like any currency, a text has value because we give it value. It

functions only because we extend it the credit necessary to function.

The truth of literature is its non-truth, the fact that there is no truth to be revealed.

As pure superficiality, literature blocks access to the thing itself. Like the ghost in

Hamlet, it has a spectral existence; it both is and is not at the same time. We encounter it,

but its manifestation is never quite real and always eludes our grasp. And like counterfeit

money, a text is not something we can eventually master. It is what it is only by

appearing as what it is not. A story is a fiction. We accept it only when we suspend

disbelief, that is, only when we extend credit to the narrator and accept what we are told.

In Baudelaires story, we believe, if only for a moment, that the narrator is telling a true

story about false money. Of course, the difference between fiction and counterfeit money

is our realization that the narrator is fictional and that we have bracketed our disbelief:

counterfeit money functions because we fail to recognize it as such; if we realize it is a

fiction, it fails to be what it is.

The pure superficiality of the text is the source of the texts secret, the secret that

there is no deep secret; there is only a structural void that drives us to find those things

that appear to keep themselves hidden. It calls attention to our ignorance, but lets us

believe there must be an answer if only we dig deeper. If we read closely enough, we tell

ourselves, perhaps we can figure out what the narrators friend was thinking. Everything

is predicated upon our reliance upon better or worse interpretive structures. Belief is the

very structure of literature: we give credence to what we read because we can know

nothing else about what we are reading. Our structural inability to learn what the text is

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about in an extratextual way is what drives our reading. But this structural inaccessibility

is not limited to literature: the entire world is like this. We are always operating within

interpretive structures that we believe will get us to the deeper meaning hidden beneath

the surface. If we can only find the right interpretive framework, we will uncover the

secret buried there. We will learn the truth about the way the world is. But the secret is

what remains structurally inaccessible. The secret of the text, that deep interiority, cannot

be made phenomenal. Even when it is revealed as a secret, i.e., even once we have read

Derrida and understand the secrets role in literature, it remains a secret. One can

always speak about it, that is not enough to disrupt it.13 It cannot be revealed because it

does not turn on notions of concealment. It remains inviolable even when one thinks

one has revealed it.14 It cannot be reduced to the binary oppositions surrounding secrets,

viz. concealed/revealed, invisible/visible. And without the possibility of unconcealment,

what Derrida offers us is a principle of endless interpretability; what is necessary is a way

to steer through these interpretations.

The secret, then, precludes the stability necessary for any normalized reading. It

makes the text something beyond knowledge and beyond the sphere of the same,

something always other. In Baudelaires story, the narrator condemns his friend based on

what he thought he saw in his friends eyes, that by giving the beggar the counterfeit coin

he could do a good deed on the cheap. But as with a text, the other is always

inaccessible: her motives are never entirely known to us. We cannot pass judgment on

the other because we cannot know her secret. Between the narrator and his friend an

interruption opens, in truth it recalls to its opening the space of an absolute heterogeneity

13
Jacques Derrida, Passions: An Oblique Offering, trans. David Wood, in On the Name, ed. Thomas
Dutoit (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993) 26.
14
Ibid.

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and an infinite secret between the two, between all the twos of the world (GT, 156).

Understanding this, recognizing the secret becomes a way of letting the other be. We

cannot pass a moral judgment, we cannot normalize the other, without appealing to the

other, who is inaccessible.

How does this relate to the gift? The text presents a structural giving akin to the

es gibt, but without any notion that the text comes into its essencethere is no essence,

only surface. This structural giving turns on the secret and lack of any interiority; and

because there is no interiority, we can never fully possess the text. And because the text

is beyond the intentions of the author, there is no one to whom we feel indebted and no

one who feels generous. Rather, any reading of the text is our own, so there is nothing

that we recognize as a gift.

The Impossibility of the Gift

As Derrida shows, a careful analysis of the gift reveals its lack of any stable unity of

meaning. It is a self-deconstructing concept: the conditions of its possibility render it

impossible. Where does this leave us? Derrida tells us that we must begin with the

impossible, i.e., the impossible impassions us. It is a sense of hope or desire that shocks

us into action and disrupts the horizon of expectation. We cannot know the truth of a

text, but this does not mean we should abandon texts. We cannot know the gift, but this

does not mean we cannot or should not give gifts. The implications are quite the opposite

for Derrida: giving is an act we must performeven though we cannot truly know what

we are doing.

It is a matterof responding faithfully but also as rigorously as possible to

the injunction of the order of the gift: Know still what giving wants to
say, know how to give, know what you want and want to say when you

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 give, know what you intend to give, know how the gift annuls itself,
commit yourself even if commitment is the destruction of the gift by the
gift, give economy its chance (GT, 30).

A pure gift cannot exist, but this does not mean gifts cannot still be given. Giving

requires knowing what annuls giving, and giving anyway. We are to give even while

realizing that our gifts only amount to economic acts. But this is more than absorption of

gifts by an economy. Economies only function when gifts are given. Economic

relationships are purely contractual, and contracts are zero-sum gamesone does only

what one is bound to do; one follows the letter of the law. Within any pure quid pro quo

relationship, progress is never made. It is the gifts that are giventhe going beyond

ones duty and giving more than is expected or required or owed, for examplethat

produce the surplus and allow the economy to function smoothly and, more importantly,

expand. Without these seemingly minor gifts, there is no growth since the system always

returns to zero. These gifts, of course, cannot last: giving never gets us outside of the

circle; we cannot free ourselves from economies. A gift functions only as a moment of

transgression. It exceeds the circle of the economy, but only momentarily. The instant

the gift breaks open the circle of the economy, the economy expands to reclaim it.

[T]he overrunning of the circle by the gift, if there is any, does not lead to
a simple, ineffable exteriority that would be transcendent and without
relation. It is this exteriority that sets the circle going, it is this exteriority
that puts the economy in motion. It is this exteriority that engages in the
circle and makes it turn (GT, 30).

The economy adapts to the surplus produced by the employees so that what were once

gifts become part of the logic of the system, and new forms of giving arise to take their

place. Each time gifts are given, the economy gets a little larger, the circle gets a little

wider, but it remains firmly intact.

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 Giving even when we know that it is impossible to break free of the economy is

one half of the double gesture of the gift. The second half requires giving this economy

its chance. This injunction plays with two different readings. We must tolerate

economies since, after all, they cannot be tossed out, nor should they. They are

necessary, but it is equally necessary to interrupt them in order to let something new

happen: Nothing can happen without the family and without economy, to be sure, but

neither can anything happen in the family: in the family, that is, in the sealed enclosure,

which is moreover unimaginable, of the restricted, absolutely restricted economy, without

the least chrematistic vertigo (GT, 158). We find in this passage the second reading of

Derridas injunction. An economy operates by reducing everything to the sphere of the

same: everything is viewed as an incoming or outgoing resource, an asset or a liability.

But a pure economy is as much an impossibility as a pure gift. A pure economy is a

world without gifts, a world in which people do only what duty bounds them to do. Such

an economy would be a failed system. A gift momentarily disrupts this sameness by

introducing a random and (temporarily) unassimilable element. It allows chance to

appear within the systematic logic. One mustil fautopt for the gift, for generosity,

for noble expenditure, for a practice and a morality of the gift (GT, 62). Giving

means being open, resisting the normalization of the larger economy that seeks to reduce

everything to the same.

The injunctive donne calls upon us to give others a break, to open up the
impossible for the other, not to close the other down within the horizon of
possibility and normalization, not to remake others in the image of the
Same (us), to let invention of the other happen, to let events happen
(PTJD, 185).

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Giving demands a letting-be of the other. In light of what weve seen in the two previous

chapters, however, this seems almost impossible.

Caputo examines the question of the gift in light of tradition, which is very useful.

The tradition gives and we are indebted to it. He points out that Derrida is fine with this:

we cannot avoid traditions or get outside of them; there is no exteriority to which we can

relocate (PTJD, 181). For Derrida, healthy traditions are those that keep themselves open

and that avoid becoming too ossified. Traditions happen when quasi-systems of

tracesnot just books, of course, but institutions, laws, works of art, beliefs, practices,

whatever you need, whatever is aroundare fluid, open-ended, supple, flexible,

reconfigurable, and reinterpretable (PTJD, 182). Traditions only become

problematic when they close off new possibilities. Traditions that are too constraining

and no longer allow for interruptions continue to give, but what they give are poisoned

gifts. They then seek to keep us indebted to the subjects venerated by the tradition. That

is why the highest gratitude would always involve in-gratitude about such monumental

debts, which opens up the possibility of letting a new gift loose (PTJD, 182).

The task for us is to give, which means keeping the normalizing systems of

economy open to new possibilities, which means opening up ourselves and our traditions

to the unknown. Acting within a tradition becomes a matter of releasing aleatory chains,

of initiatives which initiate unforeseeable possibilities and unexpected initiatives from

others, over which the initiators neither can nor want to maintain control (PTJD, 183).

The concept of the gift brings us back to the avenir, the to-come: giving is the ever-

renewed effort to keep our traditions and our horizons of expectation open to something

new, even as those horizons of expectation render that impossible.

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 Derridas treatment of the gift gives us a framework with which to approach

Foucaults concept of normalizing power. But before we return to Foucault, we must

look at Derridas second examination of the gift, The Gift of Death. It is there that we see

an evolution of his understanding of the gift, one that presents us with a general economy

of giving.

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 Chapter 7: Everyday Madness: The Gift in The Gift of Death

Given Time showed us the conceptual instability of the gift and made the case that

any pure gift must be a structural giving, the product of a quasi-transcendental structure

that gives without return. It is giving qua disseminative act, giving the effects of which

cannot return to the giver. In Derridas second examination of the gift, The Gift of Death,

the gift is ethical rather than structural. The structural paradoxes elucidated in Given

Timethat it can only be given without its being known to the giver or the receiver and

that it cannot manifest itself as a giftstill obtain. However, The Gift of Death shows us

that gifts are not limited to a structural generosity producing meanings and effects

through the play of differences. Here, Derrida presents the gift as the sacrifice of that

which is irreplaceable; and because what is given is irreplaceable, this is a gift that

remains an-economic. With no possibility of restoration, there is no possibility of an

economic return.

The title of the book, The Gift of Death plays with the French idiom Donner la

mort, which means causing the death of someone or something. In the background is

Heideggers analysis of death in Being and Time: death is the moment of irreplaceability;

no one can die in place of another. I can give my whole life for another, I can offer my

death to the other, but in doing this I will only be replacing or saving something partial in

a particular situation (there will be a nonexhaustive exchange or sacrifice, an economy of

sacrifice).1 My death is my death: I can die in place of the other, but my sacrifice only

postpones the others death. It does not remove it. The difficulty with giving death is

that my death is what is without giving or taking. I cannot give it away, nor can someone

1
Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. D. Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1992) 43. Hereafter
abbreviated in the text as GD.

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take it from me. Even more problematic is the fact that death typically belongs to an

economy; there is some kind of return. A gift or return is always found in death. Perhaps

it is part of the natural cycle of things, or it may mark a sacrifice in which the loss of life

leads to something greater. Take, for instance, two great deaths of the Westthe death

of Socrates and the death of Jesus. Socrates execution produced the Western episteme;

the death of Jesus is the birth of Christianity. In both cases, the death of an individual

yields a fundamental shift in Western culture.

Derrida turns this economic understanding of death on its head by asking, Under

what conditions might giving death be a gift without return? When is giving death an act

of pure giving, as opposed to an economic act in which death is simply the cost of

achieving another purpose? Derrida is now looking at an ethics or politics of the gift and

the agency of the giver. While the gift is the basis of an ethics in both books (since Given

Time calls us to give despite the impossibility of preventing an economic relationship), it

is more developed here where the gift appears not just as a sacrifice but as the sacrifice of

ethics for an absolute responsibility. To understand the gift as sacrifice, Derrida

undertakes a deconstructive reading of Fear and Trembling and examines Abrahams

sacrifice of Isaac as an act of absolute and unconditional giving. Since nothing could

possibly replace his son, the sacrifice of Isaac is made without any hope of return and is

thus a gift.

In this chapter, I want to explore how Derridas conception of the gift evolves

from Given Time. I will first lay out the Kiekegaardian notion of Abrahams absolute

relation to the absolute that he develops in Fear and Trembling. I will then take up

Derridas reading of Kierkegaard, which approaches the text through Levinas and argues

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that the akedah of Abraham is the paradigm of absolute and unconditional giving. On

this reading, the knight of faith becomes representative of everyone, not just the rare

individual. Finally, I will discuss the implications of such a reading on Derridas

understanding of the gift, claiming that it represents an important shift in his thinking on

this theme.

Abraham in Fear and Trembling

In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard criticizes what he sees as the decline of Christian

faith into easy spiritual reassurance. Believers no longer recognize the demands genuine

faith imposes; their relationship with God is comforting when it should be disconcerting

if not downright terrifying. This is the true pathos of Abrahams sacrifice of Isaac: Gods

command is beyond all human reason and trumps any sense of ethics or justice, yet

Abraham accepts it and acts.

The Gift of Death is Derridas reading of Fear and Trembling. He pushes

Kierkegaards interpretation further to show that Abrahams sacrifice of Isaac

exemplifies the sacrifice of ethics: Abraham has a fatherly obligation to protect his son,

but he also has an obligation to obey God. Caught between his responsibility to Isaac and

his obedience to Yahweh, he cannot fulfill both. But this aporia of responsibility goes

further than simply failing to honor his paternal duties. As the story of Abraham

illustrates, meeting one responsibility entails sacrificing the other.

To understand what Derrida means by a sacrifice of ethics, we first have to

understand the difference Kierkegaard posits between the ethical and the religious. The

ethical is what we find in the concrete ethical community or the universal law. It is the

universal norm that governs our relationships with others and that applies to everyone

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and every situation. Take for example Kants categorical imperative: one should always

act in such a way that one would be willing for everyone else to act similarly. With this

universal rule, lying is unethical, even when telling the truth may harm someone you care

about, since it means accepting the idea that it is permissible for everyone to lie, which

would lead to social collapse. But the ethical realm is not limited to objective moral

laws. It also means conforming to social institutions and social values. Ethics demands

that we show the necessary courage to face the reality of our situation and act.

Agamemnons fleet is ready to sail for Troy, but the gods have withheld the wind and

demand the sacrifice of his daughter Iphigenia. Like Abraham, this means sacrificing

both his happiness and violating a core belief that he should protect his child. However,

he makes the sacrifice, and he is regarded as a hero for it. His competing ethical duties

make Agamemnons situation a tragedy: either choice would have him honoring one of

his ethical obligations and sacrificing another; so he set aside his personal duty for the

higher duty to the state. Consequently,

[t]he tragic hero is still within the ethical. He allows an expression of the
ethical to have its telos in a higher expression of the ethical; he scales
down the ethical relation between father and son or daughter and father to
a feeling that has its dialectic in its relation to the idea of moral conduct.2

Agamemnons sacrifice is an ethical act because it subordinates his private ethical

responsibility to Iphegenia to his public ethical duty to the Achaeans. Ethics demands

that we, like Agamemnon, honor our universal duty. Sometimes this duty requires

personal sacrifice, but such a sacrifice remains within the sphere of human existence and

puts us in relation with others.

2
Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, ed. and trans. Howard and Edna Hong (Princeton: Princeton
University, 1983) 59.

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 It is the universality of Agamemnons duty that makes him a tragic hero.

Everyone can identify with his conflicting obligations. But what of Abraham? Cannot

everyone understand his duty as a father to Isaac, even those who are not fathers

themselves? The difficulty with Abraham, and what differentiates him from

Agamemnon, is the absence of any higher ethical duty to which he can resign his paternal

responsibilities. He acts without any universal ethical justification and therefore cannot

be so easily reduced to the tropes of tragedy. Whereas Agamemnon was operating in the

public capacity of king serving his people, Abrahams acts are motivated by a purely

private relationship with God: he sacrifices Isaac only because God tells him to. There is

no clear purpose. His private relationship with God precludes universally accepted

action. He cannot meet the demands of universal ethics that say he must protect his son.

His duty is absolute, and absolute duty entails renouncing the law and ethics and

everything universal.

By assuming an absolute responsibility that transcends any ethical principle,

Abraham removes himself from the realm of human sympathy. We cannot identify with

him because his is a singular focus on God. He stands in absolute relation to the

absolute. Understanding the nature of this relationship more fully, it is helpful to employ

the distinction James Edwards makes between the absolute relation to the absolute and a

universal relation to the universal. In a universal relation to the universal, we operate

within public relationships that have prescribed roles and practices. In public

relationships, the constitutive rights and duties are universal, or at least very general:

the expectations defining excellent performance attach (ceteris paribus) no matter which

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particular individual is holding down that role.3 My role as a teacher carries certain

expectations about how I should act in the classroom. While I am free to develop my

particular style of teaching and interacting with students, within that role I am not entirely

free: the role imposes rules and expectations that govern my behavior. Some of these are

codified in law and institutional policies (such as having a sexual relationship with a

student or disclosing confidential student information); others are less explicit and less

defined (such as maintaining certain levels of accessibility). Whatever the particular

variations, this role demands a responsibility that accords with these expectations. The

universality of a public role stems from its discursive nature: the role and its norms can

be articulated and understood by everyone. Derrida draws a similar distinction when he

contrasts responsibility in general, which adheres to the universal norms and applies to

everyone, and absolute responsibility, which is exceptional or extraordinary. This is not

ethical responsibility:

[I]t is as if absolute responsibility could not be derived from a concept of

responsibility and therefore, in order for it to be what it must be, it must
remain inconceivable, and indeed unthinkable: it must therefore be
irresponsible in order to be absolutely responsible (GD, 61).

If our ordinary understanding of responsibility is dictated by ethical norms, absolute

responsibility is the responsibility we accept when we suspend those norms. In his

absolute relation to the absolute, Abraham can no longer rely on ordinary conceptions of

responsibility; the public role of fatherhood and the norms that come with it no longer

apply.

In suspending universally accepted norms, absolute responsibility appears

irresponsible in the eyes of the ethical. It is a responsibility others cannot understand and

3
James C. Edwards, The Plain Sense of Things: The Fate of Religion in an Age of Normal Nihilism
(University Park: Pennsylvania State University, 1997) 83.

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cannot assimilate into existing ethical thought. Absolute responsibility is not a

responsibility, at least it is not general responsibility or responsibility in general (GD,

61). To those watching from outside the absolute relation to the absolute, Abrahams

actions appear inexplicable and unjustifiable. And they are. The ethical sphere is the

sphere of language and reason: Agamemnon can explain himself to the satisfaction of

everyone. Clytemnestra may hate him for what he did, but she understands why he acted.

No such recourse is available to Abraham. He might certainly tell Sarah and Eliezer and

Isaac that God has commanded him to do this, but if he does so, if he speaks, his situation

ceases to be an absolute relation to the absolute. His private relationship with God would

become public. The dilemma would remainsacrifice his son or disobey Godbut it

would be reduced to a spiritual trial everyone can sympathize with. As it is, Abraham is

entirely alone. Because this relationship is singular, it is beyond the reach of language,

which is also universal; hence Abrahams inability to express his ordeal. This is why

Kierkegaard regards ethics as a temptation for Abraham: he could get out of sacrificing

Isaac by appealing to his paternal duty. The ethical thus (paradoxically) becomes a

temptation since it offers him a reason and a way to relinquish Yahwehs seemingly

irrational demand. As a rule, what tempts a person is something that will hold him back

from doing his duty, but here the temptation is the ethical itself, which would hold him

back from doing Gods will.4 This makes ethics a form of irresponsibilization: in

acting responsibly (in the ordinary sense) and remaining within a universal relation to the

universal, he is acting irresponsibly (in the extraordinary or absolute sense). Ethics is

irresponsibility insofar as it demands we give up the singular relationship. By standing in

absolute relation to the absolute, Abraham accepts the singular relationship with God and
4
Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 60.

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renounces everything universal, transgressing the ethical and suspending it because of a

higher telos. His singular existence contrasts with the universal; existing beyond ethics,

he exists only through his faith.5 For Kierkegaard, such an existence is beyond most of

us. The anxiety of leaving the sphere of ethics and the requisite isolation demands too

much. This is why the knight of faith is rare and unrecognized.

For Derrida, pace Kierkegaard, the knight of faith is not such a rarity. On

Derridas reading, the knight of faiths position is the position we all find ourselves in.

The religious exception, the singularity of the religious situation in which

ethical generality is suspended, is always upon us. Such exceptionality is
the daily business of lifewhich implies that the unexceptional
regularities, the programmable problems found in the ethics books, are
rarely found in life (Caputo, PTJD, 208).

What Kierkegaard regarded as an exceptional state is in fact a universal condition.

Derridas point is not to tear down Abraham, however. His deconstruction of Fear and

Trembling shows that it is the programmatic and programmable ethical systems that are

in fact the exceptions.6 The artificiality of ethical theory recalls the artificiality of classic

economic theory mentioned in the last chapter: both rely on idealized approaches and

theoretical constructs that only rarely apply to real-world situations. When faced with

specific ethical dilemmas that arise in our everyday relationships, we do not gauge our

actions according to the categorical imperative. Nor do we weigh decisions based upon

how well they maximize utility. Instead, my relationship to the other is the same singular

5
Ibid., 61-62.
6
Ethics as promoted and as practiced (with monotonous regularity in the context of philosophy) is read
by Derrida as serving little purpose other than to appease what he rather derisively calls good conscience.
It is inseparable, therefore, from a morality that is inspired by, and remains inseparable from a religious
tradition. Although ethics of this type is held to be necessary and intrinsic to philosophy, for Derrida, it
becomes at a certain point a failure to think philosophically, a failure to take thinking to its limits.
Responsibility is from that perspective opposed to ethics; it is scandalous, untenable, never offering the
comfort of conscience. David Wills, Matchbook: Essays in Deconstruction (Stanford: Stanford University,
2005) 116.

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relationship to the absolute that we find in Abrahams relationship to God. Like

Abraham, I am faced with inherent conflicting obligations: Abraham cannot honor his

responsibility to Yahweh and still fulfill his duty as a father to Isaac; nor can we do our

duty to the absolute other standing before us and, at the same time, honor our duties to all

of the other absolutely singular others. And like Abraham, my absolute duty binds me to

an absolutely singular other and requires that I act irresponsibly and unethically in the

eyes of those clinging to universal notions of ethics.

God and the Other: Derrida on Kierkegaard and Levinas

To understand how Derrida arrives at this reading, it is necessary to understand that

Derrida is reading Fear and Trembling through Levinas. This is an unorthodox

approach, to say the least: Levinas and Kierkegaard have, at least at first glance, an

antagonistic understanding of Abraham. For Levinas, the story of Abraham and Isaac is

purely anthropological; it is the story of the end of human sacrifice. At the last moment,

God calls off the sacrifice, and this for Levinas marks Abrahams return to the ethical.

But more important is their differences concerning the nature of ethics. Levinas takes

ethics to be our unconditional obligation to the other, and this obligation cannot bind us

in a universal way. Kierkegaard, as we have already seen, regards ethics as the universal

that cannot unconditionally bind us. Derrida thinks the antagonism between Kierkegaard

and Levinas gives way: on his reading of Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaards religious

sphere comprises the same structural obligation to the other that we find in Levinass

ethics. In both, the subject ceases to be commensurable with the universal (whether this

takes the form of ethical concepts for Kierkegaard or phenomenological concepts and

ontological categories for Levinas) because the subject succumbs to the demands of the

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wholly other. If Kierkegaard shows Levinas that the ethical has the structure of a

religious bond with the other, Levinas shows Kierkegaard that the religious has ethical

implications.

For Derridas purposes, this collapse allows him to conflate the infinity of God

with the infinity of the other; Abrahams relationship to God is analogous to the

Levinasian subjects relationship to the other. God in the story of Abraham is the

Levinasian wholly other, the singular other who remains wholly unknowable and wholly

inaccessible. Just as Abraham cannot know Gods full intentions, I can never fully grasp

the other. I can never fully know what the other is thinking or feeling. This

understanding of the inaccessible other stems from Husserls 5th Cartesian Meditation in

which he shows that the other is never fully present to us: we only know the other

through apperception. I can only make assumptions about the other through analogical

thinking; the consciousness of the other is never phenomenologically present to me. No

matter how well I know my wife, no matter how successful I may be at anticipating her

thoughts or responses to a given situation, they are all mediated through words or actions

that signify her as a conscious being. Levinas pushes this further by arguing that the

other is not just phenomenologically inaccessible to me, not just beyond my own

conscious awareness, but that in my proximity, the other withdraws and therefore is not

touched by a relation with us. Because of this withdrawal, there is no homogeneity

between the other and myself: there is no shared language, no shared horizon of

experience, no shared background with the wholly other. Consequently the other does

not give reasons: If the other were to share his reasons with us by explaining them to us,

if he were to speak to us all the time without any secrets, he wouldnt be the other, we

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would share a type of homogeneity (GD, 57). Instead, we find a radical heterogeneity

between ourselves and the other.

We see this heterogeneity in the story of Abraham. There, God exemplifies the

phrase tout autre est tout autre, God is every (bit) other (GD, 87). As the wholly

other, God remains absolutely transcendent, and Abraham finds himself in a relationship

without relation to God (GD, 72-73). Abraham knows nothing about God or about why

he demands the sacrifice of Isaac. After promising Abraham that he would father

generations, God is now commanding him to kill his only son. He has, it would seem,

reneged on the promise, and he never explains why. Only God knows what is going on,

and he is keeping it beyond the sphere of reason.

God doesnt give his reasons, he acts as he intends, he doesnt have to give
his reasons or share anything with us: neither his motivations, if he has
any, nor his deliberations, nor his decisions. Otherwise he wouldnt be
God, we wouldnt be dealing with the Other as God or with God as the
wholly other [tout autre] (GD, 57).

When called by God, Abraham does not ask God why. He does not argue with God the

way he did when God told him of his plans to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah. Abraham

only responds with Here I am, which is the only response one can give within the

religious sphere (GD, 71). He only understands Gods command. He obeys, but he does

not understand why God wants this and therefore cannot explain himselfeven to

himself. The knight of faith must not hesitate. He accepts his responsibility by heading

off towards the absolute request of the other, beyond knowledge. He decides, but his

absolute decision is neither guided nor controlled by knowledge. (GD, 77). The

command of the other is a secret that singles us out. It is incommunicable and cannot be

shared with others. Thus God isolates Abraham through two layers of secrecy: his

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inability to tell Isaac or Sarah what he is doing and his own ignorance of what he is

doing. The secret command that drives Abraham is similarly structural for us: the secret

of the other that commands us is incommunicable; we cannot share it with other others.

Yet, this is the secret that impassions.

Because of the secret, his responsibility is absolutely to God, who is not seen and

who speaks only in secret.7 For Kierkegaard, Abrahams secret is not an absolute secret

since God knows what is going on. Kierkegaard understands the secret to be a deep and

determinate truth stored in the relationship between the self and God. For Derrida, the

secret is absolute: it is the secret that there is no secret. We have already seen this

conception of the secret in Given Time where the secret of literature is the absence of any

secret, the structural inaccessibility that keeps our experience of a text at the surface. We

can never know the deep interiority of a text or a character because there is no interiority.

The text is a pure surface that hints at something deeper we can never know because there

is no interiority. In The Gift of Death, instead of closing off any interiority, the secret

opens up the space of interiority. This secret arises from the asymmetrical relationship

that exists between the subject and the other: God knows everything about Abraham

while Abraham knows nothing about him. This relationship recalls the analysis from

chapter three of the ghost in Hamlet, which shows the lack of any face-to-face exchange

of looks between the other and myself.

It is dissymmetrical: this gaze that sees me without my seeing it looking at

me. It knows my very secret even when I myself dont see it and even
though the Socratic Know yourself seems to install the philosophical

7
[T]o be absolutely responsible implies that you alone are responsible, that you have a unique relationship
to your obligation which cannot be accounted for, justified, or explained; your responsibility, if it is truly
yours, is unique and cannot be understood in terms of any universal laws, principles, or language. Absolute
responsibility requires secrecy because the secret obligation defies words; it cannot be spoken even if one
were to try. Kelly Oliver, Fatherhood and the Promise of Ethics, Diacritics 27.1 (Spring 1997): 54.

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 within the lure of reflexivity, in the disavowal of a secret that is always for
me alone, that is to say for the other: for me who never sees anything in it,
and hence for the other alone to whom, through the dissymmetry, a secret
is revealed. For the other my secret will no longer be a secret (GD, 91).8

God is closer to Abraham than Abraham is to himself, which is why Abraham approaches

with fear and trembling. Gods secret reveals aspects of Abrahams subjectivity that are

inaccessible even to himself. It is the secret that God keeps from Abraham that rips

Abraham from the sphere of ethics and the sphere of community and leaves him in a

singular relationship with God.

The phrase tout autre est tout autre Derrida uses to describe God as the wholly

other is open to another reading: The wholly other is every other. All others possess

the same inaccessibility as God. Each thing, each being, you, me, the other, each X,

each name, and each name of God can become the example of other substitutable Xs.

[] Any other is totally other.9 All others are equally wholly other.

It implies that God, as the wholly other, is to be found everywhere there is

something of the wholly other. And since each of us, everyone else, each
other is infinitely other in its absolute singularity, inaccessible, solitary,
transcendent, nonmanifest, originarily nonpresent to my ego, then what
can be said about Abrahams relation to God can be said about my relation
without relation to every other (one) as every (bit) other, in particular my
relation to my neighbor or my loved ones who are as inaccessible to me,
as secret and transcendent as Jahweh. Every other (in the sense of each
other) is every bit other (absolutely other) (GD, 78).

This is a critical point in Derridas analysis of Fear and Trembling: here he expands

Kierkegaards conception of the knight of faith. If every other is as inaccessible to us as

God, Abrahams relationship to God becomes something more than a single event: it
8
It is worth noting that this description not only recalls the ghost in Hamlet, it also recalls Foucaults
description of the Panopticon. God functions here as the ultimate normalizing force.
9
Jacques Derrida, Sauf le nom (Post-Scriptum), trans. John P. Leavey, Jr., in On the Name, 76. See also
GD, 87. Caputo calls this a radical heterology, a hetero-tautology, which takes Gods infinite alterity
and attributes it to every form of alterity: one or other persons but just as well places, animals, language
(PTJD, 209).

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represents our relationships to every other, not just God. The wholly otherwhether

God or my neighboris the point or moment in which I experience the unforeseeable. It

is an experience that does not, that cannot, be phenomenological. This is because the

wholly other is characterized by an infinite alterity. In the story of Abraham, the alterity

of God also belongs to every other; and like Abraham, we can never know what this other

wants from us because the other is not the same as us.

The Sacrifice of Ethics

So God in the story of Abraham represents the wholly other who lays unconditional claim

to me. And like Abraham, I am, in my absolute singularity, bound to this wholly other.

I am responsible to the other as other, I answer to him and I answer for what I do before

him. But of course, what binds me thus in my singularity to the absolute singularity of

the other, immediately propels me into the space or risk of absolute sacrifice (GD, 68).

Here we come to the sacrifice of ethics: I find myself in this absolute relationship with

the other, but there is never a moment in which it is just the wholly other and me. There

is never only the dyadic relationship; a third, another other, is always also there. For

Abraham, of course, this is Isaac, and the irony and the paradox that Derrida recognizes is

that Isaacthe object of sacrificeis just as much a wholly other as God and therefore

just as deserving of Abrahams absolute responsibility. So it is that Derridas reading

ratchets up Abrahams dilemma: by doing his absolute duty to God, Abraham cannot

honor his equally absolute responsibility to Isaac. By doing his duty to God, he sacrifices

Isaac. Kierkegaard regards this absolute relation to the absolute as something rare, but

Derrida sees this as not unique to Abraham: this is the very nature of responsibility: I

cannot respond to the call, the request, the obligation, or even the love of another without

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sacrificing the other other, the other others (GD, 68). The other others are everyone else

standing outside my absolute relationship with the absolute. If every other is wholly

other, if God is merely a placeholder for anyone who might occupy that position, then

every other places equal demands on my responsibility. At the instant of every decision

and through the relation to every other (one) as every (bit) other, everyone else asks us at

every moment to behave like knights of faith (GD, 78-79). Ethical responsibility

presents us with an aporia: we cannot fulfill our responsibility to these other others when

we fulfill our obligations to the wholly other, so we sacrifice these other others.10

Isaac represents the ethical community to which I belong. He is the other other,

all of those others who remain connected to us within the realm of the law or reason or

calculation. For Levinas, the other other limits my obligation to the other standing before

me: I cannot simply give everything I have to this other; I have to hold something in

reserve for the other others whose demands are equally valid and equally worthy of my

attention. So it is that the other other, the third, disrupts my relation to the other by

imposing a competing obligation to question and compare my duties.11 I am pulled out of

my absolute relationship and forced to calculate: I need to weigh the merits of my

obligations to determine who gets what. With absolute responsibility in the face of the

wholly other, there is no calculation, so there is no justice; the wholly other is

incomparable. But it is the third who (re)-introduces justice:

The act of consciousness is motivated by the presence of a third party

alongside of the neighbor approached. A third party is also approached;
and the relationship between the neighbor and the third party cannot be
indifferent to me when I approach. There must be a justice among

10
With the third, then, emerges the questionnot only a being put into question by the Other but, without
waiting, the necessity of taking up speech in order to ask questions about my responsibilities for the Other,
and for the others of the Other (Nass, 106).
11
Ibid., 104.

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 incomparable ones. There must then be a comparison among
incomparables and a synopsis, a togetherness and contemporaneousness,
there must be thematization, thought, history, and inscription.12

Isaac forces such a comparison between incomparables. And here we see a difference

between how Derrida and Levinas approach the issue of the other others. Levinas thinks

the relationship with the other others flows smoothly and without opposition from the

primary singular relationship. I cannot simply give everything to the other who is facing

me because there are all the other others to whom I am also responsible. They are what

limit me and remind me to keep a little something in reserve to meet my other

obligations. Derrida, on the other hand, regards this calculation as a moment of conflict.

Meeting the demand of the other means neglecting the other others. Abrahams paternal

love for Isaac is what creates his spiritual crisis; it is what forces him to confront the

horror of his own willingness to sacrifice that love to this absolute duty. This relation to

the other stands in opposition to these relationships: my loyalties are divided. The

structural paradox for Abraham becomes a paradigm for Derrida: any ethical relationship

entails inner conflict.13

We are in Abrahams position: we are caught between the competing demands of

the wholly other and the demands of all the other others. To act is to be conflicted: my

deepest allegiance is to those around me and is constituted by proximity, but this

proximity is always interrupted by the other others we do not know. Any ethical decision

poses a conflict of duty: my responsibility to the other entails the sacrifice of my

responsibility to all the other others. The world is built on the sacrifice of the other

12
Levinas, Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence, 16.
13
Diane Moira Duncan makes the interesting point that Noah is more paradigmatic of the ethical
relationship than Abraham since Noah shut himself up in the ark and did not have to look his sacrificial
victims in the eyes. See Duncans The Pre-Text of Ethics: On Derrida and Levinas (New York: Peter
Lang, 2001) 149-150.

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others. The only way I can act responsibly and respond to the other standing in front of

me is by sacrificing the other other. I cannot honor my responsibilities to all the others.

This is not some moral failing on my part, however. The structure of morality requires us

to give the death of other others to the absolute other. We are always sacrificing other

others for the sake of the other standing before us. Feeding my family means not feeding

other families. Feeding some of those other families means not feeding all of the other

other families. This is not simply a reality of limited resources; these are structural

sacrifices. For Derrida, we are continually making these sacrifices, though we do not

typically notice them: I am sacrificing and betraying at every moment all my other

obligations: my obligations to the other others whom I know or dont know every one

being sacrificed to every one else in this land of Moriah that is our habitat every second

of every day (GD, 69; my italics). And these sacrifices, these gifts, occur at every

moment with everything we do, regardless of our intentions. Ethically, Abraham is a

murderer: he fully intended and was wholeheartedly committed to killing his son. But,

Derrida reminds us, Abrahams act is the most common event in the world, an act that is

inscribed in the structure of our existence to the extent of no longer constituting an

event (GD, 85). From the moment I am in relation to the other, I sacrifice ethics and my

responsibility to the other others.

I offer a gift of death, I betray, I dont need to raise my knife over my son
on Mount Moriah for that. Day and night, at every instant, on all the
Mount Moriahs of this world, I am doing that, raising my knife over what
I love and must love, over those to whom I owe absolute fidelity,
incommensurably (GD, 68).

We are always already giving the gift of death in the form of the sacrifice of the other

other. Regardless of how we much we might want to avoid such sacrifices, no matter

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how much we try to pay attention to the hidden costs of honoring our duties, everything

is given over to the absolute duty to the other before me (GD, 70). The challengethe

impossibilityis not to become inured to this structurally necessary death.

Derridas analysis of the ethical relationship with the other reveals a relationship

built on continuous structural giving. This view of the giftthe gift as constant

sacrificemarks a substantial evolution in his thinking of the gift from Given Time. The

gift of death adheres to the criteria of the gift that he lays out in the earlier work: a giver

who is unaware that a gift has been given, a receiver unaware that a gift has been

received, and a gift that does not appear as such. But Derrida is no longer focusing on

particular acts of giving, such as the friends giving the counterfeit coin to the beggar.

Nor are the ethics of the gift based on our own willingness to give even as we know that

such gifts are impossible. Here, our giving is unavoidable, but the ethical aspect of such

giving is much deeper: his analysis takes an oddly (and unintentionally) Maussian turn

insofar as it reveals how giving creates a web of connections between us and everyone

else. Through the choices I make to honor my responsibilities, I give the gift of death;

but I do not know what I give, how I give it, when I give it, or to whom I give it. The

recipients are those other others I could have helped but did not, but they do not receive it

as a gift, they do not know from whom their sacrifice comes. They may sense that they

are forgotten, but forgotten by whom exactly? Rwandan refugees, for example, may

indict the international community for sitting on its hands, but what they recognize is

what they have not received, not what our own complacency has given them. And in this

giving what has been given? The gifts of death I make to the other, i.e., those sacrifices

of all the other others that my relationship to the other requires, lack the possibility of

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phenomenality. Most of the time, I am completely ignorant of the sacrifices: they are the

unseen and unnoticed consequences of my actions. I might, of course, realize that by

giving to one charity I have to forgo giving to another. I can understand that helping the

homeless in Philadelphia means I cannot help the homeless in New York or Baltimore.

But even if I am aware of my sacrifice of some of the other others, I cannot possibly

catalogue all of the other sacrifices I make on a daily basis because I can never know

what those sacrifices are. Who else does my Western bourgeois lifestyle sacrifice?

Certainly, I can read Derrida and know in the abstract that such gifts are given or

received, but they never rise to the phenomenal level because the receiver and the gift and

the act of giving itself are structurally inaccessible.

On one level, the continuous giving of the gift of death pre-empts economic

thinking. There is no closure or return. Abrahams sacrifice of Isaac is literally a

sacrifice of economy. Sacrificing his son is the sacrifice of the oikonomia, namely of

the law of the home (oikos), of the hearth, of what is ones own or proper, of the private,

of the love and affection of ones kin (GD, 95).14 The books do not and cannot balance,

and the closed circuit of the economy gives way to a Bataillean general economy. If the

structure of our closest relationships is predicated on a general economy of death, there is

then a certain madness underlying our very existence. In Given Time, Derrida reminds us

that the gift is itself an act of madness: to give, knowing that it is impossible, is irrational.

14
Oliver argues that the economic relation does remain in effect insofar as the sacrifice of Isaac is the cost
of preserving paternal authority: [I]f [Abrahams] sacrifice is made at the command of the ultimate
Patriarch, God the Father, then [Abraham] the son is only protecting what is his own by giving in. His
sacrifice is made in the name of fatherhood, for the sake of preserving the authority of fatherhood (Oliver,
56).

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From an economic standpoint, it is a bad investment. Now, we are confronted with the

irrationally exorbitant costs of our relations with the other.

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 Chapter 8: The Gift of Power

We began by examining the debate between Derrida and Foucault about the

possibility of writing a history of madness. Now in this final chapter, I return to that

debate to bring together the themes we have been tracingthe issue of madness, the

question of normalization and the other, the nature of power and the gift. I will argue that

reading Derrida and Foucault against each other provides us with a more complete

picture of the process of normalization. Derrida warns us that the other is always subject

to the imposition of our normalizing power. The economy of thought renders whatever is

other the same, which is necessary if we are to make sense of the other. But it also means

never letting the other appear as other. Foucault shows us how we are always already

normalized by the institutions and the intersubjective relationships in which we find

ourselves. The normalization comes from the other; it is the other who normalizes me

and who I must resist, even if I ultimately cannot. By reading Derrida and Foucault

together, we gain a deeper understanding of Foucaults analytic of power; we can

understand it as a gift.

Freud and the Question of Mastery

In 1991, at the Ninth Colloquium of the International Society for the History of

Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis, which was devoted to Foucaults History of Madness,

Derrida revisited his original exchange with Foucault. In that paper and subsequent

essay, To Do Justice to Freud: The History of Madness in the Age of Psychoanalysis,

Derrida says (repeatedly and at times less than forthrightly) that his aim is not to resume

the discussion (since, after all, Foucault is already dead) but to explore the place of Freud

and psychoanalysis in Foucaults history of madness. Derrida asks about Foucaults

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debts to Freud: Would Foucaults project have been possible without psychoanalysis,

with which it is contemporary and of which it speaks little and in such an equivocal or

ambivalent manner in the book?1 In History of Madness, Foucault largely ignores

Freud, which is perhaps justifiable given Foucaults focus on the classical age;

psychoanalysis simply was not an issue in the treatment of madness. The problem for

Derrida is that a close reading of History of Madness reveals that Freud occupies a

curiously ambiguous place in the text. Freud acts as a hinge, a point of rotation, around

which History of Madness successively opens and closes, draws near and distances,

rejects and accepts, excludes and includes, disqualifies and legitimates, masters and

liberates (DJF, 234). Foucaults treatment of Freud follows a back-and-forth movement

that Derrida tracks in order to give Freud his due, i.e., to do justice to Freud.

The first swing in the hinge appears in the way Foucault aligns Freud with those

artists and thinkers who embody the point of contact between madness and the world,

figures such as Nietzsche, Artaud, Van Gogh, and Hlderlin. Foucault never actually

includes Freud in these lists, but he does acknowledge Freuds break with classical

psychology:

Freud took up madness at the level of its language, reconstituting one of

the essential elements of an experience that positivism had reduced to
silence. He did not set out to bring a major addition to the list of
psychological treatments of madness, but restored instead the possibility
of a dialogue with unreason to medical thought. [] Psychoanalysis is not
about psychology, but it is about an experience of unreason that
psychology, in the modern world, was meant to disguise (HM, 339).

In its willingness to speak with unreason, psychoanalysis recalls the attitude toward

madness that was prevalent prior to the classical age. Rather than exclude madness as

1
Jacques Derrida, To Do Justice to Freud: The History of Madness in the Age of Psychoanalysis,
trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, Critical Inquiry 20 (Winter 1994): 233. Hereafter
abbreviated in the text as DJF.

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unreasonable or silence it as pathology, Freud lifts the Cartesian interdiction that

forbids dialogue with madness (DJF, 236). He encourages it to speak, letting it say what

it will; he does not demand that, if it must speak, it should only parrot reason and thus

conceal itself. But more than simply allowing madness to speak, Freud actually engages

it, drawing it out in dialogue. On this view, psychoanalysis becomes a site where

madness and reason come into contact.

The second swing of the hinge occurs when Foucault claims that Freud is the

culmination of nineteenth-century psychiatry and aligns Freud with psychologists like

Tuke and Pinel who consign madness to the asylum (DJF, 244; HM, 510-511). Foucault

describes Freuds approach as imparting to the doctor an absence that was also a total

presence capable of a thaumaturgical omnipotence (HM, 510). The figure of the doctor

thus assumes all of the heretofore disparate powers of the asylum. Derrida observes that

this power of the doctoromnipotent, divine by simulacrum, at once divine and

satanic reiterates the very qualities of Descartess evil genius (DJF, 247). When

Foucault dismisses this power by grouping Freud with the practitioners of classical

psychiatry, he performs the same exclusion of the evil genius that he earlier criticized

Descartes for: by dismissing the idea of the Evil Genius, Descartes excluded madness.

Now we see Foucault dismissing the fictive omnipotence of the doctor and the

possibility of a dialogue between madness and psychoanalysis (DJF, 247-248). Foucault

himself will write that despite the dialogue Freud engages in with unreason,

psychoanalysis cannot and will never be able to hear the voices of unreason nor decipher

on their own terms the signs of the insane. Psychoanalysis can untangle some forms of

madness, but it is a perpetual stranger to the sovereign work of unreason (HM, 511).

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This dismissal of the doctors bad genius inadvertently repeats the Cartesian exclusion

in a deadly and devilish way, like a heritage inscribed within a diabolical and almost all-

power program that one should admit one never gets rid of or frees oneself from without

remainder (DJF, 248). The implication here is that Foucault has failed to extricate

himself from Cartesianism (DJF, 241).

But the overarching issue for Derrida is Foucaults claim that we must do justice

to Freud, a claim this back-and-forth renders problematic. Engaging in a bit of

psychology himself, Derrida remarks that when one says, one must do justice, one has

to be fair, it is often with the intention of correcting an impulse or reversing the direction

of a tendency; one is also recommending resisting a temptation (DJF, 236). What is this

temptation that Foucault is resisting? The need to master Freud. Foucault recognizes the

need to acknowledge Freuds break with classical psychiatry, but ultimately he succumbs

to the temptation to associate Freud with psychiatry and those who regard madness as

psychopathology. Doing so, he excludes Freud from those who conjoined madness and

the work of artand thus made Foucaults very project possible: The madness where an

uvre plunges into the void is the space of our work (HM, 537; my italics). On this

reading, Foucault not only relegates Freud to the sidelines; he suppresses the historical

conditions of his own project since he is writing a history of madness from within the age

of psychoanalysis (DJF, 232, 251). History of Madness both is and is not a work of the

age of Freudian psychoanalysis (DJF, 251). As a result of this suppression, the figure of

Freud perpetually threatens Foucaults project:

The perpetual threat, that is, the shadow of hauntingdoes not challenge
only one thing or another; it threatens the logic that distinguishes between
one thing and another, the very logic of exclusion or foreclosure, as well
as the history that is founded upon this logic and its alternatives. What is

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 excluded is, of course, never simply excluded, not by the cogito nor by
anything else, without this eventually returningand that is what a certain
psychoanalysis will have also helped us to understand (DJF, 242).

As we saw in chapter 3, the specter undermines the logic of opposition. It is both here

and not here. It is and is not. Such a figure likewise undermines a historical project,

which relies on clear determinations for historical knowledge. In this case, it is Freud

who returns to haunt Foucaults history of madness; it is Freud who will not stay put in

the categories assigned to him.

A guiding issue in this debateand it is the issue that first opened the debate in

1963 and (literally and figuratively) closes the debateis mastery, and in this case

Foucaults efforts to master Freud. But given Derridas numerous asides about

Foucaults unfair and unjust reproaches and his parenthetical justifications for previous

comments in this debate (that he does not want to reopen), one cannot help wonder if

Freud is Derridas proxy.2 Derrida makes explicit his decision not to re-engage his

earlier debate with Foucault: I declined [the suggestion to re-open the debate] for

numerous reasons, the first being the one I just mentioned: one does not carry on a

stormy discussion after the other has departed. Second, because this whole thing has

become too distant from me, and perhaps because of the drama just alluded to I no longer

wished to return to it (DJF, 228). Once the possibility of the discussion returns, there is

an implicit demand to tip the scales. By responding to Foucault, Derrida could make this

protracted argument pay offhe will after all have the last word. He could take the role

of a long-term investor: by waiting long enough, i.e. until his antagonist can no longer

respond, he is free to win the debate. However, Derrida declines to capitalize on his

2
There is thus an inevitable slippage from Foucaults analysis of Descartess or Freuds mastery of
madness to Derridas analysis of Foucaults mastery of the ambivalence within his text with regard to
Descartes or Freud, to, finally, the relationship between Derrida and Foucault. (Naas, 68).

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argumentative advantage since doing so would be unseemly and too tied to issues long

past. He refuses to speculate with the argument. He wants to let this discussion come to

a close.

Yet there is greater irony in Derridas refusal. The passage just cited continues:

By rereading all the texts of this discussion, right up to the last word, and especially the

last word, one will be better able to understand, I imagine, why I prefer not to give it a

new impetus today (DJF, 228; my italics). The formulation of the last clause, Derridas

declaration of his preference not to give the debate a new impetus, anticipates his brief

meditation on the same form of expression in The Gift of Death, which was published in

1992, shortly after this paper was delivered. There he muses about Melvilles Bartleby

and Bartlebys response without response, I would prefer not to:

Can we not find there the secret of a hypothetical reference to some

indecipherable providence or prudence? We dont know what he wants or
means to say, or what he doesnt want to do or say, but we are given to
understand quite clearly that he would prefer not to (GD, 75).

Bartlebys response is sublimely ironic (GD, 76). Derridas own expression is equally

ironic since he of all people knows it is impossible for his text not to give new energy to

the discussion.3 His I would prefer not to must be read not as a reference to an

indecipherable prudence but as resignation, a knowing comment that recognizes his

merely stating his preference will already re-open the debate. As much as he prefers not

to, it is impossible but to give new impetus. To actually attempt to close off the debate

would require faith in ones ability to master the text, which is impossible.

3
Naas glosses the preference itself: Derridas claimed desire not to give a new impetus to the debate
between himself and Foucault could be read as a desire not to return to the themes of exclusion and
madness in Descartes, that is, to a particular historical debate, but to give a new impetus, in the absence of
the other, to the question of what an impetus is, to give an impetus, then not to the debate as such but to the
impetus of the debate (Naas, 66-67).

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 Knowing that the debate is going to be reopened and shifting attention away from

Descartes to Freud, Derrida introduces another term to the discussion. Descartes had

merely been the catalyst for Derridas and Foucaults intellectual sparring; one gets the

sense he was a convenient vehicle for both men to stake out their philosophical positions.

Here, however, Freud occupies the place of the other other, the one who appears and

demands justice. And justice for Freud, at least as Derrida articulates it, means

recognizing that he was, on a certain reading, hospitable to madness (DJF, 255).

Earlier in the essay, Derrida tells us that Freud is the doorman of today, the holder of the

keys, of those that open as well as those that close the dooronto the today or onto

madness (DJF, 235). The doorman occupies an ambiguous position insofar as he

polices the threshold, determining who is excluded and who is included, who is denied

entry and who is admitted; it is at once a position of the law and of hospitality.4 By

making Freud the doorkeeper, Derrida implicitly equates Freuds and Foucaults

positions vis--vis reason and madness: both stand outside of madness but take the point

of contact between reason and madness as their focus. Foucaults critique of

psychoanalysisthat it remains a stranger to the sovereign enterprise of unreason

echoes Derridas first critique of Foucault, viz. that despite the best intentions, one cannot

speak for madness from the standpoint of reason. If Freud is to be included with those

like Pinel who attempt to master madness, so must Foucault.

There is another way to look at Foucaults treatment of Freud in History of

Madness that may account for this ambivalence, and we can find the necessary terms in

Foucaults final works. In his introduction to The Use of Pleasure, Foucault

4
David Boothroyd, "To be Hospitable to Madness: Derrida and Foucault Chez Freud, Journal for
Cultural Research 9.1 (2005): 13. Boothroyd sees Derrida as more sympathetic to Foucault than I do.

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distinguishes between two elements that comprise any morality, viz. codes of behavior

and forms of subjectivity; each particular morality will prioritize one or the other. For

those that are code oriented, the focus is on the ability of the code to encompass all moral

questions and behavior and to systematize human life. And underlying this code is the

authority that demands it be observed and that punishes infractions. [I]n these

conditions, the subjectivation occurs basically in a quasi-juridical form, where the ethical

subject refers his conduct to a law, or a set of laws, to which he must submit at the risk of

committing offenses that may make him liable to punishment.5 Moralities that

emphasize the forms and practices that produce subjectivation, on the other hand, give

priority to the individuals relationship to herself, not her relationship to the rules, which

may be fairly basic. These moralities give greater ethical weight to the methods by which

those relations evolve, the exercises the individual engages in to know herself, and the

practices that transform her mode of being (HS2, 30).

Applying this code of behavior/form of subjectivity dichotomy to the portrait we

get of Freud in History of Madness can begin to address Derridas justified reading. (I

am not implying that this framework was somehow implicit in History of Madness and

only later thematized by Foucault; I am merely appropriating it as an interpretative tool.)

Freud clearly assigns the analyst a quasi-juridical role: one need merely read his case

studies to see the application of norms and the passing of judgment on the thoughts and

behaviors of his patients. Dora, for example, violates the code of normal human

development by refusing to accept Freuds analysis and acknowledge her love for Herr K

(and Frau K and her father and, ultimately, Freud himself). For Freud, the doctor is the

5
Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, Volume 2: The Use of Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley (New York:
Vintage, 1985) 29-30. Hereafter abbreviated in the text as HS2.

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voice of reason, the figure of authority whose role is to pull the abnormal into alignment

with the codes of proper psychological functioning.

The tension arises, however, from the fact that Freud is not simply imposing a

morality of behavior. Freuds willingness to engage madness in dialogue is the product

of his recognition that psychopathology is a type of subject formation. Foucaults earlier

treatment of Freud and psychoanalysis already hints at this:

An investigation of the unconscious, a search for infantile traumas, the freeing of

a libido that supposedly existed behind all the phenomena of the affective life, an
uncovering of such mythical impulses as the death instinctpsychoanalysis has
long been just this; but it is tending more and more to turn its attention to the
defense mechanisms and finally to admit that the subject reproduces his history
only because he responds to a present situation.6

Madness is a particular relationship one has to oneself and ones experiences, and this

relationship was of special interest to Freud. Unlike Pinel, he sees in madness not merely

a departure from social norms but a mode of being. The difficulty for Foucault is that

Freud succumbs to the code-oriented aspect and situates this form of subjectivity within a

relationship of domination.

For Derrida, both Freud and Foucault illustrate the danger and aporia of mastery:

Too much mastery (in the form of exclusion but also of objectification)
deprives one of mastery (in the form of access, knowledge, competence).
The concept of mastery is an impossible concept to manipulate, as we
know: the more there is, the less there is, and vice versa (DJF, 254).

Mastering something can mean overpowering and dominating, e.g. mastering the mad by

locking them away in asylums. At the same time, it can mean attaining an aptitude or

facility, e.g. mastering the piano. Foucault, of course, is well aware of the aporetic nature

of mastery. Our normalization expands our competencies while limiting our ability to

understand or conceive of ourselves in new ways. The mastery imparted by normalizing

6
Foucault, Mental Illness and Psychology, 36.

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power deprives us of other forms of self-mastery. Here, then, is the crux of the difference

between Derrida and Foucault: they understand the question of normalization from

fundamentally opposite orientations. Where Foucault shows us how to see ourselves as

products of the normalizing other, Derrida is cautioning us that our mastery over the

otherour rendering the other the sameis necessary to know the other, but it deprives

us of knowing the other since what we know is reduced or homogenized to our own

conceptual frameworks.

The introduction of Freud into the debate illustrates these opposite orientations

toward mastery. For Derrida, Freud is the other whose normalization by Foucault we are

witnessingDerrida argues that Foucault ignores fundamental texts of Freud such as

Beyond the Pleasure Principle that would problematize his reading. For Foucault, the

point is to get out from under the normalized ways of thinking (embodied in this case by

Freud) that shape our understanding. But Foucault, like Derrida, is aware that mastery

can too easily become domination. As his final works show, he was uncovering

precedents that show how mastery without domination.

Self-Mastery in Late Foucault

As we saw in the quotation from Foucault that opened the chapter, relations of power

comprise human relations in which one directs or attempts to direct the behavior of the

other. These relations occur at different levels, assume different forms, are changeable

and modifiable; they are open (they are not given once and for all). In fact, relations of

power require free subjects. In order to exercise a relation of power, there must be on

both sides at least a certain form of liberty (ECS, 12). This presents relations of power

as inherently unstable: in all such relations, power can be reversed. It is precisely the

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reversibility of power relations that differentiates it from domination: states of

domination block the field of power relations, rendering the relations invariable and

preventing any reversibility. So it is not relations of power that must be avoided (which

would be impossible since they are necessary). What must be avoided is power that

becomes domination: The problem is not to dissolve [power relations] in the utopia of a

perfectly transparent communication, but to give ones self the rules of law, the

techniques of management, and also the ethics, the ethos, the practice of self, which

would allow these games of power to be played with a minimum of domination (ECS,

18).

For Foucault, classical ethics provide a helpful model for us because they

organized forms of life without appealing to a normalizing structure. And because there

was no normalizing structure, there was no question of deviancy or abnormality. Instead,

the aim of such ethics is aesthetic.

It is the development of an art of existence that revolves around the

question of the self, of its dependence and independence, of its universal
form and of the connection it can and should establish with others, of the
procedures by which it exerts its control over itself, and of the way in
which it can establish a complete supremacy over itself.7

The art of the self emphasizes developing practices and exercises that engender self-

control. But this self-control is not motivated out of a Protestant sense of self-denial.

The purpose is to produce enjoyment of oneself (HS3, 239). The tradition that has

produced us as modern subjects posits an external lawa code of behavioras the

necessary basis for morality, whether it is Gods law or universal rational principles.

Because of this heritage, an aesthetics and enjoyment of the self as a moral stance is hard

7
Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, Volume 3: The Care of the Self, trans. Robert Hurley (New York:
Vintage, 1986) 239. Hereafter abbreviated in the text as HS3.

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for us to fathom. [O]ur morality, a morality of asceticism, insists that the self is that

which one can reject.8 Within classical ethics, the arts of existence are

those intentional and voluntary actions by which men not only set
themselves rules of conduct, but also seek to transform themselves, to
change themselves in their singular being, and to make their life into an
oeuvre that carries certain aesthetic values and meets certain stylistic
criteria (HS2, 10-11).

The moral value of a chosen way of life did not derive from conformity with a code of

behavior. It had to do with how one used pleasures, limited them, and hierarchized them

(HS2, 89). Our sensibilities, shaped as they are by a morality of asceticism, see this

emphasis on pleasure as opening the door to hedonism, but as Foucaults analyses reveal,

making ones life a work of art requires discipline, discipline recast in terms of

moderation and excess as defined by the subject.

Nobody is obligedto behave in such a way as to be truthful to their

wives, to not touch boys, and so on. But, if they want to have a beautiful
existence, if they want to have a good reputation, if they want to be able to
rule others, they have to do that. So they accept those obligations in a
conscious way for the beauty or glory of existence.9

Classical ethics was a choice, not the imposition of a norm. [I]t was not a question of

giving a pattern of behavior for everybody (OGE, 230). The subject chose the practices

and exercises he imposed on himself. This relationship of the self to itself, the totality of

practices through which I constitute and organize the strategies I can use with regard to

others and their libertieswhat Foucault calls governmentalityallows one to set

off the freedom of the subject and the relationship to others, i.e., that which constitutes

the very matter of ethics (ECS, 20). In these practices, we find careful attention paid to

8
Luther Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick Hutton, eds., Technologies of the Self: A Seminar With Michel
Foucault (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988) 22. Hereafter abbreviated in the text as TS.
9
Michel Foucault, On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress, in Dreyfus and
Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 240. Hereafter abbreviated in the
text as OGE.

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the points of contact between technologies of domination of others and technologies of

the self. These technologies are designed to liberate insofar as they keep the relations of

power open. The mastery they seek is self-mastery, not the mastery of the other that

Derrida warns against.

Self-mastery as we understand it today takes as its starting point the principle of

Know thyself, the fundamental principle of Western thought. This is the Socratic

maxim that is supposed to ground a purposeful life; it is also now the driving force

behind the religious and psychotherapeutic industries. But the original central principle

for the Greeks was the other Delphic imperative to care for the self. Caring for oneself,

epimeleia heautou, posits a different relation to knowledge: it means choosing to know

only what is important to ones self or life (OGE, 243). This is not simply self-interest or

narcissism. It is a form of attention that requires certain activities, knowledge, and

techniques. Care in this sense goes beyond self-attachment or self-interest. It means

being concerned with something or working on it, paying attention to how one does

something, and subordinating knowledge to ethics.

Within classical ethics, the individual did not become an ethical subject by

adhering to universal principles or by universalizing the principles that directed his

actions. One became an ethical subject by acting in accordance with an individualized,

but rational and deliberate, structure (HS2, 62). These actions and this structure signified

a self-mastery and a stylized attitude toward ones life that provide an ethical framework

in which cultivating oneself is not predicated on possessing the truth of oneself. This is

the difference between care of the self and a narcissistic cult of self: in the latter, people

believe they act as that they do because they know the truth about themselves (about their

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desires, their body, their psychology, etc.). Classical concern with the self is different

from what Foucault calls the California cult of the self because the Greeks and Romans

posited no true or authentic self (OGE, 245). For them, care of the self was not about

uncovering a true self but about creating oneself as a work of art.

Nor is this care of the self meant to be quietistic or require the withdrawal of the

subject from involvement with others. Quite the opposite: the care of the self explicitly

involves carefully cultivated relationships with others. Care of the self in the Greco-

Roman world consisted of social practices; it was carried out in schools and communities

and between friends.

Around the care of the self, there developed an entire activity of speaking
and writing in which the work of oneself on oneself and communication
with others were linked together. Here we touch on one of the most
important aspects of this activity devoted to oneself: it constituted, not an
exercise in solitude, but a true social practice (HS3, 51).

Its goal was social and political involvement along with the affirmation of ones

autonomy and freedom. For the Romans, attention needed to be paid to ones

relationships to others, but the danger was not mastery of the other; it was physical and

psychical dependence in which one lacked control over ones own life and risked pain

over the loss of the other. There must be constant monitoring that one is not growing too

bound up with the other. So while the care of the self entails a correct relationship to

others, oneself comes first. The care of the self takes moral precedence in the measure

that the relationship to self takes ontological precedence (ECS, 7). This intensification

of concern for the self corresponds to the valorization of the other.

When, in the practice of the care of the self, one appealed to another
person in whom one recognized an aptitude for guidance and counseling,
one was exercising a right. And it was a duty that one was performing
when one lavished ones assistance on another, or when one gratefully

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 received the lessons the other might give. [] The care of the selfor the
attention one devotes to the care that others should take of themselves
appears then as an intensification of social relations (HS3, 53).

Care for the self creates the recognition of obligations toward the other. In cultivating

oneself, one would seek help from ones friends and colleagues, with the understanding

that there was an obligation to reciprocate when asked.

With the Greeks, the concern surrounding the issues raised by caring for the self

and the relationship between caring for the self and knowing the self stemmed from the

idea that young men preparing for adulthood needed a techne that enabled them to live in

such a way that they could care for the city. Caring for the self was preparation for

caring for political life. With the Romans, cultivation of the self became a lifelong

preparation for death and, therefore, an end in itself. More than a political techne, Roman

care for the self takes the form of doctoring the self (TS, 31). Over the course of a

lifetime, the individual is vulnerable to various hazards, so attention needs to be paid and

precautions have to be taken. Sex, for example, is something to be managed, not because

it is evil but because it taxes the body in the same ways that exercise and food tax the

body. Austerity with regard to these practices was merely the way in which one stylized

a particular activity and exercised power over it (HS2, 23).

These practices and technologies of the self are manifold and differ widely, but

they all have a common goal, viz., the principle of conversion to self (HS3, 64). It is a

shift in attention focused on oneself and no longer wasted in everyday concerns or

fruitless worrying about what others are doing or thinking.

This relation to self that constitutes the end of the conversion and the final
goal of all the practices of the self still belongs to an ethics of control. []
If to convert to oneself is to turn away from the preoccupations of the
external world, from the concerns of ambition, from fear of the future,

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 then one can turn back to ones own past, recall it to mind, have it unfold
as one pleases before ones own eyes, and have a relationship with it that
nothing can disturb (HS3, 65-66).

For the Romans, the ethics of control is cast in the discourse of juridical possession: one

masters oneself or belongs to oneself. But this possession is not presupposed; it is the

result of taking oneself as an object to be cultivated. The principle features of such

control are tests to see how one responds to situations. They measure ones

independence from the superfluous (HS3, 59). Epictetus paid close attention to his

representations with the goal of evaluating every thought. He sought to live in a state of

permanent self-examination in order to master every representation and response to the

world around him by establishing what he had control over and what he did not. Other

Stoics engaged in meditation, for example, that involved a kind of eidetic reduction: they

imagined the worst-case scenario was occurring right now. The goal of such

premeditatio mallorum is to realize that these sufferings are not really things to suffer

from; these events are not intrinsically bad, they just are what they are. Seneca, who

advised reflection on ones actions at the end of each day, saw self-examination as a way

of remembering the truth. This truth is not some authentic core of the subject that needs

to be dug out; it is merely the rules of conduct we set for ourselveswhat should be done

in our daily lives and in our dealings with others. The subject thus becomes the locus of

self-imposed rules of conduct and acts, and this examination of ones conscience

becomes an important way of taking stock of oneself. It is not a way of judging oneself

because the point is not to assess intentions. Rather, the goal is to find our faults, which

are merely good intentions not acted on. These are mistakes that need to be corrected,

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not signs of a corrupt inner self. Seneca never passes judgment on himself: his model is

administrative and not judicial. Errors are strategic, not moral.

Conceiving of existence as an aesthetic exercise is foreign to our culture. But the

Roman period, like our own, was concerned about the individuals relation to alienating

social conditions. These similarities are not meant to imply that the Romans are a

primitive version of the social fragmentation of modern society. Nor are ancient cultures

an alternative to which we can turn. There is no ideal historical period we can recover.

Foucault states clearly that he is not looking for an alternative, merely looking at how

responses to similar problems produce entirely different forms of life. Earlier ages only

offer points of comparison and reveal that our current situation is not a historical

necessity (OGE, 234).

Among the cultural inventions of mankind there is a treasury of devices,

techniques, ideas, procedures, and so on, that cannot exactly be
reactivated, but at least constitute, or help to constitute, a certain point of
view which can be very useful as a tool for analyzing whats going on
nowand to change it (OGE, 236).

It merely shows us the contingency of our own forms of life and provides us with an

example of how care of the self can produce self-knowledge and social interaction.

Power and the Gift

Even the non-normative framework of an aesthetics of the self has become normalizing.

However attractive this idea of self-creation might be, it is now the central trope for

consumer culture. In Foucault Beyond Foucault, Jeffrey Nealon takes issue with those

Foucauldians who propound self-creation as the anodyne to the normalizing pressures

endemic to late capitalism. Self-fashioning has been appropriated by the normalizing

systems within capitalism, and he argues, rightly, that consumption capitalism performs

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its hegemonic or totalizing work not through some notion of cultural standardization or

repression, but precisely through the cultural/economic imperative to become a flexibly

specialized individual, resistant to the normalizing influence of the government, the

Man, or the herd.10 Resistance qua self-creation is now a marketing ploy.

Multinational corporations encourage us to discover our unique style and define our own

way of beingby purchasing their products. Subcultures such as skateboarders and bike

messengers show their disdain for the commercialized and homogenized beer of major

brewers by drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon, which is brewed by Miller.11 Young men

(mostly) declare their individuality by modifying their Toyota Scions using the

companys pre-packaged options. The dieting industry appropriates the language of self-

care.12 The subsumption of the very act of self-creation represents the ne plus ultra of

late capitalism. More specific to our purposes, it is a clear illustration of the impossibility

of emancipation: our ownmost inner projects are already pre-packaged and commodified.

Even the rejection of a consumer lifestyle has itself become a lifestyle to be marketed.

The gift of liberation now expands the economy; the very act of resisting supports the

normalization it resists.

As we have seen so far, both Derrida and Foucault show us that any attempt to

break free of the bonds of the existing system will, in the end, reinforce the system. The

gift expands the economy; acts of resistance support the expansion of power. We have

been circling this theme for some time now. Chapters six and seven showed how Derrida

10
Jeffrey Nealon, Foucault Beyond Foucault, Power and Its Intensifications since 1984 (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2008) 12.
11
See Rob Walkers interesting account of this in Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy
and Who We Are (New York: Random House, 2008).
12
See chapter 3 of Cressida Heyes, Self-Transformations: Foucault, Ethics, and Normalized Bodies
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

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situates the impossibility of emancipation along the gift-economy axis; and chapters four

and five examined how Foucault situates it along the power-resistance axis. On first

glance, the concept of power is analogous to the concept of economy: both act as

overarching systems that encompass disruptive moments. However, power does not

function as an overarching system within which resistance occurs; gifts are given within a

larger economy. Economies need gifts in order to function, as Derrida maintains, but

unlike gifts and economies, resistance and power are concomitant. The emergence of

power relations automatically brings resistance with it. But while the analogy between

power and economy does not hold, we can find another, perhaps counterintuitive,

connection. On closer inspection, we find that Foucauldian power functions as a

Derridean gift.

Consider the three criteria necessary for a pure gift that were laid out in chapter

six: (1) a giver who is unrecognized, either by herself or by the receiver; (2) a receiver

who is unrecognized by himself or by the giver; and (3) a gift that is unrecognized as a

gift. Derrida has already shown us two instances of this impossible gift, viz. the giving

of a text and the giving of death to the other others I sacrifice. Foucaults concept of

normalizing power adheres to these criteria and is another instance of this impossible

gift. Let us take these criteria point by point.

Criterion 1: The gift must be unrecognized by the giver. If I give a gifteven

(and actually, especially) if I give it anonymouslyI am able to see myself as a generous

person, a caring spouse, a committed member of a community. But what I have done, in

effect, is bought a sense of self-satisfaction. My gift turned out to be actually nothing

more than an exchange.

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 Power, as we saw in chapters four and five, is not something we possess. It is not

a thing or a commodity, so it is not ours to give yet we give power constantly. Foucault

tells us that as subjects, individuals are always exercising power. We are the elements

of its articulation and the vehicles of power (PK, 98). At the end of Discipline and

Punish, Foucault describes the rise of the carceral, the network of disciplinary

institutions that merged prisons, orphanages, schools, factoriesinstitutions that relied

on disciplinary techniques to produce subjects. He tells us that

the judges of normality are present everywhere. We are in the society of

the teacher-judge, the doctor-judge, the educator-judge, the social
worker-judge;and each individual, wherever he may find himself,
subjects to [normality] his body, his gestures, his behavior, his aptitudes,
his achievements (DP, 304).

But as normalizing processes and techniques have continued to expand, we can apply this

description to daily life. The judges of normality are present, and we are they. Our

position within normalizing frameworksbe it as an explicit judge of normality (say as a

teacher) or as an indirect enforcer of normsmakes us vehicles of power. At the same

time, we are constantly being shaped through the ever-present giving and receiving of

normalizing power. My actions and behavior toward another influence her actions and

behavior. I am giving her reinforcement, whether positive or negative, but, because

normalized behavior is so deeply embedded in us, I remain unaware of my act of giving;

it is concealed by the behaviors themselves. This is a gift we never know that we give.

I cannot know that I give power because of the peculiar impact that power has on

me as it circulates through me. I am constituted by a multiplicity of power relations

accreted through my particular experience, and

like a video image constantly readjusting in patterns to the activations of

the pixel matrix on the screen, power appears, across a decidedly

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 indefinite, constantly shifting screen of local sites, on the surfaces of
interactions, of the bodies themselves, in patterns produced by the local
intensities of force and relations of force that happen to be activated.13

Each person comprises a unique arrangement of power relations. The introduction of any

new form of power or new relation will be altered to fit even as it alters the existing

arrangement. As I interact with others, these constitutive relations and their attendant

local intensities and relations of force intersect with new ones and are reinforced. What

results is not a product of conscious thought: I do not know beforehand (or even after)

what the effects of these intersections will be, nor am I aware that power has passed

between us. Of course I am aware of the interaction, and sometimes I am aware of the

power relations that exist in the relation (if, for example, I am talking to one of my

students), but I am not conscious of powers circulation. I cannot know how the

intersection of multiplicities of power relations will alter that particular multiplicity that

comprises the other person. I have given him something, viz. normalizing power, but I

do not know what was given, when it was given, or how it was given. It is unknown to

me and therefore does not leave me with a sense of self-satisfaction.

Criterion 2: The gift must be unrecognized by the receiver. Similarly, if I receive

a gift, I accept it with gratitude. I may be unaware of who gave it to me, but I still feel an

obligation to reciprocate with a similar gesture. The gift thus becomes merely a debt that

must be discharged.

Just as we are the unwitting vehicles of power, we are the unwitting recipients of

it. Everyone else is constantly articulating normalizing power, which means we are

constantly receiving power from the other, even though we do not recognize it as such.

13
John Carvalho, Power: Method of the Deployments of Sexuality, Reinterpreting the Political:
Continental Philosophy and Political Theory, eds. Lenore Langsdorf and Stephen Watson, volume 20
(Albany: SUNY Press, 1998) 257.

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The disciplinary processes we undergo are certainly recognizable to us. I can look back

at a given experience and identify the technologies of power and its effects in my new

capacities. I can even feel gratitude toward those who instilled those capacities. But the

normalization itself that these capacities require, i.e., the closing off of other possibilities,

is never present to me and can never be structurally present to me for the same reason

that the other others I sacrifice in fulfilling my duty to the other before me are never

present. Normalization structurally conceals the forms of life we will never know behind

the abilities and bodies that it produces.

At the same time, because I constitute a constantly shifting configuration of

power relations, the effects that I recognize are already different from the power that

created them. How I am changed, how the configuration of power relations that is me

has been altered because of my interaction with the other, is unknown to me. I therefore

feel no sense of obligation or gratitude.

Criterion 3: The gift must be unrecognized as a gift. To perceive the gift as such,

whether I am the giver or the receiver, instantly puts me back into a system of exchange.

To be a gift, the gift must be structurally invisible to us.

While Foucaults project is to make the recognition of the effects of power

possiblethis is the point of Foucaults genealogical methodwe can never be

conscious of power itself nor can we know precisely those particular power relations that

shaped us and are shaping us now. As a result of its constant circulation, power

undergoes constant change (HS1, 99). Ransom employs the metaphor of genetic coding

to explain powers alteration: in its circulation, there are errors of transcription.

From the perspective of broader organizations of power, individuals are

genes helping to make up the strand of DNA that produces and reproduces

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 power relations. A mutation of one of these genes can, as it were, change
the balance of factors making up the broader unit, thus producing a
mutation.14

As with genes, the slightest mutations are passed on to others and altered further, setting

off larger and compounding alterations. While Ransom presents this error and the

consequent alterations as a function of self-reflection, conscious thought is not necessary

to change power.15 I do not have to reflect on my actions to make room for new ones,

although I certainly can. Power is always already altered by its contact with other forms

of power: as a nexus of power relations, I am constantly reconfiguring the forms of

power that flow through me. Any reflection on those relations will not yield the original

form of power, but will show only the new instantiation. Thus the forms of power that

have made us what we are are never present to consciousness.

Power constitutes a giving without a gift. It is not a thing, but it still operates in

and through things, viz. practices and the bodies of subjects. It remains invisible while

simultaneously producinggivingsubjects. As subjects produced by power, we

remain unaware of that productivity; we do not recognize power as giving, nor do we

recognize the gift of subjectivity that is given to us, nor do we recognize ourselves as

recipients of that gift. Such giving does notcannotgive something substantive or

something identifiable. And it is a giving that does not automatically and

instantaneously instigate a reciprocal giving.

As a gift, power mirrors the general economy of giving that Derrida describes in

The Gift of Death. The giving of power is not an isolated or discrete act; it is a

continuous process in which we find ourselves engaged. More importantly, if power is a

14
Ransom, 176-177.
15
Ibid., 129-130, 178.

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gift given without reserve, resistance ceases to be a discrete or rare or intentional act

since, as Foucault tells us, where there is power there is also resistance. So while we

might thematize certain practices as forms of resistance, resistance itself is ubiquitous.

We have then a way to re-conceive not only power, but how we respond to power. If we

continue to think of resistance as a simple act of evasion or an act that rejects

conventional norms, we fail to move beyond the binary opposition of power/resistance.16

And if we fail to do so, we fail to recognize the openness, the general economy of

resistance that surrounds us. The possibilities for inventing new ways of responding to

normalization are endless and endlessly expanding. This expansion brings us back to

Derridas conclusion to To Do Justice to Freud where he raises the question of how

Foucault would respond to Freuds conceptualization of the drive for power that he

develops in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Imagining Foucaults response, speaking for

him, Derrida says, one must stop believing in the principled unity of pleasure and

power, or of some drive that is thought to be more originary than the other. The theme of

the spiral would be that of a drive duality (power/pleasure) that is without principle.

Then, speaking for himself, Derrida adds, It is the spirit of this spiral that keeps one in

suspense, holding ones breathand, thus, keeps one alive (DJF, 266).

16
Nealon, 99.

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 Conclusion

In his lectures on biopolitics, Foucault describes madness as a transactional reality.

Such a reality is born precisely from the interplay of relations of power and everything

which constantly eludes them, at the interface, so to speak, of governors and governed.1

Madness emerges as a form of subjectivity, it becomes a reality, only in and through a

particular circulation of power. Here, in a nutshell, is my argument: the power that

circulates from the governing to the governed is a Derridean gift; this transactional reality

is in fact a transaction that fails to institute an economy. The circulating or giving of

normalizing power, which is intended to yield order and homogeneity, which is intended

to nullify the unproductive and restore rational thinking, in fact produces new forms of

life. As Foucault shows us throughout his work, the transactional realities that are born

out of relations of power are the conditions of possibility for new ways of thinking and

being.

By following the theme of madness that framed their initial debate, I have tracked

the parallels between Foucaults and Derridas subsequent work. It has led us to the

(perhaps mad) idea that the circulation of normalizing power can be thought of in terms

of Derridas aneconomy of the gift. One might argue that the gift and power are not

analogs. If the gift is analogous to anything in Foucault, it is analogous to resistance: like

the gift described in Given Time, resistance is a temporary disruption of a larger system;

and this disruption ultimately allows the system to extend its reach. What we see initially

when we juxtapose Derridas and Foucaults thinking is a proportional relation: the gift

functions within the circular movement of the economy just as resistance functions within

1
Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collge de France, 1978-1979, trans. Graham
Burchell, ed. Arnold I. Davidson (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) 297.

206
the circulation of normalizing power. Two points speak against this view, one from

Foucault, one from Derrida. First, Foucault states that resistance can only occur within

power. Resistance is not an original act; it a reconfiguration of the forces of normalizing

power that are already present. It is power disrupting its own circulation in ways that

cause it to expand.

Second, Derridas later analysis of the gift in The Gift of Death reveals a deeper

and philosophically richer connection between the gift and normalizing power: here the

gift is no longer viewed as a discrete act within a larger economy (as it was in Given

Time); instead, the gift of death, the sacrifice of the other others, is in constant

circulation. This gift is always being given, with every act and at every moment. Taking

normalizing power as a gift, we recognize that this sacrifice is immanent in every

relationship and every interactionnot just our non-relationships with other others.

Normalizing power is a constant sacrifice of otherness. A parent feeding his own child

sacrifices all the other children he cannot feed. But feeding his own child also sacrifices

the child herself: in the process, he normalizes her in terms of when to eat, what to eat,

how to eat. Together, Foucault and Derrida make it clear that every encounter with the

other sacrifices otherness, whether it is the otherness of the other or the otherness of

myself. Derrida worries that the sacrifice of the other, the reduction of the other to the

same, is unavoidable. Foucault worries that the other unavoidably sacrifices me by

rendering me more normal.

Derrida calls our attention to the inexorability of my normalizing the other;

Foucault details the subtle normalizing impact of the other on me. For Derrida, to be

truly other, the other must be completely unexpected: if I harbor expectations about the

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other, I determine beforehand what the other will be and what I will recognize. The other

must be something unforeseeable and unprogrammable, something for which I have no

rules telling me how to respond to it. As his analyses illustrate, I have a responsibility to

let the other show itself as other, i.e., without my placing limitations or determinations on

it, which is an impossibility. However much I might want the other to remain other, I

cannot help but make the other something assimilable and thus the same. Even trying to

understand the other entails turning the other something understandable, something

normal.

Reading Derrida through Foucault and introducing the question of power into the

analyses of the gift intensifies the aporia of the coming of the other. To take one

example, Derrida begins Given Time with a reading of a sentence from a letter by

Madame de Maintenon, the wife of Louis XIV: The king takes all my time; I give the

rest to Saint-Cyr, to whom I would like to give all. In his signature fashion, Derrida

reads this literally and turns it into a paradox. The king takes all of de Maintenons time,

she writes. Her duties to the sovereign claim her time. She can give only what is left

over, which is nothing. For Derrida, de Maintenon is in an impossible situation, and this

impossibility structures the gift. Her desire is to give what she cannot, but desire here is a

Levinasian gesture; it is expenditure or emptying of herself. This desire takes the form of

giving and is directed toward the impossible. Wanting to give what she does not have,

she represents a giving beyond ones means and a giving of what one needs for oneself;

this is a giving of what one did not know one had to give.

What Derrida does not comment on are the multi-layered power relations

contained in this passage. From a Foucauldian standpoint, Madame de Maintenon

208
embodies both the juridico-monarchical form of power (in her relationship to the king)

and the disciplinary, normalizing form (in her role as founder of Saint-Cyr). However

much she desires the power of giving, she already gives power, power that she herself

does not necessarily possess. As Louis XIVs morganatic wife, she who was not queen

herself returned a sense of normalcy by bringing the Louis XIV back to his role as king

(GT, 2, fn 1). She is outside the recognized structure of sovereign power, yet

instrumental to it. As the founder of Saint-Cyr, de Maintenon oversaw the social,

intellectual, and moral growth of young women from good families that had fallen into

financial difficulty. Her position within the economy of sovereign power enabled her to

start a charitable institution, i.e., one that remained outside the circle of the economy.

Following Louis XIVs death, de Maintenon retired to Saint-Cyr, i.e., left the economy of

political power, and served as administrator of the institution full time, thus assuming a

permanent role in an economy of normalizing power.

This omission of power on Derridas reading is all the more curious since he

explicitly recognizes the element of power in de Maintenons situation:

This rest of the rest of time of which she cannot make a present, that is
in truth what she would desire, not for herself but so as to be able to give
itfor the power of giving, perhaps, so as to give herself this power of
giving (GT, 4; emphasis added).

Madame de Maintenon desires this power of giving, the power found in giving to the

king, i.e. her influence over him, the power found in maintaining her institution, and the

power found in overseeing the development of young people.

Viewing power as a gift introduces another level of meaning to the power of

giving. De Maintenons gives herself the power of giving by resisting the totalizing

influence of the king; she creates for herself something to give. But she can do so only

209
because she exists within the circulation of power. Far from being rendered powerless,

she has the power of giving, the power to create something new, because of powers

effect on her. On this view, the powerless are not those oppressed by power; the

powerless are those who are untouched by power. This raises the interesting implication

for Derrida since the other, as one untouched by normalization, is fact powerless. The

other cannot create anything new until it is within the circulation of power. The other

must come before anything new can occur within the sphere of the same.

Reading Foucault and Derrida together and against each other, we gain a deeper

understanding of the liberating potential normalizing power. By recognizing power as

structural giving, we are left with the counterintuitive conclusion that normalization is

dissemination. Foucault has been criticized for the quietist or fatalist implications of his

work, but by viewing power as a general economy, as a structural giving, we can see that

with the aneconomic circulation of power also come boundless possibilities for self-

creation. By recognizing normalization as power that never returns to itself, we must also

recognize the possibility of constant change and development. Thinking the unthought,

finding those moments of emancipation from the sphere of sameness, come gradually and

only through the giving of power. Normalizing power is the maddest gift of all.

210
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