Professional Documents
Culture Documents
MICHEL FOUCAULT: A
MARCUSEAN IN
STRUCTURALIST CLOTHING
Joel Whitebook
I
The History of Sexuality, Vol. I, represents Foucault’s attempt to exorcise
the specter of psychoanalysis. Characteristically, however, he doesn’t try to
accomplish this feat through a frontal encounter with the substance of the
Freudian position. Rather, he attempts an end run around Freud by trying to
trump psychoanalysis, as a theoretical and practical project, through an
archaeological-genealogical reduction of its significance. This reduction will
pave the way for Foucault to formulate a counter-project, namely, ‘the aes-
thetics of existence’.
In The Order of Things, Foucault had disingenuously praised psycho-
analysis as an exemplary counter-science (Foucault, 1994: 373–9). But in The
History of Sexuality, Vol. I, the pretense is dropped, and he assumes an overtly
disparaging attitude towards Freud. Now, rather than being presented as a
critical counter-science, which could guide the archaeological attack on
humanism, psychoanalysis is seen as perhaps the most invidious form of
humanism and becomes the object of archaeological scrutiny. However, if
Foucault’s opposition towards psychoanalysis is unmistakable, the attack
itself is anything but direct. Indeed, it is the most tortuous of all Foucault’s
encounters with Freud, proceeding more through derision, innuendo and
irony than through argument. It is peculiar that in a book purporting to be
an ‘archaeology of psychoanalysis’ (Foucault, 1978: 130), psychoanalytic texts
are rarely discussed and Freud is hardly mentioned by name. Furthermore,
in a move that strains the reader’s credulity, psychoanalysis isn’t even pre-
sented as the major episode in what Foucault calls ‘the deployment of sexu-
ality’ – itself part of the power/knowledge apparatus – as one would expect.
Instead, it is relegated to one minor episode in that entire history. This is
strange. For whether one celebrates or deplores psychoanalysis, it seems hard
to deny the sheer magnitude of Freud’s impact. But it would grant too much
power to Freud for Foucault even to let him play the devil.
John Forrester rightly observes that the obliqueness of the attack on
Freud and the minimizing subsumption of psychoanalysis under the deploy-
ment of sexuality give the book an ‘odd, refracted and displaced’ character.
He ‘senses’, moreover, these oddities represent ‘tactical cunning’ devices on
Foucault’s part which require ‘comment, if not explanation’ (Forrester, 1990:
289). Unfortunately, however, Forrester – perhaps because of his idealization
of Foucault – isn’t able to pursue his sound intuition further and examine the
ends Foucault’s tactical stratagems are meant to serve. Jacques-Alain Miller,
on the other hand, can. As a practicing psychoanalyst, he has more reason
to spot the aggression coming his way and is therefore better able to untangle
what Foucault is up to. In a roundtable discussion that included Foucault,
Miller states his thesis directly: Foucault is ‘using a complex strategy’ that will
enable him ‘to erase the break that is located with Freud’ (Foucault, 1980a:
211–12). And Foucault doesn’t deny it. In a significant exchange, Miller
presses Foucault on the artificiality of assimilating Freud to the deployment
of sexuality:
MILLER: It’s a matter of appearances, is that what you are telling us?
FOUCAULT: Not a delusive appearance, but a fabrication.
MILLER: Right, and so it’s motivated by what you want, or hope, you’re . . .
FOUCAULT: Correct, and that’s where the polemical or political objective comes
in. But as you know, I never go in for polemics, and I’m a good distance away
from politics. (Foucault, 1980a: 211–12)
04 Whitebook (jr/d) 11/20/02 1:36 PM Page 54
thought within which the question of transgression arises in the first place.
What I am referring to is Foucault’s claim, which lies at the center of the first
volume of The History of Sexuality, to have refuted the ‘repressive hypothe-
sis’. But what is the repressive hypothesis, after all, if not another name for
Freud’s transhistorical thesis – which received its canonical formulation in
Civilization and its Discontents – that the requirements of civilization are
inevitably opposed to the demands of human sexuality (and aggression) and
therefore must repress the latter (Freud, 1930)? In Madness and Civilization,
Foucault had accepted the validity of the repressive hypothesis – at least with
respect to modernity – and then tried to find a radical solution from within
it, namely, the valorization of madness. Now, he challenges the hypothesis
itself. Were he successful in this approach, Foucault would have rid himself
of the question of limits and transgression and the challenge of psycho-
analysis at the same time. The refutation is, however, more apparent than
real.
II
Foucault likes to begin his books with a stunning rhetorical gesture that
grabs the reader’s attention. In the first chapter of Madness and Civilization,
we encountered the haunting image of the Ship of Fools gliding ‘along the
calm rivers of the Rhineland and the Flemish canals’ (Foucault, 1988: vii) in
what was a voyage of simultaneous expulsion and purification. Similarly, The
Order of Things begins with a burst of philosophical laughter provoked by a
reading from Borges’ fantastic Chinese encyclopedia (Foucault, 1994: xvii).
The point of the passage is, to dramatize the sheer contingency of all categori-
cal schemes – especially our own. And what reader can forget the excruci-
ating account of Damiens’ torture and execution, which provides the overture
for Discipline and Punish (Foucault, 1979)? It is meant to recall the real terror
that has been masked by the rationalized world of the Panopticon.
In this regard, The History of Sexuality, Vol. I, is no exception. Foucault
begins the book by flying in the face of the conventional claim that the Vic-
torians were, as it were, not Victorian – if by ‘Victorian’ we mean puritanical
and sexually repressed. In addition to challenging the received image of late
19th century culture and morality, this assertion was also meant to provoke
the established Freudian left, the désirants who dominated the French intel-
lectual scene after 1968, and whose partisans included some of Foucault’s
closest friends.
The claim about the Victorians is at the center of Foucault’s larger rejec-
tion of the repressive hypothesis, which held that, from the 18th century
onward, modern European history has involved the increasing repression of
sexuality. Conservative and left Freudians took the hypothesis as an accurate
description of the historical trajectory of the last several centuries. But whereas
the conservatives have thought the state of affairs was unchangeable, the
04 Whitebook (jr/d) 11/20/02 1:36 PM Page 56
Freudian left believed that sexual repression could and, moreover, should be
undone. For them, emancipation consists in the lifting of that repression and
the liberation of sexuality from repressive power. Foucault, however, doesn’t
even believe the hypothesis is accurate as a description. Rather than experi-
encing a steady increase in repression which peaked in the Victorian age,
modernity has, he argues, witnessed an ‘institutional incitement to speak
about’ sex and a ‘multiplication of discourses concerning’ it. Moreover, he
maintains this discursive explosion has occurred in the service of power.
On this interpretation, Frank Harris’s My Secret Life – with its catalogu-
ing, categorizing and dissecting of all the details of his sexual experience –
no longer appears as a courageous anomaly in Victorian society, but as an
exemplary work. Furthermore, Harris’s compulsion to articulate the minutiae
of his sexual life wasn’t something new, but the result of a force that ‘had
been lodged in the heart of modern man for over two centuries’ (Foucault,
1978: 22–3) and which was essentially bound up with the creation of the
modern subject. It may have become secularized, scientized, intensified in
modernity, but the genealogy of this compulsion to put sex into words can
be traced back to the early Christian era – to what Foucault calls ‘pastoral
power’.
As he had done earlier with the asylum, the clinic and the prison,
Foucault links the rise of a new form of institutional confinement, namely,
the monastery, with the emergence of new forms of power and discourse.
Although he would later trace the deployment of sexuality’s precursors even
further back into the Greek and Roman period, the formation of the monastic
life nevertheless constitutes a crucial episode in the crystallization of the
‘hermeneutics of the self’. For it instituted the demand for the constant and
methodical scrutiny of one’s inner world and desires. The connection
between the new forms of subjection, subjectification and internalization can
be seen, Foucault argues, in the battle for chastity, championed by Cassian,
an early theorist of monastic life. Whereas the struggle against fornication
was primarily concerned with one’s outward behavior, the battle for chastity,
introduced in the monasteries, directs itself at the purity of a person’s
thoughts – even including involuntary nocturnal thoughts, that is, dreams.
Indeed, Cassian goes so far as to make ‘the absence of erotic dreams and
nocturnal pollution a sign that one has reached the pinnacle of chastity’
(Foucault, 1997: 192).
What is most important about the rise of monasticism is not merely that
the number and intensity of prohibitions increases, but that the prohibited
thoughts – that is, the representations of desire – now become a target for
control. ‘The most important moment of transgression’ shifted, as Foucault
puts it, from the performance of the act ‘to the stirrings – so difficult to
perceive and formulate – of desire’. What is significantly new ‘is a whole
technique for analyzing and diagnosing thought, its origins, its qualities its
dangers, its potential for temptation and all the dark forces that can lurk
04 Whitebook (jr/d) 11/20/02 1:36 PM Page 57
between the naturally given and the constructed parts of our sexual lives,
with conservative theorists tending to assign more weight to the former, and
progressives to the latter.
We must appreciate how thoroughgoing Foucault’s constructivism is.
He is not simply arguing, like many left-wing Freudians, that the largest
portion of our sexual life is socially constructed and therefore historically con-
tingent and mutable. He is claiming rather that the existence of a biological
substratum is virtually an illusion.2 It is a construction of ‘the deployment of
sexuality’. The new Scientia Sexualis, motivated by power, must posit the
existence of sex, which exists by nature, to legitimate itself. ‘Sex’, in other
words, is the pseudo-object of the pseudo-science of sexuality. It is, ‘in fact,
an imaginary point determined by the deployment of sexuality’ (Foucault,
1978: 106). ‘Sexuality’, in contrast,
is the name given to a historical construct, not a furtive reality that is difficult
to grasp, but a great surface network in which the stimulation of bodies, the
intensification of pleasures, the incitement to discourse, the formation of special
knowledges, the strengthening of controls and resistances, are linked to one
another, in accordance with a few major strategies of knowledge power.
(Foucault, 1978: 105–6)
III
Foucault pursues a two-fold strategy in The History of Sexuality, Vol. I.
He presents himself as an anti-psychoanalytic anti-utopian thinker who is
offering a new post-liberationist form of politics. But at the same time as he
tries to repudiate the Freudian left by attacking the relatively crude position
of Wilhelm Reich, he borrows the arguments of one of its other major figures,
Herbert Marcuse, without acknowledging the debt. Foucault, at this stage of
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While Reich and Marcuse pursue the same basic left Freudian strategy,
there is a crucial difference between them. Reich accepts a conventional
Freudian view, which sees genitality as the culmination of ideal psychosex-
ual development. In a rather simplistic hydraulic conception, he views
orgasmic potency as the main sign of psychic well-being. His diagnosis and
his solution are straightforward, to say the least: Capitalism necessarily
represses orgasmic potency and a socialist society would free it. Marcuse, in
contrast, rejects the Freudian scheme of development, and views genitality
as a repressive form of sexual organization. It requires the sacrifices of ‘poly-
morphous perversity’ and the pre-genital stages of development to genital
supremacy. Polymorphous perversity is a concept the early Freud used to
refer to the unformed sexuality of the child before the component drives are
integrated into genitality and brought under the dominance of the reality prin-
ciple (and the ego). The child’s entire body is, at this stage, presumably eroti-
cized. Whereas genitality operates under the sign of the reality principle,
polymorphous perversity somehow eludes its reach and, with it, the reach
of socialization. For Marcuse, polymorphous perversity constitutes a pre-social
– unformed yet formable – material that has not yet been shaped and deter-
mined by the unifying forces of the reality principle.
Marcuse pursues his strategy by attempting to ‘de-ontologize’, which is
to say historicize the reality principle. To this end, he introduces two corre-
lated sets of distinctions: between the basic reality principle and the perform-
ance principle, on the one hand, and between necessary repression and
surplus repression, on the other. The basic reality principle is ‘by nature’ and
refers to the renunciation, however minimal, that will always be required to
negotiate the metabolism between humanity and the external world, regard-
less of how thoroughly outer nature may have been mastered. The ‘perform-
ance principle’, in contrast, is ‘by convention’, which is to say, is historically
constructed. It is a term Marcuse introduces to designate ‘the prevailing
historical form of the reality principle ’ (Marcuse, 1966: 35) that operates in
advanced societies. He argues that, in such societies, where modern science
and technology have the potential to create unprecedented abundance,
shorten the working day and ameliorate the struggle for existence, the exten-
siveness of actual repression and renunciation is not the result of natural
necessity. Rather, it results from the maintenance of a system of political and
economic domination.
The distinction between necessary repression and surplus repression is
meant to designate the difference ‘between the biological and the historical
sources of human suffering’ (Marcuse, 1966: 88). Necessary repression, which
pertains to the phylogenetic dimension of human existence, refers to the
degree of repression and renunciation necessitated by the basic reality
principle. This is precisely the natural and non-constructed component of
human sexuality that Foucault wants to deny. And surplus repression – obvi-
ously modeled on Marx’s notion of ‘surplus labor’ – refers to the superfluous
04 Whitebook (jr/d) 11/20/02 1:36 PM Page 64
IV
This, then, was exactly the sort of theoretical and political program that
Foucault ostensibly sets out to repudiate as a tough-minded genealogist, freed
from romantic illusions – that is, as an arch anti-utopian. He argues that the
‘historico-political critique of sexual repression’ that developed ‘around Reich
. . . between the two world wars’, and continued into the 1970s, was funda-
mentally misguided (Foucault, 1978: 131). By assuming that power always
requires the repression of sex, the Freudian left could convince itself that, in
its personal struggles for sexual freedom, it was ipso facto struggling against
power. Mocking their naïveté, John Forrester observes that the left-wing psy-
choanalysts believed ‘that truth is a means of liberation, that truth is always
on the side of the repressed, of the oppressed, of the dominated – a final
consolation for God’s always being on the side of the big battalions’ (For-
rester, 1990: 306–7). We should be clear about the extent of Foucault’s criti-
cisms. He isn’t just rejecting the proposition that ‘by saying yes to sex, one
says no to power’ – a proposition that conflates sexual repression and
political repression – as mistaken. He goes further and claims that the anti-
repressive struggle is itself actually a ‘ruse’ of power. It not only misses the
fundamental point and remains ‘within the deployment of sexuality’ instead
of operating ‘outside or against it’, but also, by ‘putting sex into discourse’,
the struggle against repression in fact advances the stratagem of power. It is
one more ‘incitement’ to speak about sex (Foucault, 1978: 131, 12).5
The Freudian left’s position, according to Foucault, rested on an anach-
ronistic and therefore inaccurate model that pictured power as essentially
negative – as an ‘anti-energy’, as the ‘power to say no’ (Foucault, 1978: 85).
Because they failed to appreciate the emergence of bio-power, which, as we
have seen, is essentially productive, the left Freudians continued to operate
with a ‘juridico-discursive’ conception that belongs to an earlier phase of
historical development. According to the law of the father-sovereign, the
same ‘monotonous’ repressive scheme functions throughout the whole hier-
archical organization of society, in the state, the family and the individual,
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varieties of human sexuality. Foucault claims that in the Middle Ages, both
canon and civil law treated hermaphroditism with surprising flexibility. At the
time of baptism the father or the godfather – that is, the person who locates
the child in a categorical scheme by naming it – assigns the hermaphroditic
infant to one sex or another. They were advised to do this according to which
sex appeared to be ‘the warmest’ or ‘the most vigorous’. However, at the
‘threshold of adulthood’, the hermaphrodite was legally free – a fact that
Foucault emphasizes – to choose whichever sex s/he wanted to belong to,
with the strict proviso that the decision could not be reversed. The adminis-
trative requirements of ‘modern nations’, however, could no longer tolerate
this degree of ambiguity and assigned everybody a location in its classifica-
tory grid. Thereafter, ‘everybody was to have one and only one sex’. Med-
ically, it was now up to the doctors to determine the ‘true sex’ that lay behind
‘the anatomical deceptions’ of hermaphroditism and ‘to say which sex nature
had chosen for [an individual] and to which society must consequently ask
him to adhere’ (Foucault, 1980b: vii–ix).
Foucault acknowledges that contemporary medicine has, to a degree,
‘corrected many things in this reductive oversimplification’ and that we are
much more tolerant of individuals that do not conform to the conventional
sexual categories. But we still suspect, Foucault maintains, that ‘the idea that
one must indeed finally have a true sex is far from being completely dis-
pelled’ (Foucault, 1980b: ix–x).
Foucault locates the Memoirs in this context. Herculine Barbin was a poor
child who grew up in a convent, where she was taken to be a girl and called
by the female name ‘Alexina’. But when undeniable maturational changes
began to transform her appearance in a way that set her apart from the other
girls, a priest and a physician took it upon themselves to determine her true
sexual identity. After a medical examination, ‘the difficult game of truth’ was
finally imposed on the child’s ‘indeterminate anatomy’ (Foucault, 1980b:
xi–xii). As a result, Alexina’s ‘civil status’ was ‘modified’, and she was legally
compelled to change her sex. That Herculine committed suicide not long after
its imposition testifies to the violence that is involved when an individual is
forced to assume an identity. In the Memoirs, written shortly before the suicide,
Herculine seeks to record life in the convent when s/he had retained her her-
maphroditic indeterminacy. Foucault stresses that the erotic fascination with
Herculine’s sexual ambiguity caused a pseudo-imbecility in the other members
of the convent so that they denied what they saw in front of them. He argues,
moreover, that her ambiguous sexuality contributed, in no small part, to the
heightened pleasure of the sexual contacts that are typical of such institutions.
For Foucault, Herculine represents ‘the happy limbo of non-identity’ (Foucault,
1980b: xiii) that exists prior to the imposition of sexual determinacy. The
upshot of his ‘Introduction’ is the valorization of pre-categorical and indeter-
minate sexuality and its assertion against the ‘true sex’ that is imposed on the
individual by the normalizing grid of power/knowledge.
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It is part of the complexity of Freud’s work that his theory has been seen by
some as ascribing an inescapable biological destiny to man and woman, while
others have understood him to uphold the revolutionary belief that, psycho-
logically speaking, we are not born man or woman, and that masculinity and
femininity are constructed over a period of time and are relatively independent
of biological sex. (Breen, 1983: 1)
Breen goes on to argue that this ‘duality’ is not the result of confusion or
indecision on Freud’s part but of ‘an inherent tension existing at the heart of
the matter’. This is the reason, moreover, ‘why this opposition is not going
away and why the debate is still alive half a century after [Freud’s] death’
(Breen, 1993: 1). To use Foucauldian language, human beings are in fact bio-
logical-symbolic doublets.
While Foucault’s position has the appearance of being as anti-utopian
as Freud’s, it is in fact even more utopian than the Freudian left’s. As Peter
Dews argues, Foucault’s rejection of the repressive hypothesis – conceived
of as the opposition between power and its repressed or excluded other –
is more apparent than real, not ‘abolished, but simply displaced’ (Dews, 1987:
168). By placing bodies and pleasures in the position of the repressed other
of the apparatus of sexuality – but not thematizing it directly – Foucault
attempts to finesse his central dilemma. On the one hand, he still retains an
extra-discursive, counter-norm to power which, as Dews argues, the critique
of power logically requires. And, to his credit, Foucault still wants to criticize
power. On the other hand, by leaving the notion of bodies and pleasures so
04 Whitebook (jr/d) 11/20/02 1:36 PM Page 69
Notes
1. The claim that power is productive is often offered as a response to the charge
that, according to Foucault’s analysis, power is totalized. We should point out,
however, that, for Foucault, the term ‘productive’ is purely descriptive. It simply
refers to the fact that power generates effects and doesn’t say anything about
the value of those effects – whether or not they are praiseworthy. Indeed,
because he suspects that all forms of normativity are masked forms of normal-
ization, Foucault cannot and will not address the question of how they might
be evaluated. Given, therefore, that the effects of power are intentionally
generated for purposes of social engineering and that Foucault won’t allow
himself to evaluate them, I don’t see how the thesis of the productivity of power
provides an answer to Foucault’s critics.
2. Thomas Laqueur (1990: 12) observes that ‘under the influence of Foucault,
various versions of deconstruction, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and poststruc-
turalism generally’, the biological body ‘threatens to disappear entirely’.
3. See Sigmund Freud, 1915: 122–3.
4. See Herbert Marcuse, 1970.
5. Consider also his statement that the discourse about repression
is in fact a formidable tool of control and power. As always, it uses what
people say, feel and hope for. It exploits their temptation to believe that
to be happy, it suffices to cross the threshold of discourse and remove a
few prohibitions. It ends up in fact repressing and controlling movements
of revolt and liberation. (Foucault, 1989: 142)
04 Whitebook (jr/d) 11/20/02 1:36 PM Page 70
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