Foucault's Aestheticism

Kevin Lamb

Diacritics, Volume 35, Number 2, Summer 2005, pp. 43-64 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/dia.2007.0004

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/214697

[ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ]
Foucault’s Aestheticism

KEVIN LAMB

I am no doubt not the only one who writes in order to have no face. Do not ask
who I am and do not ask me to remain the same.
—Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge

Critical Style

Can critique as Foucault conceives it be read as a form of style? If so—and we may need
to remain uncertain as to whether yes or no is the answer, even as to whether the question
is the right one—any such account will face the difficulty of naming the form in question.
For critique’s task is to refuse easy answers, to withdraw the dependability and familiar-
ity of the categories with which thought presents us, so as to give thinking a chance to
happen. Asking about the connection between critique and style may therefore require
forsaking style in the usual sense—as a way of identifying an author—and transforming it
into an activity of self-creation still in the making. But out of what is the self created? To
call style an activity of self-creation will not be to forget its role in the field of classifica-
tion, nor to exempt oneself from participating, but to give thought the right to interrogate
the circumstances that make that role possible, in which case self-creation will signify
less an autonomous procedure than a liberty taken in encountering a specific domain. It
does not follow that we will not or cannot name the style with which to associate critique
but that, if we are to practice critique, we must also take a distance from the answer, pre-
senting the type of relation critique is in the potential opening it establishes between our
given replies and the possibility of replying differently.
Surely, then, no single reply could suffice to reveal or capture critique fully. One
moment might orient us nonetheless to its peculiar form, a moment in which the act of
discovery also recalls the difference—indeed the different relations—that one kind of
orientation already makes. The moment I have in mind is from an interview with Gai
Pied in 1981, “Friendship as a Way of Life,” where Foucault announced, “homosexuality
is not a form of desire but something desirable. Therefore, we have to work at becoming
homosexuals and not be obstinate in recognizing that we are” [308]. Asked to assess the
“discourse” of Gai Pied, Foucault answers that its existence is what matters by virtue of
the new contacts and affiliations it produces. The point, he continues, is not to name the
innommable nor to represent a group, however marginal or invisible, but to explore “what
relations, through homosexuality, can be established, invented, multiplied and modulat-
ed.” Homosexuality, he repeats, is historically vital insofar as homosexuals develop ways
of becoming it.
Since Foucault, “queer” has become one such way. In adopting the term, however,
we may be getting ahead of ourselves, creating something not quite or no longer even
homosexual, for which being homosexual is itself neither necessary nor sufficient. And
yet had Foucault only had the word “queer,” had he not needed to work so hard to detach
homosexuality from “the hermeneutics of the subject,” would not his proposal be easier

diacritics / summer 2005 diacritics 35.2: 43–64 43

to grasp, allowing us to reserve “queer” for an ideal of self-innovation, to which one
aspires, and “homosexual” for a type of desire, which makes one an object of confession
and interpretation, amenable to study and regulation? For better or worse, during the late
1970s and early 1980s, “queer” was not yet part of the reigning vocabulary of queers on
either side of the Atlantic; homosexuality was just becoming gay. And as Foucault saw
it, the change from one term to the other was not reducible to different ways of being the
same thing but central to a transformation already underway in creating a “gay lifestyle.”
In his interviews, in fact, Foucault uses the word “gay” almost exclusively in conjunc-
tion with “style” and with the problematic that he calls in his later work “a stylization
of the self,” which refers to a practice and an ethics, an “art of living,” a form given to
existence in the mode of its elaboration. “To be ‘gay,’” he asserts, “is not to identify with
the psychological traits and the visible masks of the homosexual, but to try to define and
develop a way of life” [310]. For Foucault’s contemporary readers, however, style and
gay identity doubtless belong so closely together that they are effectively metonymic.
Can we still hear in “gay” or, for that matter, “queer” the work of self-invention rather
than a given subject, of whom fashion is another symptom?
That Foucault did not have the term “queer,” that queer itself may no longer be queer,
is part of the problem and the point. No single term can do the work we ask of it. Writing
in the early 1980s, Foucault understands the effort at inventing the self to be a dimension
of being gay, in that the style of existence to which it refers entails devising one, crafting
“a manner of being” and a culture “still improbable” in the world [310]. When Judith But-
ler calls a decade later for us to become “Critically Queer,” she too changes what it can
mean to be queer, warning that, in appearing to offer the “summary moment” rather than
“only the most recent,” queer can become complacent; to link queerness with “critique”
is thus to style it differently, to activate new possibilities for its appropriation [Bodies
223]. Perhaps to make style “critical” requires, then, from the start that style remain un-
willing to resolve the self or establish a final shape for it, that style claim value only and
precisely by the operations it carries out and the modifications in thought it enables. And
to establish a relation between critique and style may already be to style critique itself
anew, to ask that we contrive means of becoming critical and “not be obstinate in recog-
nizing that we are.”

From Artwork to the Art of Work

On one memorable occasion, in his interview with Stephen Riggins in 1983, “An Ethics
of Pleasure,” Foucault designates the work at becoming oneself by its affinity with “aes-
theticism,” the reference to which is striking not only for its rarity but for the meaning it
acquires in his self-description. Responding to Riggins’s question as to whether “there
is a special kinship between [his] kind of philosophy and the arts in general,” Foucault
confesses that he’s “not in a position to answer” because his work is not that of “a good
academic,” not the object of specialized knowledge or of a given field of research, but
“related to what you could call aestheticism, meaning transforming yourself.” He ex-
plains:

I am not interested in the academic status of what I am doing because my prob-

lem is my own transformation. That’s the reason also why, when people say,
“Well, you thought this a few years ago and now you say something else,” my
answer is, (Laughs) “Well, do you think I have worked like that all those years to

44
 say the same thing and not to be changed?” This transformation of one’s self by
one’s own knowledge is, I think, something rather close to the aesthetic experi-
ence. Why should a painter work if he is not transformed by his own painting?
[379]

Confronted by the allegation that his work is inconsistent, Foucault emphasizes how
hard-won that inconsistency is in a manner that recalls the introduction to L’archéologie
du savoir, where he cites the same criticism and reply. The goal, he suggests, should not
be to demonstrate the work’s unity but to offer work as a form of continuous change, in
which being true to the self means not saying the same thing but persevering in the task
of one’s transformation, seeing the self in quotation marks, as a draft to be circulated and
revised without becoming final.
Aestheticism is not, we can infer, Foucault’s last word on his work, and this may be
precisely its value for thinking the relation between critique and style. For he introduces
the term as but a relational possibility, as the potential but still indefinite relation to what
one could call aestheticism, but perhaps need not or only provisionally.1 In calling it “aes-
theticism,” venturing this term rather than others, Foucault establishes a certain distance
with respect to it, as though to activate something dynamic within the term that also ex-
ceeds it, something that links the “strange relationship between knowledge, scholarship,
theory and real history” in his books to the ongoing transformation of himself, which he
can name, if he can name it (note that he puts the possibility in question as he takes up
a possible reply), only with uncertainty, with a sense of the makeshift quality of one’s
calling it anything. What Foucault calls it will thus be “critical” not only in naming the
relation but in that the form of relation he posits surfaces by already being undercut in its
finality.
Unlike the terms “stylization” and “aesthetics of existence,” by which he refers to
antiquity in The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self, “aestheticism” indicates a
fin-de-siècle movement of art, though, as befits Foucault, a rather elusive one; far from
the ancients but still engrossed by their creative spirit, it brings to mind the modern ho-
mosexual who finds new life in décadence as well as the historical autonomization of art
as a separate practice. Foucault’s allusion to aestheticism is intriguing in part, however,
because he refers to none of its customary associations: Wilde, art for art’s sake, willful
paradox, artifice, dandyism. Nor does he invite comparison between his study of clas-
sical ethics and the Hellenism that inspired nineteenth-century aesthetes to seek life’s
perfection in art. Clearly, his analogy to “aesthetic experience” bears on the importance
of art for his work, but what Foucault means by that expression is equally perplexing.
For his “aesthetic experience” is not that of a reader or spectator but something like the
artist’s method or technique, which is the opposite of how we normally understand it. If
we are transformed by art, it is by experiencing it, in the mode of observation rather than
of creation. Aesthetics might refer to an artist’s style, but aesthetic experience retains the
significance of an encounter with the beautiful or the sublime, one that, following Kant,

1. The difference between Foucault’s use of “aestheticism” and Judith Butler’s suggests the
provisional character of the term, which has to do, one might suspect, not only with their distinc-
tive styles but with their different audiences. Butler cites the term as a “risk,” a “charge” to which
it “exposes one” in drawing a given ontology in question. Interrogating the rules that distinguish
valid from invalid forms of governance, she asks: “How does one call into question the exhaustive
hold that such rules of ordering have upon certainty without risking uncertainty, without inhabiting
that place of wavering which exposes one to the charge of immorality, evil, aestheticism?” [“What
Is Critique?” 220]. Whereas Foucault appeals to “aestheticism” as a tentative self-description,
Butler approaches it as an allegation made by others, which calls one to clarify or account for one’s
actions.

diacritics / summer 2005 45

involves purposiveness without purpose (Zweckmässigkeit ohne Zweck). Insofar as aes-
theticism is Foucault’s model, however, the encounter promises to be as provocatively
self-involved as self-reflexive, the sort of experience, like Dorian’s in The Picture of
Dorian Gray, in which beholding a stylized reflection not only arrests the self in its gaze
but leaves it forever changed.
The imagined scene of the artist as his own spectator, represented as the object of his
own practice, is one that preoccupies Foucault from the start of his career. And, of course,
for Foucault self-reflexivity itself has a history, one whose emergence he famously intro-
duces in a reading of Velasquez’s self-portrait “Las Meninas.” What we call self-reflexiv-
ity is not, he argues, the timeless agency of the Cartesian cogito but belongs to a specific
historical dispositif, in which thought takes shape with respect to a specified order of
knowledge and a set of disciplines and institutions, even or precisely as it responds to
the constraints they impose. The relatively recent configuration of “man” as an object of
study in the humanities—what the French call “les sciences humaines”—produces thus
a particular mode of subjectivation, one Foucault traces in encyclopedic breadth in Les
mots et les choses but to which he returns much later and from a different vantage in a
prominent series of lectures and essays on Kant and les Lumières.2 Prepared at the end of
his life, during his study of classical ethics, these may be the most direct answer we have
to Riggins’s question: is Foucault’s form of philosophy art?
In the most famous of these, “What Is Enlightenment?,” Foucault approaches the
history of thought by explicating two classic texts of modern consciousness, which, as
it turns out, are archetypal for the peculiar stance they assume toward their time: Kant’s
“An Answer to the Question: ‘What is Enlightenment?’” and Baudelaire’s “The Painter
of Modern Life.” Reading two figures nearly synonymous by now with modernity, Fou-
cault attempts to specify their historical exemplarity by grasping something unusual in
the performance of it, in the fashion in which they engage their own historicity, each
stepping back—as artist, as philosopher—to reflect on his work so as to address the con-
temporary questions that condition it and to which it replies, albeit in a difficult form. It is
the style of the encounter they propose that Foucault takes to be central to his own task of
giving “an ontology of the present” and to the practice that he calls, following Kant, “cri-
tique.” Critique will, hence, entail both an attitude toward history and a position within
it, a stance inside modernity that transforms what it means to belong, with the result that
modernity itself comes to signify not simply or primarily an epoch but, in Foucault’s
words, an ethos.
In what exactly does this ethos consist? In the case of Baudelaire, Foucault distin-
guishes four elements: (1) the “heroization” of the present—for Baudelaire, the object
of art is not merely to recognize or accept the ephemeral movement of modern life but
to establish a relation to it, a relation that summons “something eternal . . . not beyond
the present instant, nor behind it, but within it” [114]; (2) the irony of the heroization;
(3) the asceticism of the self—that is to say, a relation to the self in which it is no longer
something to discover but to create, “as the object of a complex and difficult elaboration”
[117]; and (4) the awareness that there is no place for (1) through (3) in society or the
body politic, that they can only appear somewhere else called “art.” Amid the “heroiza-
tion” of the present, the “indispensable asceticism” of the self, and the turn to art, it is
easy to discern a lineage of self-creation by which that late nineteenth-century aesthetic

2. Earlier in his career, Foucault pursued the problem of “man” in the introduction to his
translation of Kant’s Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht, where he argues for a synthesis
of structural and genetic approaches to the text, given its history of writing and rewriting over 25
years. Submitted in 1961 as the secondary thesis for his doctorat d’état, the introduction was not
published with the translation, which appeared in 1963.

46
Maurice Benayoun
installation, fear
philosophy associated as much with Wilde as Baudelaire lives on in the aspiration of
Foucault’s “homosexual,” who no longer endeavors to find the self but to invent it.
What is far more difficult in this “difficult, deliberate attitude” of modernity is curi-
ously also easiest to sum up, something Foucault raises in the following—almost dis-
missive—manner: “this heroization is ironical, needless to say.” In what sense is this,
as Foucault says, “needless to say” [114–15]? Is it merely obvious? Or is it needless in
the sense of being useless or pointless? Perhaps irony takes the form “needless to say”
because in the case of irony it is precisely form that speaks, through the relation that the
manner of saying establishes to what is said. But Foucault has much more to say on the
subject, for the irony at issue involves neither negating the present nor directing our at-
tention elsewhere (to the past or the future) but honoring that which has yet to be in the
moment that we encounter it, without falling into the belief that it was there all along. An
ironical heroization will mean valorizing the present without sacralizing it, making it an
object of interest and work without attempting to preserve it or to display it as a passing
curiosity.3
In order to clarify the point, Foucault catches Baudelaire’s modern painter at work,
in the instant “when the whole world is falling asleep” and the painter begins his task of
transforming it into art. “His transfiguration,” writes Foucault,

does not entail an annulling of reality, but a difficult interplay between the truth
of what is real and the exercise of freedom: “natural” things become “more
than natural,” “beautiful” things become “more than beautiful,” and individual
objects appear “endowed with an impulsive life like the soul of [their] creator.”
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 vio-
lates it. [117]

The choreography Foucault perceives in Baudelaire’s portrayal of the relationship

between the world and the painter draws to mind his own portrayal of S/M in two well-
known interviews with the gay press, “Sexual Choice, Sexual Act” and “Sex, Power,
and the Politics of Identity.” There he describes S/M as a game and an ethics, in which
the “mixture of rules and openness has the effect of intensifying sexual relations by in-
troducing a perpetual novelty, a perpetual tension and a perpetual uncertainty” [“Sexual
Choice” 331]. In the same way that Baudelaire’s reality becomes more than real in art, in
S/M sex becomes more than itself in that, as Foucault writes, “a whole new art of sexual
practice develops” from which as yet undetermined “internal possibilities” emanate as
a consequence of the activity [330]. That is to say, as “a kind of creation, a creative
enterprise,” S/M both sets and challenges boundaries, with the participants accepting

3. The element of irony also distinguishes Baudelaire’s modern painter, Constantin Guys, from
the flâneur, who collects impressions in passing but does not arrange or style them in a critical
manner. In the interview “How Much Does It Cost for Reason to Tell the Truth?,” Foucault for-
mulates a similar account with respect to Kant’s Aufklärung: “In relation to the Kantian question,
‘What is Enlightenment,’ one can say that it is the task of philosophy to explain what today is and
what we are today, but without breast-beating drama and theatricality and maintaining that this
moment is the greatest damnation or daybreak of the rising sun. No, it is a day like every other, or
much more, a day which is never like another” [359]. The last sentence in French reads: “Non,
c’est un jour comme les autres, ou plutôt c’est un jour qui n’est jamais tout à fait comme les autres”
[“Structuralisme et poststructuralisme” 1267].

48
roles and constraints as an occasion to renegotiate, reverse, and innovate [“Sex” 384].
What transpires between master and slave is, consequently, no mere staging of power for
Foucault but rather “eroticizes” power through “strategic relations,” which are more fluid
than social relations in that the latter’s mobility is policed and “stabilized through institu-
tions” [387]. S/M is thus, more accurately, “the use of a strategic relationship as a source
of pleasure,” and “those strategic relations,” he stresses, “are inside sex, as a convention
of pleasure within a particular situation” [388, Foucault’s emphasis]. Asserting freedom
as part of a practice, S/M discovers pleasure by at the same time inventing it, dispersing
it over the body’s surface, locating it in new parts and combinations.
“The practice of a liberty that simultaneously respects this reality and violates it”—it
takes a slightly perverse imagination to hear in Foucault’s irony the inventiveness of his
S/M.4 And yet, for Foucault, an ironical heroization of the present founds a practice of lib-
erty because it already imagines the present perversely, from the vantage of creative use,
without using it only to bring about an end or to consummate an act, and without making
it an object of veneration either, something only to guard or exhibit rather than to modify
and create. Insofar as Foucault evokes S/M while discussing irony, it is, we might say,
because he conceives S/M artistically, heroizing it ironically, not in order to arouse the
spectacle of transgression nor to annul it but to capture an element of play and mobility in
the migration and adaptation of sex instigated by S/M. In other words, Foucault’s render-
ing of S/M changes what it can mean; it will no longer be but a brand of sex, however
new, but an ethos with respect to it, which manifests itself throughout but also surpasses
the given performances in which we identify participation.
To return to Riggins’s question, what sex and irony have to do with one another
matters precisely at the moment when the style of their enactment in Foucault raises our
consideration of its specific form: is it art? For Baudelaire, it is by definition, in that the
attitude or orientation at issue has no other status, that it “can only be produced in another,
a different place, which [he] calls art” [“What Is Enlightenment?” 118]. Calling it art for
Baudelaire will thus be another way of naming its exclusion while creating new modes
for its realization. But in the figure of the modern painter, who works while others sleep,
encountering the world in the strange light of its darkness, the task must seem a lonely
one, a job for specialists, the province not only of a single discipline, like art, but of a
peculiar variety of it, like aestheticism. Inasmuch as this ethos belongs to the world, the
examples of modern art and S/M imply that its function is confined to oddly solipsistic
4. Paul de Man’s view of irony in his later work as, following Schlegel, a “permanent para-
basis” develops “The Concept of Irony” in a perverse manner not unlike Foucault’s description of
Aufklärung as, following Kant, a “permanent state of critique.” Both presuppose an interruption
into as well as a distance from the present, though for Foucault the attitude of critique involves not
only stylization but a relation to history and of the self to itself. De Man, on the other hand, treats
each of these as a way of defusing irony’s force: reducing it to “an aesthetic practice or artistic
device, a Kunstmittel”; to “a dialectic of the self as a reflexive structure” (which, de Man admits,
is how he treats it in his earlier work); or, as in Hegel and Kierkegaard, to “a dialectic of history”
[169–70]. In the example from Schlegel’s Lucinde and the interpretation of it de Man offers, one
can hear nonetheless evident echoes of Foucault’s suggestion of S/M in his reading of Baudelaire.
Trying to indicate what a “permanent parabasis” is exactly, de Man alludes to but does not quote
a short chapter from Lucinde entitled “Eine Reflexion,” of which he writes, “it doesn’t take a very
perverse mind, only a slightly perverse one, to see that what is actually being described is not a
philosophical argument at all but is—well, how shall I put it?—a reflection on the very physical
questions involved in sexual intercourse” [168]. For de Man, the interruption is not local but
cuts across the whole, as irony cuts across the narrative of all tropes while seeming to be but a
trope itself. The result is that any single reflexive structure (any Reflexion, as it were) is denied the
privilege of bringing coherence or closure to the narrative of reflexivity at the same time that the
interruption runs the risk of becoming an allegory of “the infinite project,” “reveal[ing] as such,
by the undoing of the work, the absolute toward which the work is under way” [183].

diacritics / summer 2005 49

experiences at the margins, experiences intended not for communication, reproduction,
intimacy, or leisure but for the work of innovation in the form of the experience itself.
Surely, however, sex is the last place one expects to uncover irony, even in Foucault.
And this is the trick, not to deny what’s going on but to invent an element of play in the
process. The problem of isolation becomes a problem only when we insist on seeing
in aestheticism or S/M, as most of us unsurprisingly now do, one type of art or desire
among others, rather than our own self-creation or pleasure. By suggesting his portrayal
of S/M in the art of Baudelaire’s modern painter, Foucault honors the ethos of modernity
by testing the limit of what we recognize in it, using it to devise and multiply new rela-
tions. Rather than broaching Foucault’s relation to art through his philosophy, perhaps it
is time, then, to reverse the approach and ask: is a certain art doing the work of Foucault’s
philosophy? Or is Foucault even doing philosophy at all? And if so, in what way? Maybe,
however, we had better pose the last question first, ask not whether but in what way, since,
as Socrates understood in the Symposium, talk of Eros has a habit of turning the question
of doing it or not doing it away from the art of seduction by which we are drawn into the
conversation in the first place. Embarrassingly enough, we miss all of the action by look-
ing for it. And do we not already have Foucault’s ars erotica at hand in the ironic attitude
toward the present that he glimpses in Baudelaire?
The question that Foucault raises in “What Is Enlightenment?” is not, however, about
a simple return to this or that moment in time but about the possibility of doing a practice
differently by grasping oneself in its history, as part of the contemporary order it creates,
where one confronts the pervasive demand of scientia sexualis that one fit here or there
in a taxonomy, even in the case of ars erotica and scientia sexualis themselves. To under-
stand the self as an art of erotic initiation will no doubt require that we return to Socrates
and the Greeks, but what of the historical present, the tradition of Kant and the Enlighten-
ment in which we remain restlessly lodged? Foucault’s reconsideration of the Enlighten-
ment after a career often thought to be dedicated to its critique should surprise us both
for what it does to the notion of critique and for the image of Foucault it presents in the
act of reading. For Foucault finds critique not in the obvious places, not in Kant’s first,
second, or third one, nor in opposition to the legacy they found, but in the philosopher’s
labored response to the present of philosophical activity, as a demanding answer to the
question of his time—“Was ist Aufklärung?”—that simultaneously raises the possibility
of answering the question differently.
In taking up the specific mode of relation that Kant establishes to his historical
moment, Foucault hopes to indicate its persistence by capturing the extent to which
Aufklärung for Kant is itself an exit (what Kant calls “der Ausgang des Menschen aus
seiner selbstverschuldeten Unmündigkeit”), where daring to use reason will signal
a release from the internalization of limits placed on understanding. In the activity of
Aufklärung as Kant imagines it, we leave behind our “self-incurred tutelage”; taken by
reason alone, we no longer accept the given to be the destiny of our becoming and, in
effect, no longer deem the commandment supplied by others to be an adequate form of
governance for our faculties. But the object, Foucault maintains, will not be to decide
in favor of or against Aufklärung, as between freedom and slavery. Rather, the refusal
itself will be a form of Aufklärung, a way of replying to the imposition of constraint
on thought, a style of negotiating with tyranny. The “practice of liberty” that Kant puts
forward happens as a form of freedom in obedience, in which submitting enables one to
practice the use of reason and thereby promises the historical work of self-actualization.
Indeed, the word that Kant uses here for “to reason” (“räsonieren”)—a word also marked
by its appearance in the three Critiques—“does not,” writes Foucault, “refer to just any
use of reason, but to a use of reason in which reason has no other end but itself: räsonie-
ren is to reason for reasoning’s sake” [108]. Much like aestheticism’s “l’art pour l’art”

50
or Foucault’s S/M, both of which use “strategic relations” to explore their own “internal
possibilities,” Kant’s Enlightenment calls reason back to itself, where its exercise springs
from a sovereignty that is neither produced ex nihilo nor given in advance but taken in
questioning the existing sovereign’s right to govern the domain of reason in its entirety.
And lest we assume that in räsonieren we have mere “freedom of conscience” or
“personal belief,” Kant insists that the use (Gebrauch) under dispute is public, constituted
by being universal, free, and open. The contract Kant proposes is that insofar as it is for
the sake of reason, where its office is nothing other than to realize its nature, reason shall
remain unhindered, with the understanding that it conform in private matters, where it has
another end in view, that of meeting everyday needs and obligations. Foucault will not be
satisfied by the distinction, since it appeals to political expediency, pledging obedience to
curry Frederick II’s favor while attempting to curb his rule. But it is also the dissatisfac-
tion and the uncertainty of the philosopher’s engagement with his historicity by which
Foucault specifies Kant’s Aufklärung and, with it, the emergence of a certain practice of
critical philosophy, as “an attitude, an ethos, a philosophical life in which the critique of
what we are is at one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits that are im-
posed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them” [132].
Certainly, the fact that Foucault offers philosophy in the form of critique leaves some
question as to the place of Kant in his reading, given that for Kant the activity associated
with the Critiques is not yet a matter of putting philosophy in practice but itself prior
to doing philosophy, that by which one clears the ground for the later doing, settling
questions about what can be done, what it is possible to do. For Foucault, on the other
hand, critique appears in the moment when philosophy steps back and reflects on its role,
manifesting itself in the mode of relation it assumes toward the problem of the present.
One feels inevitably that Foucault’s notion of critique is not quite or no longer still Kant’s
idea of doing philosophy. And yet not fitting also delimits the place of philosophy as Kant
poses it in Aufklärung, just as the task of the work of art in Baudelaire is, in some sense,
not to work, not to belong to society as what Kant calls “a cog in the machine” but, rather,
to create itself through its imaginative encounter with the world. In other words, to the
extent that Kant and Baudelaire belong together in the modernity Foucault constructs, it
is because the manner by which neither belongs becomes an occasion to work at grasping
who it is we are, by refusing to foreclose what we can become. The heritage of critique
they offer thus constitutes “an ontology of the present” in that it is the problem of the
present outlined in the form of its emergence, the description of which entails unsettling
our expectation that having a place in the world is a given and not the work of a desperate
aspiration. Perhaps, then, Kant and Foucault are different primarily in where they start.
And maybe critique itself is always a matter both of getting started on one’s work, on the
work of oneself, and of putting an ethos into practice by the style in which one goes about it.

Translating Critique into Practice

In 1971, in a brief article in Diacritics entitled “Monstrosities in Criticism,” Foucault ap-

proaches the role of the critic from an odd angle. Responding to two reviews, he strikes
the usual poses—dispute, self-defense—associated with an author intent on setting the re-
cord straight. But he begins, ironically, by reading his critics for the impersonal structure
of their discourse, for the interpretive order they share, which sustains their involvement.
Wondering whether their criticisms must touch the book in deforming it, whether it, “in

diacritics / summer 2005 51

a certain manner, form[s] and nourish[es] them,” Foucault suspends the usual distinction
between “good” and “bad” criticism, between respecting the text and violating it, so as to
discover an underlying “critical grid, a certain manner of coding and transcribing a book,
a singularly systematic transformation.” For “all criticism,” he continues, “will appear as
transformations,” which have principles of their own and are, in their regulatory effect,
vital to the activity of critics [58].
In linking “aestheticism” to Foucault, we might speculate as to what modifications
the link creates, knowing full well the different use to which it is put in Wilde. In ac-
counting for critique, have we shifted from the regularity of a system to a stylized, in-
dividualistic art, something in which the self might be thought to recover control of its
doings? Or will critique be but another discipline, with laws of its own, indifferent to
its practitioners? For whom or what is critique intended? Is it for all, a select few? The
scope and applicability cannot be incidental, since, as we will see in Foucault’s analysis
of the Greeks, to undertake critique is to refuse the choice so as to ask after the history
of modes of subjectivation that occurs with the very division, between creating of one’s
own existence a work (an oeuvre) and instituting a universal requirement, appropriate to
everyone.
In the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde defines the critic as “he who
can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things”
[3]. For Foucault, beauty is hardly the term of choice, but its centrality in Wilde may be
different than we often suppose. In inaugurating criticism as an art, Wilde makes beauty
the fulcrum for other inventions, not something to reveal but through which to plot new
modes of realization. By translating “beauty,” in other words, Wilde’s criticism trans-
forms the practice of translation from something derivative or parasitic, which is to be
measured only by correspondence to an original or by its approximation of a prior ideal,
into an ongoing aspiration, which assumes its own activity as the basis for self-innova-
tion. In the case of Foucault, however, the question of the critic takes new meaning in
rendering not criticism but critique. Will imparting the latter demand not only discover-
ing a new style but taking a distance from that discovery, leaving room for what critique
might yet become? Insofar as the critic’s task entails “translation,” will the point be to
dissipate critique’s difficulty by casting it in a language one recognizes or to capture its
significance in the manner in which it puts one to work, asks one to explore new possibili-
ties internal to criticism itself?
To begin with, the question of what critique is for is not Foucault’s. In the title of
one of his many later talks on Kant, he does, however, approach the more basic ques-
tion underlying our own: “What Is Critique?” In a recent essay that bears the same title
as Foucault’s, Judith Butler takes up this task of clarifying critique as a tribute to his
“virtue,” connecting his work with a determination of value that will be as difficult as cri-
tique. For though critique as Butler conceives it will also be Foucault’s virtue, she implies
that this form of virtue may only be realized in the mode of critique, in the place of its
encounter with the world, which remains irreducible to the given ontological horizon and
to existing social norms, including the norms governing sociability. In her opening line,
moreover, Butler shifts from Foucault’s question and the question of her title to a slightly
different one that asks instead about critique in motion: “What is it to offer a critique?”
[212]. And this shift from the first question to the second, with the addition of a verb and
an indefinite article, importantly moves critique from the given—from the definition of
critique in itself—to a certain style of giving that appears in an instance of offering it.
The object of our inquiry will thus no longer quite belong to the customary fields of clas-
sification or abstract universality but will be a strange, indeterminate hybrid that Butler
designates “constrained generality.” In fact, the problem of accounting for critique in
general, she suggests, is that such an account risks missing the essence of the activity by

52
making it inactive, losing the giving in the given by presenting a thing instead of a mode
of relation. But insofar as critique is presumptively particular and derivative—critique is
always a critique of something—part of its function will be to engage that tension and
shift, between what qualifies as universal and the particular field of thought in which it
operates. Will knowing what critique is require, in some sense, doing it?
Butler’s essay is at the very least criticism, part of a tradition of commentary codified
by recognizable procedures and conventions. Is criticism also critique here? And if not,
are they still related? If Foucauldian critique is a more general activity or practice, might
not the better term be criticism anyway? While the a and of that particularize critique can
just as easily confine criticism to a specific object, it can appear without these without
drawing as much attention to itself as critique does. Critique sits awkwardly when on its
own, whereas criticism possesses the more specialized meaning we associate with a field
of activity, as the “art,” “function,” or “work” undertaken by the critic. The OED not only
gives this usage but specifies under it both “the critical science which deals with the text,
character, composition, and origin of literary documents” as well as “the critical philoso-
phy of Kant.”5 Butler notes, furthermore, that what Raymond Williams hoped to establish
under “criticism” has a striking resemblance to Foucault’s idea of “critique,” in that each
author wished to set the term apart from its conventional use as “fault-finding” in order to
supply an idiom for a type of response to the world that suspends ordinary judgment [see
Butler 212; Williams 84–86]. But if the point is to isolate its use, perhaps the awkward
word is better suited to the task, precisely in being conspicuous. Where criticism seam-
lessly designates a more general practice, critique lets the seams show, as though torn
from another context and still unsure where to belong.
Part of the issue is that using either term to denote what Foucault calls in French
“critique” requires making a choice, since we can render the word as either “critique” or
“criticism” in English. Is the difference simply a matter of preference or language, pe-
culiar to a person or sign system? Or will the manner in which one chooses from what’s
offered suggest something peculiar to the relation between critique and style, something
that makes critique’s own relation to context unruly? The choice involved in translation
becomes especially marked in an interview with Didier Eribon that Foucault gave in
1981 just after the election of François Mitterrand to the presidency, an interview that
appears in English under the title “Practicing Criticism,” though it originally appeared
in French in the leftist Libération as “Est-il donc important de penser?” (“Is it therefore
important to think?”).6 In translating the interview, Alan Sheridan uses the term “criti-

5. The entry for “criticism” from the Oxford English Dictionary online, <http://dictionary.
oed.com/>, reads:

1. The action of criticizing, or passing judgement upon the qualities or merits of anything;
esp. the passing of unfavourable judgement; fault-finding, censure.
2. a. The art of estimating the qualities and character of literary or artistic work; the func-
tion or work of a critic.
b. spec. The critical science which deals with the text, character, composition, and
origin of literary documents, esp. those of the Old and New Testaments.
c. Philos. The critical philosophy of Kant.
So called from its being based on a critical examination of the faculty of knowledge.
3. (with pl.) An act of criticizing; a critical remark, comment; a critical essay, critique.
4. A nice point or distinction, a minute particular, a nicety; a subtlety; in bad sense, a
quibble.

6. In the translation of this interview for The Essential Works of Foucault, Robert Hurley takes
the original title from the French, but he, like Sheridan, maintains the distinction between a critique
and criticism in general.

diacritics / summer 2005 53

cism” for the broader practice and “a critique” for a particular instance of it, where the
difference in French is conveyed by the articles “la” and “une.” If critique is—as Butler
defines it—a hybrid, tracking the shift between general activity and specific occurrence
would seem to be crucial. But while such a shift is certainly meaningful in general, it can
be hard to sort out in practice. For instance, “a critique” (“une critique”) for Foucault is
not a matter of opposing the existing order but of revealing the broader structural and
conceptual underpinnings of social life, not “saying that things are not right as they are”
but determining “on what kinds of assumptions, what kinds of familiar, unchallenged, un-
considered modes of thought the practices that we accept rest” [154]. On the other hand,
as a more general activity, “criticism” (“la critique”) remains “absolutely indispensable
for any transformation” [155]. Indeed, Foucault doubts that “one can oppose critique and
transformation, ‘ideal’ critique and ‘real’ transformation.”7
Contesting the world and transforming it are not the same thing, and the difference
is, to be sure, what broaches the value of critique. Sheridan’s translation, needless to say,
does not invent the distinction; it is customary for la critique to mean “criticism” in the
sense of a field of activity, while une critique refers to what we are more likely to call “a
critique,” something with a specific object in mind. And yet from the colloquial to the
philosophical, the given instance (une critique) has as its specific object not to oppose
things but to offer their conditions of possibility, while the general practice (la critique)
is busy changing the existing conditions of the world. Which is critique? Or is critique
already happening when Foucault shifts uneasily between them, using one article, then
the other, sometimes neither, introducing a degree of uncertainty as to where he belongs?
Is Butler herself describing critique or giving a demonstration when she introduces its
“offering,” asking whether the task is to define it or to supply an example?
Like any translation, Sheridan’s preserves some features, such as the distinction be-
tween la and une, while transforming others. In one salient instance, the title “Practicing
Criticism”—from Foucault’s summation that “practicing criticism is a matter of mak-
ing facile gestures difficult” (“faire la critique, c’est rendre difficile les gestes trop fac-
iles”)—may ironically do the opposite of what the sentence from which it is taken calls
for, making a very difficult gesture seem too easy, or at least too straightforward. For in
underscoring Foucault’s practice, it abandons the specificity of the encounter, lifting criti-
cism from its context in order to set it apart as a subject in itself, removed from the events
that occasion the inquiry into its function and value. What is stranger still, the headnote
to the interview creates as its context the fact of this abstraction, where criticism becomes
a permanent state of theoretical activity, untethered to the social realm. In the process, it
reverses the problem with the grammatical article in French; we are no longer concerned
with what comes before critique but with making sure that criticism comes first:

[The interview] uncovers the Foucauldian imperative to place thought before

the “sacrilization of the social.” To practice criticism demands not only a lib-
eration of thought, but also an intellectual activity that makes conflicts visible
through the action of theory. If transformation is to be achieved, it can only be
realized in a permanent state of criticism. [152, emphasis added]

“A liberation of thought” would seem a somewhat unFoucauldian ambition, given a life-

work devoted to undermining liberation’s centrality in critical theory and left politics.

7. The French reads: “Et puis surtout, je ne crois pas que l’on puisse opposer critique et trans-
formation, la critique ‘idéale’ et la transformation ‘réelle’” [999]. In Sheridan’s translation, the
key negation is missing, with the result that the translation asserts an opposition where Foucault
rejects one: “And, then, above all, I believe that an opposition can be made between critique and
transformation, ‘ideal’ critique and ‘real’ transformation” [154].

54
And yet the assumption that one must liberate the practice of critique from its context,
and content from its manifest form, while it doubtless reflects a liberty taken in transla-
tion, also strangely expresses a constitutive paradox of critique, a paradox that emerges
in the context of translation, since the object of translation (to separate thought from its
source in conveying it elsewhere) cannot help but shape the interpretation of critique that
it offers (that one must liberate thought to make it an object in itself, transportable, self-
determining).
And we should not be too quick to turn to the original, thinking it will solve the
dilemma. For while the title in English seems to disregard the constraint involved in
Butler’s “constrained generality,” the French title construes critique narrowly, asking us
in its therefore—“Est-il donc important de penser?”—to see critique as a political tool, as
though its point were to be valuable for reform or electoral victory, a notion that Foucault
is at pains to resist, arguing rather that critique is a way of refusing the demand that one
be “either for or against” [154]. That the English translation strays in taking thought from
its context may be, accordingly, what makes it pertinent to the task of critique, in that it
underscores a liberation lost in Libération from the start, something elided in the demand
for participation or evaluation. The refusal of such a demand institutes for Foucault the
activity of critique in its situated departure from the limits of its environment, in the
insubordinate relation it establishes to the pressure to belong. The “exit” that Foucault
offers is a way of occupying the dilemma, one that disappears precisely when we insist
that what comes before we got there remain fixed in its place.
The misalignment here between translation and original on the use and value of cri-
tique makes felt—because it comes about within—conflicts immanent to an existing set
of practices undertaken by author, translator, and critic, where being the last in the series
means becoming the next object of interpretation, correction, in short, criticism; that is,
the problem of capturing critique remains one’s insertion in an ongoing set of transfor-
mations, which take rightness as their object in the hope of preserving the object by also
releasing it from the limits in relation to and against which it operates. And, among its
possible acceptations, the title “Practicing Criticism” fittingly includes along with the
much loftier aim associated with Foucault and with the refusal of immediate judgment
something quite banal that belongs to any act of critical writing, something obscured by
its obviousness: the fact of doing it or even of getting the hang of it by trying it out. In
the case of Foucault’s critique, the point is not perhaps to right the wrong of prior critics
so much as to honor what is already right in being wrong, to discover what precedes the
difference so as to ask about the relations of force exercised by knowing it and to under-
score the choices one’s own task demands—between “good” and “bad,” or critique and
criticism—as the price of operating within a given field of possibility. Insofar as critique
for Foucault is a practice, its task will be not only to grasp the susceptibility to change in
our existing forms of work but also to effect a change by the manner in which it works on
and through them. We might rightly wonder: how are we to make sense of change here,
without also changing its sense?
Foucault does come across on this occasion as uncharacteristically optimistic about
the prospect of change, something that Eribon questions. He refuses, however, to specify
a hope or to determine a political use to which such change might be put, even as he allies
critique with transformation and asks that we not write it off to social inutility or leftist
melancholy. He also takes this opportunity to reject an emerging picture of himself, in
which he is understood to begin his career as an activist only to end it as an aesthete. On
the contrary, his method, Foucault maintains, stays much the same throughout, in that his
work takes shape in glitches and fragments that are not apart from but themselves traverse
experience:

diacritics / summer 2005 55

 Whenever I have tried to carry out a piece of theoretical work, it has been
on the basis of my own experience, always in relation to processes I saw taking
place around me. It is because I thought I could recognize in the things I saw,
in the institutions with which I dealt, in my relations with others, cracks, silent
shocks, malfunctionings . . . that I undertook a particular piece of work, a few
fragments of autobiography.
I’m not an activist who has retired from the fray and who would now like to
return to service. My mode of work hasn’t changed much; but what I do expect
from it is that it will continue to change me more. [156]

Foucault concludes that his work has not modified from, say, activist history to classical
philosophy but has modified him. And in saying this, while he to some extent brackets
critique’s impact on the world, he implies that the job of criticism might be individual
rather than political or social. Or, from Wilde’s l’art pour l’art, we get not la critique pour
la critique in Foucault, but apparently la critique pour le critique lui-même, criticism not
for its own sake or the world’s, but the critic’s.

A Passion for Anonymity

Undoubtedly, Foucault’s turn to classical ethics in the last two volumes of The Histo-
ry of Sexuality looks like a return to the self after a career dedicated to its extinction.
And whether sympathetic or hostile, critics by and large agree that the classical arts of
existence Foucault studies in The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self represent
something close to his heart. Presenting the conversion in a favorable light, Alexander
Nehamas in The Art of Living lauds what he calls the “personal, aestheticist turn” as the
source of inspiration that allowed Foucault to “become who he was.” Adding him to the
list of “great individuals,” like Montaigne and Nietzsche, for whom “the private and the
public, the aesthetic and the political, are as entangled with one another as the ‘life’ and
the ‘work,’” Nehamas concludes that “by turning to the self in his later works and by
living in a way consonant with his ideas, Foucault finally managed to express his ‘deep
love’ for the excluded and marginalized in practical terms. He made himself into a model
of autonomy, of a voice of one’s own” [180].
Remarkably enough, however, not only does Foucault find himself in the Greeks, but
the self he finds there is a thoroughly impersonal one. Indeed, in Saint Foucault, David
Halperin argues that while Foucault “looked to the dandyism of Baudelaire or the ‘limit-
experience’ of Bataille,” he “ultimately had to leave the modern world behind entirely”
in order to find a form of asceticism—the Greek askesis—adequate to shift the subject
from its function in “modern disciplinary society” [111–12]. While Halperin emphasizes
the centrality of style to Foucault’s project and the role that it plays as “a transformative
technology of the self,” he asks us to distinguish it from “decadent style” in Baudelaire or
Wilde, with whom it is tempting to classify him [74]. What marks Foucault’s conception
of “the self” is, for Halperin, its emptiness, which he glosses—by way of antiquity—as
“the site of a radical alterity”: “the space within each human being where she or he en-
counters the not-self, the beyond” [75]. This, according to Halperin, is why the self in
Foucault is not “Emersonian,” “not a personal substance or essence” but “a strategic
possibility” [76]. It is also, however, why Terry Eagleton in The Ideology of the Aesthetic
claims that—far from restoring the self—Foucault drains it of all significance, reducing it
to a matter of “surface” and “art,” making only the barest “half-way, crab-wise, aestheti-

56
 Maurice Benayoun
installation, Globe of Emotions
cizing move towards the subject” while supplying no “basis for an ethics or a politics.”
By Eagleton’s reckoning, Foucault’s turn to classical ethics leaves “his rebellion” against
biopower nothing but “a useless passion” [395].
Given the notorious impassivity in his work, the theme of “passion” has a surprising
significance in criticism on Foucault, doubtless partly in response to the publication in
1993 of James Miller’s biography The Passion of Michel Foucault. But already in 1968
Michel Serres in his analysis of Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (then titled, Folie
et déraison) detects amid the rigor of Foucault’s “geometry,” in the dispassionate man-
ner with which Foucault sets about to account for the sovereign unreason at the heart of
reason, “a deep-seated love,” a “love” to which Nehamas, citing Serres, also alludes. In
“striving ceaselessly to master an impossible language, structuring the unstructurable
with the greatest rationality,” Foucault’s “moving language” is itself, Serres informs us,
“an outcry” [44]. The striking combination of personal commitment and formal restraint
in accounts of Foucault leaves some question, however, as to how exactly his passion
emerges in its absence. Does his evasion of disclosure reveal unspoken solicitude for
the insane and, later, the prisoner and the deviant? Does the manner in which Foucault
demonstrates that the procedures of exclusion and disqualification are not natural or in-
evitable but products of historical changes that give rise to our existing rationality emit
an “outcry” against them?
Such questions are as unavoidable as perhaps insoluble, provided that criticism’s
job is, in some sense, to arbitrate what an author says in light of what he or she does not.
Foucault himself observes in the first volume of The History of Sexuality (La volonté de
savoir), “There is not one but many silences, and they are an integral part of the strate-
gies that underlie and permeate discourses” [27]. It seems only natural that his silence
should raise critics’ awareness of an underlying strategy, even when he asks that we read
silence for the function it plays in the interior organization of discourse, not for individual
motives or for some “absolute limit” outside. The fact remains that Foucault’s silence
conveys evident purpose and concentration, appears less a surface effect of discourse in
its indifference than the deliberate strategy of an author taking great pains to articulate
discourse differently. Foucault’s cunning presents the critic, hence, with a considerable
but not unusual challenge, in that getting him right entails capturing his elusiveness.
Eagleton’s reading of Foucault’s later work sensibly turns to style as the key:

Foucault habitually writes of oppressive, even horrendous practices and institu-

tions with a carefully calculated clinical neutrality, which has even attracted
the epithet “positivist” from Jürgen Habermas. Foucault’s style is scrupulously
non-judgemental, his commentaries purged of the least hint of normativity. This
stylistic mode is not far at times from a certain perverse eroticism, as the most
sensational materials—the torture of a human body, for example—are mediated
through a distanced, dispassionate tone, a measured, mandarin French serenely
unruffled by its own shocking contents. [384]

Style does not stand alone, however. In fact, it is the disparity between the contents,
which compel censure, and the form of narration, which bears no sign of it, that arouses
Eagleton’s suspicion. In mediating “the most sensational materials,” Foucault outwardly
abandons the denunciation they require, asking instead whether the representation of acts
of torture and systems of oppression must convey only disgust for them, whether the op-
tions available to critical thought are, ultimately, to condemn the act and to reform the
system. The result, Eagleton explains, is that Foucault “refrains from explicit judgement
but in a way so marked that this very silence itself becomes eloquent, that the very lack
of moral comment becomes a comment all its own” [384].

58
 “A comment all its own” might suggest that style acts independently of Foucault or
of the context, when Eagleton’s point is to stress the failed engagement between the au-
thor and his historical situation, that in not commenting, Foucault’s style makes an appall-
ing comment on his politics. To give the assessment force, however, Eagleton will need
to adapt style’s “comment” to more familiar terms, capturing the shift in Foucault’s work
from modernity to antiquity by translating the author’s practice in relation to the present
into his present support for a practice from the distant past. Eagleton thus substitutes one
style (Foucault’s) for another (the Greeks’) as well as one sense of style (how Foucault
writes, his technique in his earlier genealogies of power) for another (the theme of his
later work); in the shuffle, he concludes that Foucault “clearly endorses” the classical
style of self-governance, even while “clearly” disapproving of its political context, the
management of household and polis.8 Foucault’s refusal to exercise judgment when the
situation calls for it lands us, Eagleton advises, in an age where ethical conduct no longer
concerns normative grounds as such, only aesthetic ones (harmony, balance, proportion)
that leave little with which to create opposition.
The basis for Eagleton’s comparison is itself, not insignificantly, aesthetic, a cor-
respondence of form between, on the one hand, the “marked” silence in Foucault’s work
and, on the other, the absence—in the Greeks’ ethical style—of normative judgment,
strict prohibitions, or universal maxims. Foucault’s silence, however, unlike that of antiq-
uity, is crafted in relation to existing norms, in very opposition to the hold they assert on
what one is able to think or become; like Kant, in other words, he replies to the pressure
of modernity by refusing its coercion of thought. In contrast to Eagleton, Paul Veyne, one
of Foucault’s close companions during his research on antiquity, argues that Foucault
situates himself restlessly as a researcher, not at home in modernity or antiquity, work-
ing untiringly to change himself in order to change how he approaches the subject of
thinking the self prior to the norm. “Clearly,” concludes Veyne, “no one will charge him
with aspiring to renew the Stoic ethics of the Greeks” [230]. Clearly, Veyne had not read
Eagleton. Or from Eagleton’s “clearly” to Veyne’s, matters are perhaps not so clear.
We might, therefore, hazard the naïve question: Does Foucault endorse the ethics at
issue? And if so, in what sense? Certainly, in many of his late interviews as well as in the
preface to L’usage des plaisirs, Foucault describes his methodology in much the same
way he refers to the object of his studies of antiquity, as a type of work on the self, or ask-
esis. The obvious echo leads the majority of commentators, pace Veyne, to link his stance
with that of the Stoics. By defining his attitude in this way, as a model or even personal
solution, we also modify its significance, show his silent refusal to provide an answer
to modernity by unearthing a specific style or praxis of the self in antiquity, one that is,
however, no longer or not quite a self at all, or at least not as we now know it. For in be-
ing neither psychological interiority nor personality but something historically prior, the
practice we would have Foucault “endorse” points in its disappearance to the intelligible
horizon of modernity. And yet his difficult work on antiquity is only recognizable to us in
these forms, where it belongs to “the hermeneutics of the subject,” in which one becomes
a subject by acceding to the norm, outlining a position, taking a stand with respect to the
yes/no and for/against that constitute our prevailing bases of moral conduct and political
participation. Will Foucault’s encounter with the Greeks have more to say about our read-
ing than it does about his passion, even for anonymity?
That Foucault had convictions and spoke as a public intellectual helps to explain why
critics treat his turn to ancient ethics as strangely personal, some choosing to ignore it,

8. Eagleton writes, “Indeed [Foucault] actually quotes Plato’s comments on the homology
between this [the Stoics’] style of self-governance, which Foucault himself clearly endorses, and
the imperative of maintaining the polis, which he clearly does not endorse” [393].

diacritics / summer 2005 59

while others (fewer) embrace it as a “model of autonomy” otherwise missing. Insofar as
criticism in the main prefers his genealogies of power to his work on antiquity, it may be
not only or principally because power envelops us today but because Foucault’s account
of it still seems “critical” to us in the more familiar, unFoucauldian sense of “disapprov-
ing” or “oppositional.” It may in fact be that power—no matter how often we hear of its
immanence or ubiquity—appears distant enough to be a manageable adversary, while
style—no matter how we thrive on classifying others’—remains too close when it comes
to our own. But it wants as little imagination on our part to oppose style to power as to
show that, like sex, it is another of power’s ruses, promising agency only to blind us to
power’s interior function. To the degree that practicing critique requires styling a singular
reply, its point perhaps is not to recognize Foucault in antiquity or elsewhere but to with-
draw the immediate forms at hand by which we confer recognition, to put in question the
reliability that even style can come to offer us in looking for the author.

The Nonsecret of Style

In the end, the bigger mystery may be not what stance Foucault takes but that he took
one. And to keep the secret no longer, Foucault’s last word on the subject of the Greeks
is wonderfully simple and simply French: “non.” In an interview that appeared three
days after his death, what is reportedly his final interview, Foucault answers directly and
incontrovertibly the question put to him by every reader since:

Q: A style of existence—that’s admirable. These Greeks, did you find them

admirable?
MF: No.
Q: What did you think of them? [Comment les avez-vous trouvés?]
MF: Not very much [Pas très fameux]. They were stymied right away by
what seems to be the point of contradiction of ancient morality: between on the
one hand this obstinate search for a certain style of existence and, on the other,
the effort to make it common to everyone, a style that they approached more or
less obscurely with Seneca and Epictetus but which would find the possibility of
realization only within a religious style. All of Antiquity appears to me to have
been a “profound error.” (Laughs) [“Return” 466]

Foucault’s bluntness is striking, for he was certainly in the habit of dodging such ques-
tions, refusing the demand for judgment as an occasion to interrogate its necessity. Yet
here he submits a self-sufficient response with no qualification or finesse, and, for that
reason, his answer appears wanting. One can see in the original transcript that the in-
terviewer asks Foucault not once but twice, rephrasing and qualifying the question as
though unsure how to understand the reply, looking for an evident explanation that Fou-
cault, yet again, declines:

— Un style d’existence, c’est admirable. Ces Grecs, vous les avez trouvés ad-
mirables?
— Non.
— Ni exemplaires ni admirables?
— Non. [“Retour” 1515]

60
 The interviewer’s surprise is indexical of the widespread consensus to the contrary,
that Foucault admires the ancients and turns to them as a young Athenian seeker after
wisdom might turn to Socrates for instruction, if only to receive more questions than
answers. Why else would he dedicate the last years of his life to classical ethics, if not
out of regard for their importance? Or does his “non” say less about the value of his work
or even his appraisal of the Greeks than about the question at hand? Is this not another
of Foucault’s refusals to express himself in the expected form, to make his voice easy or
recognizable? For whom, after all, is the reply intended—the Greeks or the interviewer,
antiquity’s style of existence or modernity’s demand for its ready assessment? Should we
ask whether Foucault is even in earnest? What of the quotation marks around the final
verdict—a “profound error”—or his laugh upon saying it? Is the climax a judgment or a
joke, or not quite either, maybe even a bit of both? In other words, what about Foucault’s
irony? It is, we should recall, that aspect of his style that for Nehamas sets him in the
tradition of Socratic thought and transforms him into one of history’s most distinguished
advocates for and exemplars of the classical art of living.
Nehamas admits that not all ironies are Socratic though, and even Foucault’s, much
like Nietzsche’s, is not as Socratic as it might be in that it is less ironic. However, “one
of the most attractive features of Foucault’s late lectures,” Nehamas argues, “is his ac-
commodation with Socrates,” which “emerges through [. . .] speaking in Socrates’ place,
obliterating the lines that separate quotation, paraphrase, accepting another’s views, put-
ting words in another’s mouth, and finally taking another’s self as one’s own” [183]. Of
course, Foucault often speaks in others’ voices; he is—truth be told—rather infamous for
speaking around, assuming the voices of individuals throughout history, the choruses of
ages, entire discourses in their anonymity. And this is part of Nehamas’s point, part of
what establishes the irony that characterizes Foucault’s engagement with the world. So
what distinguishes it when the subject is Socrates rather than the Victorians? Nehamas
repeats several times the assertion that Foucault adopts the Socratic imperative to care for
the self, citing at each instance his use of free indirect speech. Yet, much like Foucault’s
repeated “non,” this repetition amplifies an uncertainty about where irony begins and
ends, taking two different styles and style in two different senses as one. Put differently,
Nehamas’s conclusion regarding the correspondence between Foucault and Socrates
requires and introduces repetition in that what demonstrates their affinity is and is not
Foucault’s irony; that is to say, Foucault is ironic, except in taking on the voice of the
ironist.
While Nehamas and Eagleton diverge on the value of his ethics, they are of a piece
in their approach, describing Foucault’s style only to evaluate it based on his description
of someone else’s. But what should we make of Foucault’s parting negation? Is “non”
the nonrelation of his style to the contents it treats, its detachment and promiscuity, its
resistance to the very hermeneutics by which we attempt to read it? Must it then turn
from “no” to “yes,” becoming a Greek practice of the self? Can the question be decided
apart from the predicament it poses? Or have things come to the point where Foucault’s
most unequivocal answer signifies both his immediate judgment—his outright refusal of
the Stoic ethics of the Greeks—and the place of nonjudgment from which he speaks, the
stylized refusal of judgment with which he associates the practice of critique?
To make matters worse, Foucault’s “non” arrives in the context of his evident rejec-
tion of the style at issue. “What strikes the reader of your last books,” the interviewer
begins, “is the writing—clear, pure, smooth, and very different from your habitual style.
Why this change?” [“Return” 465]. Foucault explains that he “completely gave up this
style” because he undertook to ask a different question, began to write not more histories
of disciplines or institutions but “a history of the subject.” He concludes:

diacritics / summer 2005 61

 In admitting—and I admit it!—that with The Order of Things, Madness and
Civilization, even with Discipline and Punish, I put into practice a philosophical
study essentially founded on a certain use of vocabulary, of play, of philosophi-
cal experience to which I adhered completely, you can be sure that now I’m try-
ing to disengage myself from that form of philosophy. [465]

Foucault’s claim would seem to be that in his early work philosophy depended on its styl-
ization in writing, while his later work seeks to reflect on style itself, to make style sus-
ceptible to—rather than merely the basis for—philosophical reflection. But in exclaim-
ing that he discards the series of masks he elsewhere dons with care, does not Foucault
also leave some uncertainty as to whether he is still playing, repeating the confession
by admitting that he admits, assuring us that where he had once “completely adhered,”
he “now” is “trying to disengage himself”? The certainty of an attempt is precious little
guarantee after promising candor. Declaring it would seem to be the conclusion to what
he is only now venturing: to make an honest man of M. Foucault. And yet is it not the
effort itself, the uncertain work at one’s transformation, that Foucault offers as his most
certain certainty?
Foucault’s endeavor to “disengage himself” (se déprendre) imagines him—at last!—
taken by his ingenuity, for even in fabricating a style of writing by which to lose the self
and resurface far away before nameless eyes, one can, it turns out, get caught in a game
with rules of its own, never entirely of one’s own making. It should come as no surprise,
then, that the stage for Foucault’s posthumous explanation was also set long in advance,
in Death and the Labyrinth, his little-read book on one of France’s most obscure and
dandified aesthetes, Raymond Roussel. When Foucault confesses to abandoning his laby-
rinth so as, at once, to explain it, Roussel resurfaces in his voice as the uncanny return
of a secret held “in a reserve suddenly abandoned” [5]. For in echoing Roussel’s self-
reflection on style in Comment j’ai écrit certains de mes livres, Foucault puts us in the
same interpretive dilemma he deciphered twenty years prior with respect to Roussel, of
whom—in an attempt to maneuver his reflection on Roussel both within and around this
constitutive paradox—Foucault asked: how are we to take the abandonment of secrecy,
which “forces the reader [. . .] to feel trapped in an anonymous, amorphous, now-you-see-
it-now-you-don’t, never really demonstrable type of secret” [5]? What are we to do with
“the impossibility of coming to a decision [that] links all discourse about Roussel with the
common risk of being wrong and of being deceived less by a secret than by the awareness
that there is secrecy” [5]?
In framing his inquiry in this way, Foucault prefigures the move that he would later
make in La volonté de savoir, shifting the focus of attention from what the secret is to the
relation one takes to secrecy in the act of interpretation. From the more urgent question
of decipherment—have we discovered the author’s hidden truth?—we arrive at an eth-
ics of self-reflection regarding the use to which interpretation can be put: what remains
possible to do when concealment is a function of the practice and of the question reading
itself incites? A way of reading and a style of writing—is it not the enabling illusion of
literary criticism that these might coincide, even when we acknowledge, as Foucault does
of Roussel’s writing, that “this exact repetition, this faithful double, this repetition of lan-
guage has the function of pointing out all the flaws, of highlighting all the impediments
to its being the exact representation of what it tries to duplicate, or else of filling the void
with an enigma that it fails to solve” [25]?
In his essays and interviews, Foucault often expressed the fantasy that he might be-
come one day a mere “writer,” rather than an “author,” so that he might speak only “in the
anonymity of a murmur” [“What Is an Author?” 222]. It was a fantasy about himself that
was also an expression of his fervent desire for his work, that his books might be sent off

62
into the world to become mere instruments, manipulated, plied, adapted by others with-
out fear of desecrating his image. And yet Foucault also endlessly retraced his footsteps,
qualified and resituated his work, announced, clarified, and changed his positions, often
brandishing the secrecy of hermeneutics in order to refuse it and to ask after its conditions
while at the same time dealing in its currency. Foucault, in other words, offers himself to
us in writing to be taken up elsewhere and put in practice and yet, in that likeness, holds
onto his own practice of doing so as the site of significance, as what one might call, in
Foucault’s words, “the principle of a certain unity of writing,” as “a point where contra-
dictions are resolved, where incompatible elements are at last tied together or organized
around a fundamental or originating contradiction” [215].
The fact that Foucault calls the practices he associates with classical ethics an “aes-
thetics of existence” and “a stylization of the self” has led critics to understand his notion
of “practice” as also the functional equivalent of “style,” something for which literary
criticism has typologies, rules, procedures of recognition; as Foucault himself notes, style
is one of the chief criteria according to which we discriminate among authors. When
style becomes a theme of the work, however, we turn to exegetical principles for the de-
termination of meaning, following in the last instance what is said rather than how. And
yet these two dimensions of style cannot be fully separated, since the author’s manner of
presentation can reverse or align—or even undercut any basis for evaluating—the value
attached to style in his or her account of it. As a result, the significance Foucault attributes
to his own practice paradoxically must be and cannot be a matter of the immediate point
of application. But perhaps it was Foucault’s point all along that inhabiting a paradox is
not the same thing as resolving it. In the end, the real risk of asking whether Foucault
endorses a given practice—of critique, of the self, or of aestheticism—is not that the
critic invariably gets the answer wrong, mistaking no for yes, but that the procedure of
the question requires that, at some point, they both stop practicing and get it right.

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