Arnold I. Davidson

Society must be defended : lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-76

SOCIETY MUST BE DEFENDED is a full transcript of the lectures given by Foucault at the College de France in 1975-76. The main theme of the lectures is the contention that war can be used to analyse power relations. Foucault contends that politics isa continuation of war by other means. Thus, any constitutional theory of sovereignty and right is an attempt to refute the fact that power relations are based upon a relationship of conflict, violence and domination. The book is coloured with historical examples, drawn from the early modern period in both England and France, with wonderful digressions into subjects as diverse as classical French tragedy and the gothic novel.

Ethics as Ascetics: Foucault, the History of Ethics, and Ancient Thought

In presenting the topic of Michel Foucaults significance as a writer of the history of ethics, I have two main goals. First, I hope to be able to elucidate Foucaults own aims in shifting his attention, in his last writings, to what he himself called “ethics.” These aims, in my opinion, have been widely misinterpreted and even more widely ignored, and the result has been a failure to come to terms with the conceptual and philosophical distinctiveness of Foucaults last works. Volumes 2 and 3 of The History of Sexuality are about sex in roughly the way that Discipline and Punish is about the prison. As the modern prison serves as a reference point for Foucault to work out his analytics of power, so ancient sex functions as the material around which Foucault elaborates his conception of ethics. Although the history of sex is, obviously, sexier than the history of ethics, it is this latter history that oriented Foucaults last writings. Foucault once remarked to me, as he had to others, that “sex is so boring.” He used this remark in different ways on different occasions, but one thing he meant by it was that what made sex so interesting to him had little to do with sex itself. His focus on the history of ancient sex, its interest for him, was part of his interest in the history of ancient ethics.

In praise of counter-conduct

Without access to Michel Foucault’s courses, it was extremely difficult to understand his reorientation from an analysis of the strategies and tactics of power immanent in the modern discourse on sexuality (1976) to an analysis of the ancient forms and modalities of relation to oneself by which one constituted oneself as a moral subject of sexual conduct (1984). In short, Foucault’s passage from the political to the ethical dimension of sexuality seemed sudden and inexplicable. Moreover, it was clear from his published essays and interviews that this displacement of focus had consequences far beyond the specific domain of the history of sexuality. Security, Territory, Population (Foucault, 2007) contains a conceptual hinge, a key concept, that allows us to link together the political and ethical axes of Foucault’s thought. Indeed, it is Foucault’s analysis of the notions of conduct and counter-conduct in his lecture of 1 March 1978 that seems to me to constitute one of the richest and most brilliant moments in the entire course. It is astonishing, and of profound significance, that the autonomous sphere of conduct has been more or less invisible in the history of modern (as opposed to ancient) moral and political philosophy. This article argues that a new attention should be given to this notion, both in Foucault’s work and more generally.

Sex and the Emergence of Sexuality

Some years ago a collection of historical and philosophical essays on sex was advertised under the slogan: Philosophers are interested in sex again. Since that time the history of sexuality has become an almost unexceptionable topic, occasioning as many books and articles as anyone would ever care to read. Yet there are still fundamental conceptual problems that get passed over imperceptibly when this topic is discussed, passed over, at least in part, because they seem so basic or obvious that it would be time badly spent to worry too much about them. However, without backtracking toward this set of problems, one will quite literally not know what one is writing the history of when one writes a history of sexuality. An excellent example of some of the most sophisticated current writing in this field can be found in Western Sexuality, a collection of essays that resulted from a seminar conducted by Philippe Aries at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in 1979-80.1 As one would expect, Western Sexuality is characterized by a diversity of methodological and historiographical approaches--social history, intellectual history, cultural history (which one historian I know refers to as the history of bad ideas), historical sociology, the analysis of literary texts, and that distinctive kind of history practiced by Michel Foucault and also in evidence in the short essay by Paul Veyne. One perspective virtually absent from this collection

How to do the history of psychoanalysis: a reading of Freud's Three essays on the theory of sexuality.

I have two primary aims in the following paper, aims that are inextricably intertwined. First, I want to raise some historiographical and epistemological issues about how to write the history of psychoanalysis. Although they arise quite generally in the history of science, these issues have a special status and urgency when the domain is the history of psychoanalysis. Second, in light of the epistemological and methodological orientation that I am going to advocate, I want to begin a reading of Freuds Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, one whose specificity is a function of my attachment to this orientation, to a particular way of doing the history of psychoanalysis. Despite the enormous number of pages that have been written on Freuds Three Essays, it is very easy to underestimate the density of this book, a density at once historical, rhetorical, and conceptual. This underestimation stems in part from historiographical presumptions that quite quickly misdirect us away from the fundamental issues. In raising questions about the historiography of the history of science, I obviously cannot begin at the beginning. So let me begin much further along, with the writings of Michel Foucault. I think of the work of Foucault, in conjunction with that of Gaston Bachelard and Georges Canguilhem, as exemplifying a very distinctive perspective about how to write the

Miracles of Bodily Transformation, or How St. Francis Received the Stigmata

No brief discussion of stigmata can hope to take account of the many, and sometimes conflicting, dimensions of this historically datable, and relatively recent, religious phenomenon. A more appropriate title might have been “Miracle, Mysticism, Malady: The Iconography and Philosophy of Stigmata.” A thorough discussion of stigmata ought to consider them in the contexts of the history of the miraculous, the history of mysticism, and the history of psychiatric explanations of stigmata. In this essay, however, I will concentrate almost exclusively on interpretations of the stigmata as miraculous, for reasons that I hope will soon become clear. Furthermore, I will restrict my discussion to the stigmatization of St. Francis, a limitation whose motive will become evident as I develop my argument. I would like to begin with a few brief observations on points of view that I will not consider here. From the perspective of the history of mysticism, Francis’s stigmata

Arts of Transmission: An Introduction

The essays collected in this issue of Critical Inquiry range widely in both approach and subject. Some mount theoretical arguments about how best to conceive of the role ofmedia in shaping humanhistory.Others delve into the practices devoted to the creation, distribution, and preservation of knowledge, from the singing of songs in archaic Greece to the production of secrets by today’s U.S. government. All, however, address what we call arts of transmission. That odd but resonant phrase derives fromFrancis Bacon, yet its descent to us from the seventeenth century is peculiarly indirect. As John Guillory notes below, Bacon’s original Latin expression is perhaps closer to “arts of tradition” or handing down to posterity. The specific phrasingwe chose for our title is a Victorian translation of Bacon’s “ars tradendi.” Not exactly original nor yet quite an imposition, the phrase nicely exemplifies a point that Bacon himself was making in coining it: that what we know depends on the practices of communication by which the knowledge comes to us. The point of this issue is to explore how, historically and theoretically, that conjunction has operated in the past and continues to operate today. This is a subject that eludes disciplinary definition. Bacon’s own “arts” ranged from apparently basic activities like speaking and listening to the complexmodalities of logic and dialectic. They also includedwhatwe think of as modes of communication or media—orality, writing, and printing— though we would nowadays add digital systems to the list; nevertheless, all of Bacon’s arts remain pertinent. They embrace now, as they did then, the principal ways of organizing, arguing for, and expressing new claims. The phrase is useful because it indicates that we may do well to consider these practices collectively: in a spirit of Baconian experimentation, as it were, to

Ethics between Cognition and Volition

Michael Fishbane’s “Ethics and Sacred Attunement” embodies all of the virtues of the classic genre of the essay. Building on his Sacred Attunement, but standing fully on its own, this essay succeeds in combining extraordinary scholarship with profound philosophical insight. “Ethics and Sacred Attunement” calls for a reading in at least three separate, but contiguous and interrelated dimensions: ð1Þ the general relationship between theology and ethics; ð2Þ the specifically Jewish tradition of relating theology and ethics; and ð3Þ the nature and foundations of ethics as such. Despite its brevity, the richness and subtlety of “Ethics and Sacred Attunement” can hardly be exhausted in the space of this response. I have chosen to focus on a limited, and I believe essential, set of issues in the hope of raising further questions, questions implicit in this text that have to be confronted by all theologians and philosophers who are gripped by these problems. Central to “Ethics and Sacred Attunement” is the idea that “patterns and their meanings are neither self-evident nor imposed, but are the product of human interpretation” ð422Þ and, therefore, that “we take hermeneutic responsibility for our relations with things and persons,” an idea that, as Fishbaneputsit, is“afundamentalpreconditionforethics”ð423Þ.Our fundamental orientation in the world is as “‘hermeneutic beings’ who bear inalienable responsibility for our assessments and explanations” ð422Þ. As ethical moments break forth explicitly, we must consciously assess “a particular person in a particular situation here and now,” and any such assessment requires a hermeneutic moment that Fishbane calls a reflective pause, “a space for reflection and deliberation”: “Ethical attunement requires a series of pauses amid the entwined loops of intersubjectivity, each one effecting deliberate actsofcoregulationbetweentheselves”ð431–32Þ. As our hermeneutic aware-