Notes: Chapter 12
1. Michel Foucault, "Truth and Power," in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Writings, 1972-1977, Colin Gordon, ed. (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 118.
2. Ibid.
3. See, e.g., Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage, 1979), 170.
4. Foucault, "Truth and Power," 118.
5. See Foucault, "Truth and Power," 131.
6. Charles Taylor, "Foucault on Freedom and Truth," in Foucault: A Critical Reader, David Couzens Hoy, ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 69-102. Ironically, although the goal of genealogy is to deny that a deeper hidden meaning lurks beneath the surface of social events, this truth itself must be revealed through a process of unmasking the fraud of deep meaning. The deeper meaning of social life is that there is no deeper meaning. Dreyfus and Rabinow demonstrate this paradox in their very formulation of Foucault's project: "The genealogist recognizes that the deep hidden meanings, the unreachable heights of truth, the murky interiors of consciousness are all shams ... Genealogy's ... banner [is]: Mistrust identities in history: they are only masks." Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2d ed., 1983), 107. Yet mistrust implies a truer state of affairs that lies behind what is mistrusted.
7. See Nicos Poulantzas, State, Power, and Socialism, trans. Patrick Camiller (London: New Left, 1978), 149.
8. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction (New York: Vintage, 1980), 95-96.
9. Ibid., 94.
10. Thomas Seung has suggested to me that Foucault's theory of resistance is Hegelian, because the antithesis (resistance) grows magically out of the thesis (the system of power).
11. See Foucault, Power/Knowledge, 82-83.
12. Ibid., 81.
13. See, e.g., Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 1: 95.
14. See Michel Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," in Language, CounterMemory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977), 148-51.
15. See, e.g., Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," 147-48; Discipline and Punish, 25-30.
16. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 1: 94.
17. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 2, The Use of Pleasure (New York: Vintage, 1985), 6-7.
18. Ibid., 7.
19. Ibid., 6.
20. Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," 142.
21. Stanley Fish, Doing What Comes Naturally: Rhetoric and Change in Law and Literary Studies (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1990), 520 (italics omitted).
22. See Charles Taylor, "Foucault on Freedom and Truth."
23. See Stephen Jay Gould, Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes (New York: Norton, 1983), 158-65.
24. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Crossroad, 1975), 23840.
25. Stanley Fish, There's No Such Thing as Free Speech (and It's a Good Thing Too) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 117.
26. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 1: 94-95.
27. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 266-67, 324-25.
28. See Michel Foucault, "An Aesthetics of Existence," in Foucault Live: Interviews, 1966-84 (New York: Semiotext(e), 1989), 313.
29. Like all articulation, this process involves construction as well as refinement; thus Foucault is partly correct that articulation does not involve the rediscovery of a deeper sexual nature that was always present. That is because sexual desire, like all human desires and values, is inchoate and indeterminate. It must be articulated through the development of culture. Although sexual desire is articulated through culture, sexual desire is not wholly a creation of culture; even before culture existed, human beings had sexual desires. Foucault is ambiguous on this point. He doubts that "sex is an anchorage point that supports the manifestations of sexuality"; rather, he thinks it is "a complex idea that was formed inside the deployment of sexuality." Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 1: 152. Sex is a concept that we use to describe the ways in which we have understood our bodies through culture. Thus, Foucault insists, "sex is not an autonomous agency which secondarily produces manifold effects of sexuality over the entire length of its surface of contact with power." Instead, "sex is the most speculative, most ideal, and most internal element in a deployment of sexuality organized by power in its grip on bodies and their materiality, their forces, energies, sensations, and pleasures" (155).
The difficulty with this formulation lies in the last phrase. How can power have a grip on the "energies, sensations, and pleasures" of bodies if bodies have energies, sensations, and pleasures only as a result of culture? Here Foucault's Parmenideanism reasserts itself: sex must always have been internal to sexuality; everything must already be fully contained within the system of cultural power. Yet without human values to be shaped through culture, cultural articulation cannot even get off the ground.
30. 30. Immanuel Kant, "Conjectural Beginning of Human History," in Kant on History, Lewis White Beck, ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1963), 57.
Yale University Press