STS 6534: Reading Foucault: Lectures at the Collège de France
Spring Semester 2011
*Mar. 22, The Birth of Biopolitics, 1-157, Hyunkyoung Cho
[Fig 1] “Generic Art: The Virtual Garden and
The Things Growing in the Virtual Garden,” William Latham, Images generated and created by Computer Programming (Generic and Evolutionary Algorithm)
From “Sleeping dog” to “action between”
1. The decision that universals do not exist
Sigmund Freud said that “The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.”[1] For him, ‘Acheronto morebo’ is to picture the efforts of the repressed instinctual impluses, the symptom-formation: ‘Flectere si nequeo Superos, Acheronta movebo’; If I cannot bend the Higher Powers, I will move the Infernal Regions, or I will raise hell.
The phrase was quot
ed by Michel Foucault. In the book, ‘The Birth of Biopolitics,’ he used the motto ‘Acheronto morebo,’ in order to attack the English Statesman Walpole’s reference to his way of governing; “Let sleeping dogs lie.” He insists that the governing is not sleeping dogs but the “action between” depending on the decision that universals do not exist.[2] In ‘The history of Sexuality,’ Foucault explains what the starting from the decision means, the implication of Acheronto morebo: an age-old decision. ”In reality, this question, so often repeated nowadays, is but the recent form of a considerable affirmation and a secular prescription: there is where the truth is; go see if you can uncover it. Acheronto morebo: an age-old decision....It is reasonable therefore to ask first of all: What is this injunction? Why this great chase after the truth of sex, the truth in sex?”[3]
He deploys the opposite of historicism: “not, then, question universals by using history as a critical method, but staring from the decision that universals do not exists, asking what kind of history we can do.”[4] The theoretical and methodological decision, the choice of method denies the deducing concrete phenomena from universals, the staring with universals as an obligatory grid of intelligibility for certain concrete practices. It says that “Let’s suppose that universals do not exist...Let’s suppose that madness does not exist. If we suppose that it does not exist, then what can history make of these different events and practices which are apparently organized around something that is supposed to be madness?”[5]
2. The criticism of universals.[6]
Foucault comments on methodological nominalism with regard to the phrase ”madness does not exists.”[7]
“ the first choice of method entailed by “the question of the relations between the subject and truth” was “a systematic skepticism toward all anthropological universals.”[8]
“We can certainly say that madness “does not exist,” but this does not mean it is nothing. All in all, it was a matter of doing the opposite of what phenomenology had taught us to say and think, the phenomenology that said, roughly: Madness exists, which does not mean that it is a thing.[9]
“ I have been seen as saying that madness does not exist, whereas the problem is absolutely the converse: it was a question of knowing how madness, under the various definitions that have been given, was at a particular time integrated into an institutional field that constituted it as a mental illness occupying a specific place alongside other illnesses.”[10]
“When I showed the present text to Foucault, he responded roughly as follows:’ I personally have never written that madness does not exist, but it can be written; because, for phenomenology, madness exists, but is not a thing, whereas one has to say on the contrary that madness does not exist, but that it is not therefore nothing.’”[11]
[1] Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1958) P. 604.
[2] Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, Lecture at the College De France 1978-1979 (New York: PICADOR, 2004) p.12.
[3] Foucault, The history of sexuality, Volume1.:Introduction. (New York: Pantheon, 1978) p. 78-9.
[4] Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, p. 3.
[5] Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, p.3.
[6] a nominalism against realism, the view that universals do exist over and above particulars
[7] Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, p. 23-24.
[8] Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984, Vol. 2.: Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology (New York: The New Press, 1998) p. 461.
[9] Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, p. 118.
[10] “The Ethics of the Concern for Self as a Practice of Freedom” in Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984, Vol.1.: Ethics: Subjectivity and truth , ed. Paul Rainbow (New York: The New Press, 1997)p 297.
[11] “Foucault Revolutionizes History” in Foucault and his Interlocutors (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1997)p. 170. This quotation came from Paul Veyne’s essay on Foucault, translated by Catherine Porter.
No comments:
Post a Comment