Rethinking Sexuality: Foucault and Classical Antiquity

By David H.J. Larmour, Paul Allen Miller and Charles Platter

In this collection of provocative essays, historians and literary theorists assess the influence of Michel Foucault, particularly his History of Sexuality, on the study of classics. Foucault's famous work presents a bold theory of sexuality for both ancient and modern times, and yet until now it has remained under-explored and insufficiently analyzed. By bringing together the historical knowledge, philological skills, and theoretical perspectives of a wide range of scholars, this collection enables the reader to explore Foucault's model of Greek culture and see how well his interpretation accounts for the full range of evidence from Greece and Rome. Not only do the essays bring to light the assumptions, ideas, and practices that constituted the intimate lives of men and women in the ancient Mediterranean world, but they also demonstrate the importance of the History of Sexuality for fields as diverse as Greco-Roman antiquity, women's history, cultural studies, philosophy, and modern sexuality.


The essays include "Situating The History of Sexuality" (the editors), "Taking the Sex Out of Sexuality: Foucault's Failed History" (Joel Black), "Incipit Philosophia" (Alain Vizier), "The Subject in Antiquity after Foucault" (Page duBois), "This Myth Which Is Not One: Construction of Discourse in Plato's Symposium" (Jeffrey S. Carnes), "Foucault's History of Sexuality: A Useful Theory for Women?" (Amy Richlin), "Catullan Consciousness, the 'Care of the Self,' and the Force of the Negative in History" (Paul Allen Miller), "Reversals of Platonic Love in Petronius' Satyricon" (Daniel B. McGlathery), and an essay from Dislocating Masculinity (Lin Foxhall).

• Language: English
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Release date: Jan 12, 2021
• ISBN: 9780691224077

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

SITUATING THE HISTORY OF SEXUALITY

David H. J. Larmour, Paul Allen Miller, and Charles Platter

THE PHILOSOPHICAL and historical inquiries of Michel Foucault have always had an explicitly political dimension, and this engagement with the politics of power has, in turn, had a direct bearing on the responses his texts have generated. In an article entitled The Subject and Power, Foucault locates his theoretical analysis within a series of oppositions which have developed over the last few years: oppositions to the power of men over women, of parents over children, of psychiatry over the mentally ill, of medicine over the population, of administration over the ways people live. ¹ In the first volume of The History of Sexuality, Foucault coins the term bio-power to describe the techniques for achieving [this] subjugation of bodies and the control of populations that accompanied the growth of capitalism in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe. ² Not surprisingly, this concern with both the discursive oppositions and the ideology of power, as well as the scrutiny of capitalist economic structures, has often led critics to associate Foucault with structuralist and Marxist thought. While it may be accurate to speak of structuralist or Marxist tendencies in his work, his texts fit neatly into neither category. One goal of this introduction is to help situate Foucault’s work more clearly in relation to these competing discourses.

Foucault’s reception by feminists, gays, and lesbians—activists as well as scholars—presents an equally complex picture. This is particularly true of his final volumes, which have drawn the attention of classicists as well. The History of Sexuality has generated multiple competing and contradictory assessments of its usefulness both for the study of sexuality and for the advancement of the claims of women and homosexuals. The three volumes and the theoretical methodologies they display have been characterized both as tools of liberation and instruments for maintaining traditional structures of gendered and sexual power.

What may be most important, however, is the success Foucault has had as a catalyst. The reaction to and debate over The History of Sexuality is ongoing and rich. It has produced many responses that not only shed light on the work of Foucault but also stand as valuable intellectual contributions in their own right. As an introduction to the essays in this volume— themselves a polyphonic response of competing discourses—we here offer a brief account of Foucault’s relationship to structuralism, poststructuralism, Marxism, feminism, gay and lesbian studies, and classics.

Structuralism, Poststructuralism, and Marxism

Foucault’s early concern with discourse and the regularities of language led him to be identified with the structuralists, who dominated the Parisian intellectual scene in the late fifties and early sixties. This was a tag he soon rejected. The reasons for his aversion to the structuralist label go beyond a simple unwillingness to be categorized under a generalizing rubric. While he accepted structuralism’s focus on the determining power of language, as well as the structuralists’ rejection of existential humanism and philosophies of the subject, he also saw discourse as a form of practice and not as an isolated or atemporal set of norms in the manner of Saussure.³ His rejection of humanism and other models of the self as the origin of meaning or the site of unfathomable depths, moreover, did not lead him to embrace structuralism’s often apolitical scientism. Rather, after 1968 he consistently sought to encourage various forms of local resistance to power wherever the sites of such resistance were found: in the prisons of the state; the interchanges between patients, counselors, psychoanalysts, and others who employed the normalizing discourse of sexuality and confession; the acts of defiance performed by East European dissidents against a sclerotic and self-perpetuating revolutionary party and state.⁴ As David Halperin has noted, the fifty-year-old Foucault did not shrink from doing physical battle with the police, at considerable personal risk (and, sometimes, cost).⁵ Unlike structuralists such as Todorov, Greimas, or Genette, for him, knowledge and power were inseparable; scholarship could not be above the fray.

A further area of disagreement between Foucault and structuralism lies in the fact that where the structuralists sought to map out total systems of abstract possibility (langue) that could account for all the actual variations in concrete practice (parole)—whether in literature, fashion, or primitive kinship patterns—Foucault consistently refused to endorse any form of totalization, preferring to concentrate on the local and the particular. His examination of history sought to offer individual diagnoses of specific problems rather than to propound teleologies showing history’s inevitable path to the present.⁶ He explicitly rejected what he viewed as the imperial subtext that underlay structuralism’s totalizing vision.

Rather than representing a simple continuation of the structuralist enterprise, Foucault’s rejection of both master subjects and master narratives reveals much in common with those decentered and contingent forms of thought that Lyotard has characterized as the Postmodern Condition.⁷ By the same token, Foucault’s distrust of the representational powers of language and his strong sense of the discursive constitution of both the subject and object of thought recall analogous themes in Baudrillard and Derrida, two writers whose works move beyond structuralism while accepting many of its postulates.⁸ More concretely, Mark Poster has argued that the model of power that Foucault elaborates in the first volume of The History of Sexuality is itself derived from that described in Deleuze and Guattari’s post-Lacanian Anti-Oedipus⁹ In sum, when analyzed in terms of the work of his contemporaries, Foucault’s oeuvre appears at the heart of that series of debates commonly labeled poststructuralism, a name whose diachronic reference points to that very lack of system that is its distinguishing characteristic.

Of course, to locate Foucault’s word within the practices of poststructuralism, however broadly defined, is not to say that there are not significant areas of difference between his work and that of fellow poststructuralists. One of the most famous disagreements was that between Foucault and Derrida over Madness and Civilization—or, as it was known in its first edition (the English translation being based on a later abridgment), Folie et déraison: Histoire de la folie à l'âge classique. In a public lecture held in 1963, Derrida, then a young and relatively unknown philosopher, launched a deliberate and systematic attack on the basic assumptions of Foucault’s first major work. His assault was essentially three-pronged. First, he observed that in the preface to the first edition Foucault claims that the goal of his work is to provide an archaeology of the silence to which madness had been condemned since its formal exclusion from the discourse of the West at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Foucault’s purpose is to let madness speak for itself rather than to let reason silence it. Derrida’s response is that this goal is, by definition, unreachable since it assumes the presence of a discourse that is coherent—and hence communicable—but outside reason. To make a silence speak is to betray it. Thus, what Foucault really does, according to Derrida, is to articulate a fissure or fold within reason. Foucault never responded specifically to this charge, though the original preface was dropped from all later editions of the book.¹⁰

The second prong of Derrida’s attack is related to the first. It, too, rests on the premise that there is no intelligible realm outside of reason. From the Derridean perspective, the moment we speak, the logos, with all its coercive, normalizing force, is always already present. Thus Derrida contends that Foucault’s argument that Western reason constitutes itself through the exclusion of madness at the beginning of the seventeenth century is incorrect. In particular, he takes issue with Foucault’s statement that in the Greek world there was no other of reason since hubris was not excluded from but welcomed within the reassuring logos of Socratic dialectics. Yet, as Derrida points out, if that is the case, then the other of reason was already contained within reason itself, and the great confinement of the seventeenth century represents not the founding consolidation of Western reason but a historically determined fold in which a schism between reason and madness is created within the larger framework of reason as a whole. If, on the other hand, hubris is not so contained, then neither is the Socratic dialectic so reassuring, nor is the split between reason and its other at the beginning of the modern world unique or determining.¹¹ Again, Foucault does not respond directly to these charges except to note that Derrida’s assertion of the inescapability of the logos is primarily designed to ensure the preeminence of philosophy as the queen of the sciences and to promote a renewed emphasis on textuality rather than practical discursivity and the kind of archival and historical research the latter implies.¹² In his response Foucault has been seconded by subsequent critical opinion.¹³ Yet, as Roy Boyne notes, Foucault’s later articulation of the inescapability of power at once effectively acknowledges the correctness of Derrida’s formulation of the omnipresence of the normalizing logos and simultaneously transforms it into a means of analyzing practical-discursive complexes beyond the reach of an all-consuming textualism.¹⁴ By the same token, it is at the very least ironic that Foucault’s last works centered on precisely the world of Greek philosophy that Derrida had taxed him with neglecting.

The third prong of Derrida’s attack is where Foucault chose to take issue with him most directly. Essentially Derrida argues that Foucault misreads Descartes when Foucault claims that Descartes excludes madness from his attempt to establish a realm of absolute certitude in the first Meditation. The arguments and counterarguments on this score are highly technical and involve an attention to the nuances of Descartes’ Latin text that would make many a philologist blush. Derrida’s thesis is that when Descartes—in the course of pursuing his systematic doubt of all sensory evidence so as to find a bedrock of epistemological certainty—excludes the possibility that one could doubt the presence of one’s own body on the grounds that such an extreme position would be that of a madman, he is not excluding madness per se but rather making a tactical concession to his reader so as to arrive at a position of even more radical and systematic doubt. This more radical position is found in the world of dreams, which, Derrida argues, are at once more universal and more extreme than madness since the mad are not generally delusional about all things, whereas the dream state is total. The final step in this maneuver, according to Derrida, is the scenario of the Evil Genius. Here Descartes notes that even in dreams certain basic truths remain: a square still has four sides and two plus three still equals five. He therefore posits an Evil Genius who controls his perceptions and only makes him believe such things are true when, in fact, a square has five sides, and two plus three equals four. In this realm, then, there are no universal truths. Every thought, every feeling, every clear and distinct idea must be doubted. The only thing that cannot be doubted is that I am doubting and therefore that I exist. Madness, then, far from being excluded as too radical, is merely sidestepped on the route to the most extreme madness of all, a realm in which even the most certain of certainties are delusions. Therefore, Derrida concludes, the cogito and, with it, the modern subject are not constituted through the exclusion of madness but rather at a point before madness and reason are separated. Hence, for Derrida there is no outside of reason and its metaphysics; there are only a variety of determined folds within it.¹⁵

Foucault’s response to this third prong of the Derridean attack is firm. First, he notes that Descartes never says that dreams are more total forms of delusion than madness; rather, dreams are of more demonstrative value precisely because they can be compared to waking perception, whereas madmen are always mad.¹⁶ Second, he argues that at certain key points Derrida—who takes Foucault to task for neglecting the subtlety of Descartes’ Latin—relies on phrases found only in the standard French translation.¹⁷ Third, he contends that a close examination of Descartes’ text reveals that the mad are, in fact, excluded because they are incapable of meditating. Only a reasonable subject, on this view, is capable of systematic doubt. The madman perceives and believes that his body is made of glass, whereas the reasonable man may both dream that his body is made of glass and doubt it.¹⁸ Therefore the scenario of being mad and that of being deluded by the Evil Genius are, in truth, completely opposed since the madman cannot doubt and it is the possibility of universal doubt in the case of the Evil Genius that establishes the bedrock certainty of cogito, ergo sum.¹⁹

Foucault’s last point is perhaps less persuasive since, as Roy Boyne notes, it never addresses the role the Evil Genius plays within the economy of the first Meditation.²⁰ On Foucault’s reading he serves no integral purpose. Moreover, since the Evil Genius has the power to make all thoughts and feelings delusional, he could do the same for doubt as well. But whether I am deluded or not, it is still I who am the subject. Descartes’ proof, in fact, does not require the separation of reason from delusion, though on the practical-discursive level the exclusion of the mad from reasoned discourse at the dawn of the modern era is never called into question. Hence, it is arguable that Derrida and Foucault are correct with respect to their own chief concerns, namely, Western metaphysics and discursive practice.

Foucault’s antagonistic relationship with Baudrillard is even better known than his debate with Derrida, in part because Baudrillard’s polemical pamphlet Forget Foucault casts itself as a frontal assault on Foucault’s entire genealogical project, from Les Mots et les choses to the first volume of The History of Sexuality. Further, given the fact that Baudrillard’s attack occurred in 1978, when Foucault’s reputation was at its height, it has quite naturally remained an issue more public, if not more serious, than the exchange with Derrida.²¹

In fact, as Macey notes, Forget Foucault contains relatively little of direct application to Foucault’s work,²² although its provocative title has certainly contributed to its celebrity. Much space is instead devoted to Baudrillard’s own theoretical work. An extended discussion of pornography and libidinal energy, for example, is appended to a brief examination of Foucault’s denial of the repressive hypothesis (pp. 22-26). The attitude is critical, although Baudrillard appears to concede in advance that the incitement to discourse that Foucault substitutes for traditional assumptions about sexual repression accurately characterizes the transparency of desire in pornography, with its encyclopedic approach to bodily pleasures (pp. 21-22).

More directly, Baudrillard accuses Foucault of analyzing his historical subjects with a gaze that is a mirror of the powers it describes (p. 10). In this Baudrillard essentially repeats the second prong of Derrida’s critique, by charging that Foucault’s analyses reflect rather than undermine the powers that be. The result of Foucault’s position, he argues, is a kind of stasis; the genealogical inquiries have no transformative potential because their ability to be captured by the Foucauldian gaze, as Baudrillard understands it, defines them as no longer relevant instruments of analysis. What if [Foucault] spoke so well of sexuality, he asks, "only because its form, this great production (that too) was in the process of disappearing. Sex, like man, or like the category of the social, may only last for a while" (p. 13). What succeeds them, presumably, is the uniquely decentered consciousness of postmodernity that eludes the disciplinary gaze, on the one hand, and, on the other, Foucault’s neototalitarianism, rising from the crumbling remains of its predecessors. For Baudrillard, then, the success of Foucault’s genealogies amounts to a reinscription of the very disciplinary systems he exposes and critiques.

Baudrillard’s reading of Foucault reprises some of the themes already introduced by Derrida over a decade earlier. Both writers point to an issue that is crucial for Foucault and his supporters, who tend to view genealogical analysis as a political tool. Yet it is hard to see how Baudrillard’s text (as well as Derrida’s) avoids the panoptic temptation to which he accuses Foucault of succumbing.²³ In this context, the delerium of the aestheticized hyperreal landscapes invoked by Baudrillard’s often cryptic work becomes yet another form of tactical rhetoric and is deployed with regicidal power. Foucault’s response that a crucial by-product of Derrida’s claim is the maintainence of philosophy’s intellectual hegemony can be deployed with equal force to attack Baudrillard’s position, even if the cui bono of the analogy is less certain for a man philosophizing at the edge of the abyss.

If the relationship of Foucault to poststructuralism is complex, then his entente with Marxism is even more so. On the one hand, some critics have argued that he is clearly anti- or post-Marxist, or that Marxism has no place in his thought.²⁴ Certainly his embrace of the contention by nouveauxphilosophes that there is a direct causal relation between Marxism and the Gulag strengthened this impression.²⁵ On the other hand, Foucault’s rejection of Marxism was neither absolute nor entirely consistent. We know, for example, that not only were Althusser and Foucault close personal friends but the work of each influenced the other; Althusser and Balibar at one time believed that The Order of Things could be used to construct a general theory of ideology. Moreover, on his return from Tunisia in 1968, at the height of student unrest, Foucault declared, with considerable enthusiasm, that he had been rereading not only Marx but also Rosa Luxembourg and Leon Trotsky.²⁶ Likewise, at the end of his last course at the Collège de France, he situated his own work in a philosophical tradition that stretched from Hegel to the Frankfurt school while passing through Nietzsche and Max Weber, and compared his own work to that of Adorno.²⁷ In later years he expressed dismay that Madness and Civilization had not appealed to more Marxists, given its examination of economic functions and modes of production in relation to the history of madness and internment.²⁸ By the same token, as Dreyfus and Rabinow have noted, in Foucault’s genealogical work disciplinary control and the creation of docile bodies is unquestionably connected to the rise of capitalism.²⁹ This view is echoed by Ron Sakolsky, who, in an article on the importance of Foucault’s concept of disciplinary power for constructing a satisfactory theory of the laboring subject, quotes approvingly Deleuze’s contention that Foucault does not deny the existence of class and class struggle, but [merely] illustrates it in a totally different way.³⁰ Indeed, in the outline for his course at the Collège de France for the year 1973-74 he notes a strict correspondence between prison as society’s dominant form of punishment and wage labor as its dominant form of work.³¹ Thus, Foucault’s long-standing ambivalence about Marxism—as well as what has seemed to many at least a partial compatibility of the two—has led Mark Poster to argue that Foucault is continuing the work of the Western Marxists by other means.³²

The phrase other means, however, is crucial. Foucault was not a revolutionary in the classic sense. Yet it would certainly be a vast oversimplification for anyone seriously interested in contemporary politics or political thought to argue that because Foucault was never sanguine about the possibility of mass, organized, revolutionary change, he was therefore any friend of the status quo. Indeed, various groups in the gay, feminist, and other radical social movements have appropriated elements of Foucault’s theoretical stances or his historical research in order to advance their individual political agendas. Moreover, this interest in politics points to something more radical than a renewal of liberal humanism, which the antihumanist Foucault repudiated throughout his Nietzschean career. Biddy Martin sums up the case for the politically progressive reading of Foucault: Foucault’s elaborations of the relationship between desire-knowledge-power have opened up exciting critiques of both liberal and traditional Marxist approaches to questions of ideology, sexuality, and power. . . . His questions and hypotheses are part of a radical reevaluation in poststructuralist thought of the classical humanist conceptual split between ideology and economics, sexuality and politics, the individual and the social, the subversive and the repressive.³³ Many contemporary Marxists would have little problem with seeing this kind of critical examination of the loci of power in contemporary society as an essentially positive development, even if only to identify Foucault as a fellow traveler on the road to examining questions of sexuality and knowledge /power.

Indeed, the problems Marxists have with Foucault are associated less directly with Foucault himself than with the positions of some of his disciples who exhibit somewhat rarefied political attitudes. Two examples come to mind. The first is Angèle Kremer-Marietti, who argues that it would now be impossible to envisage penal reform without considering Foucault’s analyses in Discipline and Punish. In so doing, she evinces a confidence in the theoretical acumen and good faith of the French ruling class that seems lacking in empirical foundation. By the same token, from the perspective of American penal reform—characterized by such phenomena as mandatory minimum sentencing, three strikes and you’re out, and the reestablishment of capital punishment—she seems to demonstrate a positive blindness to the vulgarities of political power.³⁴

The second is David Halperin, who contends that gay male gym culture is a form of Foucauldian political ascesis. To those who label this position a trivialization of Foucault’s concept of resistance, he responds that they are mere elitists, "suspicious of any technology of the self that is widely dispersed in a culture, and is genuinely popular. From the Marxist perspective, this is disingenuous at best.³⁵ In the same text he makes a clear distinction between gay muscles and the kind of muscles that are produced by hard physical labor. This distinction, in turn, is part of a larger argument that gay male body-builders, in their inscription of their disciplinary practices on their flesh, should be seen as having performed a valuable political service on behalf of everyone.³⁶ While Halperin’s position makes the valuable distinction between the complex and largely independent matrices of gay and straight gym culture, it is difficult not to draw the inference that gay muscles are somehow superior to those produced by hard physical labor. The implication of such a position is twofold. The first is that the service provided to the community by gay male bodybuilders is more important than that of those who get their muscles through backbreaking labor; hence, gay gym culture is more worthy of the attention of radical theorists than, say, the labors of farm workers picking strawberries in the Rio Grande valley. The second is that none of the young workers sweating in the fields are gay. This is a position difficult to square with a stance that aspires to be antielitist and truly popular. It defines gay males as essentially upper-middle-class, urban professionals, a definition consistent with Halperin’s stated desire not to deny the possibility that resistance could ever take the form of shopping for the right outfit."³⁷ Yet Halperin’s view represents only one rather narrow interpretation of Foucauldian politics, and to conclude from it that Marxists and Foucauldians share no common ground would be to undervalue the depth and complexity of Foucault’s work.

Angèle Kremer-Marietti has undertaken one of the most extensive surveys of Foucault’s varied and conflicted relationship with Marxism. She has argued that Foucauldian genealogy should be seen as a kind of exercise in demystification whose roots can be traced both to Marx and Nietzsche. The crux of her argument is that Foucault’s genre of philosophical intervention is fimdamentally transgressive in nature; in both his archeological and genealogical works, his aim is to demystify the present by demonstrating the fundamentally fictitious nature of the historical rationalizations it uses to argue in favor of the natural and necessary existence of contemporary power relations.³⁸ In so doing, Foucault is continuing down the path blazed by Nietzsche and Marx. Her text is worth quoting at length since it remains untranslated and is little known in the English-speaking world:

Now, the Genealogy of Morals commits this same transgression by revealing what lies behind the posited values of justice, fault, duty, and moral conscience. But this philosopher’s madness [of naming what is hidden] nonetheless hopes to be usefill for effective history, though it is opposed to metaphysics. Philosophical madness is thus the abandonment of metaphysics and the discovery of true history, a discovery that also states that history is the history of class struggle: and Marx, like Nietzsche, like Foucault, participates in this transgression of normal usage. The only philosophical route possible remains that of history, the only route that is practicable by us, for history permits this madness of naming the completely different thing that lies hidden behind words and things.³⁹

The abandonment of metaphysics through its dissolution into history is, of course, a necessary corollary of the Nietzschean death of God. For what Nietzsche understood by the death of God was not simply the departure of a hoary anthropomorphism from the popular imagination but the passing of a notion of transcendental law that defined the limits of man and nature by means of artificial constructs that the practice of genealogy revealed to have been products of a will to power. The death of God was the passing of all that kept human beings from rising above themselves to attain the superhuman. It therefore not only implied the death of metaphysics but also the death of man defined as an essence above and beyond history. This same denial of a priori definitions of man and nature, Kremer-Marietti notes, was already present in Marx and Engels’ critique of ideology and in their descent from the Olympian heights of Hegel’s absolute idealism to the mundane world of historical materialism, later echoed in Althusser’s theoretical antihumanism:

Certainly, it is undeniable that the death of God is a definite end of man, which Nietzsche perceived as the end point of mein’s determination and definition, the end of any a priori, the end of any innate character, the end of man defined metaphysically, the end of the blind belief in the fiction of the concept of man. With regard to this idealistic concept, Marx and Engels do no differently when they substitute for Man living, concrete men. The formal process of the individuation of man, the principle of which is Apollo insofar as he represents norm, limit, measure, and thought, was deployed and brought to fulfillment in the history of men, in the history from Socrates to Descartes and their heirs; and the cogito defines this fixed point, the veritable summit of existence of the subject of representation, the intelligible light of reason that triumphs over the shadows of ignorance and whose absolute foundation is lodged both in the interior and the exterior: God.⁴⁰

The death of God and the collapse of metaphysics in turn leads to the concept of history as a discontinuous series rather than a uniform unfolding of a predetermined essence. This concept of historical discontinuity is the centerpiece of Foucault’s method as defined in the Archeology of Knowledge. Once again Kremer-Marietti finds a philosophical precursor in Marx, but this time the third side of the triangle is found in the person of Auguste Comte, the founder of positivism, rather than Nietzsche:

We are now able to situate the first moment of this epistemological mutation [toward discontinuous history]: it begins with Karl Marx and historical materialism. It can even be said—and this is much less well known—that it began even earlier with Auguste Comte and his conception of general history. ... If it began early, however, this mutation has not yet reached completion. Above all, it had not yet been explicitly reflected upon nor elaborated as such before the Archeology of Knowledge.⁴¹

To situate Foucault at the intersection of Nietzsche, Marx, and positivism is, in many ways, at once provocative and productive. His commitment to a genealogy and consequent demystification of the present is both Nietzschean and Marxian. His rejection of an all-encompassing Hegelian historical logos is common to all three, but his subsequent commitment to description rather than prescription is far more positivist than Marxian.⁴²

There are, then, real resemblances between the projects of Marx and Foucault, but there are also real differences between a Foucauldian and Marxian analysis. Both modes of thought assume that choices made on the level of theory have decisive practical ramifications. Thus, while Foucault does not deny the existence of class struggle, he never analyzes the contradictions and concrete conflicts that, from a Marxian perspective, make that struggle a structural necessity.⁴³ In so doing, he ignores what Marxists see as the fundamental power conflict within a society, since class struggle lies at the heart of a society’s ability to reproduce itself. This insistence on the primacy of class conflict is not to argue that all other social conflicts can be reduced to the status of mere reflections of that underlying struggle. Few contemporary Marxists would be so reductive. The problem is more pragmatic: from a Marxist point of view, the failure to recognize the fimdamentai conflict between those who control the means of production and those who produce the goods and services necessary for a society’s survival renders a truly radical transformation of the social world impossible, since the basic material structures of daily life remain unchanged.⁴⁴ Failure to account for the class struggle leads to failed attempts at radical change.

Kremer-Marietti tries to answer this charge by noting that Foucault does include economic motivations in his analyses in Birth of the Clinic and of the great internment that forms the centerpiece of Madness and Civilization. She argues that where Marx deconstructs the ideology of the unified, originary subject by analyzing the economy of labor, Foucault does the same by analyzing the economy of enunciation. Recognizing that such a position leaves Foucault open to the charge that he is more interested in words than things, she insists on the primacy of language in the articulation of social structure by noting that things only enter into consciousness to the extent that they are capable of being expressed in language.⁴⁵ In the end, however, she acknowledges that Foucault only deals with one part of the Marxian worldview—what is conventionally known as the ideological superstructure. Thus, she notes that while Marx can be seen as making archeology possible, by not examining class struggle per se Foucault falls short of what Marx felt was necessary to explain historical change. She notes that Foucault’s repudiation of what he viewed as the simplistic and mechanistic models of causality operative in much Marxist thought led to his rejection of historical explanation as such in favor of description.⁴⁶

This theoretical difference over the importance of class analysis and historical explanation for effective political action in the world is symptomatic of an even more basic conflict between Foucauldian and Marxian methods of analysis in terms of their understanding of the role of dialectics. Foucault is an explicitly antidialectical thinker. He writes, The freeing of difference requires thought without contradiction, without dialectics. . . . We must think problematically rather than question and answer dialectically.⁴⁷ He sees the dialectic as a reductive process of thought that serves to annihilate difference in the name of synthesis, a position well articulated in the present volume by Alain Vizier (see chapter 2). Consequently, from Foucault’s perspective individual power centers must be opposed by individual forms of resistance. The Marxist synthetic perspective thus becomes nothing more than a power move that seeks to subordinate all forms of resistance to a central controlling instance, which, in terms of the history of French politics, effectively means the Communist Party as the representative of the working class.⁴⁸ Rebellion is thus co-opted and difference reduced to more of the same. Although perhaps not quarreling with the implied critique of the French Communist Party, a Marxist would argue that the opposite is true on the theoretical level: dialectics is precisely what makes the concept of difference possible, since difference is always a relationship, not a phenomenon in and of itself. Individual identity or individual power relationships are only possible—only identifiable—against an assumed background of relationships (both harmonious and conflictual) that make individuality itself possible. Thus, where Foucault’s politics implies the ability to deal with issues like prisoner’s rights, sexuality, or political dissent under authoritarian regimes as separate dossiers that fall within the competence of various specific intellectuals,⁴⁹ the Marxist argues that none of these issues exists separately from the others; even their relative autonomy is a relationship that ultimately must be accounted for, and none of these issues can exist outside the material relations that make social life possible. Thus, while Marxists and Foucauldians may share certain common political goals and may borrow from one another individual theoretical insights and empirical findings, an unbridgeable gap remains between the basic philosophical assumptions that support their respective political and theoretical edifices.

Foucault and Feminism

While the gap between the broader Foucauldian project and feminist sexual politics may not be unbridgeable, Foucault’s reception by feminist scholars has been mixed.⁵⁰ It is indisputable that his analyses do not identify gender as a constitutive feature of power, a fact that, according to some critics, has led to the continued—and now theoretically rationalized—erasure of women from history Nor is Foucault’s understanding of power easily compatible with the idea of a unitary subject who can be identified as the victim of repression/domination in the past and whose actions can help bring about a liberation from oppression in the future. In fact, the view of power in Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, as well as in his later work on sexuality, shows little confidence in the success of liberation politics since power is ubiquitous and inescapable. Such a view has troubled those who see political struggle as a positive force for the improvement of human life, for this conception of power seems to offer limited possibilities for meaningful political change.⁵¹ While acknowledging the gaps in Foucault’s analyses and practices, others feel that the appropriation of Foucauldian techniques—like the microhistorical investigation of power and genealogical analysis, as well as his distrust of totalizing theories—opens up their own fields. They tend to interpret the general absence of women and women’s issues from the core of Foucault’s work as reflecting neither indifference nor antifeminism, but simply as an expression of his reluctance to attempt to speak from subject positions other than his own. The debate over the usefulness of Foucault’s theories for feminists continues, with recently published work on both sides of the argument, and is reflected in several essays in this volume (see chapters 3 and 6).

Contemporary feminist appraisals critical of Foucault have taken two basic forms, both of which have implications that go well beyond the usual interpretation of Foucault’s published works and personal interviews. The first such appraisal takes place within the context of the current debate over the relationship between poststructuralist /postmodernist and feminist theory, where the understanding of history as present in Foucault (as well as in Derrida and Lyotard) can provide a model for positive political action by women. Here much discussion centers on the epistemological status of women’s identity, which is challenged by Foucault’s radical constructionism. Nancy Hartsock expresses extreme doubt about the value of the models of power relations put forward by Lévi-Strauss and Foucault: Not only do I find them not useful or fruitful for women or other oppressed groups, but I also fail to see how they might be reconceptualized or otherwise adapted to our needs.⁵² She concludes that rather than getting rid of subjectivity, in the manner of Foucault, or notions of the subject as an effect of power relations, we need to engage in the historical, political, and theoretical process of constituting ourselves as subjects as well as objects of history.⁵³ She expresses her faith in