RP 167 (May/Jun 2011)

1

Modern French thought, ‘structuralism’, ‘poststructuralism’, ‘postmodernism’, Marxism as well, are currently associated with the so-called ‘death of the subject’. Foucault’s ‘anti-humanism’, the celebrated ‘death of Man’, the declining popularity of the rational, Kantian, transcendantal subject, reigning over what Lyotard called ‘metanarratives’,1 are all parts of the process. Foucault’s rejection of the subject is unequivocally linked to his views on history, more precisely to his criticism of the role played by ‘the sovereignty of consciousness’ in history. His plea against ‘continuous history’ and his full-scale attacks on ‘the sovereignty of the subject’ are closely related:

Continuous history is the indispensable correlative of the founding function of the subject: the guarantee that everything that has eluded him may be restored to him; the certainty that time will disperse nothing without restoring it in a reconstituted unity; the promise that one day the subject – in the form of historical consciousness – will once again be able to appropriate, to bring back under his sway, all those things that are kept at a distance by difference, and find in them what might be called his abode. Making historical analysis the discourse of the continuous and making human consciousness the original subject of all historical development and all action are the two sides of the same system of thought. In this system, time is conceived in terms of totalization and revolutions are never more than moments of consciousness. In various forms, this theme has played a constant role since the nineteenth century: to preserve, against all decentrings, the sovereignty of the subject, and the twin figures of anthropology and humanism.2

By ‘decentrings’ of the subject Foucault means ‘the researches of psychoanalysis, linguistics and ethnology’, which ‘have decentred the subject in relation to the laws of his desire, the forms of his language, the rules of his action, or the games of his mythical or fabulous discourse.’3 ‘Decentred’ does not mean ‘dead’. Foucault’s 1981–82 lectures at the Collège de France dealt with The Hermeneutics of the Subject, that is with the self, the ‘care of the self’ and ancient ethics. It was not at variance with the proposals of The Archaeology of Knowledge: if archaeology is supposed to challenge the ‘transcendental dimension’, if its aim is to ‘free history’ from the grip of the ‘twin figures of anthropology and humanism’, that is of the ‘constituent consciousness’, if its aim is even ‘to free history from the grip of phenomenology’, it is clear that The Hermeneutics of the Subject does the job in its own, particular way: it surely breaks with ‘historical phenomenology’, while contributing to a ‘history of subjectivity’ as described in Dits et écrits:

[the project is] to study the constitution of the subject as an object for himself: the formation of procedures by which the subject is led to observe himself, analyse himself, interpret himself, recognize himself as a domain of possible knowledge. In short, this concerns the history of subjectivity’, if what is meant by the term is the way in which the subject experiences himself in a game of truth where he relates to himself. 4

The Subject and/or The Self. One could rewrite Foucault’s statement using ‘Self’ and ‘Selfhood’ instead of ‘subject’ and ‘subjectivity’. One could even write a whole book on the topics. This book exists. It is Soi-même comme un autre (Oneself as Another), by Paul Ricoeur.

[...]

Notes The first part of this dossier – on ‘Structure’, ‘Sex’, ‘Science’ and ‘Networks’ – appeared in Radical Philosophy 165, January/February 2011, pp. 15–40. The dossier consists of revised versions of papers presented to the conference ‘From Structure to Rhizome: Transdisciplinarity in French Thought, 1945 to the Present – Histories, Concepts, Constructions’, held at the French Institute, London, 16–17 April 2010. It was organized by the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP), now located at Kingston University, London, and supported by the Cultural Service of theFrench Embassy. The conference functioned as a pilot for a broader two-year project, ‘Transdisciplinarity in the Humanities: Problems, Methods,Histories, Concepts’, for which an AHRC research grant has recently been awarded, to commence in September 2011. Regular updates on events andpublications associated with the project will appear at www.kingston.ac.uk/crmep/transdisciplinarity.

1. J.-F. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1989, xxiv.

2. Michel Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith, Pantheon Books, New York, 1972, p. 12.

3. Ibid., p. 13.

4. Michel Foucault, ‘Foucault on Foucault, in Paul Rabinow and Niklas Rose, eds, The Essential Foucault: Selections From the Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, New Press, New York, 2003, pp. 1–5; ‘Définition de Foucault par lui-même’, in Michel Foucault, Dits et Écrits, Vol. 4, Gallimard, Paris: 2000, p. 633.