CRITICAL COUNTER-CONDUCTS

I can't help but dream about a kind of criticism that would try not to judge, but to bring an oeuvre, a book, a sentence, an idea to life; it would light fires, watch the grass grow, listen to the wind, and catch the sea-foam in the breeze and scatter it. Michel Foucault

From Critique to Acceptance?

There is a common and, at first glance, perfectly plausible explanation for the puzzle of Foucault's late engagement with rights discourse. It proceeds by setting Foucault's engagements with rights within a major shift in the late work (his "ethical turn" or "return to the subject"). This frequently invoked shift, from the so-called power to the "ethical" phase of his writing, is one in which Foucault supposedly retreats from critiquing to eventually accepting the normative importance of the subject. Such readings are plainly revisionist in intent — after all, what could possibly be more critical a subject to the Foucauldian legacy than the very critique of the subject, one of the leitmotifs of Foucault's project as it unfolded throughout the 1970s? "At the time of Foucault's death in 1984," writes Richard Wolin with evident satisfaction, "prominent observers noted the irony that the ex-structuralist and 'death of man' prophet had played a pivotal role in the French acceptance of political liberalism." Having on this view rashly consigned the subject to its grave as early as the mid-1960s in a fit of (post)structuralist pique, Foucault is embarrassingly forced to exhume it only a decade later for compelling moral and political reasons — a seemingly remarkable "capitulation in the face of the moral superiority of humanism." For many, this supposed shift — from critique to acceptance of the subject — provides a convenient and almost self-evident lens through which to view the thinker's late engagements with rights. Of course, so goes the argument, if the later Foucault comes finally to formulate what the intellectual historian Eric Paras has hailed as a "prediscursive subject" unmarked by power and knowledge, then it follows that his contemporaneous resorts to rights discourse come to be understood in an orthodox liberal individualist fashion — namely, as juridical protections for certain pre-political qualities of the subject (its inalienable dignity, originary liberty, and so forth). For me, once such an interpretive schema is adopted in order to read Foucault's deployments of rights, then this interesting, disparate, ambivalent, and challenging late political body of work is unhelpfully reduced to a unitary and extended paean to liberalism — which is precisely what Wolin intends by such a reading when he approvingly (yet provocatively) refers to Foucault, in another piece, as a "neohumanist."

But something more — at once more politically challenging and more faithful to the critical and transformative intent of Foucault's thought — can yet be made of this late work. In what follows I construct an alternative conceptual lens through which to view the late work on rights. I proceed in three steps. First, I articulate a general understanding of what critique means and how it functions in Foucault's work. As intimated earlier, the understanding I propose here is intended to foreground the affirmative dimensions of Foucault's critical approach — to him, critique is a form of disassembly that productively opens the contingent present to an undetermined future. Then, moving from a general and principled statement about the intent of Foucault's critical method to some particular instantiations of it, I revisit in greater detail material outlined in the Introduction — that is, Foucault's related critiques of subjectivity and of sovereignty. In this section I shall necessarily traverse some fairly well-trodden Foucauldian territory, both historical and conceptual (disciplinary power and biopolitics) and methodological (archaeology and genealogy) in nature. Finally, I shall offer a more detailed discussion of Foucault's mature conception of power as the affecting of "conduct" and the crucial notion of "counter-conduct" that such a conception brings with it. My overall aim in this chapter is hence to present an understanding of critique in Foucault's work and then to relate this understanding to his more specific concept of "counter-conduct." I hope to show how the resistant and affirmative potential embodied in this concept, a concept that looks to make sense of his late politics of rights, itself rests upon the theoretical premises of Foucault's own understanding of (archaeological and genealogical) critique.

Both this chapter and Chapter 2 together constitute an attack upon the idea that Foucault, when it comes to the subject, moves from a posture of critique to one of acceptance — an idea central to the misreading of Foucault as a belated convert to a liberal political philosophy of rights. But if Foucault, as I maintain, consistently adopts a critical stance well into his later work, then it is necessary to start by examining in some detail precisely what is meant here by critique. If, as I contend, a certain (mis)understanding of critique contours the reception of Foucault in the liberal misreadings to which I have just referred, then I am obliged to articulate a proper understanding of just what it is that Foucault intends, and more to the point, does not intend, by critique. It is to this task that I now turn.

What Is Foucauldian Critique?

What precisely does Foucault mean by "critique"? My premise is that one way of understanding the contention that Foucault moves toward an unlikely rapprochement with liberalism in the late work is to approach his alleged "turn" through the prism of critique itself. By commencing in this way — that is, by distinguishing the specifically Foucauldian idiom of critique from other critical traditions, with their attendant understandings of the role of the critic and of the social function of critique itself — we shall begin to see a little more clearly just what the intent, the uses, and (perhaps even) the limitations of Foucault's particular critical project might be. It will show that any claim that he reverts approvingly to liberal individualism in the late work is untenable.

No doubt an entire book could be written on Foucault's various critical practices and his serial formulations of what it means to be engaged in critique. Thankfully, Foucault himself rescues me from such a task: in the late essay "What Is Enlightenment?" he provides a synoptic (and cumulative) account of his different methodological approaches. I shall accordingly take this text, an "apologia" in the "classical sense," as a distillation of Foucault's critical methods and of what he believes the work of the critic to be. As is common with Foucault, he proceeds in this essay to construct his own position by reference to the position of another thinker. As is somewhat less common, the thinker on this occasion is Immanuel Kant — and quite remarkably, Foucault begins by implicitly...