Introductory statement:
Because it is my first reading group, I need to promise you that I will not give the “why Foucault” talk. I’ve talked about it elsewhere, and I would imagine most of you have already found a reason or two to mute my Twitter. So we will dive right into this lecture. Which we chose for two reasons. First, is that Ill Will recently put out a version of it and we appreciate quite a bit of what they do. Second, because it is late in Foucault’s career, which is when he is most often treated with a very different set of gloves philosophically and politically.
There is quite a bit going on in Foucault’s “Analytic Philosophy of Politics.”
Enough that I don’t think it is necessarily important that we cover it all here. I won’t be able to give some sort of definitive account, or crystallized analysis. I want to focus on three of Foucault’s provocations, and one action; one that I think others have found in Foucault – Deleuze especially in his work on Michel. The first provocation being the one I don’t think, in our age, especially in a digital room with folks like you all, is all that controversial. That of the permanent virtual potentiality of a schematic of power that tends towards the atrocious manifestations of fascism in Italy, Germany, Spain, Chile, etc, and the unique malignance of Stalinism. To Foucault, we lose something essential when we reduce these two horrors to pure aberrations in the history of Western governance that are completely alien to the systems that preceded them. Fascism is, in several ways, the monstrous state of this “whole series” of technologies of power that defined the some of the fundamental shifts present in the nineteenth century. It is this element of Foucault’s later project that can operate as the technological and institutional side of Deleuze and Guattari’s considerations regarding the “micro-fascistic”. Far from simply being an emergent horror that springs out of an ungraspable evil, fascism is that which looms in many exercises of power and structural orientations of governmental practices.
The next provocation is one that may be a bit more divisive, on account that I would imagine we are all quite weary of those who attest a linkage between Nietzscheanism and Nazism or Hegel and Joseph Stalin’s “dialectics”. Foucault argues that philosophy historically found itself in a relation to power and the state that ultimately perpetually betrayed its own function. But furthermore, that it is precisely when a philosophical project or movement positions itself as a principle of “counter-power” that it ultimately, and profoundly, sides with it.
And finally, that the age of the modern revolution is closing – or has closed. In this sense, one sees why our comrades on the internet who endlessly screenshot passages from State and Revolution may be upset. But we will return to this one briefly at the end. I think there is a question of investment in revolt, where insurrectionary passion must be focused, that, once articulated, makes it clear that the question of revolution must be handled carefully in this text. Maybe even more carefully than Foucault allows himself to be.
With that out of the way, let us address the real topic. The unexamined path. Foucault provides three relationships philosophy has historically had with power. The first being the anti-tyrant. It no question that philosophy has had tyranny as its greatest foil since Socrates first entered Cephalus’s threshold and met a blustering Thrasymachus who, in some ways, will come to represent the figure of the tyrant for Plato. It is also telling that tyranny is a lifeless low hum – the desolate wasteland that Kallipolis’s failure leaves in its wake. Philosophy can establish a limit to power. It can try to answer, in a sort of pseudo-categorical fashion, what its legitimate and illegitimate claims can be. Of course, this plants philosophical practice firmly on the side of power. And, as we have seen, once it finds itself treated as a foundation to the new regime, it becomes a thoughtless husk – like the fascists’ Nietzsche or the Stalinists’ Marx.
The second is as philosophical counsel, Foucault uses Plato here, but we can be more risky with our analogies. These figures have existed throughout history, in a very clear manner. Whether it is Aristotle and Alexander, Machiavelli and Lorenzo de Medici, or Leo Strauss and Fukuyama. One thing seems clear, philosophy has often wanted to possess power, by establishing the confines of its proper execution, or—alternatively—to possess its proverbial ear.
The third is that action which I would like to focus on today. One that Deleuze sees in both Nietzsche and Foucault, that of laughter. Today in particular, however, we will focus on the laughter of the Cynic who, in the face of power, laughs, rejects it, and refuses to play the games of power altogether. The cynic is no pastor, no councilperson, no member of the intellectual vanguard. Foucault only briefly speaks of this figure directly both here and in the second and third volumes of the history of sexuality. He provides a more in-depth articulation in the later lectures of the courage of truth. So, instead of the describing cynic as a classical figure, maybe we would be better off articulating what this laughter means. Let us start with what it does not mean.
To laugh in refusal to the game of power could be seen, mistakenly as a rejection of the ability to alter anything. Political murderous hacks in contemporary mainstream discourse certainly throw out the category of the cynic with such a connotation, but we know that is not what the cynic’s laughter means. The refusal of the “game” of power does not entail a looking away. The rejection of the broader dynamic of power precisely means an investment in the immediate struggles. It means that the philosopher takes a new position regarding the now individual systems of control. It is to recognize the immediate, the everyday, the molecular. It is to resist the prison, not to take control of it, but to refuse the paradigm that gave rise to it, to resist the actions that perpetuate it. The example of the Swedish activist who is concerned of the fascism of the unlocked door at conjugal visits, far from being a comedic foil in the lecture, becomes essential. If philosophy’s function is, in part, to render the visible visible, then a philosophy in relation to power is to render its execution, even in its most seemingly minute, intolerable. It is a process of destabilization without end, a perpetual laughter that leaves the throat raw.
Foucault’s lecture: https://assets.ctfassets.net/zzo3jtyu2pmq/9nM7vSUduG4Cc95unpSZk/1aac920282238ca1ead168b56e678a40/Foucault_-The_Analytic_Philosophy_of_Politics–READ__updated.pdf
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