AUT: Negri on Foucault

[Arianna Bove <a.bove@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

A contribution on Foucault


Toni Negri

samedi 9 octobre 2004.


Seminar: Transformations of work and crisis of the political economy
(provisional title).

Douze séminaires d?octobre à juin 2004/5: 1 par mois. 2 pour les mois
d?octobre, mars et mai. Lieu: Université de Paris 1 Panthéon -Sorbonne
5, Place du Panthéon 75005, Paris Salle 216, 2ème étage de 19h30 à
21h30.
Coordination et animation du séminaire assurée par: A. Negri, A.
Querrien, B. Holmes, C. Vercellone, M. Lazzarato, P.Elicio, P.Dieuaide,
R. Moneta.


Question 1: Are Foucault's analyses of actualité useful to understand
the movement of societies? In which fields does it seem to you it that
they should be renewed, readjusted, continued?


Answer 1: Foucault's work is a strange machine, it actually makes it
impossible to think of history as other than present history. Probably,
a great deal of what Foucault wrote (as Deleuze rightly underlined)
should be rewritten today. What is astonishing - and concerning -, is
that he never ceases to seek, he makes approximations, he deconstructs,
he formulates hypotheses, he imagines, he makes analogies and tells
fables, he launches concepts, withdraws them or modifies them? His is a
thought of a formidable inventiveness. But this is not its essence: I
believe that his method is fundamental, because it enables him to study
and describe at the same time the movement from the past to the present
and that from the present to the future. It is a method of transition
where the present represents the center. Foucault is there, between the
two, neither in the past where he does archaeology, nor in the future
whose image he sometimes sketches - ??comme à la limite de la mer un
visage sur le sable?? -. It is starting from the present that it is
possible to distinguish other times. Foucault has often been reproached
for the scientific legitimacy of his periodizations: we I can
understand the historians, but at the same time, I would want to say
that this is not a real problem: Foucault is where the questioning
lies, which always originates in his own time.
Historical analysis, with Foucault, thus becomes an action, knowledge
of the past becomes a genealogy, the future perspective becomes a
dispositif. For those who come from the militant Marxism of the 1960s
(but not from the dogmatic and caricatural traditions of the Second and
Third International), Foucault's point of view is obviously perceived
as absolutely legitimate: it corresponds to the perception of the
event, of the struggles and of the joy of taking risks outside of all
necessity and pre-established teleology. In Foucault's thought, Marxism
is completely dismantled at the level of analysis of power relations
and historical teleology, of the refusal of historicism or of a certain
positivism; but at the same time, Marxism is also reinvented and
remodelled on the perspective of the movements and struggles, i.e.
actually on the reality of the subjects of these movements and
struggles: because to know is to produce subjectivity.

But before going any further, I would like to go back for a moment. It
is common to distinguish three 'Foucaults': up to the end of the
Sixties, the study of the emergence of the discourse of the human
sciences, i.e. that which he defines an archaeology of knowledge and of
its economy in the last three centuries, and a great reading of Western
modernity through the concept of épistème; then, in the Seventies, the
researches on the relationship between knowledges and powers, on the
emergence of disciplines, control and biopowers, the norm and
biopolitics, which is both a general analytic of power and an attempt
to trace the history of the development of the concept of sovereignty
from its emergence in political theory until our days; and finally, in
the Eighties, the analysis of the processes of subjectivation under the
double perspective of the aesthetic relation to the oneself and of the
political relation to others - but undoubtedly they are parts of one
investigation: that on the crossing of the aesthetics of the self and
of the political concern (care), which is what is also renowned as
ethics.

Actually, I do not know if we can distinguish three Foucault?s, nor
even two, since before the publication of Dits et Ecrits and the
Courses at the Collège of France, the whole of the last Foucault was
often not considered. It seems to me indeed that the three themes
Foucault focussed on are perfectly continuous and coherent - coherent
in so fare as they form a unitary and continuous theoretical production.

What changes is probably the specificity of the historical conditions
and the political needs with which Foucault is confronted and which
absolutely determine the fields of his interests. On this assumption, -
and I tell you in my own words, in the hope that they could have been
Foucault's words too - to assume the Foucauldian perspective also
entails putting a style of thought, identified as the genealogy of the
present and always open in so far as it deals with the production of
subjectivity, in touch with a given historical situation. And this
given historical situation is a historical reality of power relations.
Foucault often repeats this, when he talks about his passion for
archives, and about the fact that the emotion of reading them stems
from what they tell us about fragments of existence: existence, whether
past or present, delivered by yellowed papers or lived from day to day,
is always an encounter with power - it is nothing but that, but that in
itself is enormous.
(...continues on http://www.generation-online.org/p/fpnegri14.htm)



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