Sexuality and solitude: Foucault and Sennett

You’ve read the piece known as Sexuality and Solitude by Foucault (DE 295) which begins:

In a work consecrated to the moral treatment of madness and published in 1840, a French psychiatrist, Louren*, tells of the manner in which he treated one of his patients – treated and of course, as you may imagine, cured. One morning he placed Mr A., his patient, in a shower-room. He makes him recount in detail his delirium. ‘But all that,’ said the doctor, ‘is nothing but madness. Promise me not to believe in it any more.’ The patient hesitates, then promises. ‘That is not enough,’ replies the doctor. ‘You have already made me similar promises and you haven’t kept them,’ And he turns on the cold shower above the patient’s head. ‘Yes, yes! I am mad!’ the patient cries. The shower is turned off; the interrogation is resumed. ‘Yes. I recognise that I am mad,’ the patient repeats. ‘But,’ he adds, ‘I recognise it because you are forcing me to do so.’ Another shower. ‘Well, well,’ says Mr A., ‘I admit it. I am mad, and all that was nothing but madness.’

*See footnote a in Ethics: subjectivity and truth, edited by P. Rabinow.

This text has appeared in various forms (the one in J. Carrette’s Religion and culture is the best since it is a variorum) but as far as I know the complementary piece by novelist and author Richard Sennett, originally published alongside Foucault in the London Review of Books in May 1981, has not appeared.

With the reorganisation of the LRB website recently in honor of their 30th anniversary, this text is now very easy to read (sub. req’d).

An extract:

A few years ago, Michel Foucault and I discovered we were interested in the same problem, in very different periods of history. The problem is why sexuality has become so important to people as a definition of themselves. Sex is as basic as eating or sleeping, to be sure, but it is treated in modern society as something more. It is the medium through which people seek to define their personalities, their tastes. Above all, sexuality is the means by which people seek to be conscious of themselves. It is that relationship between self-consciousness, or subjectivity, and sexuality that we want to explore. Few people today would subscribe to Brillat-Savarin’s ‘Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you who you are,’ but a translation of this dictum to the field of sex does command assent: know how you love, and you will know who you are.

Michel Foucault and I are working, as I say, on two very different historical periods in which this theme of self-consciousness via sexuality appears. He focuses on how Christianity in its early phases, from the third to the sixth century, assigned a new value to sexuality, and redefined sexuality itself. I focus on the late 18th and 19th centuries, and within that period on how medical doctors, educators and judges took a new interest in sexuality.

There is also a letter, a few issues later in 1981 from a certain William Milne, identified as a professor at Newcastle Upon Tyne who says:

Michel Foucault sternly claims that he is not a structuralist. If this is the case, can he please explain to a layman what he means exactly by ‘technologies of the self’? And why no citations from women themselves? And why no analysis of sado-masochism? Nietzsche’s aphorism, ‘Thou goest to woman? Do not forget thy whip,’ tells us more about recent history surely than the theories of Tissot and Boerhaave, or, come to that, the obsessively self-centred memoirs of Casanova, ever can.

Sennett then offers a final series of remarks centering around Tissot’s Onania (1758):

Tissot set in motion three attitudes about auto-eroticism that profoundly influenced medical and educational opinion later in the 18th and throughout the 19th century: sexuality in solitude is, first, profoundly arousing; auto-eroticism is, secondly, the condition in which a person is most aware of him or herself. To be both sexually aroused and self-aware, alone, is, thirdly, dangerous: the body is on the road to madness and the soul on the road to perdition. What is important about Tissot’s legacy, and about the phenomenon of auto-eroticism generally in the 19th century, is that through the prism of auto-eroticism authorities attempted to understand eroticism itself. Armed with these three assumptions, researchers set out to try and understand sexuality. Rather than considering people making love together as constituting a domain of knowledge about which the doctor would learn, the notion was to separate the individual and to study him by himself, because it was in isolation that the person felt his sexuality most strongly. It was an application to the study of sex of other forms of 19th-century individualism, this assumption that a person was to be considered as an isolated individual.

Update on the Heidegger situation

As we noted here on foucaultblog last week, The Chronicle of Higher Education ran a slash and run piece by a guy called Carlin Romano on Heidegger. Romano’s stated goal was to ridicule and mock Heidegger:

How many scholarly stakes in the heart will we need before Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), still regarded by some as Germany’s greatest 20th-century philosopher, reaches his final resting place as a prolific, provincial Nazi hack? Overrated in his prime, bizarrely venerated by acolytes even now, the pretentious old Black Forest babbler makes one wonder whether there’s a university-press equivalent of wolfsbane, guaranteed to keep philosophical frauds at a distance.

Romano has already been called out by Slate, but now even the New Republic piles on:

this column is an intellectual disgrace, and one that the Chronicle should be ashamed for having published. I say this as someone who’s very far from being one of the “acolytes” who “bizarrely venerate” Heidegger and his ideas.

The writer here is Damon Linker, who continues:

Yet even if distinguishing between Heidegger’s philosophy and his politics were as impossible as Romano (and Faye) would have us believe, that still would not justify excluding Heidegger’s thought from serious reflection, study, and a place in the university. On the contrary, it would serve as an additional reason to wrestle with the challenge it poses.

I think I would agree with this.

However, now Slate is back with more comments from someone else who finds the Romano essay “delightfully acerbic”:

Romano’s Chronicle piece generated an often-furious comments thread, a spectacle of postmodernists in temper tantrum mode.

I can understand the splenetic attacks on Romano for not taking Heidegger seriously, although the angry Heideggerian academics never explained exactly why we should.

In general, I’m in favor of separating the man (or woman) from the work, but it was Heidegger himself, his defenders don’t seem to recognize, who claimed Nazism for his own. He didn’t make the separation between man and philosophy that they conveniently claim to excuse his personal racism.

This is by a guy called Ron Rosenbaum, who goes on to attack Hannah Arendt:

Which brings us back to Arendt again. As the extent of Heidegger’s enthusiastic embrace of Nazism becomes more apparent, and as it becomes ever clearer that the allegiance was not merely opportunistic and careerist but derived from a philosophical affinity with his Fuhrer’s effusions, it becomes impossible not to reexamine certain questions. Such as: How much did Arendt know about the depth of Heidegger’s allegiance? Did Heidegger lie to her? Did she believe him the way she believed Eichmann? Did she assume his complicity with the genocidaires was something careerist and banal? Or worse, did she know? And did she disingenuously (or self-deceptively) construct her false banal Eichmann from her false banal Heidegger?

Rosenbaum or Slate however have turned off comments so we’ll not be able to address these questions. Perhaps they got scared by the Chronicle responses.

Two items: sex SF and Galilée

Two quick items today:

Gai pied hebdo (a name supposedly suggested by Foucault and a pun on guêpier or hornet’s nest according to Wikipedia; hebdo = “weekly” in French) published an interview with MF “Friendship as a way of life” (DE #293). Sex SF, a blog from the San Francisco Bay Guardian, has a piece about this interview today and how you can download the interview (and lots of other stuff, most of it in a legal grey zone) from aaaarg.org.

Philosophy in a time of error blog compares the Derrida lecture series to the Foucault ones, and claims:

I don’t think we’ll see the breakthrough in studies on Derrida from the publication of these lectures as we did with the publication of Foucault’s courses. For me, there was the Foucault before the lectures were published and the much more interesting Foucault after the lectures. Not that there isn’t a link between the two, but Foucault’s work in the lectures offers less totalizing views of the periods under discussion and it’s much more experimental. A lot of Derrida’s lectures have already been published and though I’ve seen some good stuff at the archives in Irvine, I don’t think you’ll see the massive onslaught of publications that greeted a lot of Foucault lectures’ publication.

He also wants to know when the next book is coming out. Any ideas?

Update. 500th post! Incroyable.

Neil Smith on Foucault and revolution

Seen in Heidelberg, Germany, June 2009

Neil Smith (Uneven Development) has added some new material to his site, including an editorial he did for Environment Planning D: Society and Space in 2007 (pdf version).

Smith’s position is that Foucault is actually useful in thinking about revolution again (ie., since the 1960s). He argues that Foucault’s position on revolution is (A) misunderstood mainly because of his visits and comments on Iran in 1978/9 and (B) potentially better than Marx’s because whereas Marx’s revolutions were tied to a specific time and place, Foucault’s is “universalized.”

Unlike other radical geographers (eg David Harvey and Nigel Thrift in our book) Smith here finds more hope in Foucault (eg Thrift once said “it always seems to be raining in Foucault country.”) That’s fair enough and each reader will take what they need from any author, but I wonder here what Neil would say to the point that he sort of makes himself: that is, that revolutions attract their own counter-revolutions. As he says:

Whatever the very real successes of these movements, they did not remain revolutionary and with only a few exceptions – foremost Cuba, perhaps – they did not dislodge the integument of capitalist social relations. On the contrary, the response to many of these challenges was the opposite: a forceful, often military, counterrevolution, often with US support, which eventually strengthened local capitalism under the banners of an emergent globalization and neoliberalism, injecting capitalist social relations deeper and deeper into the marrow of daily life.

Is this an instance of a reversal of Foucault’s famous aphorism that where there is power, there is resistance?

Telos reaches back

But not that far back…

Each Tuesday in the TELOSscope blog, we reach back into the archives and highlight an article whose critical insights continue to illuminate our thinking and challenge our assumptions. Today, Marcus Michelson looks at Jean-Michel Landry’s ” Confession, Obedience, and Subjectivity: Michel Foucault’s Unpublished Lectures On the Government of the Living,” from Telos 146 (Spring 2009).

Why do we obey? Even when people rebel, it seems they simply reconstitute a form of obedience. We all know the old cliché “they aren’t rebels, they’re just following a ‘rebellious’ social code.” The way people dress, their hairstyle, tattoos, earrings, piercings, etc., only seem to reinforce our belief in their obedience to well-defined social practices. Even if we aren’t all playing by the same rules, we are all playing by rules. Do we even know what it would mean anymore to rebel? In the meantime, cultural critics admonish our decline, criticizing us for adhering to more philistine, insipid, or self-defeating values. But doesn’t this criticism amount to saying that we are just obeying the wrong thing, whereas obedience itself is simply presupposed? Could obedience really be ubiquitous, and if so, how did we get this way? On the other hand, how can we describe a legitimate form of autonomy?

If you want to know the answers to these questions, it’ll cost you $5 for a day’s access (cheap).

Telos offers a free taster. Landry:

Behind the doors of the first monasteries, Foucault sees a major displacement: the act of confession became linked to a requirement of permanent obedience. “Obeying in all things” and “keeping no secret thoughts”: from that point on, these two principles would form a single requirement. Furthermore, this dual imperative introduced a fundamental break between the direction of Christian conscience and its ancestor, ancient philosophical direction. Unlike Christian direction, ancient direction remained provisional. Its role was limited to accompanying the person being directed until he became independent. The obedience required from the subject in the ancient world was instrumental: it was limited in time and subordinated to the objective of autonomy. In Foucault’s view, monasticism inverted in every respect the ways in which ancient techniques of direction functioned. The Christian direction of conscience would be ongoing and would consider obedience no longer as a means, but as an end in itself (obedience generated obedience). Obedience, within monasticism, sought only to root obedience ever more deeply within the subject.

Foucault’s birthday (belated)

We forgot to note Foucault’s birthday last week. He would have been 83 years old.

Update. More importantly, we missed Asterix and Obelix’s birthday! They were 50 years old, sort of.

Chronicle of Higher Ed: Heil Heidegger!

The Chronicle of Higher Education last week had a popular, even sensationalist story entitled Heil Heidegger! by a guy called Carlin Romano, whose main aim seems to be to make fun of Heidegger as a strategy of undermining his influence. A flavor:

How many scholarly stakes in the heart will we need before Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), still regarded by some as Germany’s greatest 20th-century philosopher, reaches his final resting place as a prolific, provincial Nazi hack? Overrated in his prime, bizarrely venerated by acolytes even now, the pretentious old Black Forest babbler makes one wonder whether there’s a university-press equivalent of wolfsbane, guaranteed to keep philosophical frauds at a distance.

To be sure, every philosophy reference book credits Heidegger with one or another headscratcher achievement. One lauds him for his “revival of ontology.” (Would we not think about things that exist without this ponderous, existentialist Teuton?)

“Fraud,” “ponderous,” “hack” and later “oafish” etc etc. are all obvious signs of an over-excited sensibility, not to mention the classic reasoning error known as argumentum ad hominem, which readers will recognise as a frequent line of critique on Foucault (coupled with the fact that the attacker sees signs of his pernicious–to use a
Romano word–influence everywhere on young unformed minds). Just in case we missed it, Romano admits that he’s lobbing the insults rather than engaging with the issue as a deliberate strategy:

In the case of Heidegger, it may be that only ridicule—not further proof of his sordid 1930s acts—can save us.

…

He should be the butt of jokes, not the subject of dissertations.

The shame here is that by adopting a policy of non-engagement he is closing off what he seems to want: a focus on Heidegger’s Nazi involvement. It’s also not that clear that Romano grasps Heidegger’s work; how can anybody seriously commenting on Heidegger think that Heidegger’s ontology is what permits us to “think about things that exist” or that calling someone an existentialist is an insult? (Or a “Teuton”?)

I suspect that some readers here are uncomfortable with Heidegger’s life and its relationship to his thought, and that’s as it should be. But Romano’s attack is unfair and inaccurate. He comes off as an ignorant ideologue more interested in “handbags” as the Brits say. Slate adds:

Here is what you would not know if you encountered Heidegger only in Romano’s review. You would not know that, though no-name colleagues (typically not disinterested judges of peer reputation, as Romano no doubt knows) thought Heidegger was a quack, his philosophy was admired and studied by Edmund Husserl (his mentor), Hannah Arendt (his protégé and lover), and the philosophers Karl Jaspers and Hans-Georg Gadamer. You would not know that almost all of Sartre’s existentialism is based directly on Heidegger, that the American uber-liberal and Pragmatist Richard Rorty admired Heidegger deeply—as does the great Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor and as did the pioneering genius of quantum mechanics Werner Heisenberg. You would not know that the poet Paul Celan, whose Jewish parents were exterminated, and whose most powerful poetry commemorates the death camps, took a pilgrimage to visit Heidegger in his Black Forest hut in 1966. The two men shared a love of nature, and of the German romantic poetry of Holderlin and Trakl. (For a moving account of Celan’s visit, please read this.)

The Chronicle is the trade journal of higher education but it’s not covered itself in glory in publishing this piece. I’m not sure I want to draw any big anti-intellectualism conclusions; it could equally be that some portions of the web and especially TV talkshows are eroding the nature of debate. Luckily the article has attracted getting on for 100 comments that provide a more elevated and worthwhile conversation.

Didier Eribon new book Retour à Reims

One of Foucault’s biographers and friends, Didier Eribon, has a new book out, an autobiography. Sounds interesting as described here. Since I spent 3 weeks near Reims this summer it’s fascinating to see that that is where Eribon’s family apparently comes from (it’s in the champagne region of France):

Blessé, or wounded, is how Didier Eribon, Foucault’s biographer, appears in his latest book, a memoir:  Retour à Reims (Fayard, 2009, 250p).

While his father is institutionalized with advanced Alzheimer disease, then dies, Eribon, who had broken with his parents many years earlier, reconnects with his mother and reflects on his growing up and his family history. It’s a heart-rending story. The story of a progressive estrangement from his blue-collar family, his refusal to assume his very humble origins, while becoming the first member of his family to continue his studies beyond the legal age, and to attend university… In a very class-conscious France and era, he ends up being perceived by his parents as a class enemy. And simply stops seeing them and his brothers and sisters. This candid and lucid account forms the core of the book, and is worth reading.

[Avec] l’idée, en apparence évidente, que ma rupture totale avec ma famille pouvait s’expliquer par mon homosexualité, par l’homophobie foncière de mon père et celle du milieu dans lequel j’avais vécu, ne m’étais-je pas donné, en même temps – et aussi profondément vrai que cela ait pu être -, de nobles et incontestables raisons pour éviter de penser qu’il s’agissait tout autant d’une rupture de classe avec mon milieu d’origine?

A partial translation of Agamben on Foucault

Just found a partial online translation of Agamben’s Il Regno e La Gloria at least apparently as far as he discusses Foucault.

GLBT History Month 2009

October is GLBT History Month and Foucault has been chosen as an “icon” (what would he make of that–pride? modesty?).

Anyway they provide a short video, a bio, some recommended books about him (tho not Clare O’Farrell’s tut-tut, tho they do link to her website) and some downloads.