Theory of the state: “an indigestible meal”

In reading through The Birth of Biopolitics I reached the lecture where Foucault addresses the objection that he does without a theory of the state, and famously observes:

Well, I would reply, yes, I do, I want to, I must do without a theory of the state, as one can and must forgo an indigestible meal (Birth of Biopolitics, pp. 76-78), lecture of 31 January 1979.

Thomas Lemke recently wrote a piece using this phrase (which was I believe first pointed out by Colin Gordon in his introduction in 1991 to the Foucault Effect). Lemke observes:

In his lectures of 1978 and 1979 at the Collège de France, Michel Foucault responded to some Marxist critics who had complained that the “genealogy of power” lacked an elaborated theory of the state. Foucault remarked that he had refrained from pursuing a theory of the state “in the sense that one abstains from an indigestible meal”… However, a few sentences later Foucault states: “The problem of state formation is at the centre of the questions that I want to pose.”

Here is the passage as translated by Graham Burchell in the new English edition (2008):

[continuing from “meal”]. What does doing without a theory of the state mean? If you say that in my analyses I cancel the presence and the effect of state mechanisms, then I would reply: Wrong, you are mistaken or want to deceive yourself, for to tell the truth I do exactly the opposite of this. Whether in the case of madness, of the constitution of that category, that quasi-natural object, mental illness, or of the organization of a clinical medicine, or of the integration of disciplinary mechanisms and technologies within the penal system, what was involved in each case was always the identification of the gradual, piecemeal, but contiuous takeover by the state of a number of practices, ways of doing things, and, if you like, governmentalities. The problem of bringing under state control, of ‘statification’ (étatisation) is at the heart of the questions I have tried to address.

However, if, on the other hand, “doing without a theory of the state” means not starting off with an analysis of the nature, structure, and functions of the state in and for itself, if it means not starting from the state considered as a sort of political universal and then, through successive extension, deducing the status of the mad, the sick, children, delinquents, and so on, in our kind of society then I reply: Yes, of course, I am determined to refrain from that kind of analysis. There is no question of deducing this set of practices from a supposed essence of the state in and for itself. We must refrain form this kind of analysis first of all because, quite simply, history is not a deductive science, and secondly, for another no more important and serious reason: the state does not have an essence. The state is not a universal nor in itself an autonomous source of power. The state is nothing else but the effect, the profile, the mobile shape of a perpetual statification (étatisation) or statifications, in the sense of incessant transactions which modify, or move, or drastically change, or insidiously shift sources of finance, modes of investment, decision-making centers, forms and types of control, relationships between local powers, the central authority, and so on. In short, the state has no heart, as we well know, but not just in the sense that it has no feelings, either good or bad, but it has no heart in the sense that it has no interior. The state is nothing else but the mobile effect of a regime of multiple governmentalities. That is why i propose to analyze, or rather take up and text this anxiety about the state, this state-phobia, which seems to me a typical feature of common themes today, not by trying to wrest from the state the secret of what it is, like Marx tried to extract the secret of the commodity, but by moving outside and questioning the problem of the state, undertaking an investigation of the problem of the state, on the basis of practices of governmentality.

Birth of Biopolitics, 2008, pp. 77-8.

NB Bob Jessop wrote about some of this in Political Geography last year in a paper called “From micro-powers to governmentality: Foucault’s work on statehood, state formation, statecraft and state power.” He ended up arguing that Foucault’s analysis was not incompatible with state theory given that it was “from below”:

generalizing from Marsden’s re-reading of Marx and Foucault on capitalism (1999), it seems that, while Marx seeks to explain the why of capital accumulation and state power, Foucault’s analyses of disciplinarity and governmentality try to explain the how of economic exploitation and political domination (on the importance of ‘how’ questions for Foucault, see his 1982). There is far more, of course, to Foucault’s work in this period but this re-reading shows that there is more scope than many believe for dialogue between critical Marxist and Foucauldian analyses.

Danny Postel review of Afary & Anderson Foucault in Iran book

I missed this review by Danny Postel of Afary and Anderson’s Foucault in Iran book, which was published in The Common Review in 2006.

Excerpt:

Indeed, it was not despite the revolution’s Islamist dimension that Foucault’s intellectual-political juices got flowing, but because of it. He saw in the Iranian experience
the promise of a whole different kind of rebellion—not just another national liberation struggle against colonialism, but something that went deeper: a revolt against modernity itself. Whereas third-world revolutions of the Marxist-Leninist variety were trapped, as Foucault saw it, in the language of the Enlightenment, the Iranians had chosen a different path—one that departed on a fundamental level from the logic of all modern revolutions and that promised not merely a new political order but, in his words, a whole different “regime of truth.”

Why did Foucault interpret the events around him in the particular way he did? Why, in the case of Iran, did he suspend the deep-seated skepticism and antiutopianism which so marked his overall approach to political questions? What exactly was it about the Iranian revolution that animated Foucault and stirred his imagination, leading him to view the events of 1978–79 as world-historical in nature?

Postel then discusses two proposals by Afary and Anderson to reply to these questions. 1. Foucault was so anti-Enlightenment that when he saw protests against it in Iran he was swept away; 2. on a personal level his fascination with “pain, punishment, surveillance, and codes of sexual “normality” and “abnormality,” on the one hand, and the penchant he displayed for sadomasochistic homoeroticism in his private life” (here Postel draws on James Miller’s biography of Foucault) led him to be swept away by the displays of grief and penitence he observed during Muharram (a time of mourning for the murder of Hussein, Mohammad’s descendant).

Afary and Anderson continue to draw on Miller’s emphasis on the so-called “limit experience” he finds embedded throughout Foucault’s work, and Postel gives a sympathetic hearing to it. In the end he concludes:

Afary and Anderson are engaged in an admittedly speculative enterprise, and are thus wide open to criticism. Champions of Foucault will likely disagree with the conclusions these authors reach. This is as it should be. Among the virtues of this book is that its publication of original source material in English will allow readers of Foucault to judge for themselves. The full text of everything Foucault ever published on Iran is here, in Foucault’s own words, allowing us—and history—to ruminate on one more illuminating chapter in the history of philosopher-kings.

Postel’s site is here. He is the author of Reading Legitimation  Crisis in Tehran: Iran and the Future of Liberalism.

Philosophers on film

It’s interesting how many philosophers have been captured on film. I’ve seen footage of some surprising people, long gone now, such as Heidegger, Foucault, Baudrillard, Sartre and more recently Derrida (I saw him IRL lecture on Spectres of Marx once) and Badiou (still lecturing).

Digital storage and digital video have certainly helped, especially in capturing video, but what’s helping the most may be the fact that companies like Google are making it very easy to distribute these videos (Youtube and Google video). Whereas previously this film was stacked in a dusty shelf or on someone’s video off the TV, the fact that it can be shared motivates people to upload it. And for events that are occurring now the availability of material is even greater.

These thoughts were spurred by seeing that David Harvey’s lectures on Marx are being made available on his website (the fact that Harvey has a website is also somewhat arresting). They are introduced by his CUNY colleague and former student, Neil Smith, and are very well done (multiple cameras in the classroom, professional editing etc). Harvey has talked about teaching Marx in the introduction to one of his books (I forget which) and how while it has waxed and waned, today it seems more relevant than ever.

Update: I should add that David Harvey was kind enough to contribute a commentary on Foucault for our book called “The Kantian roots of Foucault’s Dilemmas.” Here is the first page of that chapter (pdf).

And here’s the first Harvey video.

Interview with Foucault’s brother

Rare interview with Denys Foucault (in French).

It provides one of the more amusing pictures of Foucault, on a donkey during the occupation. No problem with the hair in this one.

(h/t Adresscomptoir).

Some excerpts:

L’Actualité.– Pourquoi votre frère a-t-il quitté le lycée Henri IV de Poitiers pour Saint-Stanislas?

Denys Foucault. – Je sais qu’en classe de troisième, pendant l’année scolaire 1939-1940, il était
assez malheureux parce que son professeur principal l’avait pris en grippe. D’autre part beaucoup de professeurs de l’enseignement public étaient prisonniers en Allemagne, ce qui n’était pas le cas dans le privé.

On était même pétainiste à Saint-Stan…

A part le chanoine Duret, qui était résistant et fut déporté. L’établissement s’est alors retrouvé sans professeur de philo. Le supérieur voulait que le cours soit assuré par un prof de lettres. Mais ma mère, qui se méfiait un peu de l’enseignement privé, a protesté en disant : «C’est de la littérature, pas de la philo !» En outre, mon frère ne supportait pas ce prof. Ma mère a réussi à faire en sorte qu’un moine de Ligugé, Dom Pierrot, enseigne la philo à Saint-Stan. Entretemps, elle avait demandé à Louis Girard, étudiant en licence de philo, de donner des cours particuliers à mon frère. Mon frère prenait aussi des cours de latin et de grec chez le chanoine Aigrain, qui lui prêtait des volumes de sa bibliothèque très fournie.

L’Actualité Poitou-Charentes – N° 51 (PDF), S.26.

Said on Foucault

Said is invited to Paris in early 1979:

When I arrived, I found a short, mysterious letter from Sartre and Beauvoir waiting for me at the hotel I had booked in the Latin Quarter. ‘For security reasons,’ the message ran, ‘the meetings will be held at the home of Michel Foucault.’ I was duly provided with an address, and at ten the next morning I arrived at Foucault’s apartment to find a number of people – but not Sartre – already milling around. No one was ever to explain the mysterious ‘security reasons’ that had forced a change in venue, though as a result a conspiratorial air hung over our proceedings. Beauvoir was already there in her famous turban, lecturing anyone who would listen about her forthcoming trip to Teheran with Kate Millett, where they were planning to demonstrate against the chador; the whole idea struck me as patronising and silly, and although I was eager to hear what Beauvoir had to say, I also realised that she was quite vain and quite beyond arguing with at that moment. Besides, she left an hour or so later (just before Sartre’s arrival) and was never seen again.

Foucault very quickly made it clear to me that he had nothing to contribute to the seminar and would be leaving directly for his daily bout of research at the Bibliothèque Nationale. I was pleased to see my book Beginnings on his bookshelves, which were brimming with a neatly arranged mass of materials, including papers and journals. Although we chatted together amiably it wasn’t until much later (in fact almost a decade after his death in 1984) that I got some idea why he had been so unwilling to say anything to me about Middle Eastern politics. In their biographies, both Didier Eribon and James Miller reveal that in 1967 he had been teaching in Tunisia and had left the country in some haste, shortly after the June War. Foucault had said at the time that the reason he left had been his horror at the ‘anti-semitic’ anti-Israel riots of the time, common in every Arab city after the great Arab defeat. A Tunisian colleague of his in the University of Tunis philosophy department told me a different story in the early 1990s: Foucault, she said, had been deported because of his homosexual activities with young students. I still have no idea which version is correct. At the time of the Paris seminar, he told me he had just returned from a sojourn in Iran as a special envoy of Corriere della sera. ‘Very exciting, very strange, crazy,’ I recall him saying about those early days of the Islamic Revolution. I think (perhaps mistakenly) I heard him say that in Teheran he had disguised himself in a wig, although a short while after his articles appeared, he rapidly distanced himself from all things Iranian. Finally, in the late 1980s, I was told by Gilles Deleuze that he and Foucault, once the closest of friends, had fallen out over the question of Palestine, Foucault expressing support for Israel, Deleuze for the Palestinians.

Foucault’s apartment, though large and obviously extremely comfortable, was starkly white and austere, well suited to the solitary philosopher and rigorous thinker who seemed to inhabit it alone. A few Palestinians and Israeli Jews were there. Among them I recognised only Ibrahim Dakkak, who has since become a good Jerusalem friend, Nafez Nazzal, a teacher at Bir Zeit whom I had known superficially in the US, and Yehoshofat Harkabi, the leading Israeli expert on ‘the Arab mind’, a former chief of Israeli military intelligence, fired by Golda Meir for mistakenly putting the Army on alert. Three years earlier, we had both been fellows at the Stanford Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, but we did not have much of a relationship. It was always polite but far from cordial.

LRB, 2000.

Full-text Foucaults?

I’ve noticed a trend recently of publishing full-text versions of various Foucault-related books online. Nowadays anyone with a scanner and Acrobat can upload a searchable OCR full-text pdf of say Security, Territory, Population (which floated around the internet last year) or today’s example, Foucault by Gilles Deleuze.

I’m in two minds about these. On the one hand they’re presumably illegal and take away sales (?) from small-press or university publishers (Minnesota in the case of the Deleuze).

On the other they are great for research because they are searchable. So if say you want to find references to a particular topic, a half-remembered quote, or a specific keyword they are very valuable. There is a demand for them. The top-read post on this blog is a link to the (legal) full-text of “What is an author?”

A solution would be for publishers to make these available for sale. Presumably they are afraid of them escaping into the wild. But that argument is in practice being by-passed by these folks providing pdfs of their scanned copies.

Foucault in Uppsala–new pictures

Unusual early picture of Foucault during his time in Sweden (1955).

(Michel Foucault Archives)

They write books

Simon Critchley (for it is he again) describes himself:

Simon Critchley was born in Hertfordshire in 1960, and currently lives and works in New York as Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research. He failed dramatically at school before failing in a large number of punk bands in the late 70s and failing as a poet some time later. This was followed by failure as a radical political activist. By complete accident, he ended up at university when he was 22 and decided to stay. He found a vocation in teaching philosophy, although his passions still lie in music, poetry and politics.

He’s written another book called the Book of Dead Philosophers which at first site merely seems only to contribute to the idea of “the death of…” meme (or “end of…” history, etc) but which in which he claims that the manner of the dying says something about each person. He’s arranged it in a kind of top ten:

1. Heracleitus (540-480 BC)
Heracleitus became such a hater of humanity that he wandered in the mountains and lived on a diet of grass and herbs. But malnutrition gave him dropsy and he returned to the city to seek a cure, asking to be covered in cow dung, which he believed would draw the bad humours out of his body. In the first version of the story, the cow dung is wet and the weeping philosopher drowns; in the second, it is dry and he is baked to death in the Ionian sun.

After a few more in this vein we get:

10. Michel Foucault (1926-1984)
Foucault was first hospitalized in June 1984 with the symptoms of a nasty and persistent flu, fatigue, terrible coughing and migraine. “It’s like being in a fog,” he said. But he carried on working until the end on the second and third volumes of The History of Sexuality, which appeared shortly before his death. Although he was a very early victim of the virus, it seems that Foucault knew that he had Aids. Foucault was fond of reading Seneca towards the end and died on 25 June like a classical philosopher.

So that’s alright then.