Bonus Post: Foucault, the Benthamite in 1978-1979

Bonus post

In October 2020 I was invited to present to the Aristotelian Society. Some things got in the way: a pandemic & long covid. But it’s re-scheduled for next Monday, 13/5/2024 6pm in London (for details see here). I dedicate my paper (here) "Synthetic Philosophy: A restatement" to Dan Dennett at the suggestion of Walter Veit.

Because I am traveling next week, I don’t expect to blog much. So today is a bonus digression; I call attention to the way that Foucault embraced Benthamite philosophy. This is quite apparent in interviews collected as (2024) The Japan Lectures: A Transnational Critical Encounter, edited by John Racjchman. I sought these out because of my recent engagement with Daniele Lorenzini’s (2023) The Force of Truth: Critique, Genealogy, and Truth-Telling. (Recall this post; this post; this one; and this one.) In Lorenzini’s argument, a 1978 lecture by Foucault, “The Analytic Philosophy of Politics” given in Tokyo (and published in a translation by Giovanni Mascaretti in (2018) Foucault Studies), plays a rather important role (recall here). This lecture is also reprinted in The Japan lectures (as chapter 4), but in a translation by Emily Sun, and so can be read in a temporal and geographic context. It’s worth doing so because Foucault does engage a bit more with analytic philosophy in these (about that some other time more).

As I have noted, on 1 February 1978 during the fourth lecture of his Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977--1978, Foucault introduces his interest in the ‘art of government’ as an actor’s category when he discussed raison d’État, cameralism, and mercantilism. He strongly implies that it comes to an end at the start of the 19th century. As is well known, in his famous 1979 lecture series, Birth of Biopolitics, he then applies the ‘art of government’ as a way to discuss the development of liberalism and then the tail-end contemporary neo-liberalism. In the first lecture (10 January 1979, pp. 10-1), he quickly turns to Bentham’s Manual of Political Economy (or so I have argued recall here), and in the 1979 lectures traces the art of government in Bentham from Locke and Hume and to Chicago Economic (see my paper).

It’s, of course, well known how important Bentham’s writings on the Panopticon are to Foucault (see his (1975) Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison (translated as Discipline and Punishment)). Since Bentham is nearly completely absent in Security, Territory, Population, this suggests that Foucaul renewed his reading of and interest in Bentham in 1978 (as Bentham scholars have noted, see this paper by Anne Brunon-Ernst). And indeed we find some fascinating traces of it in the interviews collected in The Japan Lectures. I want to call attention to two quotes. In neither case is Bentham mentioned, but in both cases his ghost is, as it were, present.

The first occurs in an interview with C. Nemoto and M. Watanabe, April 27, 1978 (published in Asahi Jānaru, v. 20 no. 19, May 12, 1978, pp. 15–20), and published as chapter 2 in The Japan Lectures, “Sexuality and Politics.”

M. Foucault: It is difficult to answer this question, because even for myself it isn’t yet quite clear, but I think I can say this: the slogan launched by the sexual liberation movements, which is “liberate desire”, strikes me not only as lacking persuasiveness but also as a bit dangerous. For this desire that is required, liberation is in fact only one constitutive part of sexuality, and is nothing more than what has been differentiated from the rest as carnal desires by the discipline of the Catholic Church and the technique of the examination of conscience. That is how, since the Middle Ages, we started to analyze desire in the Christian world, believing that it is precisely in desire that we can find the beginning of sin, and that we can see how it operates not only in sexual acts but in all areas of human behavior. Desire was thus a foundational element of sin. And liberating desire is nothing other than deciphering one’s own unconscious, as psychoanalysts do, and long before them, the discipline of the Catholic confession made it a practice. The thing that is not talked about from this perspective is pleasure.

In this sense, I wrote that, if we wanted freedom from the science of sex, we had to find it in a foundation of pleasure, in the maximization of pleasure.—Translated by Alice Mahoney, p. 49 in The Japan Lectures.

In context, Foucault treats the science of sex as continuous with Stoicism and Christianity in rejecting pleasure. And Foucault here summarizes his own view as affirming pleasure. And, in fact, “the maximization of pleasure” evokes Bentham’s greatest happiness principle.

What he has in mind here is clarified by the transcript of “Sei to kenryoku” (“Sexuality and Power”), conference in Tokyo on April 20, 1978, followed by a debate, in Gendai-shisō, July 1978, pp. 58–77. This is published as Chapter 5 “Sexuality and Power” in the Japan Lectures, although it occurred a week earlier. I quote Foucault,

If we want to study this overproduction of the theoretical knowledge of sexuality, it seems that the first thing we encounter, the first feature that strikes us in these discourses that Western culture has held about sexuality, is that this discourse very quickly assumed a form we can call scientific. By this I don’t mean to say that this discourse has always been rational, I don’t mean to say that it has always followed the criteria of what we now call a scientific truth. Long before psychoanalysis, in 19th-century psychiatry, but also in what we can call 18th-century psychology, and, better still, in the moral theology of the 17th century and even the Middle Ages, we can find a whole speculation on what sexuality was, what desire was, and what was, at that particular moment, concupiscence, a whole discourse that claimed to be rational and scientific, and this is where, it seems to me, that we can discern a crucial difference between Western societies and at least a certain number of Eastern ones.

I am referring here to an analysis that I sketched out in an initial volume of History of Sexuality that Mr. Watanabe has kindly translated and commented upon, I think, in a journal. It is the opposition between societies that try to maintain a scientific discourse on sexuality as we do in the West, and societies in which the discourse on sexuality is also a very encompassing discourse, a proliferating discourse, a discourse that was multiplied many times over, but doesn’t seek to found a science, that seeks, on the contrary, to define an art—an art that would be the art of producing, through sexual intercourse or with sexual organs, a type of pleasure that is sought to be made as intense or as strong as possible or as long-lasting as possible. In many Eastern societies, and also in Ancient Greece and Rome, we can find a whole series of discourses on this possibility, on the search in any case of methods through which to intensify sexual pleasure. The discourse that we find in the West, at least since the Middle Ages, is altogether different from that.

In the West, we do not have erotic art. In other words, we don’t learn to make love, we don’t learn to give ourselves pleasure, we don’t learn to produce pleasure in others, we don’t learn to maximize, to intensify, our own pleasure through the pleasure of others. All of this is not taught in the West, and you have neither a discourse nor an initiation other than a clandestine and interindividual to this erotic art. On the other hand, we do have, or we try to have, a sexual science—scientia sexualis—on the sexuality of people but not on their pleasure, something that won’t be what to do to make pleasure as intense as possible, but what is the truth of this thing that, in the individual, is his sex or his sexuality: the truth about sex and not the intensity of pleasure.—Translated by Zineb Belghiti, pp. 82-3 The Japan Lectures. [emphasis added]

Let’s leave aside Foucault’s tendency to essentialize the ‘West.’ We see here Foucault’s tendency toward a kind of ‘reverse orientalism’—a very useful phrase coined by Shiguéhiko Hasumi (see p. 168 of The Japan Lectures). Either way, Foucault reads the erotic art of the East (and the pre-Stoic classical ancients) in terms of a sympathetic (‘our own pleasure through the pleasure of others’) maximization of pleasures. In fact, Foucault is clearly focused on the intensity of pleasure (which in An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation is one of the key personal circumstances Bentham identifies as valuable to an individual).

Now, if we look at Foucault’s note-taking, we find most references to Bentham in them through Halevy’s La formation du radicalisme philosophique. Halevy explicitly treats the ‘maximum of happiness’ as the goal of Bentham’s legislator, and notes the significance of ‘intensity’ to Bentham throughout his discussion. However, we also know that Foucault took notes on Bentham’s ‘Constitutional Code.’ (See here.) Somewhat annoyingly he refers explicitly to volume 8 of Bowring’s (1843) edition, although this should be volume 9. There, too, these phrased abound (although perhaps not intensity of pleasure). And not unlike Foucault, it’s a work in which Bentham frequently meditates on the nature of power.

So, I speculate that while he was reflecting on the art of government, in the Spring of 1978, Foucault returned to Bentham indirectly through Halevy and directly read at least material from volume 3 (which contains a Manual) and 9 of Bowring’s edition. More importantly, he partially understood his own project in Benthamite terms. This is also evoked in his rather positive appraisal of the Benthamite program in the 1979 Birth of Biopolitics lectures. And it is expressed as a kind of reverse orientalism in which the erotic art of the East is valorized as a kind of freedom absent in the West. Anyway, it strikes me that Foucault’s partial (and temporary) embrace of Benthamite ideas and terminology is worth exploring a bit more.