Lorenzini's overreach on Foucault (with some Feyerabend and Rorty)

This is the fourth and (I assume) final post on Daniele Lorenzini’s (2023) The Force of Truth: Critique, Genealogy, and Truth-Telling (pp. 47-49). (Recall this post; this post; and yesterday’s digression). Throughout the series I have combined admiration for the work with fairly modest (albeit substantive) critical observations. Throughout I have hinted that I think Lorenzini performs an apologia for Foucault to the left and thereby, overplays his hand in the final, fifth chapter. I quote the passage:

Indeed, genealogy’s capacity to instill a sense of ethico-political commitment in its audience relies on the constitution of a specific “we” as a transhistorical (and not suprahistorical or ahistorical) subject of resistance. As Judith Butler aptly argues, while Fraser and Habermas postulate the existence of a stable, known, and agential “we” in asking the question “What should we do?” or “Why should we resist?” Foucault refuses to appeal to any stable and predetermined “we.” This rejection, however, is not to be interpreted as a rejection of any possible form of collective subjectivity. On the contrary, as I mentioned above, Foucault claims that the problem is “to make the future formation of a ‘we’ possible” (a “we” that “would also be likely to form a community of action”), because “the ‘we’ must not be prior to the question; it can only be the result— and the necessarily temporary result— of the question.”77—Lorenzini, pp. 114-115. [Emphasis in Lorenzini.] (See also p. 105.)

Now, as regular readers know, I don’t disagree with Lorenzini’s claim that at least part of the point of Foucault’s project is to generate ethico-political commitment in its audience. But a reader of Lorenzini will come away thinking that what Lorenzini calls the “we-making dimension of possibilizing genealogy” (p. 105) is Foucault’s own emphasis. I want to offer at least two reasons for thinking otherwise in light of the material that Lorenzini himself emphasizes. The first passage involves Rorty, the second Feyerabend.

First, the passage quoted in the material from p. 105 (and cited in note 77) is Foucault, “Polemics, Politics, and Problematizations,” 114–15. And pretty much the same reference figures in the accompanying note on p. 105. This is an interview from 1984, conducted by his friend Paul Rabinow. It occurs while answering the question, “You have been read as an idealist, as a nihilist, as a “new philosopher”, an anti-Marxist, a new conservative, and so on… Where do you stand?” So here’s the full passage that Lorenzini partially quotes above (and which itself responds to a further, implied objection by Rorty):

It is a question, then, of thinking about the relations of these different experiences to politics, which doesn’t mean that one will seek in politics the main constituent of these experiences or the solution that will definitively settle their fate. The problems that experiences like these pose to politics have to be elaborated. But it is also necessary to determine what “posing a problem” to politics really means. Richard Rorty points out that in these analyses I do not appeal to any “we” — to any of those “wes” whose consensus, whose values, whose traditions constitute the framework for a thought and define the conditions in which it can be validated. But the problem is, precisely, to decide if it is actually suitable to place oneself within a “we” in order to assert the principles one recognizes and the values one accepts; or if it is not, rather, necessary to make the future formation of a “we” possible by elaborating the question. Because it seems to me that “we” must not be previous to the question; it can only be the result — and the necessary temporary result — of the question as it is posed in the new terms in which one formulates it. For example, I’m not sure that at the time when I wrote the history of madness, there was a preexisting and receptive “we” to which I would only have had to refer in order to write my book, and of which this book would have been the spontaneous expression. Laing, Cooper, Basaglia, and I had no community, nor any relationship; but the problem posed itself to those who had read us, as it also posed itself to some of us, of seeing if it were possible to establish a “we” on the basis of the work that had been done, a “we” that would also be likely to form a community of action.

So, first, Lorenzini is right to emphasize that a ‘we' can become a community of action as an effect of Foucault’s writings. This is a major point. However, this passage also makes clear that in so far a ‘we’ is an effect of Foucault’s writings this is (unsurprisingly) a contingent and a historically circumscribed (“necessary temporary”) matter. It’s not something one can expect in advance. I also see no reason to support Lorenzini’s assertion that this ‘we’ is going to be transhistorical a point Lorenzini emphasizes in the quoted passage as well as in other places in the book in part by drawing an analogy with Walter Benjamin.

More subtly, Lorenzini ignores that even in this passage Foucault first insists that “the problem is, precisely, to decide if it is actually suitable to place oneself within a “we” in order to assert the principles one recognizes and the values one accepts.” This strikes me as a more general hesitation about constituting any ‘we.’ To be sure, Foucault does not rule it out, but there is no headlong rush into it either.

And this gets me to the second issue; Lorenzini elides what we may call the ‘anarchic’ sensibility in Foucault. I am going to draw on a passage in Foucault’s On the Government of the Living (his 1979–1980 lecture series). This is not ad hoc because, as I have noted before, this lecture series is absolutely central to Lorenzini’s overall argument. The passage concludes with an aside that warmed my philosophy of science heart (so I quote it first): “Incidentally, having said this, if you like to read some of the interesting philosophy books currently being published—there are not that many—, rather than those making more noise, I recommend Feyerabend’s book on science, which has just come out in Seuil. No one is talking about it, but here is something interesting on the problem of anarchy and knowledge.” (lecture four, 30 January 1980, in Graham Burchell’s translation, p. 79.) The book Foucault has in mind is clearly Against Method.

In chapter 2 of The Force of Truth, Lorenzini calls attention to this very material: “In 1980, however, Foucault no longer speaks of critique, but instead evokes “anarchy” and “anarchism”; however, he makes clear that he does not share the anarchist postulate according to which power is intrinsically bad, and that he still considers a society without power relations to be a mere dream. Foucault’s philosophico-political project, that he here names “anarchaeology,” only shares with anarchy— or, more precisely, with Paul Feyerabend’s anarchist epistemology— a “theoretical- practical attitude” concerning the non-necessity of all power as a “principle of intelligibility of knowledge-savoir itself.” (p. 44)

I think the problem with Lorenzini’s summary of On the Government of the Living is the explicit uniqueness claim (“only shares”) that Foucault’s anarchism is restricted to a “theoretical- practical attitude” concerning the non-necessity of all power as a “principle of intelligibility of knowledge-savoir itself.” For what Lorenzini quotes is all part of Foucault’s “second” response to accusation that he is an anarchist. The first response is: “To which I shall reply: I don’t quite see why the words “anarchy” or “anarchism” are so pejorative that the mere fact of employing them counts as a triumphant critical discourse.” (30 January 1980, p. 79) Foucault then goes on to state where he differs with anarchism. And in this account (partially quoted by Lorenzini), Foucault reiterates “the position I adopt does not absolutely exclude anarchy—anarchy—and after all, once again, why would anarchy be so condemnable?” (30 January 1980, p. 79)

So, another way to read Foucault here is that he agrees with quite a lot with the anarchist stance, but that he rejects two of its explicit commitments: “first, the thesis that power is essentially bad, and second, the project of a society in which every relation of power is to be abolished, nullified—you can see that what I am proposing and talking about is clearly different.” (30 January 1980, p. 78) It’s the second I want to focus on here.

Now, if we apply Foucault’s framework that he sets out in his 1978 Tokyo lecture (again this is crucial to Lorenzini’s overall argument recall yesterday here), Foucault understands, thus, anarchism as an anti-tyrannical philosophical enterprise that wishes to legislate the abolition of power relations and arguably political entities as such. Crucially, on Foucault’s account anarchism does not wish to abolish society (as we learn from Hobbes and Locke a ‘we’) as such. That is to say, the part of anarchism that Foucault rejects (because here it has a family resemblance to the dangerous ideas that led to Fascism and Stalinism and other 19th and 20th century social evils) is the part in which it legislates or wills into being a new kind of 'we.’

Now, what to make of Foucault’s flirt with anarchism, then, is no so easy. And I will bracket that for now. So where are we? As we have seen, Lorenzini’s rhetoric inscribes into Foucault’s genealogical project a kind of teleological dimension toward ‘we’ formation. By contrast, on my view, Lorenzini is insufficiently attentive to Foucault’s more general hesitation about ‘we’ constituting enterprises as such. This is not because he rejects communities of action as such (to resist oppression), but because he is alert to — at least the mature Foucault had become so — how easy they themselves can be transformed into new intensified sources of oppression.