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Foucault and
Postmodern
Conceptions
of Reason
Laurence Barry
Foucault and Postmodern Conceptions of Reason
Laurence Barry
Foucault and
Postmodern
Conceptions
of Reason
Laurence Barry
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2020
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Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
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Preface and Acknowledgments
The context of this work is the ongoing political debate around the socio-
logical fact of multiculturalism in Western societies, and the criticism of
reason and rationality it entails. The novelty of the present-day debates
comes from a specific voice heard in the literature, a voice sometimes
called postmodern, that questions the very basis on which political answers
were traditionally built—reason as a warrant of the possibility to resolve
issues of the common good. Liberal thinkers such as Rawls and Habermas
intend to rescue from these postmodern attacks a form of modern ratio-
nality that preserves the achievability of consensus in the multicultural
public sphere. But postmodern criticism counter-questions the very
attempt to define common norms, arguing that these thinkers are trying
to “commensurate the incommensurable”. In this strand of thought, rea-
son is no longer perceived as the source of the good, but rather as an ille-
gitimate urge to unify, that itself propels injustice.
All the questions raised in this debate on the nature of modern rational-
ity also impact on the conception of what social criticism should or could
be today. Traditionally, it indeed relied on the assumption that a rational
and universally valid standpoint exists together with common norms, an
assumption that no longer holds. The postmodern criticism of reason that
led to this predicament owes much to Foucault’s early inquiries in modern
rationalities and their intertwinement with techniques of power, but
usually ignores the recently published later texts on the Greco-Roman
and early Christian techniques of the self. This book proposes to follow
Foucault’s analyses of reason and rationality in order to show how, in his
v
vi PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Laurence Barry
Contents
1 Introduction 1
Background: Post-truth and Justice 1
Foucault and the Reconstruction of Reason 3
Chapter Headings 10
References 15
vii
viii Contents
Index229
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
1
I use here the term “multicultural” in the broad sense proposed by Yonah and Shenhav
(2005): in their typology, multiculturalism can be summarized by three main strands: liberal,
communitarian, and postmodern (which they further divide into postcolonial, post-national,
and feminist). All share the criticism of the Enlightenment developed above (see for instance
Benhabib (1992)).
1 INTRODUCTION 3
2
In a more recent series of essays on religion, Habermas seems to abandon this strong
position on the possibility of common truth, admitting that in the encounter between secular
and religious worldviews, only the secular are susceptible to change (Cooke 2011, 480–481).
This may show that Habermas himself is inclined after all to abandon strong claims for the
context-transcending powers of reason, for the sake of a more multicultural thinking.
3
Kompridis (2006, 239–240) highlights the internal tension in Habermas’s thought
between his attempt to reach a contextualized consensual truth, and giving it up in favor of
a consensus on procedures alone.
4
The reference to a “post-secular” era in itself acknowledges forsaking the use of reason in
the public sphere. See also note 2 above on Habermas.
4 L. BARRY
The French is, literally, “the despotic light of reason” (DE II #219, 433).
5
(F1998d, 448); see Habermas (1987, 86) on this equation of postmodernism and radical
criticism of reason.
1 INTRODUCTION 5
and place. This distinction is correct if one adds that Foucault also refuses
to attribute any essential meaning to “reason” per se:
Reason is only the general term that covers the variety of forms rationality
can take in practice; for Foucault it is instrumental to this designation.7 It
has no essential value, nor is it an “anthropological invariant” (F1991b,
79) but remains historically and culturally determined. Characteristically,
Foucault analyzes these historically determined forms of rationality
throughout his work. From this perspective, the last years at the Collège
de France, together with the final volumes of the History of Sexuality, offer
just another of these inquiries. Devoted to the concept of ancient Greek
parrhesia and to the care of the self, Foucault’s last studies analyze prac-
tices of thinking and truth-telling (or new rationalities?) that constitute
the self as an autonomous subject (TFR 42; TFR 335; HSe 1–25). These
claims are at odds with his earlier studies of the power-knowledge nexus in
which the individual is produced as a subjugated subject.
The manner in which these later studies should be understood in rela-
tion to Foucault’s diagnosis of modernity and the type of autonomy they
render possible for the modern subject, will be at the center of my dem-
onstration in this work. I would like to suggest that the critical attitude
implied by the care of the self, if properly defined for the modern subject,
allows Foucault to offer an interesting answer to the contemporary absence
of ethical standpoint. He indeed neither limits rationality to the offering
of acceptable justifications for the sake of a hypothetical consensus, nor
does he fall, despite Habermas’s claims, into a radical criticism of reason.
In his own words, he intends instead to perform a “rational critique of
7
This is why Foucault sometimes calls himself a “nominalist;” for instance, speaking of
power in the History of Sexuality I: “One needs to be nominalist, no doubt: power is not an
institution, not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name
that one attributes to a complex strategic situation in a particular society” (HoS 93). In 1980,
he rejects the term for philosophical reasons, yet confirms his refusal of universal categories
(GL 80). In 1983, he reaffirms his commitment to a “nominalist negativism” (GSO 5,
unread).
6 L. BARRY
For Elden (2016, 3), the lectures “give an invaluable sense of how
Foucault’s work was developing.” Elden’s endeavor is to grasp Foucault’s
thought and life in general through the lens of the lectures; he also offers
a thorough reconstruction of the strata that lead to specific claims or for-
mulations in a given historical context of Foucault’s life. My focus here is
narrowed to Foucault’s changing conceptions of reason. The recent com-
pletion of the publication of the 1980’s lectures at the Collège de France,9
that focus on the self-constitution of the subject (but no longer how it is
subjugated by power), allows such a project. These publications have
given way to an extensive literature on “the subject and truth” (Cremonesi
et al. 2016) and the relation of Foucault with ancient Greek philosophy
(Zarka 2002; Guenancia 2002; Gros (ed) 2002; Gros & Levy (eds) 2003).
8
Hence the somehow provocative title given to this work, Foucault and Postmodern
Conceptions of Reason. It is all the more so as Foucault, asked in 1983 to comment on post-
modernism, ironically answers: “what are we calling postmodernity? I am not up to date”
(F1998d, 447).
9
1979–1980 On the Government of the Living (Palgrave, New York, 2014); 1980–1981
Subjectivity and Truth (Palgrave, New York, 2017); 1981–1982 The Hermeneutics of the
Subject (Palgrave, New York 2005); 1982–1983 The Government of Self and Others (Palgrave,
New York, 2010); 1983–1984 The Courage of Truth (Palgrave, New York, 2011).
1 INTRODUCTION 7
The criticism voiced in some of these studies aims at showing how Foucault
“missed the Greeks,” either by misinterpreting them or by overlooking
some essential part of the Greek culture. My intention is different: I would
like to understand why Foucault chose to read the Greeks as he did; what
did he find there that seemed to him relevant to our contemporary time?
My aim would be to make explicit the consequences of these studies for
Foucault’s concepts of modern reason and rationalities. In this endeavor,
my work lies along the lines of Allen’s (2008) and Koopman’s (2013) who
both consider that the late Foucault should not be read in contradiction
to his earlier writings, but rather as rounding out his previous diagnosis of
modernity. Yet I would like to show that the 1978 and 1979 lectures on
governmentality and the liberal exercise of power play a crucial part in this
completion, a point not shared by these authors.10
It is my contention that a focus on the “late Foucault,” as he is revealed
by the last years of lectures at the Collège de France, permits a reappraisal
of his concepts of reason and rationality—concepts that are omnipresent
in his writings. A reappraisal of that kind has not been performed so far;
indeed, Foucault’s definition of the care of the self as an aesthetical enter-
prise led to the overlooking of the rational dimension involved in these
techniques. This project seems to me important, since it would enable
giving an alternative answer to the present-day crisis of social criticism
(Trom 2008). It is my assumption here that by displacing the concept of
reason, along the lines offered by Foucault in his later writings, one might
be able to retrieve such an ethical standpoint. The aim of this book is
therefore to analyze the concepts of reason and rationality as they can be
derived from Foucault’s writings, in order to displace his commonly
admitted “criticism of rationality” toward a more positive view that would
remain compatible with the multicultural predicament. Could Foucault’s
late inquiries help define a form of rationality relevant to the constitution
of a critical attitude that is so crucially missing today?
For two main reasons, this endeavor might initially seem surprising.
The first is that the criticism of Enlightenment, to which Foucault himself
largely contributed, revealed, according to Benhabib (1992, 4), “the illu-
sions of a self-transparent and self-grounding reason, the illusion of a
10
With the exception of academic years 1970–71, 1971–72, and 1973–74, the lectures
always took place from January to March or April (“from the Nativity to the Resurrection,”
says Foucault in 1982 (HSe 395)); hence for simplification I will only mention the calendar
year of the lectures.
8 L. BARRY
11
He has also been criticized for his supposedly “strictly descriptive attitude” (Habermas
1987, 282), and for his “cryptonormativism” (Habermas 1987, 282–286; Fraser 1981,
282). Both Habermas and Fraser however wrote their criticism before the lectures were avail-
able. Habermas also consistently avoids directing the later Foucault (see Kelly 1994, 4).
1 INTRODUCTION 9
I will argue here that such an encounter was rendered possible by the
concept of governmentality, a concept at the heart of the 1978 and 1979
lectures and in the background of the following years. In a 1980 lecture in
Berkeley, Foucault contends that “the point of encounter between the way
people are driven to behave in a certain way and the way they conduct them-
selves is government” (HOW; see also Gros 2001, 507, n. 30). Lemke
rightly mentions that “governmentality” appears as “the missing link”
between the analyses of power and those of the Greeks’ sexuality (Lemke
2002, 51). This Foucaldian concept became known through the summary
of the lectures (published in 1994) and the 1991 book by Burchell,
Gordon, and Miller, The Foucault Effect – Studies in Governmentality. But
it is only with the full publication of the lectures that the importance of the
concept and its relevance for both the analyses of power and those of the
subject becomes apparent.
While Lemke concentrates on the implications for the contemporary
subject of neoliberalism as a novel technique of power (Lemke 2002; see
also Lemke 2019), my intention here is to establish how Foucault’s thesis
that the neoliberal era marks the entrance into a new regime of truth (BBe
18–20) called for further analyses of processes of subjectivation.
Furthermore, the neoliberal techniques of government lift the physical
constraint to uniformization, replacing it by other rational injunctions that
propel “systems of difference” (BBe 259). Hence Foucault’s endeavor to
define “a politics of ourselves” in the form of a new care of the self as an
answer to neoliberal governmentality (BHS 223) is both a form of resis-
tance and interestingly adjusted to our multicultural condition.12
Finally, I would like to argue that the critical attitude implied by the
care of the self is in fact a form of autonomy that Foucault is claiming as
possible, yet not self-evident, for the modern self. According to Allen, one
of the main issues of modern political and social sciences is the paradox of
theorizing the “massive impact that social, political, cultural, and discur-
sive structures have on the very formation of us as individuals,” without
“painting an overly deterministic picture of the role that structures play in
constituting individuals, thereby implicitly denying or at the very least
undermining the possibility of individual subjectivity, agency, and
12
The publication of the 1979 lectures has led to an acute debate on whether Foucault was
a neoliberal enthusiast or a visionary critic of our contemporary modes of government
(Lorenzini 2018; Gamez 2018; Zamora and Behrent 2015): I emphatically stand with the
second option.
10 L. BARRY
Chapter Headings
Focused on the new material presented by the Collège de France lectures
that started in 1970, this book gives only a short introduction to Foucault’s
prior work. The second chapter is dedicated to the understanding of rea-
son as it can be defined within his first writings: from the publication of his
thesis as The History of Madness (HM) until Discipline and Punish (DP),
reason is identified with scientific discourse; The Order of Things (OT) is a
criticism of the human sciences as a modern domain of knowledge, in
which man is entrapped in the vicious circle of being both a transcendental
subject and an object of knowledge. Foucault’s first understanding of the
human sciences is further developed in the analyses of power: sociology,
psychology, and criminology now become instruments in the exercise of
power, both created by and creating a new kind of regime, that of disci-
pline. Most of what has been said about Foucault’s criticism of reason
stems from these writings. Yet I would like to show that Foucault reaches
a point of rupture after Discipline and Punish that will force him to revise
his stance on modernity, the mechanisms of power, and the type of ratio-
nalities they propel.
Foucault’s moment of crisis after the publication of the first volume of
The History of Sexuality is often mentioned in the literature (e.g. Elden
2016, 79; Eribon 2011, 440–441). This crisis is overcome, I would like to
argue, with the 1978 lectures at the Collège de France, Security, Territory,
Population (STPe), as a turning point in Foucault’s thought. They indeed
announce the focus on governmentality that will be the core of his research
until his death, showing that this concept allows him to overcome the
1 INTRODUCTION 11
paradoxes and contradictions of his first analyses of power. It has been less
noticed that the first three lessons of the 1978 lectures are in fact a thor-
ough rereading of his own findings on political economy as set out in The
Order of Things (OT), continued the following year in the 1979 lectures.
The third chapter proposes following that rereading, in order to open a
new point of entry into the concept of governmentality: probability and
statistics, minorized in OT, give a new grid of understanding to modern
phenomena. In this revised analysis, modern power is not solely exercised
in the mode of the disciplinary, but also through the production and man-
agement of freedom.13
The turn to the studies of governmentality also meant a renewed
approach to the relations between truth and power. After 1979, Foucault
indeed displaces the description of his work to “the history of the regime
of veridictions,” in contradistinction to a history of error or a history of
ideology. The fourth chapter shows how Foucault’s late focus on forms of
subjectivity stems from his understanding of very specific features of our
contemporary, neoliberal world: Foucault was indeed strikingly led to
consider, in the course of the 1979 lectures, the possibility that individuals
could be governed without any subjection. By recognizing the importance
of veridiction (or manners of truth-telling) in the mechanisms of the lib-
eral and neoliberal exercise of power, Foucault shows that social con-
straints are not necessarily applied to the bodies; as a result, the process of
subjectivation as subjection is enlarged to other forms of subjectivity.14
The fifth chapter follows Foucault’s analyses on this point, showing
that, in Greco-Roman times, the Christian absolutely subjugated subject
had an alternative in the form of a self-mastering subject. In the conclu-
sion to The History of Sexuality, Foucault remarks that if very similar sexual
practices, that he identified in the Greeks and Early Christians, led to so
different forms of subjectivity, then the effect does not derive from the
practice itself but from the mode of thinking which accompanies it, the
bind to truth and its content. Hence my argument, rather neglected in
existing literature, but which becomes clear with the 1981 lectures: sub-
jectivation is a rational process by which an individual either constitutes
himself or is constituted into a subject. Subjectivation appears as the
13
This chapter was published in 2017 in Materiali Foucaultiani, vol. VI, number 11–12,
and is reproduced here with their kind permission.
14
An earlier version of this chapter is to be published in M. Faustino & G. Ferraro (eds),
2020, The Late Foucault: Ethical and Political Questions (London, Bloomsbury).
12 L. BARRY
reflexive capacity to establish a relation between self and truth. With the
techniques of the self, Foucault has demonstrated a third dimension to
rationality—alongside epistemological knowledge and techniques of
power, it points to rationality in relation to self, the effect on the self of the
way we think. Furthermore, subjectivation does not necessarily mean sub-
jection, and can also take the form of autonomy.
The sixth chapter performs, after Foucault, a genealogy of the modern
subject and attempts to retrieve a diagnosis of our current subjectivity.
Subjectivation relies on the assumption that the access to truth is condi-
tioned by the transformation of the subject. According to Foucault, our
modernity, starting with Descartes, lost that understanding of the care of
the self. Once truth is understood under scientific categories, the idea of
“a price to pay” in order to gain access to truth becomes incomprehensi-
ble. This does not mean that the techniques of the self have stopped func-
tioning; on the contrary, Foucault shows how the human sciences actually
incorporated these techniques in order to mold the modern subject. The
positivism of the human sciences actually led to the production of a mod-
ern self, a subject unaware of the possibility of actively transforming him-
self. The injunction, at the beginning of the 1982 lectures, to “a politics
of ourselves” in the form of a modern care of the self, might then be put
in relation with the conceptualizing of power as governmentality, and the
possibility opened for the modern individual to constitute himself as an
ethical subject, in a manner that remains to be defined.
In the last years of his life, and specifically in the first lecture of 1983,
Foucault refers time and again to Kant’s “What is Enlightenment?”; it is
my contention that Foucault strongly emphasized that text precisely
because it deals with the possibility of a modern form of autonomy. Kant’s
injunction to “exit from tutelage” echoes Foucault’s interest in the
counter-conducts correlative of governmentality and the conduct of con-
ducts. The seventh chapter aims at retrieving from Foucault’s late reading
of Kant the kind of rational transformation that might lead the modern
self to autonomy. This autonomy is a work on the self and remains a bind
to some truth. Yet in contradistinction to both Kant and the late Stoics, it
does not take the form of a universal law.
The eighth chapter will analyze the form of critical attitude that
Foucault suggests adopting in contemporary times. If, as shown in Chap.
7, autonomy is enabled by proper work on the self, it cannot be obtained
without a confrontation with “consensus and stereotypes” as they
appeared, in modern times, in “the public.” Hence the importance given
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