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There is a distinct streak of philistinism in Foucault.
In the 1960s, he was
truly interested and sometimes brilliant about figures in the aesthetic sphere,
and saw it in many ways as a distinct sphere. But as he grew older and more
professional, in the seventies, this sensitivity was submerged, or mostly submerged,
under the sense that the seriousness of life was elsewhere. I’ve seen this
syndrome in dozens of academics, for instance in philosophy. Perhaps it is
especially disappointing in philosophy as many of the high hat philosophers
evidently take science seriously and aesthetics lightly, a sort of side-effect
of living. Men ceasing to read novels- we know that score.
In a 1973 interview with S. Hasumi, Foucault was asked about
literature and, after dragging out his totem pole (Blanchot, Bataille,
Klossowski), he said: “On the other hand, I am more blocked [gêné],
or in any case much less impressed by writers, even great writers as for instance
Flaubert or Proust. Sometimes I entertain myself by saying things like this
about Flaubert, who you know a million times better than me…”
That Hasumi knows Flaubert “a million times better” than
Foucault is a very backhanded compliment. Anecdotally: it is said that Foucault
showed no enthusiasm for offering a position at the College de France to
Barthes was because he considered Barthes not quite a first ranker- Barthes was
just the type of person who know Flaubert a million times better than Foucault.
Eric Marty has written a book with a terrific title: Why did
the 20th century take Sade seriously? By the 20th
century, he doesn’t mean the publishers and the ordinary reader – he means the
pantheon of guys. And I do mean guys – he does not even write about Simone de
Beauvoir, much less treat the most known Sade scholar, Annie Le Brun.
But with this reservation, I have found the book reaching a
spot in me. I too wonder why Sade was “rediscovered” in the 20th
century. One of the chapters in Marty’s book is, naturally, on Foucault, and I
think that is where the book plumbs the question it asks. For it is a question
that presumes that Sade was a twentieth century thing, and went out of fashion
under neoliberalism. Since Foucault is the thinker most clearly identified with
the movement from New Left radicalism of a kind to neoliberalism of a kind, the
reference to Sade can be thought of as a kind of marker. In the sixties, as Marty remarks, Sade was
clearly important to Foucault – the mythic Sade, the alien, mentioned in The
History of Madness in the series with Nietzsche and Artaud. Foucault also (a
fact I didn’t know!) gave a series of lectures on Sade at the University of
Buffalo in the sixties.
But this Sade gave way to a new image of Sade in the
seventies. In one of his interviews, before the publication of his first book
on the History of Sexuality, Sade becomes somebody else, somebody not mad,
somebody who is part of the great turn
towards confessing desire endlessly – and disguising that fact with the myth of
repression. Sade, Foucault says, is a “drill sargeant of sex”, making us go
through our routines again and again. Sex here loses its transgressive aura to
become a discipline, like any other.
Marty puts the reversal on Sade well: “This time we retrjain
nothing of Sade, and Foucault seems rejoin a path which he has made his own,
the analysis proposed by Adorno and Horkheimer, for whom the deep horizon of
Sadean thought is genocide. But while the German philosophers inscribe Sade in
Kant and Kant in Sade, Foucault proposes the reverse operation. After having
believed in the cousinship of Kant and Sade, Foucault returns to a Kant without
Sade, a totally Foucaultian Kant.
Marty, who edited Barthes work, has written about Barthes a
lot: but he doesn’t quite answer the question as to why Barthes took Sade
seriously in the section on Barthes. The book does take up a theme that I think
is a tremendous find, with the find being one of those things that stare us in
the face but, in all their evidence, like the purloined letter in Poe’s story,
aren’t really seen until they are seen. But, oddly, the book loses sight of
Sade as the writer – which one would expect from a Barthes scholar. Sade, after
all, wrote novels and stories, and contributed significantly, as Mario Praz
(who isn’t mentioned) pointed out, to the Gothic as a genre. It is the thinker
and not the writer in Sade who dominates. Yet there are differences that are
overlooked. Sade, one imagines – from his letters, if nothing else – jerked off
to the New Justine as he wrote it. One can’t imagine Kant, on the other hand,
masturbating to the Critique of Pure Reason. It is in the aesthetic realm that
Sade really made his mark, so to speak. The mark of the wanker prophet.
Look around you at popular culture. Sade is still here.
2.
Klossowski, in the essay on the “philosopher-villain” that
begins Sade, my neighbor, uses Sade’s own mocking division between the
philosophers in his “own” works, who are decent people, and the philosophers in
Justine, where, in an ‘inexcusable clumsiness that was bound to set the author
at loggerheads with wise men and fools alike,” “all the philosophical
characters in this novel are villains to the core.”
In a sense, what Sade is doing is employing the Russellian distinction between
type and token, here – the philosopher-villains exist in quoted space. In one’s
own work, where the citational melts away, the philosophers are decent – as
decent as any lab worker who operates on the human product, as they used to say
at the AEC when feeding selected American detritus – the poor, the non-white –
bits of plutonium.
Claudio Magris in the 80s struck back at the elevation of transgression in the
60s: Magris’s image of transgression is not the rioter at Stonewall bu the Nazi
bureaucrat and the leader. I take this as a standard argument against
Bataille’s notion of transgression. Magris, here, aligns himself with Foucault’s
distancing from the Bataille line in the 70s. The argument that is mounted
against Bataille ignores the opposition to power encoded in it, or claims that
the opposition, being circumstantial, depends on who, at any moment, is in
power. Not all opposition is virtuously transgressive. This, as it happens, is
certainly something Bataille is aware of. He lived in a France in which a
radically anti-semitic opposition, spawned by the anti-Dreyfusard, had its own
newspapers and system of writers. And after all, if one supposes that all ideas and systems
strive for power - and didn't Bataille claim not only to be a Nietzschian
critic, but, in a sense, to be Nietzsche - than even a righteous opposition to
all the forms of servitude that constitute the established power is at heart a
hypocritical stratagem, thrown away when the transgressor gains power and can
do as he wants. Otherwise, it would seem, we are talking about organized
futility – as we approach sovereignty, the institutional bonds all dissolve
that give sovereignty meaning.
Foucault, whose essay on the experience-limit touched that
logic, began to backtrack in the seventies, for Magris like reasons – in fact,
by becoming popular, transgression was actually lowering the real level of
transgression in society.
I like Klossowski’s explanation of the Sadeian strategy, which is based on
counter-generality. I like it because it goes so nicely with how the human
limit – the traditional limits on the human right to the earth itself, the
traditional perspective of humans as not, in fact, the subject of all history –
has been erased. This erasure, on the theoretical level, by universal-making –
making, for instance, universal history. Making universal emotions. Making
universal subjects. Making a universal system of production in which
universalized labor leads to infinite substitutability among the workers.
Sade, according to Klossowski, saw how he could game this enlightenment
program:
“The peculiarly human act of writing presupposes a
generality that a singular case claims to join, and by belonging to this
generality claims to come to understand itself. Sade as a singular case
conceives his art of writing as verifying such belongingness. The medium of
generality in Sade’s time is the logically structured language of the classical
tradition: in its structure this language reproduces and reconstitutes in the
field of communicative gestures the normative structure of the human race in individuals…
With this principle of the normative generality of the human race in mind, Sade
sets out to establish a countergenerality that would obtain for the specificity
of perversions, making exchange between singular cases of perversion possible.
These, in the existing normative generality, are defined by the absense of
logical structure. Thus is conceived Sade’s notion of integral monstrosity.
Sade takes this countergenerality, valid for the specificity of perversion, to
be already implicit in the existing generality. For he thinks that the atheism
proclaimed by normative reason, in the name of man’s freedom and sovereignty,
is destined to reverse the existing generality into this countergenerality.
Atheism, the supreme act of normative reason, is thus destined to establish the
reign of the total absence of norms.” [Sade, my neighbor, trans. by Alphonso
Lingis, 14-15]
Sade, then, is rejecting – or perhaps I should say, creating an antithesis - to
one of the fundamental enlightenment discoveries – Bayle’s notion that the
society of atheists would be every bit as moral as the society of believers.
That is, Bayle took it to be a truth about human beings that belief and action
are, in practice, forever divided. To believe we should love our neighbor as
ourself, and to roust out our neighbor from her house and roast her, as a
witch, on the nearest tarred pole, were not anthropologically contradictory
things. To believe that the universe came together at random, and to denounce
witch burning, were also not anthropologically contradictory things. By which I
mean that Bayle did not come to this conclusion by going outward from a logical
analysis of belief, but by suspending any analysis of belief and looking at
what people said and did.
The image of the moral society of atheists was an immense shock in a culture
that had sacralized belief. It runs through the enlightenment like pain ran
through the princess after she’d spent the night sleeping on the pea.
Tolerance, Mandeville’s cynicism, Adam Smith’s invisible hand, they all come
out of the methodological imperative of beginning first with what people did
and said, and suspending belief. But, until one gets used to it, this is a
highly unnatural stance to take. It seemed to eat away at any belief, since
after all, what function did it have?
On the one hand, the space opened up by tolerance made possible the social
notion of happiness – for it was intolerance of belief, more than anything
else, that had acted the role of nemesis in European culture and in the global
conquests of that Europe. On the other hand, it was felt as a sort of numbing
of a once vital organ.
Ps – in some ways, the gothic horrors of Sade are too infernal, too brightly
lit by the Christianity that follows his every step like a shadow. One could
extract another logical line, from the dissolution of all norms to poshlost’ –
the world of banality. Magris, in a sense, goes wrong by not putting in this
vital step. Contra Hannah Arendt, Eichman’s evil is not something that
accidentally arises from banality – banality is the original and primal form of
evil in the world. We follow Gogol here, per Merezhovsky. Instead of Juliette, we
reference Sologub’s The Petty Demon. From which I take this wonderful extract –
Peredonov, the “hero”, a schoolteacher, has just come home to his mistress,
Varvara, who he calls his cousin. He’s promised to marry her, but is suspicious
that she won’t come through on her end of the bargain, which is to make him an
inspector. Besides, Peredenov is suspicious that she is poisoning him. He is
also suspicious, every time he hears someone laugh in front of him, that they
are laughing at him. And, to finish up this summary of his qualities, he
prefers not to think, but believes anything he is told. So Peredenov naturally
decides to torment Varvara by making her believe he has been over at the next-door
neighbours, paying court to their daughter, Marta:
She's covered with freckles," said Varvara, spitefully.
" And she's got a mouth that stretches from ear to ear. You might as well
sew up her mouth, like a frog's."
"Anyway, she's handsomer than you," said Peredonov."I think I'll
take her and marry her."
" You dare marry her," shouted Varvara, reddening and trembling with
rage, "and I'll burn her eyes out with vitriol !"
"I'd like to spit on you," said Peredonov, quite calmly.
"Just try it !" said Varvara.
"Well, I will," answered Peredonov.
He rose, and with a sluggish and indifferent expression, spat in her face.
"Pig !"said Varvara, as quietly as if his spitting on her had
refreshed her. And she began to wipe her facewith a table napkin. Peredonov was
silent. Latterly he had been more brusque with her than usual. And even in the
beginning he had never been particularly gentle with her. Encouraged by his
silence, she repeated more loudly :
"Pig ! You are a pig !"
This joyful scene is interrupted by the entrance of a friend, Volodin. Drinks
and jam tarts are served. And then:
“Suddenly Peredonov splashed the dregs of his coffee cup on the wall-paper.
Volodin goggled his sheepish eyes, and gazed in astonishment. The wall-paper
was soiled and torn. Volodin asked:
" What are you doing to your wall-paper ?"
Peredonov and Varvara laughed.
"It's to spite the landlady," said Varvara. " We're leaving
soon. Only don't you chatter."
"Splendid !' shouted Volodin, and joined in the laughter.
Peredonov walked up to the wall and began to wipe the soles of his boots on it.
Volodin followed his example.
Peredonov said :
" We always dirty the walls after every meal, so that they'll remember us
when we've gone !"
" What a mess you've made !' exclaimed Volodin,delightedly.
" Won't Irishka be surprised," said Varvara, with a dry, malicious
laugh.
And all three, standing before the wall, began to spit at it, to tear the
paper, and to smear it with their boots. Afterwards, tired but pleased, they
ceased.
Peredonov bent down and picked up the cat, a fat, white, ugly beast. He began
to torment the animal, pulling its ears, and tail, and then shook it by the
neck. Volodin laughed gleefully and suggested other methods of tormenting the
animal.
"Ardalyon Borisitch, blow into his eyes ! Brush his fur backwards !"
The cat snarled, and tried to get away, but dared not show its claws. It was
always thrashed for scratching. At last this amusement palled on Peredonov and
he let the cat go.”
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