October 29, 1985

Knowledge is not science; it is science that is a type of knowledge. Which amounts to saying that for Foucault knowledge is fundamentally a practice. Knowledge is actually composed of practices: practices of visibility, practices of statements. Or, if you wish: discursive practices (these are the statements), and non-discursive practices (these are the visibilities).

Seminar Introduction

After Michel Foucault’s death from AIDS on June 25, 1984, Deleuze decided to devote an entire year of his seminar to a study of Foucault’s writings. Deleuze analyses in detail what he took to be the three “axes” of Foucault’s thought: knowledge, power, and subjectivation. Parts of the seminar contributed to the publication of Deleuze’s book Foucault (Paris: Minuit, 1986), which subsequently appeared in an English translation by Seán Hand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).

For archival purposes, the English translations are based on the original transcripts from Paris 8, all of which have been revised with reference to the BNF recordings available thanks to Hidenobu Suzuki, and with the generous assistance of Marc Haas.

English Translation

Edited

Reviewing previous key points, Deleuze argues that the first axis consists of the historical a priori and strata as composed of stable forms of the visible and the statable, offering the example of Herman Melville’s novel, Pierre; or, The Ambiguities, to consider the shift from strata to unstratified elements of visibilities. The opening recap is summarized with the questions: what do you say, what do you see, and what do you make seen? Then, with a second aspect corresponding to the question, what is knowledge? , Deleuze shifts from strata to interstrata, in Foucault from phenomenology toward epistemology, examining knowledge as a discursive and non-discursive practice, truth as the relationship between discursive and non-discursive practices, and the rules for different types of statements. Deleuze examines how the objects of statements take on myriad aspects depending on the regime (e.g. the hospital or prison regime). As the political aspects of speaking and the visible matter to Deleuze, he comments on recent and contemporary examples of this axis, notably the “twisted vitalism” of the Holocaust, medicine without doctors or patients (malades). Reading from ‘The History of Sexuality’ I, Deleuze examines the intersection of contemporary threats of death (death sentence, nuclear war) with management of life, examples showing how Foucault’s method brings forth the supposedly hidden statements existing in plain sight.

 

Foucault at Liberation
Foucault in a discussion at the offices of the French newspaper Libération, 1973. Source: Monoskop.

 

Gilles Deleuze

Seminar on Foucault, 1985-1986

Part I: Knowledge (Historical Formations)

Lecture 02, 29 October 1985

Transcribed by Annabelle Dufourcq; time stamp and additional revisions, Charles J. Stivale

Translated by Mary Beth Mader

 

Part 1

About what we have to do, about what we did last time, what do you have to say? This work should imply a certain sort of collaboration for you, even if you have not read Foucault. It’s about what it awakens in you, do you see any connections to be drawn, things of that nature, in relation to what you know. [Pause] I’m smiling at you to encourage you. [Pause] Okay, it’ll come… [Pause] Who here is doing an undergraduate degree [premier cycle]? So, those of you who are undergraduates, for the next time, I would like you to hand in a small sheet of paper, with your name and address, but especially with what you are doing, which DEUG,[1] which whatever-it-is, and what your areas of interest and study are this year. So. And then, since there are not many of you, I’ll take them one by one as needed. I would like to have this next time. Okay, so . . . I’ll try to recap. I want to say, even what I’m calling your reactions, that can be anything, okay, in whatever field, depending on what we talked about . . . [Pause] Okay, I’ll try to recap.

Our last session was on the topic of: what is an archive according to Foucault? What is archaeology? What we brought to light is a very general idea, namely: seeing and speaking, or more precisely, but this “more precisely” should already seem almost startling to us, and we are not yet in a position to understand it, we just know that the terms that follow are more precise than “seeing and speaking.” Seeing and speaking, or more precisely, the visible and the statable, or, if you prefer, visibilities and statements, make up the two stable forms in each period. In the end, a substantial portion of Foucault’s corpus consists in dividing up and positioning these two forms—I would say that from History of Madness to Discipline and Punish (I’m not saying that Foucault’s books can be reduced to this, I’m saying that they include this)—distributing two forms according to the given historical period: the form of visibility, the form of statability. And I stressed once and for all that certain interpretations of Foucault that sacrifice the conception of the visible to a conception of the statement, of the statable or the sayable, are necessarily led to mutilate Foucault’s thought.

Hence, the visible and the statable comprise two stable forms in each historical period. This should perhaps even be reversed: what defines an historical period is a complex field of visibility and a complex regime of statements. In other words, an historical period is defined by what it sees and what it says. [Pause] Hence: what does “archaeology” mean? It means a discipline that analyzes archives. And what is an archive? It is the audiovisual record of an historical period, the visible and the statable. [Pause]

Consequently, it is through the visible and the statable that we will define an historical period, or that which we can now call “an historical formation.” An historical period is defined by what it sees and what it states. What we will call “an historical formation,” or Foucault sometimes says “a positivity,” is the intertwining [entrecroisement] of the two stable forms of an historical period, the seen and the said, the visible and the statable. Thus, Foucault can take a substantial portion of his corpus to be an analysis of certain historical formations. This way, he can say at the start of a recent book, at the start of The Use of Pleasure, he can say, “yes, one whole portion of my books is historical studies.”

You can see that the historical formation is defined by: a statement regime, a field of visibility. Which implies one thing in particular, and that is that all historical periods, all historical formations, do not see the same thing, do not say the same thing. Visibilities and statements are the variables of each formation. They vary from one formation to another. We saw this in detail, not in much detail, but we saw it in a bit of detail with respect to the two books which present quite striking parallels, History of Madness and Discipline and Punish. In History of Madness, the general hospital in the 17th century is the visibility of that period, the hospital makes madness be seen through one visual category or another. As Foucault says, there is an evidence, taking ‘evidence’ in the sense of visibility, there is an evidence to madness in the general hospital and under the conditions of the general hospital, namely: grouping mad people with vagabonds, jobless people, beggars, etc. This is a visibility of madness, madness is made to be seen, it is made to be seen in the framework of the general hospital. And in the 19th century, the asylum and the foreshadowing of what will be, over the course of the 19th century, the psychiatric asylum, provide a wholly other sort of visibility, that’s a wholly other way to see it.

And in parallel fashion, in the 17th century, at the same time as the general hospital makes madness be seen as one kind or another, the statements of madness, that is, the statements that concern madness, originate there equally, and are statements that revolve around the “discursive object”—as Foucault will put it—around the following discursive object: unreason. Madness is understood as unreason. Don’t say, “that goes without saying,” because . . . [Interruption of the recording] [10:29]

… Don’t say, “that goes without saying,” because unreason as an object of discourse is a perfectly original theme which undoubtedly can only arise in the Classical Age, due to the conception of reason in that age. But subsequently in the 18th century, starting in the 18th century, it is no longer in relation to reason that madness will be stated [énoncée]. It will be stated in relation to entirely different coordinates. To the extent that we can say: the 17th century: the way to see madness: the general hospital; the way to state madness: unreason. With respect to madness, that’s what comprises the historical formation of the “Classical Age.”

We saw that it’s the same thing for the prison. The prison in the 18th century. The prison regime is formed in the 18th century as what? As a new way of seeing crime. At the same time, penal law undergoes a change relative to preceding periods. What is this change? It is the formation of a new type of statement, whose discursive object, the statable object [l’objet énonciatif], is delinquency. Statement of delinquency, prison as the visibility of crime—this, too, defines an historical formation.

So, that was really the first point that I believe I can consider as basically established. There is always this confrontation, at the level of each historical formation, between the visible and the statable. What does a period make seen and see—it’s the same thing. What does it see and make seen? What does it say and make be said? It’s a very solid method, and in my view, very original. We will see why it is ‘original.’ Why, precisely, is it original? Why can Foucault say once again, at the start of The Use of Pleasure, “I do historical studies, but not the work of an historian?” Why is it the work of a philosopher? The new conception of history, what has been called the Annales School, proposes both a history of behaviors, and as I said last time, a history of mindsets. Indeed, I referred you to the example of the anthology, Comment on meurt en Anjou à telle époque [How one Dies in Anjou in a Given Period].[2] How one Dies in Anjou in a Given Period is solely a study of behavior, and also a study of a mindset since what is considered there is the way in which death was conceived, the ideas about death.

Foucault distances himself from this approach. Why? We already have all the elements to answer this question. He does not do the work of an historian. He does not at all say that historians are wrong. He says that his own business is elsewhere. And why? My answer was simply, when I wondered: “but why does he say this, and what does that mean?” My answer was “well, yes, because:” you can see that with the visible and the statable, he claims to ascend—whether he’s right or not is all the same to me—he claims to ascend to a determination of conditions. The visible or visibility is not a behavior, it is the condition under which, it is the general condition under which all behaviors of a period show themselves, are brought to light. Statements are not ideas . . . [Interruption of the recording] [15:39]

Part 2

. . . very important conception of philosophy has always defined philosophy as the search for conditions. Under what conditions is something possible? And that’s what a philosophical question was. If I ask “what is mathematics?”, I do not necessarily do philosophy. But if I ask “Under what conditions is mathematics possible,” then I am doing philosophy. “I do not do the work of an historian” for Foucault thus really means, it seems to me, that Foucault is ascending to the conditions that make the behaviors of a period possible, and the mindsets of a period possible. In other words, Foucault intends to determine pure elements. Hence, in Archaeology of Knowledge, the use of the very unexpected term, a priori. In philosophy, a priori has always meant “independent of experience,” whereas the conditions of experience are a priori, that is, the conditions of experience are not given in experience itself. The visible and the statable are the a prioris—the a prioris of what? The a prioris of a period, the a prioris of an historical formation. Whence Foucault’s very bizarre idea, we’ll have occasion to come across it again: the a prioris are historical. Whereas in Kant, for example, ‘a priori’ and ‘historical’ are opposed, here there are historical a prioris: these are the conditions for visibility, the conditions for statability, which permit the definition of a period. Thus, the visible and the statable are two pure elements. As such, they combine to define the historical formation, that is, to determine the conditions of this formation. Under what conditions is the Classical Age possible? Answer: under the conditions of these certain forms of visibility, of these certain forms of statability.

You can see that this is one thing that sets Foucault’s project apart; I’m not saying which sets it in opposition, but it shows its originality, and the impossibility of identifying it, in fact, with the work of an historian. At a pinch, I would say that historical formations are strata, stratifications. And we will see, here I’m using this word because it seems convenient to me and because it resonates well with the term ‘archaeology’—archaeology is the study of strata—and we will see that one can lend all sorts of senses to this word ‘stratum,’ but the first sense that would justify my using such a word is: a stratum is precisely a composite of visible and statable, an intertwining of visibility and statement. Such that historical formations are strata, are stratifications. And this is one whole axis, one first axis, as it were, of Foucault’s corpus: this archaeological study of stratifications, that is, of historical formations defined by the visibilities that they set out, the statabilities that they put forth.

I say “a first axis” . . . oh, is that right? Would there be other axes? We can indeed ask this question. Doubtless, there will be other axes. Seeing and speaking, the visible and the statable, from the very start, do not exhaust the whole, we can be sure of that, and from the start of his work Foucault is very conscious of this. But if there are other axes, we must wonder what their relations are with historical formations. If there are other axes, perhaps these other axes no longer have anything to do with the stratified. The stratified is defined by composition, the intertwining of two stable forms: the visible and the statable.

However, however, however . . . Is everything stable? Is everything an historical formation? Is everything a stratum? There is a sublime text by Herman Melville, the American novelist. It is so beautiful that I will read it to you. And just because I think it’s a text that would have pleased, that would have infinitely pleased, Foucault. It’s in a very great novel by Melville called Pierre; or, The Ambiguities [1852] I’ll read it to you: “Ten million things were as yet uncovered to Pierre. The old mummy lies buried in cloth on cloth; it takes time to unwrap this Egyptian king. Yet now, forsooth, because Pierre began to see through the first superficiality of the world, he fondly weens he has come to the unlayered substance. But, far as any geologist has yet gone down into the world, it is found to consist of nothing but surface stratified on surface” [ils n’ont trouvé que strate sur strate]. Did you catch that? That’s the archaeologist. “To its axis, the world being nothing but superinduced superficies. By vast pains we mine into the pyramid; by horrible gropings we come to the central room; with joy we espy the sarcophagus; but we lift the lid—and” And, and, ellipsis. “no body is there!—appallingly vacant as vast is the soul of a man!”[3]

There you have it . . . let’s be silent for a little bit because it’s, I don’t know if you are sensitive to the beauty of a text like this. So, I’ll read it while translating it into terms that are immediately close to Foucault. All the historical formations are strata, and what are we doing, we others—I’m voicing Foucault, here—we other archaeologists, what are we doing? We’re going from stratum to stratum, we’re going from formation to formation. We shouldn’t too hastily suppose that we’ve reached unstratified substance. Is there an unstratified substance? If there is an unstratified substance, it is beyond seeing and beyond speaking, beyond the visible and beyond the statable. For the visible and the statable join to constitute the strata and to form strata following one formula or another. We go from stratum to stratum, but have we reached unstratified substance? As far—so, I’m hardly transposing here—as far as the archaeologists have gone down into the depths of the earth, they have found only stratum upon stratum, they have found only historical formation upon historical formation, for all the way to its axis, the world is nothing but superimposed strata. “By vast pains we mine into the pyramid; by horrible gropings we come to the central room.”—that is, we are going from formation to formation seeking unstratified, we arrive at the unstratified substance, at least at the place of unstratified substance, the central chamber of the pyramid. All the faces of the pyramid are strata, but all of these strata are there to cover the central chamber of the pyramid, where unstratified substance bubbles. Why does it bubble? Because if the strata are solid, we must imagine the unstratified as strangely liquid, or worse, as gaseous. “We come to the central room; with joy we espy the sarcophagus.” We say: here is where the unstratified is. “We lift the lid . . . and no body is there!—appallingly vacant as vast is the soul of a man!”

So, you can perhaps sense that once we will have completed this axis, we will notice—and it should have been said from the start, might as well say it from the start—that this was only one first axis. Strata or historical formations, that is, the great composites of visible and statable, do not exhaust the thought of Foucault. There will be another axis and then perhaps still another axis. There will be plenty of axes to this thought, perhaps the novelty of Foucault is to have set up a new coordinate system.

But now we’re looking at the first dimension, only the first axis or the first dimension, of the coordinate system that I will summarize for the nth time: seeing and speaking, a combination of the visible and the statable, depending on the period, that is, according to each historical formation that is determinable as a stratum. And visibilities and statements are the pure elements of each stratification. Such that—I’m repeating—I must ask two fundamental questions of a stratum or an historical formation, which are not historical questions, but actually philosophical questions: what do you see? and what do you make seen? And what do you say? Or, using the more technical terms that we saw last time: what are your forms of proof? What are your discursivities? There you go. [Pause] That was what we dealt with last time.

And we had barely begun the second question, which was no longer “What is an archive? What is archaeology?”, that is, the search for the two pure conditions. You see why he uses, why he must appeal to, a word like ‘archaeology’ to distinguish himself from history, to distinguish himself from the historian—the archive is not history, it’s the determination of the two elements, that is, the conditions of visibility and statability. And we had opened up a second topic, that is, ‘what is knowledge [savoir]?”, “what is knowledge?”. And we said the same thing: to know is to see and to state. That made a nice sequence, it’s a bit as if, at first glance, the historical formation expressed objectively what knowledge tells us subjectively. Knowledge and historical formation . . . it still seems bizarre to us: knowledge and historical formation are but one. Knowing, in fact, is seeing and stating. That is, to know is to combine something of the visible with something of the statable. Consequently, all knowledge is historical. And that’s just about where we were. So, I repeat my invitation: Are there any comments on this first point about the archive? No? There’s no problem, no unclarity? It’s very clear? Okay, well then let’s continue. [Pause]

How can we understand this kind of identity between knowledge and historical formation? The identity of knowledge and historical formation is the archive itself. But how should we understand it concretely? Actually, knowledge has neither object nor subject. Knowledge [savoir] as Foucault conceives of it is not the knowledge [connaissance] of an object by a subject. Knowledge [savoir] has neither object nor subject. What does it have, then? Well, there’s nothing to do now but let oneself go. We’ll see that we’ll find new difficulties concerning the question “what is knowledge?”, but for now “it’s all downhill.” We know how to define knowledge: knowledge has neither object nor subject, it has elements. It has two elements: the visible and the statable. You’ll tell me: “the visible is its object and the statable is its subject.” No, not true, not true. There are two pure elements that are absolutely irreducible. In other words, there is nothing beneath knowledge or prior to knowledge.

Ah, there’s nothing prior to knowledge or beneath knowledge! Here, we’ve got to monitor our words, because we just let it be understood a while ago that there would be dimensions other than the historical formation or the stratum. But if knowledge is but one with the strata, with the historical formations, then the other dimensions, the other axes that are not reducible to the historical formation, are they not reducible to knowledge, either? No, doubtless, they are not reducible to knowledge, but they are not beneath knowledge or prior to knowledge. Can we at this point conceive of what these other axes could be? Perhaps they are beyond strata, or inter-strata, but they are not “beneath,” and they are not “prior to.”

That is what explains one thing on which Foucault insisted, it must be said, from the start, that is, his opposition to phenomenology. What form did this take? According to Foucault, there is no experience that can be called ‘wild’ or ‘originary.’ ‘Wild’ or ‘originary experience’ were terms used by [Maurice] Merleau-Ponty, and Foucault, on a number of occasions, signaled his departure from all phenomenology in this way: there is no originary experience. Even further, in Archaeology of Knowledge, he will tell us: in History of Madness, there was still an ambiguity, certain pages could lead one to believe in an originary experience of madness. That is, certain pages were still from the point of view of a phenomenology of the mad person. And he rejects this and says ‘no,’ these pages, he says, might have said this, but in any case, that’s never what he had in mind. What replaces phenomenology, is what? It is literally, says Foucault, an epistemology [une épistémologie]. An epistemology, that is, there is no experience that is not grasped in a knowledge. In other words, on a stratum, there is only knowledge, all is knowledge. Which implies what? Which implies that [savoir] knowledge, for Foucault, will have an entirely other sense than [connaître] knowing. Knowledge . . . Yes?

A student: [Inaudible remarks]

Deleuze: Why is the sentence ‘I know something’ not possible?

The student: [Inaudible remarks]

Deleuze: On the contrary. “I know something” is possible. Because statements have objects that are proper to them, objects that belong to them, that do not exist outside of them. These objects are discursive objects. So, ‘I know something’—what’s more, visibilities themselves have objects, objects that are their own. To know is to see and to state, it is to combine the visible and the statable. There are objects of visibility, there are objects of stating [objets d’énonciation], discursive objects. So, to say “I state something” is perfectly possible, “I see something” is perfectly possible. For example, “I state delinquency,” “In the prison, I see crime,” “At the general hospital, I see madness,” “I state unreason.” I would say: unreason, delinquency, are objects that are properly discursive. Prison, the general hospital, are places of visibilities. I can perfectly well say “I see something,” but this something is internal to knowledge, it’s not an object that would exist independently of knowledge or that would preexist knowledge. Thus, I can say “I know something,” provided we understand that the ‘something’ is internal to knowledge, that is, is a variable of knowledge. [Pause]

So . . . Knowledge [savoir] cannot be reduced to knowing [connaissance]—what does this mean? Further, there is a radical difference between knowledge [savoir] and science. Such that we would have to retract the word I just proposed a while ago, the word ‘epistemology,’ if it were taken in the strict sense, namely “concerning science.” In fact, Foucault’s epistemology concerns knowledge [savoir] and not particularly science. Hence, knowledge [savoir] is not necessarily scientific and cannot be reduced to a knowing [connaissance.] What does this mean? It means there are — you will see, maybe this will take us further along— that there are thresholds of statements, there are thresholds of statements. What is a threshold of statements? It’s a level on which basis a statement can be qualified as one kind of statement or another. In other words, for example, there is a threshold for scientificity. The threshold for scientificity must be defined by the features on the basis of which, when statements possess these features, those statements are deemed ‘scientific’ or ‘statements of knowing’ [énoncés de connaissance]. Moreover, analyzing these thresholds, Foucault even distinguishes a number of thresholds that refer to science: a threshold he will call that of “epistemologization;” a threshold he will call that of “scientificity;” and a threshold of “formalization.”

For example, mathematics reached the top threshold of science, the threshold of formalization. But other sciences have not attained it and accept a threshold of scientificity. However, if one thus defines science as a mode of knowledge [savoir], well, then one says that knowledge [savoir] is: any statement insofar as it its combinable with visibilities. There are thresholds of visibility that make vision become scientific. There are thresholds of the statement that make the statement become scientific. But one shouldn’t become fixated on science, because, as soon as I say that, I say to myself: well, yes, this conception of Foucault’s is very interesting.

We will see why it is very interesting, it’s very interesting because, in addition, it opens up thresholds: starting from what threshold does a statement become political? What are the thresholds of politicization of a statement? [Pause] I will say very simple things, but things that seem important for the analysis of historical formations. Understand that at this point we must be very, very careful. It’s always idiotic to say, “this has existed forever,” nothing has existed forever. Let’s take an example: anti-Semitism. There have always been anti-Semites. Okay, but saying this is of very little interest. What starts to become interesting? It’s if I ask: in what historical formations has anti-Semitism given rise to political statements? And there can be multiple answers to this: in this historical formation, in that one, too, etcetera. Or else there may be an anti-Semitism of public opinion that is not taken up into the political statements of a period, that does not enter or does not substantially enter the political statements of a period.

To put it otherwise: When do anti-Semitic statements cross the threshold of politicization? Now that’s becoming a good question. Good . . . and likewise for everything! I mean: I’ll speak of a threshold of politicization, and that amounts to what? It’s that statements imply rules of formation and we will see that this idea is so important that it will carry us very far. Every statement has its rules of formation. Well then, these formation rules are not therein exhausted, but they make possible the determination of a threshold, which means the statement belongs to one threshold or another. There are formation rules without which a statement cannot be political. There are formation rules without which a statement is not diplomatic. There are formation rules without which a statement cannot be religious, etc.

One must thus not only speak of a threshold of scientificity for possible statements, one must speak of a threshold of politicization, of a threshold of ethicization—starting when, and from which threshold, is a statement a moral statement? This does not at all go without saying, all of this—of a threshold of aestheticization . . . When one expresses, for example, problems of the sort: “when does nature take on an aesthetic value?”, that’s interesting. Either it’s a false problem, or it’s very interesting, we don’t know; only analysis will tend to let us know. But “when does nature begin to take on an aesthetic value?” means “when do statements about nature reach, cross, the aesthetic threshold of the period?” Hence: the need to find what the aesthetic threshold of the period is, and how statements on nature cross this threshold. And, likewise for visibilities; visibilities, too, have a threshold. Each period sees. The period sees, okay, but what are we to say, ultimately, about public opinion? The statements of public opinion. They, too, have a threshold.

You see: each formation . . . This now allows me to enrich the earlier notion of the archive. I was saying a while ago, I was saying—and that was the first determination—the archive is a stratification, it’s a stratum as an historical formation, that is, it was the first determination of the stratum—it’s a combination of the visible and the statable. That already makes for a certain thickness of the stratum. Now, I can add that the stratum is a stacking of varyingly oriented thresholds. A stacking of thresholds—and here this really takes into account the word ‘stratum,’ and you see how it enriches the notion of archaeology—a stacking of varyingly-oriented thresholds according to which statements can be deemed “political statements from a particular formation,” “aesthetic statements,” “scientific statements,” etc.

This will perhaps allow us to specify the idea of a regime of statements or statement regime. What does the statement regime comprise? It comprises at least three things. A statement regime comprises the determination of the stratum on which statements are produced, that is, the determination of the historical formation, the determination of the family of statements to which the statement belongs, and the determination of the threshold (is it a political statement, a juridical statement, an aesthetic statement, etcetera?). You will notice that statements in the same family can belong to different thresholds, statements of the same threshold can belong to different families. For example, in one same historical formation and at the level of one same science, that is, at the level of one same threshold, the threshold of biology, you will have evolutionary statements and anti-evolutionary statements that belong to the same formation, that is, to the same regime—and yet they are not in the same family, and nevertheless they have the same threshold. Thus, the formation, the family, the threshold, etcetera, are features of the stratum. Let’s move on.

So, knowledge [savoir] is not science, it is science that is a type of knowledge [savoir]. Which amounts to saying that for Foucault knowledge [savoir] is fundamentally a practice. Knowledge [savoir] is actually composed of practices: Practices of visibility, Statement practices [pratiques d’énoncé], or, if you wish: discursive practices (these are the statements), non-discursive practices (these are the visibilities).

And the true, what is that? Does it have a meaning? Well, yes, the true is, we always come back to this, it’s the combination of the visible and the statable. But in what case would the combination prejudice a truth? Now, here we might have a problem, and Foucault, in any case, will align himself with a history of the true. A history of the true. A history of truth. And in a certain sense, Foucault is entitled to suppose that he is realizing, at least in part, a fundamental element of Nietzsche’s enterprise, namely, a “history of truth.” But why is there a history of truth? There is a history of truth precisely because knowledge [savoir] is a matter of practice(s). Knowledge [savoir] is a matter of practice(s) and the true is the relation between discursive practices and non-discursive practices. Put otherwise, the true, the truth, is inseparable from the practices that produce it, the true, the truth, is inseparable from a procedure [procédure]. And this is what I was pointing out last time, in a way that was still very vague, namely: we can reserve the term ‘procedure’ [procédure] to designate the relation between the two practices: discursive practices of statements; and non-discursive practices of seeing, of visibility.

We keep the word ‘procedure,’ okay, good, and the true is never separable from the procedures by which one not only attains it, but one produces it. Actually, the notion of truth . . . So, here’s a statement, or what appears to be a statement—okay, it’s a statement: “I want the truth”, “I want the truth.” We’ll have reason to wonder: what is a statement? Because you can surely tell that we have not yet addressed the essential problem, namely, what does Foucault call a statement? Is it the same thing as a sentence? In any case, we’re starting off from a sentence, at least for the time being, since we lack the means to do otherwise; we’ll go very slowly in our analyses. “I want the truth.” Who is it who says that? What is this sentence? Actually, it is perhaps not a statement, we can already sense that, in fact, statements and sentences will not be the same thing. Why? Because this sentence does not tell me much. If I say to you, “Consider the sentence: ‘I want the truth,’” you immediately want to know “but who is it who can say such a thing?” There are many people who can say this, but they vary so much. Now we’re making a lot of progress, it’s always when we aren’t expecting it that we make progress, because shouldn’t we have to say that there are as many statements in the sentence “I want the truth” as there are people to say this sentence? But at the same time, we lose ground because that would mean that the statement depends on whoever says the sentence. Perhaps, but not only that. So, we’ll set that aside because we don’t have the wherewithal, but we’ll just keep it set aside. We’ll have to return to this point, it will be central for the question: what is a statement, what is the difference between a sentence and a statement? I’ll return now to: “I want the truth”, “I want the truth”. Who says that and what does he or she want when they say, “I want the truth?” What is his or her object? Because we saw in what sense, following the question that you asked, we saw in what sense one could speak about an object, about an object of a statement, about an object of visibility. “I want the truth.”

When Descartes says, “I want the truth,” if it’s Descartes who says it, he does not hide what he wants: He wants the thing in person, he wants presence. He wants evidence. Except it is not possible to attain evidence. He wants the thing in person as an idea. The thing in itself as an idea.

When in the 18th century, [David] Hume says, “I want the truth,” what does he want? He wants signs. Or even [Thomas] Hobbes, a contemporary of Descartes. He does not want the thing in person, that doesn’t mean much to him, the thing in person. He wants signs. Signs on the basis of which he could infer the true. But the true will never be given. It will always be inferred on the basis of something other than itself. The more probable the inference, the surer the truth. So look, here you go, wanting the truth—now things start to get more precise—“I want the truth” gives rise to two families of statements since… [Interruption of the recording] [56:45]

Part 3

… This is the highly nuanced idea of Foucault’s. You’ll really have to hold these two things in your mind at once. Each period says everything and shows everything. That’s one thesis. I’ll try to list them numerically. Thesis 1: each period, each historical formation, says everything and shows everything. Thesis 2: visibilities and statements are not given immediately, they must be extracted. There you go, we’ll consider these two aspects.

The first aspect goes fairly quickly, that is: there is nothing secret and nothing hidden. This comes down to saying: well, yes, if you consider statements—only, as an aside: the problem will pop back up again at us immediately afterwards. “If you consider statements . . .”, right, but how am I going to find the statements? If you consider the statements, you will surely see that everything is said, if you consider the visibilities, everything is shown, everything is given, obviously. And even, even before knowing what a statement is, or what a visibility is, you have to rid yourself of ready-made ideas. Ready-made ideas consist in believing that discourses, the discursive, hide… [Interruption of the recording; an audio distortion is heard] [58:42]

… You don’t have to be all that clever to see this. The rules that determine the politicization of a statement, that is, its political nature, you see that politicians never lie and that, in a sense, they say everything, with a radical cynicism. That is, it’s stupid to say, “they lie.” They absolutely do not lie. Take what is currently happening, whether it’s in the election campaign, the right, it says, but it says exactly what will happen to us after the elections, but we know this, we know this. [Jacques] Chirac, he’s not at all a liar, he’s a truthteller. They have no need to hide anything whatsoever from us, we know very well what will happen to us, we know it very well, they’re not hiding it from us: identity checks—right, well, we know that young guys who are a bit brown will be in for those. We can’t say they’re lying to us, they’re proclaiming it to us. That business leaders can fire employees without the ministry of labor having any say in it, we can’t say that this is being hidden from us. They say absolutely everything, they have nothing to hide, you know, politicians. Well, anyway, when they do have something to hide, those are entirely personal things: when they are corrupt, when they steal money, but, come on, that’s not what we mean, that’s not what’s important, that’s not what’s serious.

But apart from that, their programs, they are always absolutely faithful to their programs. Back at the very start, when most of you were not here, I took up another case: the speeches of the pope. There, too, one should never say that a speech is either lying or meaningless, or that it’s spouting empty words. When the pope speaks to us about the Holy Virgin, I said, and here, again, one must take into account the threshold of religiosity for statements. He is not spouting empty words, nor is he speaking anachronistically. He is speaking exactly according to the rules of the religious statement—obviously, he observes the rules of the religious statement, without which a statement would not have crossed the threshold of religiosity, and making his statements cross the threshold of religiosity is the very least the pope could do, otherwise, what would happen!?—he tells us something very important, namely, that ecumenism, that is, a religious policy about the unity of Christianities, of Catholicism and of Protestantism, etcetera—has had its day and that he is reintroducing universality, properly Catholic universalism, against ecumenism. Indeed, the problem of the Virgin being then, as now, a part of these points of friction between Catholicism and the Reformation, it goes without saying that the intense love of the pope for the Virgin implies something that the Reformed, that the Protestants, fully grasp. Thus, we can’t say that he spouts empty words, but by conforming to the rules according to which a statement is religious, he says absolutely everything. And when he kisses the earth, and he speaks all the languages, and he feels the need to say hello every time he lands in a country, speaking the language of the country—there, too, it’s not, as people say, to put on a show, it’s to claim the apostles’ gift of languages. And this has a meaning in the context of Catholic universality, this has an extremely precise meaning, namely: it’s a type of statement that says exactly what it means.

And I appealed to the text—I refer you to it, for those of you who love Proust—when, in In Search of Lost Time, Proust stages an ambassador by the name of Monsieur de Norpois, Monsieur de Norpois is given two pages in In Search of Lost Time, splendid pages in which Monsieur de Norpois explains that diplomatic language has specific rules — Foucault would say: there is a threshold for the diplomaticity of statements — And that given the rules of the diplomatic statement, the meeting reports, for example, between ministers from different countries, say exactly all that is true, there is never anything hidden. Once we know the formation rules for statements in a given domain, absolutely nothing can be hidden from us. What do you think they could hide?

When Reagan announced, for example, that he’ll lower taxes, and that, as a result, he’ll dismantle the institutions of social welfare, you can’t say that he’s lying or that he’s hiding something. It’s obvious. It’s obvious. It’s something evident. I mean: they always say . . . You can’t say that Hitler ever hid anything whatsoever. I mean, you would have, in fact, had to never have read a single line from Hitler in order to judge that Hitler hid anything whatsoever. It would be very interesting to ask oneself, it would be a problem suited to Foucault, but it’s to some extent the problem that Jean-Pierre Faye took up: what are, and how can one speak of, properly fascist statements? How do they appear? How do statements of a new type, fascist statements, appear in a political landscape? Moreover, far from hiding the goals of fascism and the means of fascism, Hitler is the initiator and the inventor of a regime of statements that from then on will be recognized as the form of Nazi statements and even of fascist statements. That’s why it’s very interesting to read the newspapers, because in a sense, everything is said, there’s nothing secret.

In addition, even in his own works, I would like… in his own works, Foucault returns a number of times and in a very interesting way to the speech of the humanitarian [philanthrope]. He will show that the humanitarian says, I mean, he says exactly everything, and only literally. To know the most obscure aspects of a period, what is apparently the most hidden, all one need do is to take literally, but quite literally, the discourse of the humanitarian. The rawest and most cynical aspects are all on display in the discourse of the humanitarian. And this will benefit us later, that’s why I’m discussing it starting now, since we’ll see that one of the bases for Foucault’s critique of humanism has its source in his critique of the humanitarian’s discourse. But to critique does not at all mean to extract what is secret. It’s a very different operation, it’s extracting the rules that a given type of statement obeys, but mind you, the rules that a given type of statement obeys are not given, but they are absolutely not secret, hidden. They are not given because they are rules. Rules are not given. What is given are the products, that is, the statements themselves, and that only if you find them following the rules.

Hence: the discourse of the humanitarian. The first great case of an analysis of the humanitarian’s discourse, that is, of the corresponding statement regime, is the liberation of the mad at the end of the 18th century and the start of the 19th century. Roughly simultaneously in America and in France. [Pause] In France, it was with [Philippe] Pinel. Pinel, who at the time is called a great humanitarian and who liberates the mad from their chains. Unchain the mad people. There you have it, unchain the mad people, and I checked before coming, Petit Larousse, “Pinel,” there is—okay, so, this is a statement, a statement—what’s said for Pinel, and why not?, is: “In the asylums, he replaced violence with gentleness. He is a great humanitarian for having done this.” And there is a famous anecdote, for which Foucault supplies the source: it’s Pinel’s son, who recounts the monumental meeting between the deformed monster and the great humanitarian. It is [Georges] Couthon, a member of the National Convention, a paralytic regicide—he had voted for the death of Louis XVI. He was infirm, paralyzed, he got around in a little cart, and Couthon comes to see Pinel at the asylum and says to him, “Friend, you yourself are mad, since they tell me that you want to free these base creatures.” Pinel looks at him from his full height and says: “Yes, citizen, but I’ll succeed.” And the other fellow says: “So much the better for you, but don’t let them escape!” And away he goes, pushed in his chair—the monster—and the great humanitarian accomplishes his feat, he breaks the chains of the mad. Okay.

Foucault is not against this, he says: “okay, so be it, but . . .” This will put us a bit on the trail of: how have we found statements? He says: you should not simply stop at this filial tale, which is very lovely, but that’s about it . . . Because you’ve got to look at the pronouncements of Pinel himself, what are those about? Well, those do interest us directly. In his pronouncements, Pinel indeed talks about: “liberating the mad, releasing them from their chains.” Now that is a doctrine, it can’t be denied, and in fact the mad will no longer be chained up, at least they are no longer immediately chained up. But what replaces the chains? Pinel does not hide this, the entire method is based on this: the mad person much constantly be seen, that is, monitored, that he be constantly seen and monitored, and constantly judged. And Pinel lets out the two important words that will put us on the trail of statements: the gaze (regard) and judgment.

In other words, what will replace material chains is the monitor’s [surveillant] look and perpetual judgment, the perpetual gaze from the monitor and perpetual judgment from the caregiver. Why do I stress this? The gaze leads us to visibility—the mad person must be visible twenty-four hours a day, and judgment leads us to a type of statement. The status of madness is still defined in terms of visibility and the statement. Perpetual looking, perpetual judgment. Why? Here, too, I can put . . . so, I can divide a sheet of paper in two, and put on one side what humanitarianism seems to be. Eliminate the chains, first thing.

Second thing, Pinel’s assurances are constant: the mad person is not guilty of being mad. In the 17th century, in the statements of unreason, the mad person was in a certain sense basically guilty of being mad, just as the devotee [le passionné] was guilty of his passions, guilty of not following reason. The concept of unreason ensured the guilt of the mad person: the mad person is guilty of being mad. Pinel’s humanitarian statement: the mad person is not guilty of being mad. But as Foucault says—but Pinel’s writings say it at much greater length—Pinel’s idea is that the mad person has stopped being guilty of being mad, the mad person is innocent, which is a great increase in humanity. But in his innocent madness, he is responsible for that which, in this madness, disturbs the moral order and the social order. The mad person is no longer guilty of being mad, he is responsible for that which, in his madness, itself innocent, disturbs the moral order and the social order.

In other words—this is terrific—what Pinel did is a magisterial move: he made statements on madness cross the moral threshold. It’s because of the disturbance the mad person brings to the moral order . . . The mad person is innocent, but this innocent madness leads him to disturb the moral and social order. He is responsible for what disturbs the moral and social order and is no longer guilty. The statement on madness crosses the moral threshold but—Foucault takes care to specify, and he is entirely right for the whole beginning of the 19th century—it does not in the slightest cross the epistemological threshold, the threshold of science. To the extent that Pinel never speaks in the name of a knowledge [connaissance] of madness, he speaks in the name of morality. It’s only quite a bit later that a psychiatry appealing to a knowledge [connaissance] of madness will develop; at that point in time, statements about madness will have crossed the threshold termed ‘epistemological.’ But what Pinel does is another thing altogether: he makes statements on madness cross the moral threshold.

Which amounts to saying what? If you follow the letter of Pinel’s discourse, you see two things there. On the one hand, you see that there are chains that are better than physical chains. What are the chains that are better than physical chains? It’s the monitor’s look and the judgment of the caregiver. What are these chains made of? It’s because if . . . Right, second point: there is a responsibility that is deeper than all guilt. That is, deeper than the guilt of being mad, there is the responsibility that the mad person has when he infringes on the moral order and the social order. The moral threshold of statements on madness. And consequently, how does the asylum operate in the 19th century as opposed to the situation in the 17th century? They break the mad person’s chains, but what are they going to confine him in? They will confine him in a kind of familial model. That’s what Foucault shows very, very well and in the end, psychoanalysis—psychoanalysis is perfect, because it consummates, it brings to perfection the project of 19th century psychiatry. It does not break with it at all, he says. For if you examine how the asylum is to be set up according to Pinel, the look and the judgment on which basis the mad person will be held responsible for disturbances he causes in the moral and social order—that’s the situation of the child in a familial model. And never will psychiatry give up this familial model. And the caregiver is not treated as a scholar, but as a father, and Pinel is the first father in this new treatment of the mad.

However, can one say that something is hidden? No. Nothing in the discourse of the humanitarian of the asylum, nothing, is hidden. Moreover, if the mad person persists in disturbing the moral and social order, at that point, yes, at that point, he must be punished. So, is he then put back in chains? Yes, they put him back in chains, frequently they put him back in chains. But otherwise, Pinel explains himself with great ingenuity, and he says, roughly—the passages Foucault provides are unequivocal, and Foucault summarizes, he does not interpret, he summarizes—that madness must no longer frighten. On the other hand, and this is the foundation for all therapies for madness at the start of the 19th century, the mad person must be afraid. The mad person must be afraid. It never occurred to the 17th century, which chained up mad people, that the mad should be afraid. I don’t mean—one mustn’t conclude the reverse—that the 17th century was terrific, because they sure saw their share of the mad! But they didn’t say “what we need is for the mad to be afraid;” they treated them like animals. But they were afraid of the mad, and that’s why they treated them like animals, because they were afraid of them. All of that changes with Pinel, really: it’s the mad person himself who should be afraid. Can you believe it? There’s no need to do any interpreting here to be able to say . . . this is actually a way that the bourgeoisie fundamentally reassures itself with regard to the problem of madness: they’re the ones who should be afraid, not us, it’s not for us, we normal ones, to be afraid of the mad, they’re the ones who should be afraid. And this theme is the fear that they should feel about what will happen if they disturb the moral and social order of the hospital.

And all the rules, all the statements on madness will be about that: a scale of penalties, the mad person is supposed to live in fear, which will prevent him precisely from disturbing the moral order and the social order. Thus, this scale of penalties runs from a shower, which is not at all presented by Pinel as a therapeutic tool, it is presented as a means for causing fear. The suddenness of the punishment! It is crucial that the punishment be sudden. And on this point the statements say it all. For example, with all the caregivers of the period you have a mad person who picks up a pebble, while strolling. The monitor is there and watches him; the mad person must constantly be monitored. He picks up his pebble and the monitor says to him, “Watch out, there! What have you got there in your hand? Drop the pebble . . .” If he holds onto the pebble . .  . He’s got to be afraid: the next time, he won’t pick up the pebble, he will have understood that he’s not supposed to pick up the pebble. He is no longer guilty of being mad, sure, right . . . but be careful, here! He is innocent, completely! He is innocent, but he is responsible for the disturbances he causes to the public order, that is, to the moral and social order. He picks up a pebble: but that’s a disturbance. It disturbs the social order . . . Okay, and so, if he doesn’t drop it, he’s in for it. And the suddenness of the punishment, once again, is a crucial factor. There we are.

Likewise, in Discipline and Punish, you find a lengthy analysis of the discourse of the prison humanitarian. And it’s very interesting because at the same time as the prison, as we’ve seen, penal law becomes a law whose statements are statements on delinquency. However, delinquency is a new category. It’s an object of a statement, it’s what I earlier called a discursive object. And we notice that in this penal law, since at that juncture there was a whole renewal, it seems that there was above all an alleviation of the punishments, an alleviation of the penalties. And the humanitarian achieves a humanization of the penalties. In particular, tortures tended to disappear slowly; the prison replaces tortures. In fact, in the period when there were no prisons, sanctions were of the type: torture, exile, forced labor. Exile, the galleys. A regime of penalties does not need prison, you know. It’s not necessary, you have legal systems without prisons. In any case, prison does not come from the law, Foucault showed this definitively. The penitentiary regime does not at all come from the law. On the contrary, you have all kinds of law that do not include prison, or that include prison only in very specific cases of very rare offences.

So, again, how does one punish in the 17th century? There are the galleys, there is exile, there are tortures, that in itself covers an impressive range of punishments. The case of lettres de cachet, where there certainly is confinement, is a case that Foucault studied very closely. We’ll come back to this very bizarre institution from the French monarchy, lettres de cachet, where, at the demand of the family—the lettre de cachet is exactly like what is today called “voluntary” placement—one locks a person up. Placement called “voluntary” in psychiatry today is the direct descendant, it seems to me, of the lettres de cachet. But prison is not necessary to a scale of penalties. Thus, when the prison comes about, at the same time penal law undergoes changes, for its part, independently, and there is what is called a quantification of punishments; instead of torturing people, they are given two years of prison, three years of prison, etc. The discourse of the humanitarian.

But here, too, Foucault says, we must look more closely. For if we make an effort to look, what do we see? And here, too, it’s easy to see, and it is said. The statements of the period stress significantly that criminality is in the process of changing. If we continue further, in the statements from today, we find statements of the same sort, the development of criminality. What does this mean? It means that between the 17th and the 18th centuries, there was a very interesting phenomenon, which has been very, very well analyzed by an historian called [Pierre] Chaunu, a contemporary, modern historian called Chaunu. He gives a very interesting history, he says that between the 17th and 18th centuries—this is roughly, I’m really condensing his study—crimes against persons regressed, while crimes of property, on the other hand, developed enormously. So, there are reasons for this, there are all sorts of reasons. Why? Because crimes against persons implied a whole 17th century regime. It’s very much tied to rural crimes and to gangs, marauding bands, insurgent peasants, and large gangs; and then, from one century to another, the urban model develops significantly, the circulation of money develops significantly, and for example frauds begin to proliferate. Large gangs are on the way out, and instead of large, rural gangs, you have the phenomenon of “tiny urban gangs,” who instead take to crimes of property.

Of course, there is still killing, but the proportion has changed a great deal, and thus it’s not so much that justice becomes less severe, on the contrary. In the statements from that time period, here is what we see: the old justice system is not severe enough for this new criminality. And in actuality, these are little frauds that in the 17th century would not even have been prosecuted, or thefts that would not been prosecuted. It’s a justice system that in a sense is too crude to register the detail of criminality. We see that once the nature of the crimes changes, and a large proportion of property crimes arises, the justice system must become more refined, it must tighten the nets. It’s got to weight crimes and delinquency in a completely different way, plus the justice of the Sovereign, the royal model of justice couldn’t grasp, as a result of the whole apparatus of justice . . . That is, as a result of these new crimes and the new criminality, a new organization of the power to punish is needed.

And the legal statements will convey, not so much a humanism, not so much an increase in the gentleness of mores, no, it’s something else. It’s not cruelty, either. It’s a kind of mutation, that is: a new statement regime, a new statement regime about criminality. Here is where the discursive object ‘delinquency’ will appear. It’s a question of seizing in the nets of justice a whole region of “petty,” in quotation marks, delinquency that escaped prior statements. Okay, so what does this mean? Well, this time, and I’m appealing to a third title of Foucault’s, it means that the law will truly . . . statements will really . . . legal statements, and not solely legal ones, but juridical statements, political statements, even technological statements will singularly change in nature, in regime.

If I try to give a very rough definition—we’ll come back, we’ll have reason to return to all these points: the power of the Sovereign. Let’s say that in the context of the French absolute monarchy, the power of the Sovereign ends near the end of the 17th century. What is the power of the Sovereign? It may be defined like this: deducting [prélever], it’s a right to deduct; they are statements on deducting. The King’s share. Or the lord’s share. What goes to the lord, deducted on what is produced, deducted on life, deducted on wealth? What does the lord have the right to deduct? What does the king, the lord of lords, have the right to deduct, both from the lords and from the people? It’s a right to deduct, it’s an operation of deduction. And moreover, it’s a right to deduction and the greatest of deductions is what? Life. It’s a right to death. It’s a right to make die. The Sovereign is the one who deducts and who in the end decides on death. That’s the old statement regime. The sovereign statement allots deductions and ultimately decides on death, that is: do I let you live, the Sovereign wonders, or do I decide for your death?

Towards the 18th century, a change begins that—I’m summarizing very, very roughly—will singularly change the statement regime, in these respects:  political, juridical, regulatory, technological, etc. It’s no longer about deducting, taking your portion of the yield, of wealth, it’s about compelling production. So, in other words, to compel the production of a useful result and to increase it tenfold. I would say that this is no longer a regime of deduction, it’s a regime of organization or gridding. The problem of power is no longer: what should be deducted from the vital forces [forces vives]? The problem of power becomes: how to compose the vital forces so that they produce maximally? In other words, it’s a problem, right, of organization or of gridding and no long one of deducting. And at the same time, the great statements, that’s what Foucault will call, if you will, “disciplinary statements”—“discipline statements,” as opposed to statements of sovereignty. “Disciplinary” is a regime, among others, it’s a statement regime, just as “sovereignty” was a statement regime.

And at the same time what is happening? At the same time, power is no longer the right to make perish. Power, just as it no longer deducts, but organizes and compels production and multiplies what is produced through its gridding, its organization, power no longer makes die; it takes as its aim the management and control of life. “The management and control of life:” we have to understand this very concretely down to the very technologies themselves that start up in the 18th century, which imply all the statistics pertaining to life. Statistics or the use of probabilities. The calculation of probabilities about wealth, populations, even about cultures—this is the beginning of our modern world.

Our modern world is disciplinary and managerial as opposed, if you will, to the world that ended, according to Foucault, near the end of the 17th century, which, itself was a world of sovereignty and was in this way deadly: the power of the prince is the ultimate decision to make die. To manage and control life—and it’s at this very point, near the start of the 18th century, that the fundamental idea that that there are no nations without demography emerges, and that all the demographic methods are used, that a nation’s power entails a whole demographics that increases. Under what conditions would demographics increase? These are the problems that at this point become the current problems of the State: marriages, deaths, births, the statistical comparison of all of this enters into the apparatus [l’appareil] of the government. But what does that mean?  At issue is no longer causing to die but controlling life even down to its smallest detail. That’s an entirely other kind of power.

So, as Foucault says, on a very lovely page, in History of Sexuality . . . You see, the abolition of the death penalty, it’s obvious that it’s a tendency of this new statement regime from the very start. It will take a long time to get there, but it goes without saying that the death penalty, in this new statement regime, is a remnant, it’s a remnant of the old sovereign power. Why? If power’s true object is the management and control of life, well, there is something really very shocking about the death penalty, to regimes of this sort. There is something very shocking, that’s why, starting in the 18th century, you have an absolute denunciation of the death penalty, which will carry on from author to author, from technocrat to technocrat, with all the arguments we saw brought out when it was at last abolished in France. But these arguments were already available; it was pointed out that they were all already found in Victor Hugo. But Victor Hugo’s arguments were all already found in the 18th century, about the fact that the death penalty had never prevented the spread of crime, etcetera. It was all there. And you’ll certainly understand that, in actuality, if power is defined as a management and a control of life in its lowliest detail—to the tune of: a woman must have three children. And all this, these are writings, these are statements that appear constantly, starting in the 18th century. So, one should not think that contraception came into being only recently. Already, the 18th century took part in the discussion on contraception, the use of contraception in the countryside. One should not think farmwomen are slow; it appears that since the 18th century, contraception in the countryside posed a very difficult problem for nations.

There exist new things, but sometimes we go wrong in our judgment about novelty, because we do not have a good method for identifying statements. But, well, anyway, you can surely tell that the death penalty, actually, is a sort of thing that is inassimilable by the new conception of power. On the other hand, as Foucault says, it’s not that death does not exist for this power, but that death is always the underside of what power has made of life. That was not the case for the Sovereign. I mean: modern death, in its relation to power, is the Holocaust. It’s no longer the death penalty, it’s the Holocaust, that is, it’s the death of entire groups, the death of entire groups [several indistinct words]. And why is the Holocaust really the modern thing, it’s the modern infamy? Well, it’s quite simple, it’s that holocausts cannot be conceived following the form, the old form of the Sovereign’s “I condemn you to death.” It’s not that… [Interruption of the recording] [1:41:24]

Part 4

… You can comprehend the extermination of a group, of a people, of a nation only if you relate it to the conditions for life that the exterminating people believes in or grants itself. And I believe that this is a very, very solid remark about the modern nature of holocausts. Namely: the groups, the exterminated peoples, are assimilated to germs, to infectious agents that threaten the life of the exterminating people. In other words, it’s in the name of a perverse vitalism, a properly demented vitalism. Take for example the extermination of the Jews by Hitler. The extermination of the Jews is done in the name of what? The Jew is assimilated to an agent that is pathological, pathogenic, which threatens the health of the pure German nation. To what did Hitler appeal? To life and to “living space” [l’espace vital]. It’s in the name of life, with a kind of race vitalism [une espèce de vitalisme de la race], a kind of twisted vitalism, that Hitler proceeds to eliminate homosexuals, to eliminate those condemned, then, as bacterial agents… [Interruption of the recording] [1:43:09]

. . . atomic weapons pose both the question of the elimination of entire peoples who will be considered as agents infectious to the life of the peoples that make use of the atomic weapon and being all the while a condition for survival—the theme of life and survival [de la vie et de la survie]. And already the survival of the German race is the fundamental theme of Hitler and all holocaust themes, atomic weaponry themes—I’m dealing with two very different categories—are perfectly comprehensible in relation to this new conception of the political: the management and control of life. … Yes?

A student: [Inaudible remarks]

Deleuze: The colonization of the Americas? . . . I’m unable to give you an answer, I would have to think about it, I don’t know. For you to ask the question, you must already have some idea of an answer, so tell me your reply.

The student: [Inaudible remarks]

Deleuze: [Deleuze repeats the question] Had there already been an argument based on “living space?” Well, that, that would surprise me. We should be clear. Right now, if you said to me “in the settler colonies of ancient Greece, was there already a ‘living space?’, I would say to you, ‘certainly not.’ Even though they had to export population, they had to export citizens, but this was absolutely not in the name of a “living space.” The idea of “living space” appears so 19th century . . . I am unable to give you an answer, but that’s an excellent example for a subject of research . . . The person who asks the question should answer it. Next week. Think about it and tell us next week.

So, I’d like to read to you, to finish this point, the page in Foucault that seems very lovely to me, it’s History of Sexuality, Volume I, p. 136.[4] You see, I’ll try to summarize the theme of the page, it amounts to saying that it’s for the same reasons that the individual death penalty tends to be abolished in modern societies and that the holocausts of peoples tend to develop. “Since the classical age the West has undergone a very profound transformation of these mechanisms of power. ‘Deduction’ [le prélèvement] has tended to be no longer the major form of power but merely one element among others, working to incite, reinforce…” Deduction exists, still, in the case of taxes. But the true form of power today is a “… power bent on generating forces, making them grow, and ordering them, rather than one dedicated to impeding them, making them submit, or destroying them. There has been a parallel shift in the right of death, or at least a tendency to align itself with the exigencies of a life-administering power and to define itself accordingly. This death that was based on the right of the sovereign to defend himself or to require that one defend him, is [now] manifested as simply the reverse of the right of the social body to ensure, maintain or develop its life. Yet wars were never as bloody as they have been since the nineteenth century, and all things being equal, never before did regimes visit such holocausts on their own populations.”

“But this formidable power of death”—and this is perhaps what accounts for part of its force and the cynicism with which it has so greatly expanded its limits—”now presents itself as the counterpart of a power that exerts a positive influence on life…”[5] –This was not the case for death determined by the Sovereign. — [Deleuze continues reading] “… as the counterpart of a power that exerts a positive influence on life, that endeavors to administer, optimize, and multiply it, subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations. Wars are no longer waged in the name of a sovereign who must be defended; they are waged on behalf of the existence of everyone; entire populations are mobilized for the purpose of wholesale slaughter in the name of life necessity: massacres have become vital. It is as managers of life and survival, of bodies and the race, that so many regimes have been able to wage so many wars, causing so many men to be killed. And through a turn that closes the circle, as the technology of wars has caused them to tend increasingly toward all-out destruction, the decision that initiates them and the one that terminates them are in fact increasingly informed by the naked question of survival. The atomic situation is now at the end point of this process: the power to expose a whole population to death is the underside of the power to guarantee an individual’s continued existence. The principle underlying the tactics of battle—that one has to be capable of killing in order to go on living [pouvoir tuer pour pouvoir vivre]—has become the principle that defines the strategy of states. But the existence in question is no longer the juridical existence of the sovereignty; at stake is the biological existence of a population. If genocide is indeed the dream of modern powers, this is not because of a recent return of the ancient right to kill; it is because power is situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the race, and the large-scale phenomena of population.”

“On another level, I might have taken up the example of the death penalty. Together with war, it was for a long time the other form of the right of the sword; it constituted the reply of the sovereign to those who attacked his will, his law, or his person. Those who died on the scaffold became fewer and fewer, in contrast to those who died in wars. But it was for the same reason that the latter” – those who die in wars – “became more numerous and the former” – those who die on the scaffold” — become “more and more rare.”[6] — It’s for the same reasons that the death penalty is abolished and holocaust spreads. — [Deleuze continues reading]: “As soon as power gave itself the function of administering life, its reason for being and the logic of its exercise—and not the awakening of humanitarian feelings—made it more difficult to apply the death penalty. How could power exercise its highest prerogatives by putting people to death, when its main role was to ensure, sustain, and multiply life, to put this life in order? For such a power, execution was at the same time a limit, a scandal, and a contradiction,”[7] whereas the holocaust is not that, since the holocaust is the condition for the survival of the exterminating people. Beautiful pages.

Moreover, all this—I would like to conclude since you can’t take anymore—I’m concluding, I’ve finished the first point: in what sense is everything always said, in what sense are statements not hidden, the statements are not secret, and visibilities not hidden, you can see, and you can hear in your time period all that can be seen and all that can be heard. Get rid of the idea that politicians trick you, it’s worse, it’s definitively worse: if only all they did was trick us! Even, even with respect to holocausts, they don’t hide them. They don’t hide them. You see, so of course you can tell right away what you have to read in order to learn these pseudo-secrets. This and that.

Everything’s good, and that’s what Foucault’s method will be. It’s that you have to occasionally read the medical journals to see what today’s health policy is. In medical journals, you’ll read pronouncements that personally make me shudder, of the sort: we’re heading towards a medicine without doctors or patients. It’s easy to see what that means: an illness will no longer be defined by symptoms, it will be defined by images, the kind produced by scanner, etc. That is, you’ll be treated before being sick, you won’t even have the time to be sick. That is, a medicine through images instead of a medicine through signs. This is very interesting: we can’t say that they are hiding it, they are saying it. “A medicine without doctors or patients”—in fact, everything takes place between the image and the bearer of the image, by means of the detection device. It sort of sends shivers up and down your spine—but it’s said, so don’t tell us it’s hidden! You’ll say: “it’s said, but in specialized journals” . . . so what? Specialized journals are not secret. Perhaps what is part of the statement is: the speaker and the hearer—yes, okay. But that a statement implies a given speaker and is addressed to a given hearer, does that mean that it is secret? No, that does not mean that it is secret, not at all.

You will see, this last comment will surely start us off for our next analysis. Reading the military journals is likewise very, very interesting. Because there they truly hide nothing from us. We can’t say that a general is a liar. There is nothing more candid than a general. That’s a law of statements. Even out of them all—politician, diplomat—the general is the most candid! The most terrifying, too, but the most loyal. A general does not lie, he never lies. They are very interesting, the journals, the military research. There, too, you have speakers and addressees. So, there you have it.

The theme, all I wanted to say, about this, the theme that Foucault constantly reprises, it’s a rule of his method: what’s hard is to find statements where they are, but they are somewhere. It’s up to you to find them. They are not hidden. And the archive means this: put together the corpus, as Foucault says, but he uses a term very frequently used by linguists, or at least by certain linguists, put together the corpus of statements that are characteristic of an historical formation. That in itself requires a lot of ingenuity. You have to find them where they are. “Find them where they are” means both: they are not hidden, and yet it takes an effort to find them. You must construct the corpus of statements from which you start off. When you conduct research on a particular historical formation, you’ve got to build your corpus. That’s it, so, we’ll move on to the other problem: but then, if they are not hidden, they are nonetheless not given either. So: what to do? And why are they not given? That’s it! [End of the recording] [1:56:10]

 

Notes

[1] Abbreviation for the undergraduate degree, Diplôme d’Etudes Universitaires Générales.

[2] This is close to a title published in 1971: Les Hommes et la mort en Anjou aux XVIIe et XVIII siècles. Essai de démographie et de psychologie historiques (Paris-La Haye, Mouton, 1971). (English title would be: Men and Death in 17th and 18th Century Anjou. Essay in Historical Demography and Psychology).

[3] The Project Gutenberg Ebook of Pierre; or, The Ambiguities, www.gutenberg.org, EBook #34970, page 724.

[4] La Volonté de Savoir, pp. 179-181.

[5] History of Sexuality, Volume I, pp. 136-7.

[6] History of Sexuality, Volume I, p. 137-8.

[7] History of Sexuality, Volume I, p. 138.

Notes

For archival purposes, the transcription of this seminar by Annabelle Dufourcq took place starting in 2011 with the support of a Purdue University College of Liberal Arts grant. The translation was completed in 2018, and subsequent revision of the transcript and translation and time stamp were completed in December 2021 and April 2022. Additional revisions were added in February 2024.

The aggregate audio file has been downsampled.

Lectures in this Seminar

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Reading Date: October 22, 1985
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Reading Date: October 29, 1985
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