Foucault - Power-Knowledge
Foucault - Power-Knowledge
Foucault - Power-Knowledge
Edited by
COLIN GORDON
Translated by
COLIN GORDON, LEO MARSHALL
JOHN MEPHAM, KATE SOPER
Foucault, Michel.
Power Iknowledge.
Bibliography: p.
1. Power (Social sciences) I. Gordon, Colin.
II. Title.
HM291.F59 303.3'3 79-3308
ISBN 0-394-51357-6
ISBN 0-394-73954-x (pbk.)
court, and why, on the other hand, each time that the
bourgeoisie has wished to subject a popular uprising to the
constraint of a state apparatus a court has been set up: a
table, a chairman, magistrates, confronting the two op-
ponents. Thereby the judicial system is reborn. That is my
view of things.
VICTOR: Yes. You see things up to 1789, but what I'm
interested in is what happens later. You have described the
birth of a class idea and how this class idea was materialised
in practices and apparatuses. I perfectly well understand
how it was possible, in the French Revolution, for courts to
become instruments of indirect deformation and repression
of the acts of popular justice of the common people. If I've
understood, this was because there were several social
classes involved, on the one hand the common people, on
the other hand the traitors to the nation and to the
revolution, and between them a class which attempted to
play out to the full the historical role which was open to it.
Therefore I cannot draw any definitive conclusions about
the form of the people's court from this example-in any
case, for us there are no forms which are incapable of
historical development- but merely see how the petty
bourgeoisie as a class picked up from the common people
some scrap of an idea and then, being dominated as it was,
especially in this period, by the ideas of the bourgeoisie,
crushed the ideas drawn from the common people under the
form taken by courts at that time. I cannot draw from this
any conclusions about the practical problem we are faced
with today, concerning people's courts in the present-day
ideological revolution, nor, a fortiori, in the future people's
armed revolution. This is why I would like us to compare
this example from the French Revolution with the example
which I mentioned just now, that of the people's armed
revolution in China.
Now you would say 'In this example there are only two
elements- the masses and their enemies'. But the masses in
a way delegate some part of their power to an element
which, while being deeply attached to them, is nevertheless
distinct, the People's Red Army. Now this figure, military
power/judicial power, which you pointed out, can be seen
again here with the People's Army helping the masses to
8 Power/ Knowledge
deal with in that way: it was said, 40h, those people's crimes
are too great, we'll bring them before a court'. They were
put in prison and were brought before the courts, and they,
of course, acquitted them. In this case the courts were just
used as an excuse for dealing with things other than by acts
of popular justice.
Now I've arrived at the basic point of my thesis. You
speak about contradictions among the masses and you say
that there is a need for a revolutionary state apparatus to
help the masses resolve these contradictions. Now, I don't
know what happened in China: perhaps the judicial appara-
tus was like those in feudal states, an extremely flexible
apparatus, with little centralisation, etc. In societies such as
our own, on the contrary, the judicial apparatus has been an
extremely important state apparatus of which the history
has always been obscured. People do the history of law, and
the history of the economy, but the history of the judicial
system, of judicial practices-of what has in fact been a
penal system, of what have been systems of repression-
this is rarely discussed. Now, I believe that the judicial
system as a state apparatus has historically been of absol-
utely fundamental importance. The penal system has had
the function of introducing a certain number of contradic-
tions among the masses, and one major contradiction,
namely the following: to create mutual antagonism between
the proletarianised common people and the non-proletarian-
ised common people. There was a particular period when
the penal system, of which the function in the Middle Ages
had been essentially a fiscal one, became organised around
the struggle to stamp out rebellion. Up until this point the
job of putting down popular uprisings had been primarily a
military one. From now on it was to become taken on, or
rendered unnecessary by a complex system of courts-
police-prison. It is a system which has basically a triple role;
and depending on the period, depending on the state of
struggles and on the conjuncture, it was one or other of
these roles which was dominant. On the one hand it is a
factor in 'proletarianisation ': its role is to force the people to
accept their status as proletarians and the conditions for the
exploitation of the proletariat. It is perfectly obvious that
from the end of the Middle Ages up until the eighteenth
On Popular Justice: A Discussion with Maoists 15
Notes
1 F. Engels, The Condition of the English Working Class, Chapter 11.
2 A /ycee student arrested in Paris in February 1971 during a demonstra-
tion against the prisons.
3 A Gaullist deputy charged with fraudulent property speCUlations and
saved from prison by his parliamentary immunity.
4 Managing Director of Renault.
5 A coal-mining town in Northern France where a group of Maoists,
together with lean-Paul Sartre, set up a people's court after a mining
disaster to investigate the management's responsibility for the
casualties.
2 PRISON TALK
Absolutely not.
And the more they were its victims, the more they feared it.
came into operation that stripped him of his civil status, and
when he came out he could do nothing except become a
criminal once again. He inevitably fell into the hands of a
system which made him either a pimp, a policeman or an
informer. Prison professionalised people. Instead of having
nomadic bands of robbers-often of great ferocity-roam-
ing about the countryside, as in the eighteenth century, one
had this closed milieu of delinquency, thoroughly structured
by the police: an essentially urban milieu, and one whose
political and economic value was far from negligible.
True. If that were all, perhaps one could feel confident and
hopeful. But along with that, isn't there an explanatory
discourse that involves a number of dangers? He steals
because he is poor, certainly, but we all know that all poor
people don't steal. So for this individual to steal there has to
be sonlething wrong with him, and this is his character, his
psyche, his upbringing, his unconscious, his desires. And
with that the delinquent is handed over either to the penal
technology of the prison or the medical technology, if not of
the asylum then of specialised supervision.
Notes
1 J. P. Faye, Theorie du recit and Langages totalitaires (Hermann, Paris,
1972).
2 Mandrin (1725-55), a celebrated bandit in Southern France. Special-
ised in robbing tax-farmers, noted for his respect for private property,
successfully beat off several punitive expeditions.
3 Vidocq, freed from prison on the orders of the Prefect of Police in 1809
and placed in charge of a squad of ex-convict detectives. Dismissed
from the police in 1832 on a theft charge. His exploits were fictionalised
by Balzac and became celebrated through the publication of his
memoirs (in both bogus and authentic versions).
4 Lacenaire's 'tranquil cynicism' at his trial is said to have impressed the
'romantic' Parisian public. His memoirs were published with great
success prior to his execution in 1836.
5 M. Foucault (ed.), I, Pierre Riviere . .. , (Penguin Books, Hannonds-
worth, 1978).
3 BODY/POWER
It's true that since the late nineteenth century Marxist and
'Marxised' revolutionary movements have given special
importance to the State apparatus as the stake of their
struggle. What were the ultimate consequences of this? In
order to be able to fight a State which is more than just a
government, the revolutionary movement must possess
equivalent politico-military forces and hence must con-
stitute itself as a party, organised internally in the same way
as a State apparatus with the same mechanisms of hier-
archies and organisation of powers. This consequence is
heavy with significance. Secondly, there is the question,
much discussed within Marxism itself, of the capture of the
State apparatus: should this be considered as a straight-
forward take-over, accompanied by appropriate modifica-
tions, or should it be the opportunity for the destruction of
60 Power/ Knowledge
that apparatus? You know how the issue was finally settled.
The State apparatus must be undermined, but not com-
pletely undermined, since the class struggle will not be
brought to an immediate end with the establishment of the
dictatorship of the proletariat. Hence the State apparatus
must be kept sufficiently intact for it to be employed against
the class enemy. So we reach a second consequence: during
the period of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the State
apparatus must to some extent at least be maintained.
Finally then, as a third consequence, in order to operate
these State apparatuses which have been taken over but not
destroyed, it will be necessary to have recourse to tech-
nicians and specialists. And in order to do this one has to
call upon the old class which is acquainted with the appara-
tus, namely the bourgeoisie. This clearly is what happened
in the USSR. I don't claim at all that the State apparatus is
unimportant, but it seems to me that among all the con-
ditions for avoiding a repetition of the Soviet experience
and preventing the revolutionary process from running into
the ground, one of the first things that has to be understood
is that power isn't localised in the State apparatus and that
nothing in society will be changed if the mechanisms of
power that function outside, below and alongside the State
apparatuses, on a much more minute and everyday level,
are not also changed.
Could we now turn then to the human sciences, and
psychoanalysis in particular?
The case of psychoanalysis is indeed an interesting one.
Psychoanalysis was established in opposition to a certain
kind of psychiatry, the psychiatry of degeneracy, eugenics
and heredity. This practice and theory, represented in
France by Magnan, acted as the great foil to psychoanalysis.
Indeed, in relation to that psychiatry-which is still the
psychiatry of today's psychiatrists-psychoanalysis played a
liberating role. Moreover, in certain countries (I am think-
ing of Brazil in particular), it has played a political role,
denouncing the complicity of psychiatrists with political
power. Again, take what is happening in the Eastern
countries: the people there who take an interest in psycho-
analysis are not the most disciplined among the psychia-
Body/Power 61
trists. But the fact remains that in our societies the career of
psychoanalysis has taken other directions and has been the
object of different investments. Certain of its activities have
effects which fall within the function of control and normal-
isation. If one can succeed in modifying these relationships
of power into which psychoanalysis enters, and rendering
unacceptable the effects of power they propagate, this will
render the functioning of the State apparatuses much more
difficult. Another advantage of conducting a critique of
relations existing at a minute level would be to render
impossible the reproduction of the form of the State
apparatus within revolutionary movements.
Your studies of madness and the prisons enable us to
retrace the constitution of an ever more disciplinary
form of society. This historical process seems to follow
an almost inexorable logic.
I have attempted to analyse how, at the initial stages of
industrial societies, a particular punitive apparatus was set
up together with a system for separating the normal and the
abnormal. To follow this up, it will be necessary to construct
a history of what happens in the nineteenth century and how
the present highly-conlplex relation of forces- the current
outline of the battle- has been arrived at through a succes-
sion of offensives and counter-offensives, effects and
counter-effects. The coherence of such a history does not
derive from the revelation of a project but from a logic of
opposing strategies. The archaeology of the human sciences
has to be established through studying the mechanisms of
power which have invested human bodies, acts and forms of
behaviour. And this investigation enables us to rediscover
one of the conditions of the emergence of the human
sciences: the great nineteenth-century effort in discipline
and normalisation. Freud was well aware of all this. He was
aware of the superior strength of his position on the matter
of normalisation. So why this sacralising modesty (pudeur)
that insists on denying that psychoanalysis has anything to
do with normalisation?
How do you see the intellectual's role in militant
practice?
62 Power/ Knowledge
gone over the same ground in his own terms and shown that
these genealogies that we produced were false, inadequately
elaborated, poorly articulated and ill-founded?' In fact, as
things stand in reality, these collected fragments of a
genealogy remain as they have always been, surrounded by
a prudent silence. At most, the only arguments that we have
heard against them have been of the kind I believe were
voiced by Monsieur Juquin: 1 'All this is all very well, but
Soviet psychiatry nonetheless remains the foremost in the
world'. To which I would reply: 'How right you are; Soviet
psychiatry is indeed the foremost in the world and it is
precisely that which one would hold against it'.
The silence, or rather the prudence, with which the
unitary theories avoid the genealogy of knowledges might
therefore be a good reason to continue to pursue it. Then at
least one could proceed to multiply the genealogical
fragments in the form of so many traps, demands, chal-
lenges, what you will. But in the long run, it is probably
over-optimistic, if we are thinking in terms of a contest-
that of knowledge against the effects of the power of
scientific discourse - to regard the silence of one's adver-
saries as indicative of a fear we have inspired in them. For
perhaps the silence of the enemy- and here at the very
least we have a methodological or tactical principle that it is
alwa ys useful to bear in mind - can also be the index of our
failure to produce any such fear at all. At all events, we
must proceed just as if we had not alarmed them at all, in
which case it will be no part of our concern to provide a solid
and homogeneous theoretical terrain for all these dispersed
genealogies, nor to descend upon them from on high with
some kind of halo of theory that would unite them. Our
task, on the contrary, will be to expose and specify the issue
at stake in this opposition, this struggle, this insurrection of
knowledges against the institutions and against effects of
the knowledge and power that invests scientific discourse.
What is at stake in all these genealogies is the nature of
this power which has surged into view in all its violence,
aggression and absurdity in the course of the last forty years,
contemporaneously, that is, with the collapse of Fascism
and the decline of Stalinism. What, we must ask, is this
power-or rather, since that is to give a formulation to the
88 Power/ Knowledge
Notes
1 A deputy of the French Communist Party.
2 This Union, established after 1968, has adopted a radical line on civil
rights, the law and the prisons.
6 TRUTH AND POWER
Could you briefly outline the route which led you from
your work on madness in the Classical age to the study
of criminality and delinquency?
When I was studying during the early 1950s, one of the great
problems that arose was that of the political status of science
and the ideological functions which it could serve. It wasn't
exactly the Lysenko business which dominated everything,
but I believe that around that sordid affair- which had long
remained buried and carefully hidden - a whole number of
interesting questions were provoked. These can all be
summed up in two words: power and knowledge. I believe I
wrote Madness and Civilisation to some extent within the
horizon of these questions. For me, it was a matter of saying
this: if, concerning a science like theoretical physics or
organic chemistry, one poses the problem of its relations
with the political and economic structures of society, isn't
one posing an excessively complicated question? Doesn't
this set the threshold of possible explanations impossibly
high? But on the other hand, if one takes a form of
knowledge (savoir) like psychiatry, won't the question be
much easier to resolve, since the epistemological profile of
psychiatry is a low one and psychiatric practice is linked with
a whole range of institutions, economic requirements and
political issues of social regulation? Couldn't the inter-
weaving of effects of power and knowledge be grasped with
greater certainty in the case of a science as 'dubious' as
psychiatry? It was this same question which I wanted to pose
concerning medicine in The Birth of the Clinic: medicine
certainly has a much more solid scientific armature than
psychiatry, but it too is profoundly enmeshed in social
structures. What rather threw me at the time was the fact
110 Power/ Knowledge
Yes, if you like, to the extent that it's true that, in our
student days, people of my generation were brought up on
these two forms of analysis, one in terms of the constituent
subject, the other in terms of the economic in the last
instance, ideology and the play of superstructures and
in frastructures.
The King's head still hasn't been cut off, yet already
people are trying to replace it by discipline, that vast
system instituted in the seventeenth century comprising
the functions of surveillance, normalisation and control
and, a little later, those of punishment, correction,
education and so on. One wonders where this system
comes from, why it emerges and what its use is. And
today there is rather a tendency to attribute a subject to
it, a great, molar, totalitarian subject, namely the
modern State, constituted in the sixteenth and seven-
122 Power/ Knowledge
would say instead that what I find most striking about these
new technologies of power introduced since the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries is their concrete and precise
character, their grasp of a multiple and differentiated
reality. In feudal societies power functioned essentially
through signs and levies. Signs of loyalty to the feudal lords,
rituals, ceremonies and so forth, and levies in the form of
taxes, pillage, hunting, war etc. In the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries a form of power comes into being that
begins to exercise itself through social production and social
service. It becomes a matter of obtaining productive service
from individuals in their concrete lives. And in consequence,
a real and effective 'incorporation' of power was necessary,
in the sense that power had to be able to gain access to the
bodies of individuals, to their acts, attitudes and modes of
everyday behaviour. Hence the significance of methods like
school discipline, which succeeded in making children's
bodies the object of highly complex systems of manipulation
and conditioning. But at the same time, these new tech-
niques of power needed to grapple with the phenomena of
population, in short to undertake the administration, con-
trol and direction of the accumulation of men (the economic
system that promotes the accumulation of capital and the
system of power that ordains the accumulation of men are,
from the seventeenth century on, correlated and inseparable
phenomena): hence there arise the problems of demogra-
phy, publk health, hygiene, housing conditions, longevity
and fertility. And I believe that the political significance of
the problem of sex is due to the fact that sex is located at the
point of intersection of the discipline of the body and the
control of the population.
Note
1 Foucault's response to this final question was given in writing.
7 POWERS AND STRATEGIES
How much will the machine then cost to run? But there is also
a specifically political cost. If you are too violent, you risk
provoking revolts. Again, if you intervene in too discon-
tinuous a manner, you risk allowing politically costly
phenomena of resistance and disobedience to develop in the
interstices. This was how monarchical power operated. For
instance, the judiciary only arrested a derisory proportion of
criminals; this was made into the argument that punishment
must be spectacular so as to frighten the others. Hence there
was a violent form of power which tried to attain a continuous
mode of operation through the virtue of examples. The new
theorists of the eighteenth century objected to this: such a
form of power was too costly in proportion to its results. A
great expenditure of violence is made which ultimately only
had the force of an example. It even becomes necessary to
multiply violence, but precisely by doing so one multiplies
revolts.
PERROT: Which is what happened in the gallows riots.
FOUCAULT: In contrast to that you have the system of
surveillance, which on the contrary involves very little
expense. There is no need for arms, physical violence,
material constraints. Just a gaze. An inspecting gaze, a gaze
which each individual under its weight will end by interioris-
ing to the point that he is his own overseer, each individual
thus exercising this surveillance over, and against, himself. A
superb formula: power exercised continuously and for what
turns out to be a minimal cost. When Bentham realises what
he has discovered, he calls it the Colombus's egg of political
thought, a formula exactly the opposite of monarchical
power. It is indeed the case that the gaze has had great
importance among the techniques of power developed in the
modern era, but, as I have said, it is far from being the only or
even the principal system employed.
PERROT: It seems that Bentham is mainly concerned here
with the problem of power over small groups of individuals.
Why is this? Is it because he considers the part as already the
whole- if one can succeed at the level of the small group,
one can extend the procedure to take in the whole of society?
Or is it rather that the ensemble of society, the question of
power on the scale of the social whole were tasks that had not
as yet been properly conceived? And in that case, why not?
156 Power/ Knowledge
Notes
1 Cf. the note on Translations and Sources in this volume.
2 John Howard, The State of the Prisons in England and Wales, with
Preliminary Observations and an Account of some Foreign Prisons and
Hospitals (1777).
9 THE POLITICS OF HEALTH IN
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
First of all, two preliminary remarks:
(1) No doubt it is scarcely fruitful to look for a relation of
anteriority or dependence between the two terms of a
private, 'liberal' medicine subject to the mechanisms of
individual initiative and laws of the market, and a medical
politics drawing support from structures of power and
concerning itself with the health of a collectivity. It is
somewhat mythical to suppose that Western medicine
originated as a collective practice, endowed by magico-
religious institutions with its social character and gradually
dismantled through the subsequent organisation of private
clienteles. 1 But it is equally inadequate to posit the existence
at the historical threshold of modern medicine of a singular,
private, individual medical relation, 'clinical' in its economic
functioning and epistemological form, and to imagine that a
series of corrections, adjustments and constraints gradually
came to socialise this relation, causing it to be to some
degree taken charge of by the collectivity.
What the eighteenth century shows, in any case, is a
double-sided process. The development of a medical market
in the form of private clienteles, the extension of a network
of personnel offering qualified medical attention, the growth
of individual and family demand for health care, the
emergence of a clinical medicine strongly centred on
individual examination, diagnosis and therapy, the explicitly
moral and scientific- and secretly economic- exaltation of
'private consultation', in short the progressive emplacement
of what was to become the great medical edifice of the
nineteenth century, cannot be divorced from the concurrent
organisation of a politics of health, the consideration of
disease as a political and economic problem for social
collectivities which they must seek to resolve as a matter of
overall policy. 'Private' and 'socialised' medicine, in their
reciprocal support and opposition, both derive from a
The Politics of Health in the Eighteenth Century 167
Notes
1 Cf. G. Rosen, A History of Public Health, New York 1958.
2 Cf. for example, J. P. L. Morel, Dissertation sur les causes qui
contribuent Ie plus arendre cachectique et rachitique la constitution d'un
grand nombre d'enfants de la ville de Lille (A dissertation on the causes
which most contribute to rendering the constitution of a great number
of children in the city of Lille cachectic and rachitic), 1812.
10 THE HISTORY OF SEXUALITY
anisms of State power, but also how State and familial forms
of power have each retained their specificity and have only
been able to interlock so long as the specific ways in which
they each operate have been respected). Similarly, Francois
Ewald has written a study of the mines, showing the role
played by the owners' systems of control and the way those
systems have survived the absorption of the mines by the
State without losing their effectiveness.
that this is what justifies the need to regulate sex and makes
its control possible. These two notions, that sex is at the
heart of all pleasure and that its nature requires that it
should be restricted and devoted to procreation, are not of
Christian but of Stoic origin; and Christianity was obliged to
incorporate them when it sought to integrate itself in the
State structure of the Roman Empire in which Stoicism was
virtually the universal philosophy. Sex then became the
'code' of pleasure. Whereas in societies with a heritage of
erotic art the intensification of pleasure tends to desexualise
the body, in the West this systematisation of pleasure
according to the 'laws' of sex gave rise to the whole
apparatus of sexuality. And it is this that makes us believe
that we are 'liberating' ourselves when we 'decode' all
pleasure in terms of a sex shorn at last of disguise, whereas
one should aim instead at a desexualisation, at a general
economy of pleasure not based on sexual norms.
There are few ideas there, but only hesitant ones, not yet
fully crystallised. It will be the discussion and criticism after
each volume that will perhaps allow them to become
clarified. But it is not up to me to lay down how the book
should be used.
terised the feudal system. They waited for deaths among the
male legitimate heirs, or for an heiress obliged to procure a
husband capable of taking charge of the inheritance and the
functions of head of a family. The juvenes thus constituted
the turbulent surplus necessarily engendered by the mode of
transmission of power and property. And Duby sees this as
the origin of courtly literature: courtly literature was a sort
of fictive joust between the juvenes and the head of a family,
the lord, the King even, for the stake of the already
appropriated wife. In the intervals between wars and the
leisure of the long winter evenings there was woven around
the wives the web of these courtly relations which at bottom
were the very inverse of relations of power since it was still
only an affair of a landless knight turning up at a chateau to
seduce the lord of the manor's wife. So what one had here,
engendered by the institutions themselves, was a sort of
loosening of constraints, an acceptable unbridling, which
yielded this real-fictive joust one finds in the themes of
courtly love. It's a comedy around power relations which
functions in the interstices of power but isn't itself a real
power relation.
GROSRICHARO: Perhaps, but even so courtly literature
derives, via the troubadours, from Arabic and Moslem
civilisation. Does Duby's analysis work there as well? But
let's return to the question of power and its relation to the
notion of the apparatus.
MILLOT: Discussing what you call 'general apparatuses'
('dispositifs d'ensemh/e') you write in The Will to Know that
'here the logic is perfectly clear, the aims decipherable, yet
it turns out that no one can have conceived and very few
formulated them: such is the implicit character of the great,
anonymous, almost mute strategies which coordinate the
voluble tactics whose "inventors" or directors are often
devoid of all hypocrisy .... ' You define here something like
a strategy without a subject. How is this conceivable?
FOUCAULT: Let's take an example. From around 1825 to
1830 one finds the local and perfectly explicit appearance of
definite strategies for fixing the workers in the first heavy
industries at their work-places. At Mulhouse and in
northern France various tactics are elaborated: pressuring
people to marry, providing housing, building cites ouvrieres,
The Confession of the Flesh 203
is all too neat. I don't think it's harbouring lies, but, after
seeing everything so tidily arranged and organised on the
local, the regional and the national level, and over periods
of centuries, I wonder if one doesn't still have to leave room
for the shambles?
FOUCAULT: Oh, I quite agree. Judiciary and psychiatry
join hands, but only after such a mess, such a shambles!
Only my position is as if I were dealing with a battle: if one
isn't content with descriptions, if one wants to try and
explain a victory or a defeat, then one does have to pose the
problems in terms of strategies, and ask, 'Why did that
work? How did that hold up?' That's why I look at things
from this angle, which may end up giving the impression
the story is too pretty to be true.
Racism
GROSRlCHARO: To come now to the last part of your
book ....
FOUCAULT: Yes, no one wants to talk about that last part.
Even though the book is a short one, but I suspect people
never got as far as this last chapter. All the same, it's the
fundamental part of the book.
GROSRICHARO: You articulate the theme of racism there
on to both the apparatus of sexuality and the question of
degeneracy. But the theme seems to have been articulated
much earlier than that in the West, in particular by the old
French nobility hostile to Louis XIV's absolutism which
favoured the commonalty. In Boulainvilliers, who rep-
resents this nobility, one finds already a whole history of the
superiority of Germanic blood, from which the nobility was
descended, over Gaulish blood.
FOUCAULT: This idea that the nobility came from Germany
in fact goes back to the Renaissance, and it was a theme
utilised first of all by the French Protestants, who said that
France was formerly a Germanic state, and in German law
there were limits to the power of the sovereign. It was this
idea which was subsequently taken over by a fraction of the
French nobility.
GROSRICHARO: Regarding the nobility, you talk in your
book of a myth of blood, blood as a mythical object. But
what strikes me as remarkable, apart from its symbolic
function, is that blood was also regarded by this nobility as a
biological object. Its racism wasn't founded on a mythical
The Confession of the Flesh 223
out of the theory of degeneracy. It was said that the Jews are
necessarily degenerates, firstly because they are rich,
secondly because they intermarry. They have totally
aberrant sexual and religious practices, so it is they who are
the carriers of degeneracy in our societies. One encounters
this in socialist literature down to the Dreyfus affair. Pre-
Hitlerism, the nationalist antisemitism of the Right, adopted
exactly the same themes in 1910.
GROSRICHARO: The Right will say that it's in the homeland
of socialism that one encounters the same theme today ....
J.-A. MILLER: Did you know that a first congress on
psychoanalysis is going to be held in the USSR?
FOUCAULT: So I've been told. Will there be Soviet psycho-
analysts there?
J .-A. MILLER: No, they're trying to get psychoanalysts
from elsewhere to come ....
FOUCAULT: So it will be a psychoanalysis congress in the
Soviet Union where the speakers will be foreigners! In-
credible! Although there was a Congress of Penal Sciences
at St Petersburg in 1894, where a French criminologist,
someone whose name is too little known - he was called
Monsieur Larrivee - said to the Russians: everyone is now
in agreement that criminals are impossible people, born
criminals. What is to be done with them? In our countries,
which are too snlall, we don't know how to dispose of them.
But you Russians have Siberia: couldn't you put them there
in sorts of great labour camps, and thus at the same time
exploit that extraordinarily rich territory?
GROSRICHARO: Weren't there any labour camps then in
Siberia?
FOUCAULT: No! I was very surprised about that.
CELAS: Sibera was just a zone of exile. Lenin went there
in 1898, got married, went hunting, had a maid, etc. There
were also some penal colonies. Chekhov visited one on the
Sakhalin Islands. The massive concentration camps where
people were set to work were a socialist invention! They
arose notably from initiatives like those of Trotsky, who
organised the wreckage of the Red Army into a sort of
labour army, which then constituted disciplinary camps
which rapidly became places of internment. It came about
through a combination of deliberate planning, pursuit of
The Confession of the Flesh 225
Note
1 Celebrated family agony-columnist on French radio.
AFTERWORD
The history of the sciences brings in playa theme which introduced itself
into philosophy almost surreptitiously at the end of the eighteenth
century; at that time, the question was first addressed to rational thought
not only as to its nature, its ground, its powers and rights, but as to its
history and geography, its immediate past and present actuality, its
moment and place. This is the question which Mendelssohn, followed by
Kant, sought to answer in the Berlinische Monatschrift in 1784: Was ist
Aufkliirung? [What is Enlightenment?] ... Such an undertaking always
comprises two objectives which are, in fact, indissociable and inter-
dependent: on the one hand, the search to identify in its chronology,
constituent elements and historical conditions the moment when the West
first affirmed the autonomy and sovereignty of its own mode of rationality
-Lutheran Reform, 'Copernican revolution', Cartesian philosophy,
Galilean mathematisation of nature, Newtonian physics? And, on the
other hand, an analysis of the 'present' moment which seeks to define, in
terms both of the history of this Reason and of its current balance-sheet,
its relation to that founding act: a relation of rediscovery, renewal of a
forgotten meaning, completion and fulfilment, or alternatively one of
rupture, return to a prior epoch, and so forth.
Michel Foucault, Preface to Georges Canguilhem,
The normal and the pathological. I
The way the question of power and knowledge has recently
been posed in France by Foucault and others clearly has to
do with the impact of the events of May 1968, and not least
the fact that the academic world happened to act as one of
the principal focusses of a spectacular series of political and
social upheavals. The effect of this circumstance was to cast
a fresh light on questions concerning the relation of know-
ledge and politics in general; it also gave renewed currency
and pertinence to some issues that Foucault's previous work
had been an attempt to formulate. And through this retro-
active effect it became possible to read these books in a
different way. 'When I think back now, I ask myself what
else it was that I was talking about, in Madness and
Civilisation or The Birth of the Clinic, if not power? Yet I'm
perfectly aware that I scarcely ever used the word and never
had such a field of analyses at my disposal then.' (above
p. 115).
230 Power/ Knowledge
Notes
1 Forthcoming: see Bibliography.
2 La V%nte de sa voir p. 123, trans. C. Gordon.
3 This issue is discussed in Chapter 4.
4 See the discussion of the 'man-machine' motif in Discipline and
Punish. Part III Chapter 1. On machinofacture and the body, see
Didier Deleule and Francois Guery, Le corps productif(Paris, 1972).
5 It is worth re-reading the final two chapters of The Order of Things,
dealing with 'Man' and the human sciences, in parallel with the
morphology of discipline set out in Part III of Discipline and Punish.
6 Especially valuable on this question are Canguilhem's 'Introduction'
to his Ide%gie et rationalite dans I'histoire des sciences de la vie
(1977), and Foucault's Preface to a forthcoming English translation of
Canguilhem's Le Normal et Ie path%gique (1966).
7 In his 1978 and 1979 lectures at the College de France, Foucault has
been concerning himself with the characteristics of liberalism and neo-
liberalism as rationalities of governmental practices. For analyses in a
similar perspective, see the articles by Pasquale Pasquino, Giovanna
Afterword 259
In collaboration
* Moi, Pierre Riviere, ayant egorge ma mere, ma soeur et mon frere
... Un cas de parricide au XIXe sieele (1973). See below, under
Articles. I, Pierre Riviere, having slaughtered my mother, my sister
and my brother . .. A Case of Parricide in the 19th Century trans. F.
lellinek (New York, 1975).
Les machines a guerir (1976). (Dossiers et documents d'archi-
tecture, Institut de l'environnement). See below, under Articles.
Collected translations
* Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Inter-
views edited and translated with an Introduction by D. F. Bouchard
(New York, 1977). (Cited below as LCMP).