Foucault as non Western Marxist
Foucault is often painted as an anti-Marxist, often for fairly poor reasons (see, for instance, this baffling passage where Barrett quotes Foucault calling for a “liberation” of Marx, and describing the importance of Marx for his own methodology, as evidence of Foucault’s _disagreement_ with Marx). Perhaps; but if you are going to emphasize Foucault’s “no-saying, _no-doing_” moment, it surely makes more sense to pick Freud as the target. The more I think about it (which admittedly is still not all that much thinking), the more of Foucault’s work I think can be read as an attack on Freud. Obviously, The Will to Knowledge, with its attack on “the repressive hypothesis”, but also the earlier and the later work:Madness and Civilization’s historization of normalization, Discipline and Punish’s emphasis on the production of interiority, or The Care of the Self’s account of self-fashioning; these are all examples of Foucault attacking what he calls “the California cult of the self,” built around the idea of a “true self,” which can be alienated or obscured but about which we must discover the truth. And, if we wanted to attach a name to this cult, wouldn’t that name be “Freud”?
(Incidentally, like Moll I recently read Civilization and Its Discontents for a class. Our professor commented that, while we’d been happy to take Marx, Bentham or Nietzsche on their own terms, we had been much more substantively critical of Freud. I wonder if this isn’t because Freud, unlike the previous authors, is almost a direct spokesperson for contemporary normalizing capital)
Which brings me back to my title; inasmuch as Foucault is an anti-Marxist, he is opposed particularly to certain strands of Western Marxism: the Freudian Marxism of the Frankfurt School, but also a similar kind of economic/hydraulic mode of thought that you find in, for instance, Gramsci’s theory of hegemony. On the other hand, Foucault seems much more compatible with non-Western Marxism: he worked with Maoists in the GIP, and a number of his ideas are clearly similar to ideas previously put forward by Fanon (whose own relationship to Marxism wasn’t simple, of course).
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Tim,
While I agree with your assessment of the misreading of Foucault, espically in light of the lectures published as ’society must be defended’, I am puzzled with your assessment of Freud. Lacan considered himself to be a Freudian and Zizek’s Lacan bears a similar affirmation of Frued. While the ego-centered distortion of Freud that has wreaked havoc on the United States in the field of psychology certianly bears this critique, I find it odd that you say the same of Freud. I think it is much harder to read Freud without the auto-critiques that we have all assimilated, and I appreciate both Lacan and Zizek’s effort on this front. The challenges Freud presents to developing radical politics are an important corrective to messianic tendencies, but also represent an effort to think ‘civilization’ against itself.
One of your lurkers,
Dan
Comment by Dan @ 11/27/2005 4:02 pm
I agree with Dan…
Remember what Freud said to Jung in New York… ‘Little do they know, we are bringing them the plague…’ Didn’t Lacan observe that all the Americans had to do to avoid the plague was to continue ‘not to know’, which they duly did. Doesn’t the idea of a ‘true self’ amount to the idea of a self without the unconscious?
Comment by mark k-p @ 11/29/2005 2:10 am
Freud’s definitely more complicated than just the bad stuff I’m pointing to; particularly in Civilization And Its Discontents. But I think that the bad Freudianism is definitely a part of Freud, rather than just a later misreading.
Comment by Tim @ 11/29/2005 5:06 pm
A self without an unconscious would just be transparent, though, so I’m not sure that the idea of true/false self would really apply there. It’s the unconscious, with its idea that we don’t know ourselves, but that there is something we _could_ know (namely, the unconscious), which gives rise to the idea of a ‘true’ self, no?
The developmental account of the way the id, ego, and superego are formed does go against this interpretation (and I think this is an element that Lacan develops, right?), but the normalization of a particular developmental pattern kind of reintroduces the idea of the unconscious as something “outside” consciousness, which we could come to have knowledge of.
Still, I’ve read very little Freud, so I could just be wrong here.
Comment by Tim @ 11/29/2005 9:21 pm
Isn’t there something about the unconscious which is rebarbative to being known… i.e. the pre-conscious is contingently not known but there is something about the unconscious resistance to knowledge… surely Freud is asking us not to accept a self which is potentially whole and ‘known’ but one which includes within it, as its most fundamental part, an aspect which can NEVER know itself…
Comment by mark k-p @ 12/1/2005 10:00 am
In an interview F. also said, though, that had he read the Frankfurt School stuff much earlier he might have saved himself a lot of work. Which suggests an affinity btw F. and Frankfurt School?
Comment by steff @ 12/7/2005 9:31 pm