In Foucault's Wake

Abstract

In Foucault's Wake James I. Porter (bio) With his elegant new study, Foucault's Seminars on Antiquity: Learning to Speak the Truth, Paul Allen Miller offers a comprehensive and much-needed guide to Foucault's views of antiquity down to his last lectures at the Collège de France. Foucault was a prolific writer, lecturer, and thinker during the final half-decade of his life when he made his abrupt turn, or rather return, to Greece and Rome.1 We are only now beginning to digest this complex legacy. The question I want to raise in this essay is what it would mean to reassess, reincorporate, or move beyond Foucault's approaches to self-care, the self, and the human in the study of Greek and Roman antiquity at the moment we find ourselves in today. The question, in my mind, has three parts. First, how can we situate Foucault's work on antiquity in the context of his other prodigious accomplishments in the field of modernity? Second, is there a way to historicize Foucault—to place him in his moment in time, and above all his own sense of the historical present that he found himself in? And third, what use can be made, in future studies of the premodern past, of Foucault's writings prior to his final shift to antiquity? I see a contrast and a tension here. Foucault's focus in his study of antiquity—the history of sexuality tied to questions about practices of the self—was narrow even by his own standards. It cannot match the brilliant sweep of his previous projects, which mapped out huge historical critiques that analyzed some of the ways in which modern culture in the European West organized itself on an institutional level by establishing normative structures in the areas of the human sciences, medicine, psychiatry, surveillance, incarceration, security, governmentality and law, neoliberalism, and the biopolitical. Perhaps more than that of any of his peers and contemporaries, his work was not just transformative. It was generative. It gave rise to whole new fields of inquiry in the humanities broadly conceived, not just in the interstices and forgotten margins but across their reassembled surface. Unlike with these other intellectual trends, to be a Foucauldian today is not to have a preestablished method. It is to work in Foucault's deep wake and to break new ground. Can the same be said of his work on antiquity? I am not sure it can. [End Page 395] The rupture with his earlier projects occurs after the first volume of The History of Sexuality from 1976 (La volonté de savoir), which established how discursive regimes, intertwined with regimes of institutionalized power, positivize what they repress; they produce desiring, sexualized subjects. Returning to antiquity in 1980–81 with his lectures on Subjectivity and Truth while preparing the second and third volumes of The History of Sexuality (1984), Foucault looked for the same kind of phenomenon, discursive regimes that produced desiring, sexual subjects. But it is here that things go a bit off the rails. With no institutions to target (there were none comparable to the clinical or administrative environments of the nineteenth century when sexuality was produced by sexology), Foucault had to come up with something to take their place. And what he settled on were individuals, bodies, pleasures, anxieties, and problematizations that were, so to speak, suspended in mid-air, belonging as they did to an eclectic mix of practices that were private, public, and philosophical but were overseen by no institutional frameworks. In a telling moment in volume 3 of The History of Sexuality, he teases out a notion of "the subject's 'style of activity'" that, he suggests, is more telling and powerful than any system of rules, codes, or conduct: it operates independently of any "natural structure" or "positive regulation" (Foucault 1986, 35). This kind of self-stylization Foucault calls a "form of experience" (1986: 36). Its agent and object are said to be the ancient "self," le soi, always understood as a first-personal moi. In taking this approach, Foucault was abandoning his strong suit: institutional and cultural critique. He was occasionally explicit about this precise set of...