Foucault’s immanent contradictions

by THOMAS LEMKE

This is an excerpt from the introduction to Thomas Lemke’s Foucault’s Analysis of Modern Governmentality: A Critique of Political Reason.?????

Were not Foucault’s critics right to fault him for the contradictions immanent in his work? Did they not accurately describe the theoretical incoherence of calling for political resistance on the basis of a neutral conception of power? Was it not necessary to dissolve these aporias, contradictions and paradoxes in one direction or another? It seems Foucault had only two possibilities. According to the first line of reasoning, he overcame the problem and affirmed the validity of his neutral conception of power by giving up on critical ambitions: he came to advocate theoretical relativism, no longer seeking to distinguish between better or worse, greater or lesser freedom, or more or less just forms of power. Alternatively, Foucault made his political motives and normative value judgements clear – that is, he gave up on the neutrality he had professed – so that the critical standards of his theoretical engagement became manifest and available for political mobilization. Either-or.

When I first began working on Foucault, I accepted that his analysis of power lacked (self-) reflection. Yet at the same time, I recognized that many reasons existed to call such a diagnosis into question. My engagement with Foucault’s ‘paradoxes’ followed a course that proved paradoxical in its own right: the more obvious and manifest the ‘problem’ became, the more I asked myself whether it really posed a problem. There were at least three reasons for my mounting scepticism.

To start with, it is highly improbable that such manifest contradiction escaped Foucault, a subtle thinker attuned to the political consequences of theory. On the contrary – as Habermas has noted (among others) – Foucault was well aware of the paradoxes, even if he never changed his position with regard to them. The question, then, was why he did not abandon his contradictory outlook in order to resolve the problem in one way or another. Can this bearing really be reduced to ‘professing irrationalism’,[1]or did Foucault have something else in mind – and if so, what? If we accept that Foucault consciously operated with contradictions, what did he want to achieve?

A second reason, connected to the first, involves the kind of critique levelled at Foucault. On the one hand, I felt that contradictions in his work were identified correctly and accurately, on the other hand, I was left with the impression that seeking them out proves unproductive and negative; doing so follows a rationalistic strategy focused on insufficient theoretical reflection and intellectual misprision. Critics intone lamentations about a lack of self-reflection, then sound a call for a coherent theoretical position to resolve the problem. From this perspective, ‘disquieting contradictions’ represent the product of ‘inconsistency’[2] or, alternately, ‘the result of Foucault’s deficient reflection on the normative conditions of his own writings’[3] – that is, a mistake or shortcoming of his theoretical work.

The third aspect concerns the apparent randomness of the political positions that Foucault adopted. Even though critics propose similar diagnoses, the assessment of his overall politics does not present a clear picture. Foucault has been labelled a ‘young conservative’;[4] for others, he represents nihilism or anarchism.[5] Axel Honneth views Foucault as standing close to the positivism of systems theory; in contrast, Mark Poster holds that he continued the tradition of Western Marxism ‘by other means’.[6] Notwithstanding comparable accounts of problems, then, readers have ironically enough not arrived at a uniform classification of Foucault’s writings. Quite the opposite. Their status remains unclear – or, better: contradictory.

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