In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, David Pan talks with Linus Recht about his article “After Desire: Foucault’s Ethical Critique of Psychological Man and the Foucauldian Ethos of the Internet Age,” from Telos 196 (Fall 2021). An excerpt of the article appears below. In their conversation they discussed Foucault’s critique of the psychological self and his search for a form of selfhood that would allow for continual reinvention and the discovery of new pleasures; how a reading of Platonic psychology demonstrates the weakness of Foucault’s critique of the psychological self as a historical construct; how contemporary social media has translated Foucault’s ethics of the self into reality; and how the ubiquity of mobile phones and similar devices in our everyday life, particularly the way that they subject us to a constant stream of distracting stimuli, suggests that Foucault’s notion of what the self could be might actually be a recipe for misery. If your university has an online subscription to Telos, you can read the full article at the Telos Online website. For non-subscribers, learn how your university can begin a subscription to Telos at our library recommendation page. Print copies of Telos 196 are available for purchase in our online store.
After Desire: Foucault’s Ethical Critique of Psychological Man and the Foucauldian Ethos of the Internet Age
Linus Recht
Introduction
Michel Foucault is perhaps most famous for his historical-genealogical critique of sexuality in the first volume of his History of Sexuality. But as Arnold Davidson has shown, Foucault also presented a more fundamental critique of “desiring” or “psychological” subjectivity as such.[1] This latter critique informed Foucault’s late-career “ethical turn”—his theorization of a much-debated, radical “ethics of the self.” The following study will investigate the relationship between Foucault’s conceptualization of the desiring subject and his ethics of the self in order to reach a standpoint by which the latter can be evaluated. Over the course of unfolding these concepts, we will find something familiar about Foucault’s ethical vision: it represents an uncanny formalization of many features of contemporary life in the age of the smartphone—that is, his ethical ideal has in important ways been involuntarily realized by emergent social practices that have little to do with sexuality. Therefore, although the local stimulus for Foucault’s critique was in part a form of vulgar Freudianism[2] that has been out of vogue for decades, critiquing Foucault’s critique provides a vantage point from which to grapple with contemporary sociopolitical reality.
My reading of Foucault is done with an eye toward these specific issues and so is necessarily one-sided, sometimes against the grain, or even ironic; my argument as a whole is intended to be suggestive rather than demonstrative. I wish to be clear that while I believe the account of Foucault given in this paper accurately represents one strand of his thought, I do not claim to provide an exhaustive interpretation of Foucault nor of any of the other thinkers mentioned below. The point is to clarify and employ some of Foucault’s insights, thinking both with and against Foucault, in order to develop suggestions toward a critical theoretical perspective on our own society.
This paper is organized as follows: (I) What is Foucault’s critique of psychological man? (II) What is Foucault’s ethics of the self? (III) Do we have reason to doubt Foucault’s critique of psychological man? (IV) Why might we affirm or reject Foucault’s ethics of the self? (V) What can grappling with Foucault’s ethics of the self illuminate about our sociopolitical present? Then, a conclusion.
I. Bodies and Pleasures
In the first volume of The History of Sexuality, Foucault finds that the apparently natural phenomenon of sexuality is historically specific, the product of discourses and force relations, networks and strategies of power acting through us and on us, infusing and reforming our experience. Now, our very form of experience is woven through with the scarlet thread of sexuality. But the very historical contingency of this situation means that it can be overcome, and its badness means that it should be overcome. And so, Foucault closes his slim volume with the evocative proposal: “The rallying point for the counterattack against the deployment of sexuality ought not to be sex-desire, but bodies and pleasures.”[3]
Why “bodies and pleasures”? In this text, Foucault mainly argues that since the strategy of the sexuality regime focuses its tactics on the “intensification of the body,” this is the proper site from which to mount a reversal.[4] Elsewhere, in an interview, Foucault points out that, unlike “desire,” the term “pleasure” is not loaded with “medical and naturalist connotations” and does not carry with it the whole conceptual apparatus of “sexuality.”[5] As such, discarding the latter term may provide linguistic maneuvering space for a practical counterattack. However, supposing Foucault’s critique ultimately aims deeper than sexuality, we cannot simply account for his proposal by these two surface-level reasons. And indeed, the fundamental argument comes later in the interview, where Foucault says:
[I am in favor of] treating pleasure ultimately as nothing other than an event, an event that happens . . . that is not assigned, and is not assignable, to a subject. Whereas the, let’s say, nineteenth-century notion of desire is first and foremost attached to a subject. It’s not an event; it’s a type of permanent characteristic of the events of a subject, which for this reason leads to an analysis of the subject.[6]
In short, while the notion of desire has psychological depth, pleasure does not, and neither do bodies. Davidson clarifies this passage’s implications:
Structures of desire lead to forms of sexual orientation, kinds of subjectivity; different pleasures do not imply orientation at all, require no theory of subjectivity or identity formation. The circumscription of true desire is a process of individualization; the production of pleasure is not.[7]
Conceptually, desire implies a certain attitude toward the world on the part of the desirer: desire’s dynamics choose, frame, orient, prioritize. And desire is layered; it can be hidden or obvious; desires can conflict with and conceal one another; and following from this, our innermost desires are more fundamental—they are who we really are. But pleasure makes no claim to tell us who we really are. This appeals to Foucault, who infamously quipped: “Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order.”[8]
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1. Arnold I. Davidson, The Emergence of Sexuality: Historical Epistemology and the Formation of Concepts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2001). This thematic becomes more prominent in the subsequent volumes of The History of Sexuality, whose publication history is admittedly complicated. See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 2, The Use of Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), p. 5.
2. To my eyes, Foucault is careful to avoid anywhere criticizing Freud himself, instead criticizing the society that made him possible or necessary and perhaps the mythology that grew up around him. See the praise for Freud in Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), pp. 119 (“up to the decade of the forties” is an oblique reference, it would seem, to the death of Freud himself), 150. But cf. Robert Trumbull, “Freud beyond Foucault: Thinking Pleasure as a Site of Resistance,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 32, no. 3 (2018): 522–23.
3. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 1:157.
4. Ibid., 1:107. See also 1:96 (“the strategic codification of . . . points of resistance . . . makes a revolution possible”), 1:106, 1:150, 1:157.
5. Michel Foucault, Nicolae Morar, and Daniel Smith. “The Gay Science (Interview),” Critical Inquiry 37, no. 3 (2011): 388.
6. Ibid., pp. 389–90.
7. Davidson, The Emergence of Sexuality, p. 212.
8. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 17.
