Foucault's eschatology

Berman offers this very sharp summary of Foucault's work, whom he says is "about the only writer of the past decade who has had anything substantial to say about modernity" (Berman is writing in 1982). Then: "what he has to say is an endless, excruciating series of variations on the Weberian themes of the iron cage and the human nullities whose souls are shaped to fit the bars. . . Foucault denies the possibility of any sort of freedom, either outside these institutions or within their interstices. Foucault's totalities swallow up every facet of modern life. He develops these themes with obsessive relentlessness and, indeed, with sadistic flourishes, clamping his ideas down on his readers like iron bars, twisting each dialectic into our flesh like a new turn of the screw."

For Foucault, anything that might seem to be free and spontaneous isn't. Sexual desire is the reflect of "the modern technologies of power that take life as their object" which deploy "sexuality by power in its grip on bodies and their materiality, their forces, their energies, sensations and pleasures." Political resistance is ineffectual, because constitutions are "the forms that make an essentially normalizing power acceptable."

Berman goes on: "Do we use our minds to unmask opression - as Foucault appears to be trying to do? Forget it, because all forms of inquiry into the human condition 'merely refer individuals from one disciplinary authority to another,' and hence only add to the triumphant "discourse of power.' Any criticism rings hollow, because the critic himself or herself is 'in the panoptic machine, invested by its effects of power, which we bring to ourselves, since we are part of its mechanism." In short, Foucault finds in modernity "a cage far more airtight than anything Weber ever dreamed of, into which no life can break."

Why would thinkers want to join Foucault in his suffocating environment? Berman suggests that "Foucault offers a generation of refugees from the 1960s a world-historical alibi for the sense of passivity and helplessness that gripped so many of us in the 1970s. There is no point in trying to resist the oppressions and injustices of modern life, since even our dreams of freedom only add more links to our chains; however, once we grasp the total futility of it all, at least we can relax." As with Derrida, eschatology - its denial, that is - appears to be central to Foucault.

posted by Peter J. Leithart on Saturday, November 04, 2006 at 04:51 PM

Permission is given to use material on this site, provided the source is cited, blog entries are republished in full, and the author is notified in advance.