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18. The Care of the Self and Politics
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18 The Care of the Self and Politics the will to truth underpinning disciplinary and normalizing powers may seek to categorize differences according to standards of normality and deviance. But the operations of these power relations always produce something else. Moreover, the frictions and conflicts within disciplinary institutions and practices mean that they operate, from the will to truth’s perspective, only by breaking down.1 Nevertheless, a regularity persists, giving sense and direction to the entire disciplinary regime. This regularity is found in the schema of correspondence connecting the heterogeneous domains of desire and truth, which constitutes desire as a hidden source of truth about the self. It is against the backdrop of this regularity that Foucault closes the first volume of The History of Sexuality by suggesting the possibility of ‘‘a different economy of bodies and pleasures’’ (1990a, 159). It is a mistake to see this as a move to place bodies and pleasures outside of power and discourse.2 It is rather part of a strategy thoroughly embedded in discourse , targeting a link central to modern discipline. Bringing to the fore the idea that what has been forgotten by modern disciplinary policing is the pleasure of the sexual act,3 it seeks not an escape from this game of truth but instead a way of ‘‘playing it otherwise’’ (Foucault 1988, 15). Does this leave nothing more than different, historically contingent con- figurations and senses of power and truth that cannot be judged better or 1. This may be compared with the functioning of Deleuze and Guattari’s desiring-machines , which ‘‘work only when they break down, and by continually breaking down’’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983, 8). 2. Examples of this charge against Foucault include Butler (1990, 93–111) and Newman (2000, chapter 4). A detailed and sophisticated response is provided by McWhorter (1999). 3. ‘‘And I could say that the modern ‘formula’ is desire, which is theoretically underlined and practically accepted, since you have to liberate your own desire. Acts are not very important , and pleasure—nobody knows what it is!’’ (Foucault 1984a, 359). 185 The Care of the Self and Politics worse with respect to one another? That conclusion underplays the import of archaeological and genealogical analyses. Meaning and knowledge may be impossible without disjunctive linkages, making it impossible to escape power relations and perhaps also the simulacral unities and identities arising from them. Nevertheless, by uncovering the microscopic dispersion beneath these unities, another sense can be glimpsed that is overlooked by representational thought and the will to truth. Or, perhaps better, it is possible to glimpse the sense of sense, or the sense of sensible statements as such, which underlies all statements and allows them to ‘‘make sense.’’ This second order of sense is the paradoxical but nonetheless positive content of a dispersion that exceeds the terms of identity and opposition and that is ironed out by oppositional thought. Rather than conceiving Otherness in the terms prescribed by the will to truth—as either an oppositional difference compatible with identity or an excessive, unmediatable difference that may be elevated to divinity or reduced to chaos and materiality, but in either case is treated as a difference lying outside the boundaries of identity—this sense presents it as the immanent differenciator that disjoins differences, folding together heterogeneous but mutually imbricated domains.4 This untimely excess arises with discursive practices, problematizing the surface identities and oppositions that coordinate these practices. In functioning this way, however, this excess can also help us modify our practices and ourselves. Foucault’s final turn to practices of the self cannot be understood without taking this excess into account, in terms of both the way it exceeds us by traversing and cutting us apart, demolishing anything within us that might be seen as a homogeneous substance, and the way it leads us to exceed ourselves. The self-to-self relation, ‘‘by which the individual constitutes and recognizes himself qua subject’’ (Foucault 1992, 6), is hardly a realm of freedom divorced from power. The strategies and practices available for the self to train itself are products of games of truth and the meanings and codes they establish. The self-to-self relation, in turn, resides within a microscopic realm where selves are constituted through power relations that interpenetrate them and within which they participate. Nonetheless, because these power relations are relations of disjunction, dispersion, and strife, this micropolitical realm is as much a realm of self-creation, self-stylization, and self-experimentation...