The Bodily Dimension in Thinking

Chapter Six. Exorbitant Gazes: On Foucault’s Genealogies of Bodies

103 Chapter Six  Exorbitant Gazes On Foucault’s Genealogies of Bodies F oucault’s work is quite different from the writings of the philosophers that the previous chapters focus on, so much so that many academics are not quite sure whether Foucault should be considered a philosopher at all. Some people would rather call him a historian or a structuralist, since his thinking neither moves in the paths of self-reflection that characterize traditional philosophical thought, nor is it ontological in a Merleau-Pontinian or Heideggerian sense. Foucault presents us with singular descriptions of institutions, practices, and forms of knowledge and he traces lineages and shifts in constellations of power and knowledge that lead to new practices , different forms of knowledge, and ways of understanding subjects. Foucault is not interested in finding first principles, in making universal claims, or in thinking Being as such, and yet his thinking is interesting to scholars in philosophy precisely because he challenges traditional philosophical investigations . What makes him interesting for the present book is that he provides us with a view of the bodily dimension in thinking that does not center in or move along a direct experience of this dimension. At the same time his accounts affect this dimension and thus the way we experience and think it. Foucault has a strong sense of how institutions, practices, modes of knowledge, relationships of power, and conceptions of truth play specific roles in shaping and transforming bodies. He thinks these transformations of bodies and also the ways these affect thought not from within attuned modes of being that he would attempt to express in a poietic language, but obliquely, from a distance, through descriptions of archeological fragments and testimonies, which include in the first place texts. Thus he directs our attention to concrete events and phenomena that shape and transform the bodily dimension in thought, and he does this in quite different ways from the philosophers we have been considering so far. If one can raise legitimate doubt as to whether Foucault should be called a philosopher in the traditional sense, one can as well raise legitimate doubt as to whether he should be called a historian in the traditional sense. Foucault’s “historical ” analyses move as little along the lines of common historical practices as they move along the lines of a history of be-ing. He does not view historical events as a necessary concatenation of cause and effects and does not concentrate on worldhistorical events. Instead he focuses on seemingly marginal occurrences, like medical knowledge and practices, the arising of mental institutions, practices of punishment, penal laws, sexual practices and norms, and he describes shifts of power-knowledge relations within them. Further, Foucault does not claim to have the uninvolved“objective”eye that would give an uncompromised or“disinterested” account of historical facts,since he is well aware that his own thought is influenced by the practices and modes of knowledge that he describes and analyzes, and that his own writings may effect a change in relationships of power-knowledge. As Charles Scott writes,“Foucault’s genealogy is implicated in what it comes to know and is epistemically involved in what it exposes.”1 There is, then, at least a philosophical vein in Foucault’s writings if we understand philosophy as a questioning of ways in which we perceive and understand ourselves and the world we live in, so that the very principles by which we think are questioned and transformed. The latest Foucault characterizes his whole work as being driven by the question of the relationship between subjectivity and truth. In an interview of January 20, 1984, he says that the problem of knowledge/power that many readers believe to be his primary interests, “is not for me [Foucault] the fundamental problem but an instrument allowing the analysis—in a way that seems to me [Foucault] the most exact—of the problems of relationships between subject and games of truth.”2 Foucault continues to be read as a thinker of liberation who seeks freedom from oppressions, despite his continuing efforts in various interviews to expel that view. We will see further on in this chapter that such an interpretation is inconsistent with his understanding of how power relations work. Foucault’s thinking certainly has political implications, but it is not driven by a political agenda (liberation of the oppressed), since this would reinscribe his thought in a teleologically driven discourse, which is exactly what his genealogical accounts undermine. a. Foucault as...