The Illusion of History illusion of history: time and the radical political imagination

12. Ethos and Attitude: The Return of the Phantom Self

253 12 Ethos and Attitude The Return of the Phantom Self In this concluding chapter on Foucault, I wish to examine the thinker’s readmission of the free activity of the self into his imaginative rationale, where before it had been conspicuously absent. The term “imaginative rationale” is carefully chosen so as not to overplay the reemergence of this figure in Foucault’s theoretical and conceptual edifice. The radically skeptical construction of history that Foucault had built throughout his archaeological and genealogical development is in no way conceptually crowned with the spire of the self. I will show that Foucault never gives the self a definitive form. In fact he characterizes it as an open wound of possibility that has no a priori content. The timeless will of the self is the ethereal phantom that Foucault now sees stalking the halls and corridors of his historical architectonic. This ghost in no way holds the structure together, but certainly constitutes the hidden personality of the building, a haunting presence that one feels wherever one is in the house. In this way, Foucault speaks more of the reactivation of an “ethos” or “attitude” with regard to the self, rather than definitively tracing what constitutes its scope and activities. This examination will thus be centered upon Foucault ’s posthumous volumes of the History of Sexuality and his seminal, but short text on Kant’s essay on the Enlightenment. Despite its brevity, the generosity that the period (the Enlighten- 254  Michel Foucault ment) receives at the hands of the normally merciless Foucault and the two seminal figures it invokes makes this an important essay for dissection . From these texts one can isolate three bearings of Foucault’s later work: a fascination with pagan lifestyles and values, a balancing of his relations with the intellectual monolith of the “Enlightenment,” and a fusion of these awakenings with his historicizing of the present by the invocation of the literary figure of Baudelaire. These streams will constitute the fields of analysis for this concluding chapter, which by way of comparison will culminate in a look at Albert Camus’s own formulation of the pagan mindset, his concern for revolt and the present, and his critique of the Enlightenment. The similarities of their slants on these subjects serve to highlight the obvious differences in their theoretical approaches to politics. Greco-Roman Sexual Mo(re)deration True to his traditional way of attacking a new subject for research, Foucault begins his multi-volume work on the history of sexuality by looking for the moral codes and ethical arrangements that determine the sexual subject. He seeks the configuration(s) of power/knowledge that work upon a passive, inactive self by coaxing a form agreeable to the dominant hand out of its ceaselessly impressionable nature. In other words, Foucault stays reasonably close to his determinist historical outlook , an outlook where the determining power/knowledge dyad produces selves. The research however fails to stay true to this time-tested modus operandi. Foucault delved further and further in his last days into the Greco/Roman world of classical and antiquity texts on sexual ethics and found a power relation that, until that time, he had not been able to recognize in his many other excursions into power relations. At the cradle of the Western experience and consciousness Foucault locates a power relation to which man subjects himself, a self-contained power over oneself. Before delving into this discovery of Foucault’s later work, it will be helpful to succinctly observe what Foucault so drastically moved away from in the first volume of the History of Sexuality. The first volume sets itself the task of furthering the claims of productive power by overturning the dominant view of the Victorian era as a prudish, repressed culture of dignified and socially austere sexual Ethos and Attitude   255 virtues. Taking aim at Freudian and other strands of psychoanalytical thought that confer upon themselves the mantle of liberators of our suppressed sexual drives, Foucault propels the wedge of his productive power into what he calls the “repressive hypothesis.” The Victorian regime was not one that squashed into submission the happy frankness and lenient fluency that previous ages had with their sexual climate, but is instead the age that monstrously overproduced sexual experience into a “science of sex.” Foucault notes, “Yet when one looks over these past three centuries with their continual transformations, things appear in a very...