KAREN VINTGES
Abstract: The title of this article refers to Beauvoir’s essay “Must We Burn De Sade?” (1953/1952).
Analogous to Beauvoir’s essay on Sade, this article is something of an apology for Foucault. I use Beauvoir’s essay on Sade to discuss Foucault’s concept of ethics as an art of living. I conclude that the final Foucault’s thought on ethics can be labelled a post-existentialism, combining postmodern thinking and the issues of freedom and commitment in an inspiring way. I argue, however, that the heuristics of Foucault’s later work is undertheorized. Comparing Foucault’s approach with Beauvoir’s own concept of ethics as art of living shows hers to be superior in that it has a place for the emotions. The cold stoicism of the final Foucault only deals with emotion from the point of view of repression and sublimation. Foucault’s post-existentialism must therefore be enriched with Beauvoir’s concepts. I conclude that aspects of the theoretical frameworks of both Foucault and Beauvoir can contribute to the solution of some of the dilemmas of postmodern thinking with respect to politics and political theory.
--In this article, I try to outline a ‘post-existentialism’ that can fill an hiatus in postmodern thinking with respect to politics and ethics. After discussing Foucault’s late work in light of Beauvoir’s essay, “Faut il brûler Sade?” (Beauvoir 1952), I develop a comparison of Beauvoir’s and Foucault’s ethics. In a concluding section, I explain what I think we can use from both authors when we try to rethink ethics and politics “through” postmodernism.
I. Who was Michel Foucault?
Why Foucault? One might be surprised that in the context of a Beauvoir panel I point to his theories on the subject and subjectivity. His biographies suggest that Foucault was something of a misogynist. Indeed, from Macey’s biography, The Lives of Michel Foucault (1993), we learn that he was a Beauvoir-hater in particular, treating her with icy politeness at best. Nonetheless, I think
Foucault’s last work has something in common with Beauvoir’s--an important clue, or even a possible solution to dilemmas that postmodernists, including postfeminists, face regarding politics and ethics.1
Notoriously, the issue in the debate around Foucault’s work is its lack of an ethics.2
Foucault is heavily criticized for not offering explicit normative criteria. For instance, Habermas complains that Foucault’s work is internally contradictory: a normative framework is hidden in his work, but he refuses--and even makes it impossible--to articulate one (Habermas 1987). In her well-known article, “Michel Foucault : A ‘Young Conservative’?” Fraser criticizes Foucault for being a moral nihilist after all (Fraser 1994). McNay concludes that while feminist theory can use some of Foucault’s insights, given that political movements like feminism require a normative viewpoint, his theoretical framework is unacceptable.3 Taylor, who at first criticised Foucault
primarily for his methodological inconsistencies (Taylor 1984), treats him much more harshly in his impressive Sources of the Self (1989), identifying him as a purely Nietzschean thinker who espouses distinctive and unrealistic notions of radical freedom and moral nihilism. Taylor repeats this attack in his Ethics of Authenticity (1991), lumping him and other postmodernists together with Nietzscheans like Artaud, Bataille, and others he labels “apostles of evil.”
Is this too harsh? To paraphrase Beauvoir’s metaphorical question about Sade, Must we burn Foucault? Like Beauvoir, I want to offer something of an apology for my author. As
Beauvoir says of Sade I will say of Foucault. His merit is that he transformed his experiences into an oeuvre, thus assuming responsibility for them. However, I will also argue that, unlike Sade, Foucault did leave a positive but undertheorized ethics--especially in the two last volumes of his history of sexuality (Foucault 1986a, 1986b) and in late articles and interviews in Rabinow’s collection (1997).
Who was this Michel Foucault anyway? In person, he was not easily overlooked--lively, sparkling eyed, energetic, bald, and above all, smallish. (Running into him in a corridor at the
University of Vincennes in Paris, I remember him barely reaching to my shoulder.) From his biographies, including Hervé Guibert’s novel (Guibert 1990), one gets the impression that he was also a fragmented man, occupied in many ways, always somewhere else, always active, totally dispersed into the world.
Foucault, famously experimentalist about sex and violence, loved Sade--or so another biographer informs us (Miller 1993). For a while, Foucault identified himself with Sade, and throughout his life he was attracted to sadomasochistic sexuality and near-death experiences, always looking for sensations on the border, frequenting violent orgies in San Francisco leather bars in the midst of the AIDS-crisis. What is really interesting about all this, however, Miller misses completely, namely, the way Foucault made philosophy out of his life and “lived” his philosophy. With enormous power--and here I paraphrase Beauvoir on Sade--he transformed his eroticism from an individual attitude into a challenge to society, charging his experiences with an ethical significance.4 And by putting his experiences in writing, he at the same time transformed
or rather created himself as he stated in an interview with Duccio Trombadori (Foucault 1980). Miller is therefore wrong to see Foucault’s work as an immediate expression of his sexual life (Eribon 1994). Granted that according to Foucault himself, “Whenever I have tried to carry out a piece of theoretical work it has been on the basis of my own experience.” He even called his works “a few fragments of an autobiography”(1988: 156, in Simons 1995: 8). Yet if his personal experiences motivated his books, it does follow that they are merely personal confessions
(Duyvendak 1995). For one thing, he writes of his experiences stressing how they put him in touch with what was going on around him. “It is because I thought I could recognize in the things I saw, in the institutions with which I dealt, in my relations with others, cracks, silent shocks, malfunctionings …that I undertook a particular piece of work” (Foucault 1988: 156, in Simons 1995: 8). Moreover, he makes a point of saying that an author transforms himself in the process of writing. “The ‘major work’ of a writer is, in the end, himself in the process of writing his
books….the work includes the whole life as well as the text. The work is more than the work: the subject who is writing is part of the work” (1987: 18, in Simons 1995: 8). Simons rightly argues that it is in part through writing “that Foucault produces himself as an individual who resists current modes of subjectification” (Simons 1995: 7). Again paraphrasing Beauvoir on Sade, I say that Foucault’s emotional nature and the peculiar character of his sexuality are for us data we can merely note. His chief interest lies in the manner in which he assumed responsibility for them, in an overall project of self-creation.5
Beauvoir stresses that it is to Sade’s credit that he clearly shows the selfishness of
individuals and that he makes us aware of the enmity and separateness between people. She states that he wanted to face and endorse this aspect of human existence. “De Sade tried to make of his psycho-physical destiny an ethical choice, and of this act, in which he assumed his separateness, he attempted to make an example and an appeal. It is thus that his adventure assumes a wide human significance”(Beauvoir 1953: 11). Thus Sade’s merit, she concludes,
lies not only in his having proclaimed aloud what everyone admits with shame to himself, but in the fact that he did not simply resign himself. He chose cruelty rather than indifference….He emerged with no revelation, but at least he disputed all the easy answers. If ever we hope to transcend the separateness of individuals, we may do so only on condition that we be aware of its existence. Otherwise, promises of happiness and justice conceal the worst dangers” (89).
We can, I think, make a similar judgment about Foucault. Fragmented, restless, and active as he, and his sex life, seem to have been, at least he did not restrict himself to a passive
undergoing of his experiences. On the contrary, he proclaimed them aloud and took responsibility for them, relating his work to his experiences and constructing himself through his work as an individual who questioned all the easy answers. It is to Foucault’s credit that he focused on the fragmented character of people, because if ever we hope to overcome this fragmentation, “we may do so only on condition that we be aware of its existence” (Beauvoir 1953: 89).
Thus far I have argued, analogous to Beauvoir’s conclusion on Sade, that it is Foucault’s merit that he transformed his experiences into an oeuvre, at the same time creating himself. But does Foucault’s own theoretical framework allow such an interpretation? To find a concept of self-creation we have to turn to Foucault’s later work.
In the works of the 1970’s, Foucault sticks to analyzing how we in the West today are produced, as unitary “subjects,” by all kinds of disciplinary practices and discourses. In Discipline and Punish (1979/1975), he argues that since around 1800, a “soul” or inner self is installed in us by panoptic, controlling institutions like prisons, schools, hospitals and welfare institutions. In his first volume on the history of sexuality, Foucault claims to find an interior subject posited at an even deeper level--the deep self as an effect of the so called “scientia sexualis” (Foucault 1981/1976). The scientia sexualis consists of discourses such as psychology, psychiatry,
pedagogy, and medicine. These discourses, together with all the practices and technologies that surround them, force us to talk about sex: What do you like best? How often? With whom or what? Supposedly, “truths” are thereby elicited from us on “our sexuality.” But what is actually happening is that these “truths” are being produced through techniques of confession. Each of us is thus allocated a sexual identity (homosexual, heterosexual, paedophile, sadist, masochist, etc.). It is not that such identities actually exist. Rather, “all along the great lines which the development of the deployment of sexuality has followed since the nineteenth century, one sees the elaboration of this idea that there exists something other than bodies, organs, somatic localizations, functions, anatomo-physiological systems, sensations and pleasures” (1981: 152-153).
Into the 1970’s, then, Foucault depicts human beings as really fragmented, with the unitary self being only an effect of normalization and discipline. We are subjected to and judged by the power of the Norm (which determines what is normal, what is deviant) and thereby held in check through the determination of our identity. As for the so-called “deep self,” Foucault rejects this as being just the ‘ordre interieur’ of a dominating and continually inhibiting social order. Moreover,
in this phase he also has an aversion to ethics because he sees it as necessarily based on a concept of a deep self, on subjectivity as space of self control--in other words, on discipline.
By contrast, in his last works, Foucault makes room for--and urges us to re-endorse--constructions of self-identity which escape the current forms of subjectification. In The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self (1986a, 1986b/1984, respectively), revising his earlier hypothesis that talk about sexuality only dates from the sixteenth century, he draws attention to the so-called prescriptive discourses on sexuality in Greek and Roman culture--“that is, texts whose main object, whatever their form (speech, dialogue, treatise, collection of precepts, etc.) is to suggest rules of conduct. These texts thus served as functional devices that would enable individuals to question their own conduct, to watch over and give shape to it, and shape themselves as ethical subject” (1986a: 12-13). Studying antiquity’s discourses on sexuality he comes across a type of ethics that from now on becomes his main topic.
In the preface to The Use of Pleasure, Foucault makes a distinction between ethics and moral rules, or “moral codes.” Today, we only think of the former in terms of the latter--i.e., of ethics in terms of prescriptions of how to behave. But in antiquity there were hardly any moral rules. Ethics consisted of vocabularies that were intended as guides for the concrete shaping of one’s own existence. These vocabularies constituted a relationship of the self to the self; they envisioned “intentional and voluntary actions by which men not only set themselves rules of conduct, but also seek to transform themselves, to change themselves in their singular being, and to make their life into an oeuvre that carries certain aesthetic values and meets certain stylistic criteria” (10-11).
Foucault analyzes how the traditional Greek idea of an “aesthetics of existence” gradually develops into a conception of “care of the self” that culminates in a Greek-Roman type of ethics in the first and second century that encourages the creation of an ethical self through self-techniques. He calls these Greek and Hellenist ethical discourses “practices of freedom.”6 In the two books
mentioned above Foucault tries to demonstrate how extensive these “practices of freedom” were in antiquity--which is not to say they were meant for everybody. They were aimed solely at free men, not at women and slaves. He shows the extent to which techniques had been worked out in detail to control and style their sexual behavior--everything from little self-tests (e.g., trying to pass a beautiful boy in the street and not get sexually aroused) and extensive written daily inventories of one’s actions to letter writing and so called hypomnemata, that is, personal notebooks to record insights and ideas to guide one’s future actions.
A freedom to create oneself thus was offered through vocabularies that provided the tools and techniques to acquire an ethos. If our first defense of Foucault above proceeds in analogy with Beauvoir’s apology of Sade, this is allowed by his own concepts of ethics as “aesthetics of
existence” and “care of the self.” They entail the possibility of a free self-creation, a possibility that is implied as well in Beauvoir’s approach to Sade--as also, for example, in Sartre’s of Genet (1983/1952) and Baudelaire (1972/ 1946). However, at the end of her essay, Beauvoir criticizes Sade for not offering any positive ethical solution. Here she refers to her own ethical theory. In what follows I will argue that Foucault clearly differs from Sade in that his later work articulates an ethics that confronts the dimension of the human condition he described earlier.
II. Freedom for all
Like Sartre, Beauvoir was strongly opposed to positive moral theory. Existential philosophy states that every human being is free and has to invent his or her own behavior, and there are no
universally applicable maxims or moral rules. But unlike Sartre, Beauvoir kept a lifelong interest in ethics. In her philosophical essays, among them The Ethics of Ambiguity (1948/1947), she stated that we have to adopt a “moral attitude,” which amounts to a striving for the freedom not only of ourselves but also that of all other human beings. In terms of Foucault we can say that this general rule is the only “moral code” of her ethics. In The Ethics of Ambiguity Beauvoir focuses
mostly on the relationship of the self to the self that goes with this moral code. We are free, but we only practice freedom if we dare to situate ourselves and commit ourselves to certain values. We therefore have to develop an individual identity by creating a certain coherent trajectory in life, carefully styling our daily behavior with this aim in mind (Vintges 1996). Not only do we find similarities with the aesthetics of existence that Foucault detected in history. In The Mandarins (1956/1954), a philosophical novel, Beauvoir launched a phrase for such a type of ethics: “art de vivre,” the art of living, a phrase that shows much resemblance to Foucault’s--both authors using the language of aesthetics and art to indicate that we deal here with a creative process and not with the application of general rules or laws.
I have argued elsewhere that Beauvoir’s existentialist ethics is not Sartrean in that she advocates a reflexive styling of one’s life, whereas for Sartre such a reflection on one’s life is “bad faith.”7 In my view Beauvoir’s autobiographical work amounts to such an ethical styling of
life. It should be conceived of as her art of living. Beauvoir wrote diaries and letters, as well as five volumes of autobiography, all as ways of inventorying and styling her daily behavior, thereby trying to create herself as an ethical--and political--subject that could work for the freedom of her fellow human beings. Her writing practices were for her a means of questioning her own conduct and shaping herself as ethical subject--not as an essential, unitary, self as effect of introspection or self-realization, but as a coherent self that is the effect of stylisation and practical philosophical self-creation.
In my view, Beauvoir’s thinking on ethics can contribute to the solution of some apparent dilemmas of postmodernism - and postfeminism. She, like Sartre, was thoroughly familiar with Surrealism and other ‘modernist’ movements from which postmodernism inherited its suspicion of the unitary deep self. 8 Beauvoir shared Sartre’s disgust for the idea of a deep inner self. If,
unlike Sartre, she wants us to win a different sort of self, this is because to her, people should assume responsibility for a specific set of normative values by providing themselves with a
coherent identity through constant creative activity. In this way, avant la lettre, she finds a way past postmodernism’s aversion of the fixed, essential subject with a moral perspective. Her “art of living” can contribute to filling in postmodernism’s hiatus in the field of ethics and political theory. Whereas for postmodernists, any thinking in terms of identity is to be opposed as
repressive (see Section III), Beauvoir reconceives the theme of identity in order to show that when it is interpreted in terms of the commitment to certain values, we practice and endorse freedom.
Here, I think, one finds a similarity with the later Foucault. Many Foucaultian thinkers fail to see what is at stake in his final works. They fail to see that his plea for an “aesthetics of
existence” and a “care of the self” is in fact a plea for a certain coherence of the self. Care of the self requires work on the self, organising the fragments. Foucault thus reintroduces the theme of identity in the following way. “Self…has two meanings. Auto means ‘the same,’ but it also conveys the notion of identity. The latter meaning shifts the question from ‘What is this self?’ to ‘Departing from what ground shall I find my identity?’” (1997a: 230). As with Beauvoir, this makes identity a function of a commitment to some basic values from which we create ourselves. Foucault goes on to say that what is at stake in the care of the self is not the soul-as-substance but the soul as activity (231). Here we have a self that creates itself through action in the world, beginning from some basic commitment.
Foucault’s plea for the reintroduction of ethics as care of the self should not be confused with California cults of the self that turn people into narcissists: “they are diametrically opposed” in that the latter urges people “to discover one’s true self” (1997c: 271). For Foucault, moreover, the ethical subject is always already a political subject. “Being occupied with oneself and political activities are linked” (1997a: 231); and “freedom is thus inherently political” (1997b: 286). In fact, Foucault’s real concern is politics not ethics. People often see ethos as a purely personal matter, but Foucault’s concept of ethos is political through and through. A concern for who you want to be in life and how you want to act is a political concern. At the same time, it is a concern
about acting in the polis--making politics, in the stricter sense of the word. For Foucault, both aspects of concern are interwoven; one cannot be a good citizen if one does not take good care of oneself, and care of the self spells itself out in a polis.
If, however, the later Foucault advocates a kind of free commitment to and responsibility for “values,” the obvious question is, Which ones? Could these be any values whatsoever? Antiquity’s self-technologies were aimed at self-mastery, especially the mastery of one’s sexual life. Yet, Foucault argues, these are all ethical vocabularies, because it was understood that only when we are masters of ourselves can we relate to others without tyrannizing them. As he puts it, articulating an explicit normative criterion, “The problem…[is] to acquire...the ethos, the practice of the self, that will allow us to play these games of power with as little domination as possible.”9
Not only does Foucault put forward a normative distinction of (practices of) freedom versus domination, he also advocates enlarging the domain of freedom practices over the domain of the moral code. For him, then, the most important characteristic of the ancient ethical vocabularies is that they are relatively autonomous and offer the tools to freely create oneself as an ethical subject. Western culture thus has a long tradition of such practices of the self, but they became invisible, “after they were taken over to a certain extent by religious, pedagogical, medical, or psychiatric institutions.”10 Foucault wants to rescue freedom, or what is left of it, from the
disciplines and to re-endorse the ancient type of freedom practices, taking back power over--and responsibility for--our lives and the way we relate to others. He was concerned with the
readmission of the ancient type of ethics but distanced himself explicitly from its content which focused too strongly on the master-slave concept, linked as it was to “a virile society, to
dissymmetry, exclusion of the other….All that is quite disgusting!”(1997c: 258) And, echoing Nietzsche, “couldn’t everyone’s life become a work of art?”(1997a: 261). Clearly, Foucault wants the domain of freedom practices enlarged so that everybody has access to them.
respect.11 I have argued that the later Foucault’s concept of ethics implies the idea of a political
commitment to values. In his discussions of Kant’s essay, he formulates his own political commitment, that is, the values he wants to endorse through his oeuvre. In the third and most famous essay, “What is Enlightenment?” (1997g), Foucault clearly sides with “modernism,” in the sense of a Baudelairean awareness of contingency, including the contingency of one’s
self-understanding.12 “Modern man for Baudelaire…is the man who tries to invent himself” (1997g:
311). Foucault endorses this attitude, and he connects it with a philosophical attitude or ethos that goes back to the Enlightenment and that can be described as a “work carried out by ourselves upon ourselves as free beings” (316) and “a patient labor giving form to our impatience for liberty ” (319).
Foucault thus commits himself to “modernism” but what is new is his association of Baudelaire with Kant. Foucault sides explicitly with the modern philosophical attitude Kant displays in his essays on Enlightenment and the French Revolution (see esp., Foucault 1994). In these essays, according to Foucault, Kant does not reduce contemporary events to universal truths but questions the present as such in an “ontology of the present.” Foucault thus makes it clear that a practicing of the modern attitude as he sees it is not limited to the domain of art, as was the case for Baudelaire. Like Kant, Foucault’s own concern about freedom is much broader. “Baudelaire does not imagine that [this ascetic elaboration of the self] has a place in society itself or in the body politic” (312). For Foucault, to take care of oneself is inextricably linked with questioning “domination at every level and in every form in which it exists, whether political, economic, social, institutional or what have you” (1997b: 300-301). Through his critique of Baudelaire, Foucault disconnects Enlightenment and humanism, or modernism and humanism, so that he can side with Kant’s project of Enlightenment--or “modernity”--in its striving towards freedom for all.
William Connolly (1998) has argued that Foucault’s emphasis on the contingency of any self-understanding implies a normativity he calls “ethical sensibility,” that is, a respect for the
(self-understanding of) others. But he concludes that because agonistic respect is central to
Foucault’s thinking on politics, this must extend even to respect for every sort of fundamentalist. I think, however, that we can conclude the opposite. Foucault’s interpretation of contingent self-understandings may imply a pluralism when it comes to ethos, but his “normative modernist” commitment sets limits to their content: a Nazi ethos, for instance, is excluded. One moral code can be distilled from the later Foucault’s work, namely, freedom of all persons for self-creation.
Beauvoir and Foucault, then, in spite of major differences between their overall theoretical frameworks, both appear to embrace the idea of ethics as an art of living that is thoroughly political in its commitment to making all people free.
III. Towards a post-existentialism
How can the concept of ethics as the “art of living oriented to freedom for all” fill in the hiatus in postmodern thinking with respect to ethics and politics? What can we use from the theoretical frameworks of Beauvoir and Foucault?
First, to supplement Beauvoir’s notion of freedom, we need Foucault’s idea of the “practices of freedom.” Beauvoir always talked about situated freedom, and against Sartre, she argued that freedom per se always has a social component. In her view, we are ontologically free but our social position determines whether we can realize our freedom (Vintges 1996). At the same time, however, this means she continued to accept Sartre’s concept of ontological freedom--a pure freedom thfreedom--at supposedly defines every humfreedom--an existence, wfreedom--aiting only to be refreedom--alized. And on just this point, the later Foucault’s radical socio-historical approach to freedom is preferable. For him freedom is neither absolute nor pure. It is embedded in social discourses and vocabularies that offer tools for a care of the self. The practices of the self are “not something invented by the individual himself. They are models that he finds in his culture and are proposed, suggested, imposed upon him by his culture, his society, and his social group” (Foucault 1997b: 291).
Foucault thus reconciles anti-essentialist postmodern thinking on the one hand and thinking in terms of freedom on the other. For him it is crucial that, instead of being lived by political structures, we should live and make politics ourselves. But his concept of a creative subject is not the humanist one. Foucault disliked the work of Sartre: although Sartre emphasized that the self is not given to us “through the moral notion of authenticity, he turns back to the idea that we have to be ourselves – to be truly our true self” (1997c: 262). However, we have seen that the normative nucleus of Foucault’s later work comes very close to French existentialism’s appeal to people to live as free individuals and to commit themselves through action in the world, striving toward freedom for all. Foucault as well as Beauvoir and Sartre share with cultural “modernism” its awareness of life’s inescapable contingency and of the need for us to invent ourselves. However, they all break with the Baudelairean conception of art as a separate domain. Beauvoir explicitly dismisses Oscar Wilde’s dandyism and surrealist writer Anaïs Nin’s
“aestheticism.” She criticizes them for making the beauty of their own lives the main focus (Beauvoir 1988/1972: 165,170). Sartre considers Baudelaire’s dandyism as infantile and narcissistic: Baudelaire locked himself in an artificial world; instead he should have acted in the real one (Sartre 1972/ 1946 ). As we have seen, Foucault likewise widens the modern attitude, using the language of art not to indicate a domain, separate from the real world, but to indicate that ethics is a creative process. In this respect Foucault’s thinking on ethics can be labelled a post-existentialism, combining postmodern thinking and existentialism in an inspiring way.
Second, however, we need to connect Foucault’s concept of ethics as the art of living with Beauvoir’s own, for hers is superior in that it has a place for the emotions. In contrast with Sartre, she sees emotion as the positive experience through which we have contact with the world and our fellow human beings. Not being able to experience emotion handicaps us to that we cannot become “psycho-physiological unities” (Beauvoir 1953: 33), that is, incarnated human beings living in the midst of a social world (Vintges 1996).
In Beauvoir’s philosophical framework, then, one finds both phenomenological sensitivity to our always being situated and incarnated beings as well as the insistence that pure
consciousness is also an element of our human condition--indeed, the element that separates us from ourselves and from other people. For Beauvoir, incarnation and pure consciousness are the two sides of our ambiguous condition, and their reconciliation comes by way of a moral
conversion through which one becomes an incarnate pure consciousness, involving oneself with others (Beauvoir 1948). Yet the pure, empty consciousness always remains, which is why the moral conversion has to be practised as a révolution permanente, and why there will never be complete harmony between people, as Beauvoir emphasizes in The Second Sex (1984/1949).
In her conception of moral practice, Beauvoir thus underscores the importance of
emotional life and our feelings of interpersonal and social symbiosis--something neither Foucault nor his cold Greeks and Stoics ever really did.13 Their shared preoccupation is self-mastery,
above all in the sense of coping with their sexual desires. They only deal with emotion from the point of view of repression and sublimation. Beauvoir’s central concern is rather the more general and multifaceted one of handling deep feelings for other persons. In her essay on Sade, she
opposes Stoicism explicitly, accusing Sade of “dark stoicism” (a “negative version” of stoicism, saya the French original), and she concludes that we need a more positive ethic than the Stoic “serenity of the ancient sage who regarded as futile ‘things which do not depend on ourselves’”--which is nothing but “a completely negative self-defense against possible suffering” (1953: 77). In The Ethics of Ambiguity, Stoicism is said to have “preached indifference” (1948: 29) and “impugned the ties of family, friendship, and nationality so that they recognized only the universal form of man” (144). For Beauvoir, on the contrary, the whole point of ethics is our choosing to become connected and emotionally involved with other people, and of course care for others is much more prominent in this view.14 Beauvoir pities Sade for his “emotional separatism” (1953:
for “this ‘autism’ which prevented him from ever forgetting himself or being genuinely aware of the reality of the other person” (33). Hence, “with a serenity similar to Kant’s and which has its source in the same puritan tradition, De Sade conceives the free act only as an act free of all feeling. If it were to obey emotional motives, it would make us nature’s slaves again and not autonomous subjects” (78).
In short, I want to put forward a post-existentialist conception of ethics as the art of living--a conception that combines the best of the theoretical frameworks of Beauvoir and Foucault and that thereby offers us an opportunity to rethink ethics and politics “through” postmodernism. I call my conception “post-existentialism” because it radically situates freedom; but it is also existentialist because it urges a certain unification of the self through a stylisation of acting in the world that involves a commitment to some basic values and therefore to an identity. As such it would restore political agency.
Postmodernists have often stated that any identity is repressive, because it always excludes parts of the self and other people. Personal identity thus having become suspicious, identity on a collective level--for instance, of the gay, black, or women’s movements--became suspicious, too. Every unification is seen as repression and violence. Personal identity represses heterogeneity within ourselves; and collective identity represses otherness. The only solution then seems to be to refuse--and thus “go beyond”--identity. But the question will not go away: If every unification, intra- and intersubjective, is already repressive, who is going to make politics and how? Is it really impossible to develop institutional alternatives to Western democracies--societies that, from the point of view of difference, stand revealed as the power practices of a specific group (Young 1990; Kymlicka 1998; Williams 1998)? Can there really be no politics of the “recognition of identities,” as distinct from a “politics of redistribution” (Taylor 1994)?
Here the later Foucault and Simone de Beauvoir both have something to contribute. For they make us think of identity as a moral and political commitment, instead of as a pre-given
essence. As such they give us a clue for a type of identity politics that is not based on essence but on freely taking responsibility for certain values and norms. Too many Foucaultians find in his work only the image of the nomadic self that escapes, when in fact his later work is about taking responsibility and making basic moral commitments – a contribution to political philosophy that has thus far remained under-theorized (e.g., in Moss 1998; Simons 1995).
In my view, the time has come to rethink the postmodernist project from such a
perspective. We need a new conception of political agency, and not only for reasons of collective identity politics. To urge an ethics of a care of the self is first of all about empowerment, for it is to advocate a way of life in which people have a grip on their personal lives. Second, such an ethics conceives identity in a way that is important politically in the narrower sense of the term, for it enables people to defend and enlarge the space of freedom practices against and within the disciplines in our societies and against other types of domination.15
Third, we are not yet finished with the politics of redistribution--including one on a global level--nor with identity politics. Women still have to fight for--and not only against--many things, as do many other Others. If Foucault’s final work is, as I have suggested, about political agency, it is also about re-entering the sphere of social and political so-called identity movements, but now with an ethos--and thus not falling into the trap of merely endorsing the existing disciplinary identities. For example, “what the gay movement needs now is much more the art of life….I am sure that from the point of departure of our ethical choices, we can create something that will have a certain relationship to gayness” (Foucault 1997d: 163-164; also 1997e: 156-160).
In my view, Foucault’s position here can be extrapolated to the women’s movement. When asked about the possibility of a gay movement Foucault replied “we have to work at becoming homosexuals, and not be obstinate in recognizing that we are” (1997f: 136). Likewise I would argue that it’s about time the women’s movement takes responsibility again for a certain set of values.16
Foucauldians have argued that the later Foucault advocates a model of guerrilla warfare tactics: Always avoid the trap of identity. Always attack another target, always from another place. I have been arguing on the contrary that Foucault ultimately contributes to the reinstalling of political agency and political commitment in postmodernism. “Must we burn Foucault?” I asked, paraphrasing Beauvoir’s essay on Sade. Both authors, Sade and Foucault, were attacking humanism in its theoretical and abstract-moral assumptions. Both were trying to illuminate another type of reality. For Beauvoir, “the supreme value of [Sade’s] testimony is the fact that it disturbs us” (1953: 89). We cannot, however, “be satisfied with the solution he offers….He did not suppose that there could be any possible way other than individual rebellion. He knew only two alternatives: abstract morality and crime. He was unaware of action” (87). Unlike Sade, Foucault did leave a positive ethics, one that can be inspiring to us disciplined yet fragmented people of today. What started with Foucault as a challenge ended as a real ethics, a point that was overlooked by his main critics, as well as by his postmodernist interpreters.
of this article, and to Nancy Bauer, Ineke van der Burg, Annemie Halsema, and Veronica Vasterling for valuable comments on a previous version.
I use the term, “postfeminism,” for postmodern feminist theory that deconstructs the subject woman and concentrates on the differences between women. For an overview, see Vintges (1991, 1999).
2 For an overview of this debate see Kelly (1994).
3 McNay (1992, 1994). With the exception of McNay and Sawicki (1998), feminist appropriations of
Foucault have thus far concentrated on his works from the mid-seventies (e.g., Diamond 1988, Hekman 1996).
4 Beauvoir writes: “[T]o regard de Sade’s peculiarities as simple facts is to misunderstand their meaning and
implication. They are always charged with an ethical significance….Sade’s eroticism ceased to be merely an individual attitude. It was also a challenge to society” (Beauvoir 1953: 41). Beauvoir uses the term,
“ethical,” here in the early Sartrean sense, i.e., as an equivalent of “projet” or self-creation. At the end of her essay on Sade where she criticizes him for not offering any ethical solution, Beauvoir employs her own concept of ethics (see section II).
5In Beauvoir’s view, “his emotional nature and the peculiar character of his sexuality are for us data we can
merely note….[Sade] did not restrict himself to a passive submission to the consequences of his early choices. His chief interest for us lies not in his aberrations, but in the manner in which he assumed responsibility for them” (Beauvoir 1953: 13).
6 1997b: 282. “For what is ethics, if not the practice of freedom, the conscious (réfléchie) practice of
freedom?…Freedom is the ontological condition of ethics. But ethics is the considered form that freedom takes when it is informed by reflection” (284).
7 Would the young Sartre regard an explicitly ethical attitude as “bad faith”, it is “bad politics” to the older
Sartre (Vintges 1996).
8 Here the term, “modernism,” refers to an intellectual and artistic movement from roughly the 1860’s to the
mid-20th century. For a tracing of these “modernist” sources of postmodernism, see Taylor (1989).
91997b: 298. Foucault describes domination as follows: “When an individual or social group succeeds in
blocking a field of power relations, immobilizing them and preventing any reversibility of movement by economic, political, or military means, one is faced with what may be called a state of domination. In such a state, it is certain that practices of freedom do not exist or exist only unilaterally or are extremely
freedom” (Foucault 1997b: 283).
10If this is the case, it might be interesting to see what traces we can find in history of the self-techniques of
women. My Philosophy as Passion (1996) contributes to this wider project, yet to be worked out. 11 For a lucid comparison of the three articles, see Schmidt and Wartenberg (1994).
12 Baudelaire “defines modernity as ‘the ephemeral, the fleeting, the contingent.’ But, for him, being
modern…lies in adopting a certain attitude with respect to this movement…that makes it possible to grasp the ‘heroic’ aspect of the present moment” (Foucault 1997g: 311).
13 Marcus Aurelius and Seneca were among Foucault’s favourite writers (Guibert 1990; Eribon 1989).
14 “[G]enerosity seems to us to be better grounded and therefore more valid the less distinction there is
between the other and ourselves and the more we fulfil ourselves in taking the other as an end. That is what happens if I am engaged in relation to others” (1948: 144).
15 “It takes an identity to say no,” commented the Dutch lawyer Heikelien Verrijn Stuart on Dutch television
coverage of a recent report on the Dutch military behavior in Srebrenica in 1996 in the former Yugoslavia. Before the eyes of the Dutch thousands of Moslem men were separated from the women and children. Seven thousand men are still missing.
16 Elsewhere I will try to elaborate the outlines of what I would call a “normative postfeminism.”
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