The Stage of Philosophy. “Tetsugaku no butai” (“La scène de la philosophie”; interview with M. Watanabe, April 22, 1978), Sekai, July 1978, p. 312-332.

Issue 1.5 – Scenes of Knowledge THE STAGE OF PHILOSOPHY A conversation between Michel Foucault and Moriaki Watanabe “Tetsugaku no butai” (“La scène de la philosophie”; interview with M. Watanabe, April 22, 1978), Sekai, July 1978, p. 312-332. Specialist in theatre and French literature, Moriaki Watanabe, who had introduced M. Foucault to Japanese theatrical forms, translated La volonté de savoir (The Will to Knowledge ).

Watanabe :

Why is it that the theme of the gaze and, in connection to this, the theme of the theatre consistently return in your writings, so much so that they seem to dominate the general economy of discourse?

I think that this is in fact a very important question. Western philosophy has shown little interest in theatre, possibly since its condemnation by Plato. One has to wait for Nietzsche until the question concerning the relation between philosophy and the theatre is once again put to occidental philosophy in all its sharpness. I do believe that occidental philosophy’s disregard for the theatre is connected to a certain way of addressing the question of the gaze. Since Plato, and even more since Descartes, one of the most important philosophical questions concerns the way things are regarded, or rather, the question if what we see is true or illusory; if we are in the world of reality or in the world of lies. To distinguish between the real and the illusion, between truth and falsehood, this is the task of philosophy. The theatre completely ignores these distinctions. There is no sense in asking if the theatre is true, if it’s real, if it’s an illusion or if it’s a pack of lies; by the very fact of asking this question, the theatre is made to disappear. To accept the non-difference between the true and the false, between the real and the illusion, that’s the condition for theatre to function at all. Without being such a pre-eminent specialist in theatre as you are, without having gone deeper into the particular problems of theatre like you have, there is one thing that I’m interested in, that fascinates me; what I would like to do is try to describe the way the people of the West looked at the world, without ever asking whether this was right or wrong, to try to describe the way they (jeu de leur themselves were staging the spectacle of the world by the very play of their gaze jeu regard ). ). In fact, it is not important for me if psychiatry is right or wrong, in any event, that’s not the question I’m asking myself. I don’t care if medicine proclaims truths or pronounces an untruth, that’s very important for sick people, but as an analyst, so to speak, that’s not my concern, all the more so because I don’t have the competence to tell truth from falsehood. But I would like to know how, for example, illness was staged, how madness was staged, how crime was staged, that is to say, how it was seen, how it was received, what kind of value was attached to madness, to crime, to illness, what kind of role they were made to play; I would like to write a history of the stage on which one tried to distinguish truth from falsehood; but it is not that distinction that I am interested in, but the constitution of the stage and the theatre. It is indeed the theatre of truth that I would like to describe. How the West has built itself a theatre of the truth, a stage of the truth, a stage for this rationality that has now become one of occidental imperialism’s distinctive features, because its economy, the Western economy, may have reached its summit, the essential forms of the Western way of life and the political predominance of the West are undoubtedly coming to a close. But something has remained, something that the West is undoubtedly passing on to the rest of the

Foucault:

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world, namely a certain form of rationality. It concerns a certain kind of perception of truth and error, a certain theatre of truth and falsehood.

Watanabe :

As for the relationship between your discourse and the theatre, the pleasure I take in reading your books – Barthes would say “the pleasure of the text” – certainly proceeds from the way you write: a very dramatic organization of your writing, either in Discipline and Punish or in The Will to Knowledge . To read some of your chapters from The Order of Things gives us a Britannicus for instance. pleasure that equals reading the great political tragedies of Racine, Britannicus

Foucault :

That’s flattering, too flattering, I think.

Watanabe :

It would not be wrong, whether you like it or not, to consider you the last great classical writer. It’s not so much because I’m, if I may say so, constantly engaging with Racine that I’m particularly sensitive to this stylistic aspect of your books, but simply because it conforms to a certain choice of writing, to a certain conception of writing, when you set out to describe the lines of force that pervade the big epistemological or institutional changes of the Western world. In a special issue of the Journal Arc, La crise dans la tête, for instance – which had first been designed as a special issue dedicated to Michel Foucault, but which you rejected by claiming that a special issue is a funeral –, we can read an interview given to Fontana that had first been published in Italy. In that interview you talk about the necessity to “distinguish the events, to differentiate the networks and levels to which they belong, and to reconstitute the lines along which they are connected and engender one another.” You insist on “a refusal of analyses couched in terms of the symbolic field or the domain of signifying structures”, in aid of “recourse to analyses in terms of the genealogy of relations of force, strategic developments, and tactics.” One should not refer to “the great model of language (langue) and signs”, but “to that of war and battle”, because “the historicity which bears and determines us has the form of a war”, not “that of a language (langagière)”. One should not look for “relations of meaning”, but for “relations of power”. Now, Racine’s tragedy, as Barthes has shown, is determined by relations of force. These relations are functions of a double relationship between passion and power. The strategy of Racine’s passion is eminently bellicose. Probably due to a certain realism in the bellicose and the dramatic conflicts, I’ve discovered a genealogical kinship between your discourse and Racinian writing. The theatre, in its function as a dramatic representation, has constituted, at least in Western culture, the exemplary confrontation on the stage, which is the “battlefield”, the space par excellence for strategies and tactics. If, in your books, the gaze is related to the great genius of classical French dramaturgy, that’s because these big historical conflicts that have remainedunperceived remained unperceived or unrecognized are made to appear.









logical problem. Again it was Nietzsche, I think, who first defined philosophy as an activity that leads to an understanding of what’s happening, of what’s happening right now. In other words, we are pervaded by processes, movements and forces, which we don’t know, and it is doubtlessly the philosopher’s task to be a diagnostician of these forces, to diagnose contemporary reality. It is a matter of finding an answer to the question: Who are we and what’s happening right now? These two questions are very different from the traditional questions: What is the the soul? What is eternity? Philosophy of the present, philosophy of the event, philosophy of what is happening right now. It is indeed about a certain way of grasping, through the detour of philosophy, the issues theatre deals with, because theatre always deals with an event. The paradox of theatre resides precisely in the fact that this event is repeated every night since it is staged, it is repeated eternally or in any case, in an indefinite time, since it always refers to a certain previous, repeatable event. The theatre captures the event and stages it. It’s true that in my books I try to capture an event that I considered, and consider to be important to our present time, although it is a past event. Regarding madness, for instance, it seems to me that there was a separation between madness and non-madness at a certain moment in the Western world; at another moment there emerged a certain way of grasping the intensity of crime and the problem of man raised by crime. All these events, it seems we are repeating them. We are repeating them today and I’m trying to grasp the kind of event under whose sign we were born and which continues to pervade us. That’s why these books are, you’re perfectly right here – I’m flattering myself talking about it so forbearingly, but anyway – dramatizations indeed. I’m aware of the disadvantages this entails; I’m running the risk of mistakenly presenting something as a major or as a dramatic event, which might not be of the importance I have ascribed to it. Hence my imperfection – you have to talk about your imperfections at the same time as you talk about your projects –, which might consist in a certain way of intensifying, of dramatizing events that should in a fact be talked about with less passion. But in the end, it is nevertheless important to give the greatest opportunity to these hidden events that sparkle in the past and still continue to mark our present.

Watanabe :

What you’ve said about hidden events seems very important to me, all the more so because the inflation of the event and the mass media’s overvaluation of every eventfulness is running the risk of devaluing the event as such; there is a certain distrust towards such events that are only representations, mediated by the network of mass media. But you try to grasp events as veritable factors of change. The themes of the gaze, of the stage, of dramaturgy, of the event, are linked like a logical consequence to that of space. Already in the introduction to The Birth of the Clinic, you announced that this book, “is about space, language and death”, to add immediately that “it is about the gaze”. It seems to me, if I’m allowed to simplify, that the paradigm of your analysis and your discourse is composed of a certain number of terms or themes like “the space” or “language”, “death, “the gaze”, and that the motif of death is, depending on the object of analysis, replaced by “madness”, “crime” or the “episteme”. Amongst these major motifs, space, which is of capital importance, maintains a close relationship









The great confinement of lunatics during the 17th century, analyzed in History of Madness, is a typical example. Your analysis is then aimed at, as you said yesterday at the seminary at the University of Tokyo, the mechanics of power in the juridical institution. If I may open a little parenthesis concerning another parole) in Mallarmé, as the latter constitutes the type of isolation, namely the isolation of language ( parole fundamental poetic experience in Western modernity. You yourself noticed eight years ago in our interview that modern literature since Hölderlini [1] has constituted itself under the sign of madness in order to radically detach itself as an essential or as an other language (langage) from ordinary language (langage), which functions like a currency. And this language (langage), isolated because (parole), the of its very status of social exclusion, ended up resembling another excluded language parole parole) of madness; that you once called, referring to Blanchot, “the work of fire” La (La language ( parole part du feu). I take the liberty to remind you of that episode, simply to tell you that the Foucault enthusiasts in Japan at first were people who were reading Foucault above all in his writings about Western literary modernity from Mallarmé to Bataille and Klossowski. Consequently your analysis is not aimed at the content of these isolated, enclosed, excluded spaces, but at the mechanism of power, which is in need of such spaces while knowing the limits of their efficacy. In this sense it is not about the dramaturgy which is acted out in these privileged rather than enclosed and excluded spaces, but about the staging and installation of a dispositif that makes possible such a dramaturgy of space. Discipline and Punish seems to exemplify this: the great, ceremonial and bloody The beginning of Discipline theatricality of the torment in Damiens is replaced, without transition, by the meticulous and coldblooded regulations of a correctional institution for juvenile delinquents. The refusal of theatricality itself, or at least its invisibility in the penal records, turns out to belong to the same order as the process that internalizes the theatral optics into the dispositif of power as intended by Bentham for his Panopticon. In any case, in your books the distribution and reorganization of the social space are seen as essentially strategic factors of the dispositif of power.

Foucault :

Exactly. When I was a student, a certain latent Bergsonism was dominating French philosophy. I say Bergsonism, I don’t say that this was really Bergson’s reality, far from it. There was a certain privilege given to analyses of time at the expense of space, which was seen as something dead and ossified. I remember – this is an anecdote that I find significant for the renewed Bergsonism which was very much alive at that time – that I gave a lecture at a college of architecture about ways of differentiating between spaces in a society like ours.ii [2] At the end someone rose to speak quite forcefully about the fact that to talk about space is tantamount to being an agent of capitalism, that everybody knew that space is death, paralysis, immobility, which bourgeois society wants to impose on itself, that this means to misconceive of the big movements of history, to misjudge the revolutionary dialectic and dynamic… One could easily see that he was simply developing, below a Bergsonian valorization of time at the expense of space, an extremely vulgar conception of Marxism. This anecdote is not important, but it is indicative of the way in which a certain Hegelian and Marxist conception of history superseded and increased the Bergsonian valorization of time.









Foucault :

That’s correct. Well, it seemed to me that it’s nevertheless important to see how space is actually a part of history, that is to say, how society arranges its space and inscribes power relations within it. There’s nothing original in this, by the way; historians, historians of agriculture, for instance, have already demonstrated how spatial distribution had done nothing but to, on the one hand, translate and, on the other hand, to support, inscribe and anchor relations of power, economic relations… It seemed important to me to show how in an industrial society, in a society of the capitalist type that had been developing from the 16th century onwards, there emerged a new form of social spatiality, a certain way of socially and politically distributing space, and to show that one could write the whole history of a country, of a culture or of a society, based on the way space is valuated and distributed. The first space that seems to raise this problem and which makes manifest this strong social and historical differentiation of societies, is the space of exclusion, of exclusion and confinement. In Greco-Roman societies, above all in Greek societies, in order to get rid of an individual – Greek theatre shows this quite clearly – the latter was sent into exile. This means that there was always a surrounding space. There was always the possibility to get to another place, a place that the city was not supposed to recognize or, in any case, a place where the city had no intention of establishing its laws or values. The Greek world was divided into autonomous city states surrounded by a barbarous world. Thus, there was always a polymorphism or polyvalence of spaces, a distinction between space and emptiness, the outside and the indefinite. We are certainly living in a filled up world today: the world has become round, it has become overpopulated. For a long time the Middle Ages, like the Greeks, simply kept the custom of getting rid of troublesome individuals by sending them into exile. We have to keep in mind that the main punishment imposed in the Middle Ages was banishment. “Get lost, we don’t want to see you around here again!” And the individuals were stigmatized with branding iron so that they wouldn’t come back. The same thing applied to the lunatics. But from the 17th century onwards, the population had reached a relative density – not to be compared with the density of today –, which led to the impression that the world might be full. And when it came to organizing the space inside a state, or rather inside Europe – Europe as a political and economic entity started to develop from the end of the 16th century and the beginning of the 17th century – at that moment it was no longer possible nor accepted to get rid of somebody. Hence the necessity to create spaces of exclusion, no longer in the form of banishment and exile, yet at the same time as spaces of inclusion: one disposes of people by locking them up. The practice of confinement seems to me to be one of the consequences of the existence of a filled up and enclosed world. In a word, confinement is a consequence of the world’s fertility. Then, a whole series of spatial transformations occurred; contrary to what people usually believe, the Middle Ages were an age of permanent individual circulation; borders didn’t exist, people where perfectly mobile; monks, academics, merchants and sometimes even farmers moved as soon as the soil of their places of origin was no longer able to support them. The great voyages did not begin in the 16th century, far from it. In Western societies, social space started to stabilize from the 16th or 17th century onwards due to urban organization, property regulations, surveillance and road networks… This was the time when the vagabonds were arrested, the poor were locked up, begging was prevented, and the world ossified. But it could only ossify on the condition that different types of spaces for the sick, for the lunatics and for the poor where institutionalized and that the rich









Watanabe :

In Japan we have a historical experience, which is similar and very different at the same time: the decision of the Tokugawas shogunat in the 17th century to enclose the amusement and theatre districts in a peripheral space of the city. The spatial distinction and the topological separation were maintained until the restoration of the Meiji. Social discrimination was inscribed materially in the urban space. I would also like to talk about the fascination of certain Western artists with external spaces, especially certain men of Western theatre. From Claudel to Artaud and Brecht, and more recently from Grotowski to the Théâtre du Soleil , we can see that from the end of the 19th century onwards, certain forms of traditional oriental theatre started to attract some dramaturges, some Western directors, namely as something, which is closer to the origins and escapes the pattern of Western history. In some way, the Rousseauian search for origins turns towards the outside of European spaces and changes into an investigation of the other , the outside of Western civilization. This movement cannot be reduced to a simple cultural variation on the imperialism of Western powers. It is certain, however, that there is an attraction of another space, governed by another time, different from the theo-teleological time of the West. At the same time, ethnology from Durkheim to Mauss introduces a different space as its field of research.

The revival of the vast topic of space in the 1950s-1960s was certainly one of the most interesting moments in the history of ideas, when, from Maurice Blanchot’s The Space of Literatureiv [4] to Jean Luc Godard’s Pierrot le Fouv [5] , the revaluation of space took its revenge, in the field of literature, experimental art and the human sciences against the omnipotent predominance of unequivocal time and history. It is no doubt unnecessary to add that it was precisely during this period that a set of theoretical discourses was developing, that was rightly or wrongly given the name structuralism. The case of Lévi-Strauss is a good example in this respect: it was absolutely necessary to liberate his field of research and his method from the predominance of time in the Hegelian, theo-teleological sense in order to guarantee the autonomy of his research within structural anthropology. This act of liberation was only possible due to the postulation of a multiplicity of spaces and their difference in relation to Western space.

Foucault :

Yes, structuralism, or what has been called structuralism, has actually never existed outside of certain philosophers, ethnologists, historians of religion and linguists, yet, what is called structuralism is characterized by a certain liberation or opening, you could say a displacement regarding the Hegelian privilege of history.

Watanabe :

But at the same time it is absolutely wrong to confuse the refutation of the Hegelian privilege of history with the reappraisal of events, the reappraisal of the nature of the eventfulness. Is that what you mean to say?

Foucault :

Or on the contrary – I’m not going to speak in the name of Lévi-Strauss of course, he can











installation of certain cultural spaces as a privileged historical object, that is to say as the object of an analysis which unfolds in time. That’s my first object of analysis. Hence the confusion: You know that the critics in France – I don’t know how things work in Japan – are always a little hasty, they easily confuse what one talks about with what one actually says. To merely talk about space makes people think that one is spatio-centric and that one detests history and time. That’s absurd.

Watanabe :

There was a direct echo of this in Japan, too.

Foucault :

Let’s drop the subject. It’s true that during the 50s, there was a certain liberation from a particular way of writing history, yet without denying or refusing history or criticizing the historians, but to write history differently. Look at Barthes, he is a historian to my mind. But he doesn’t do history in the way it has been done until now. This was seen as a rejection of history.

Interestingly, the philosophers saw it as a rejection of history. Because the historians were not mistaken about it; historians saw the works produced by the so-called structuralists and henceforth read them as historical works. They accepted and appreciated them and criticized them as historical works.

It’s well known that you often refer to the historian Fernand Braudel and his works about the Mediterranean world.

Watanabe:

Exactly, all the great historians from the so-called Annales school in France, I know that those are not all, but the greatest amongst them, one of the founders, Marc Bloch, was interested in rural space and tried to write its history. It’s significant that structuralism, or what was referred to as structuralism, tried to bring to light a different kind of time; in other words, there is no such thing as one single time in the Hegelian or Bergsonian sense, a sort of great flux that sweeps everything away with it, but different histories that overlap. Braudel wrote very interesting works about these

Foucault:









entirety, that we are living in a series of polymorphic spaces, and secondly, that there is not one history but several, several different times, several durations, several velocities intertwining, crossing, and thus in turn creating events. An event is not a segment of time, but basically an intersection of two durations, two velocities, two developments, two historical lines.

Watanabe :

After all, imperialist colonization was the transferal of the obsession with an unequivocal time to a different space, which had to be rearranged according to the Western model.

Foucault :

The object of my history is, to some extent, the imperialist colonization inside European space itself. How forms of domination over people or over certain categories of individuals were established and how they made the functioning of Western societies, modern societies, possible. There is one example, which, by the way, has never been examined in detail, but that fascinates me and that guides me, although I haven’t meticulously analyzed it either. That’s the problem of the army, the army in Europe. In fact, before modernity, Europe had never been dominated by military states. Feudalism was not exactly a military system but a complex juridical system within which certain categories of individuals at certain times had to carry out the task of warfare. But those were not soldiers. Although their main duty was warfare, they were not professional soldiers. And society was neither organized like a big army nor constructed according to the model of a permanent army. Such a thing as the Roman legion that served Rome as a model for its colonization, whose organization can also be found in the spatial distribution of the Roman settlers, for instance along the river Danube, in Romania, or along the waterfront of the Rhine, all that didn’t exist. The spatial organization of feudalism was not a military organization, even though the dignitaries, even those in power, were always at the same time warriors. European armies were always transitory. There came a time, a certain season, which, by the way, was always summer, when they were at war. People were gathered together and when the war was over, and often even before the war was over, the battle lost or won, the campaign finished, they left. So at the same time they were always at war and always at peace, there were times of war, but there was no military space. The armies were formed, dissolved and then reformed.

From the 17th century onwards, one begins, on the one hand, to set up standing armies, and once the armies become permanent, they have to be situated in a particular place in the country. On the other hand, there are special arms, cannons and, especially rifles, necessitating that the maneuvers, the









Watanabe :

A very beautiful article by Deleuze about your book Discipline and Punish is entitled “A New Cartographer” (“Écrivain, non, un nouveau cartographe”).vi [6] Deleuze draws attention to a certain shift that takes place between The Archaeology of Knowledge and Discipline and Punish: until The Archaeology of Knowledge , the object of your analysis had been statements or what was being said, whereas from Discipline and Punish onward, your analysis aimed at the space or the ground to which these statements were connected, the surface on which they appeared – at the borders of language, space, ground and surface which were fragmented into checkered patterns like a diagram. The object of your analysis became not only what what was being said said at a certain moment in history but what was being done at the same moment, having set itself the task of bringing to light the immanence of power relations that made such productions of statements possible.

That's right. Let's say that my viewpoint, my most important object, has nevertheless been the history of sciences. This hadn’t been a problem for phenomenology. You won't find an analysis of the constitution of scientific knowledge in Sartre, you won't even find it in MerleauPonty. I don’t mean to criticize them; it's just an observation, nothing else.

Foucault:

I was studying under the historians of science, under Canguilhem for instance, and my problem was to find out if it is possible to write a history of the sciences that is trying to grasp the emergence, the development, the organization of a science, but not so much from the perspective of its internal rational structures, but from the perspective of its external elements that might specificallyhave specificallyhave served as its support. And thus I've always been oscillating, or rather, I was oscillating for a certain time, between the internal analysis of scientific discourses and the analysis of their external conditions of development. In History of Madness, I tried to show how psychiatry had developed, what subjects it had brought up, what objects it had dealt with, what concepts it had employed. And at the same time, I tried to grasp the historical ground on which all this had happened, that is to say the practice of confinement, the change in social and economic conditions in the 17th century. Then, in The Order of Things , I tried to return to this problem, to return to the problem of scientific discourse itself, without taking account of the historical context in which it was acted out; the analysis in The Order of Things is fundamentally an analysis of statements, the rules of formation for what is being said.









in the sense of the state apparatus, but in the sense of power relations which are themselves obviously tied to all kinds of economic relations, to relations of production, but it is, above all, relations of power that have constituted this theatre where occidental rationality and the rules of truth were played out.

Watanabe :

In the first volume of The History of Sexuality - The Will to Knowledge , you establish a distinction between a statement and discourse. A discourse, especially if it's a theoretical discourse, presupposes and implies something that exceeds the level of statement.

Foucault :

Yes, at that time, as I was just trying to write a history of scientific discourses, I was studying Anglo-Saxon philosophy, analytical philosophy, a bit more closely; analytical philosophy has produced many remarkable analyses about statements and forms of utterances that one cannot ignore. Yet my concern was slightly different. My concern was not to know how such and such a statement was formed, or under which condition it could be considered true, but to deal with units larger than statements – to deal with larger statements does not mean to be less meticulous; the problem was to know how a certain type of discourse can evolve and what rules are immanent to it; rules which decide that a statement cannot belong to this discourse if it is not formed according to these rules. Let's take a very simple example. In France, until the end of the 18th century, there was no big difference between the discourse of a charlatan and that of a doctor. The differences rather emerged from success or failure, from the studies carried out or not carried out by the subject; the nature of the things they said was not so different: the type of discourse was more or less the same. Then came the moment at which medical discourse organized itself according to a number of norms and rules, in a way that it was possible to know immediately, not whether the doctor is good or not good, but whether he is a doctor or a charlatan. That’s because he no longer talked about the same things, he would no longer refer to the same type of causality, he would no longer use the same term. Yet again, this does not mean that it was not possible to perfectly imitate the medical discourse, to avoid making false statements, but still not be a good doctor, only a charlatan. But I wanted to say that his discourse, taken by itself, has to conform to norms other than the ones of the charlatan. For example, what does a medical discourse have to talk about to actually be scientific and to be accepted as a medical discourse, what kind of concepts does it have to use, what type of theory does it have to refer to? These are the problems that I tried to resolve in The Order of Things ,









I won't repeat what I've entertained you with more than once, but the technology of the body within traditional cultural practices and of martial arts in the Kabuki theatre, has undoubtedly prepared the field for the modern drill of the body, and for the implantation of a range of disciplinary rules, centered around what you called the “political technology of the body”. Paradoxically, the fascination with the body and with knowledge of the body has increased in the Japanese theatrical avant-garde, the more the exploitation of the political technology of the body by the military regime has spiraled into absurdity. In your books, the body has been present from the start: the great confinement was aimed at the physical presence of the lunatics, and the clinic attended to bodies of the invalids. But before Discipline and Punish, the body, I daresay, was apparent beneath the surface, and it is precisely with this book about crime and correctional disciplines that the body enters the stage, not without some spectacular effects.

Foucault :

It actually seemed to me that there was something important going on, not only in the political and economic history, but also in the metaphysical and philosophical history of the West. How, by trying to retrace the history of the human sciences from the perspective of power relations, did I actually come to this conclusion? How did man become the object of concern, of worry – a traditional question –, but also the object of the sciences that wanted to present themselves as sciences specifically designed to discover what man is, what he is made of, how his behavior can be predicted in advance. From which point of view should all this be investigated? That's the point where the problem of space intervened, which seemed pivotal to me. In a feudal society, the individual body is significant, of course. So how was political, economic and religious power exercised over the body? In three different ways, I think. Firstly, the body of the subject is required to provide, to produce, and to circulate signs: signs of respect, signs of devotion, of subjugation and of servility. These signs are produced by gestures and by clothes. Secondly, the body is an object of power in so far as one has the absolute right to exercise violence against it, including death. Not in every case and only according to certain rules, but the right over life and death is part of the attributes of sovereignty. Thirdly, work can be imposed. Despite this, power, in a feudal society, is indifferent to everything else: that is to say, indifferent to the fact whether people are healthy or not, indifferent as to whether they reproduce or not; it is indifferent to the way people live, the way people behave, the way they act, the way they work.











on practical knowledge, the practices of production, and then there came a moment when the people were terrorized with assembly line work. Thus it becomes clear, and that is surprising, that from the 17th century onward, political, economic and cultural power in Western societies, became interested in the body in a completely new way, namely in terms of drill, of permanent surveillance, and in terms of performance, the intensification of performances. One has to accomplish more and more in a time that becomes faster and faster. I believe that the acceleration of physical productivity is the historical condition for the development of the human sciences, sociology and psychology. That's where the whole technology of the body stems from, which, ultimately, includes psychiatry as one of the aspects of modern medicine. This valorization of the body on a level that is not moral but political and economical has been one of the key features of the Occident. And it is curious that this political and economical valorization of the body, this importance that was attached to the body, was accompanied by an increasing moral devaluation. The body is nothing, the body is evil, the body has to be covered, the body is what you have to be ashamed of. And in the 19th century, before the so-called “Victorian” age, this led to a kind of dissociation, of disjunction, that has certainly been the origin of many individual psychological disturbances, maybe also of much larger collective and cultural disturbances: an economically overvalued and a morally undervalued body.

Watanabe :

As you showed yesterday in your seminar at the University of Tokyo, the negative attitude towards the body was not an invention of Christianity, as is often believed – a real commonplace –, it had already existed with the Stoics. Christianity introduced and generalized a power technique, centered on the body and on the sex, what you call “pastoral power”.









attended the performance of the Ring of the Nibelung last year, staged by the team Chéreau-Boulez in Bayreuth. In Spring Awakening , that I just mentioned, one could also hear some pieces of Wagner as part of the production. Maybe it's time for our dialogue to draw to a close by turning to Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods). But before we move on to Wagner, would you like to talk a little bit about your friends? For instance about Gilles Deleuze, whose name was mentioned at the beginning of our discussion, or about Pierre Klossowski, about Georges Bataille or Maurice Blanchot, who shine through your books like a sort of magical constellation. Or about Claude Mauriac, who, in his book Et comme l’espérance est violenteviii [8] , evokes, close to private life, the unexpected personalities of certain Parisian intellectuals, especially in their political activities – the investigations you made concerning the illegal imprisonment of immigrant workers or the campaign of the Groupe d’information sur les prisons (prison information group) – , these are very important personal testimonies about what you're doing as an activist.

So, let's talk about my friends, but I'm not going to talk about the friends as such. Maybe I'm part of an old-fashioned generation, which sees friendship as something that is at the same time essential and secretive. And I confess that it’s always a little bit difficult for me to link and to intermingle friendships with political groups or organizations, or schools of thought, or academic circles; friendship to me is a sort of secret freemasonry. But it does have visible patches. You talked about Deleuze who is certainly very important to me. I consider him the greatest contemporary French philosopher. Foucault:

Watanabe :

“Will the coming century be Deleuzian”?









Foucault :

They know Klossowski a little bit, Bataille too, but finally I said to myself, that I, and a few others, didn’t sufficiently show what we owe them. And, around the 1950s, it is nevertheless those people who were the first to liberate us from the fascination with Hegel that we were caught up in, that had, in any case, loomed above us. Secondly, they were the first to emphasize the problem of the subject as a basic problem of philosophy and of modern thought. In other words, from Descartes to Sartre – I’m not being polemical –, it seems to me that the subject has been seen as something fundamental but something that must not been touched: the subject was that which never called into question. Most likely that's the reason why Sartre never acknowledged the unconscious in the Freudian sense, at least that's what Lacan is suggesting. The idea that the subject is not the fundamental and original form, but that it is formed on the basis of a certain number of processes that are not part of the order of subjectivity, but of an order that is obviously very difficult to name and bring to light, but more fundamental and original than the subject itself, this idea didn’t exist. The subject has a genesis, the subject has a formation, the subject has a history; the subject is certainly not original. Who said that? Freud undoubtedly, but it took Lacan to make it perfectly clear, that's why Lacan is so important. I think that Bataille in a certain way, Blanchot in his way, Klossowski too, they exploded this original evidence of the subject, they let forms of experience come to light, in which the destruction of the subject, its annihilation, its dislocation, its movement beyond its limits show very well that it doesn’t possess this original and self-sufficient form that philosophy usually imputes to it. This non-fundamental and non-original character of the subject is, I think, the point that is common to all those who have been called “structuralists”; and who caused such an irritation in the preceding generation or its representatives. It’s true for the psychoanalysis of Lacan, it is true for the structuralism of Lévi-Strauss, for the analyses of Barthes, for the works of Althusser, for what I myself am trying to do, in my way, that we all agree on that point, that we should not begin with the subject, the subject in Descartes’ sense, as an original point that generates everything, but that the subject itself has a genesis. And that's where we end up communicating with Nietzsche again.









Watanabe :

Foucault:

He's the brother of Anne Delbée, director of Claudel’s The Exchange ?

Exactly.

Watanabe :

And what did you think of The Ring?

Foucault :

I've known Boulez for a long time, since we are the same age and I met him when both of us were twenty-two or twenty-three years old. Back then I was very interested in music. I attended that Wagner cycle – certainly because Boulez invited me, but that was not the only reason –, because the work of Chéreau and Boulez was interesting in several respects. First of all, regarding The Ring there has always been, in Western culture, this denial of the values of theatre, and a reduction of the theatrical part of Wagner’s work to the benefit of its purely musical dimension. Wagner was heard, but Wagner wasn't seen. In the end the very beautiful staging of Wieland Wagner nevertheless had the function to make the music stand out and to build a sort of visual support for a music that Wagner nevertheless wanted to be situated underneath.

Watanabe:

Call it opera, call it musical drama, one has to see it: it's theatre.









conception of the subject is very limited, and that it cannot be the unconditional basis for thought; that's where he comes into contact with the Orient. And this dissolution of European subjectivity, of the coercive subjectivity that has been imposed by our culture from the 19th century onwards, I think that this is still what is at stake in the current conflicts. And this is also why I'm interested in Zen Buddhism.

Watanabe :

Actually, they say that you're going to spend a couple of days at a Zen monastery; but we need to come back to the issue of the body….

Foucault :

In the history that I’m trying to write about Western power relations, about techniques relating to the body, to the individuals, to the conduct and the souls of the individuals, I've come to assign a very important place to Christian discipline, to Christianity as the shaper of Western individuality and subjectivity. In fact, I would really like to compare these Christian techniques to the techniques of Buddhist or Far Eastern spirituality; to compare techniques that resemble each other to a certain extent; after all, Western monasticism and Christian monasticism were modeled on Buddhist monasticism, but with a completely different effect, because the rules of Buddhist spirituality aim at a de-individualization, at a de-subjectivization, they aim at taking individuality to and beyond its limits in order to liberate the subject. My project is to first become a bit more familiar with all of this, and to see how, through these techniques that are apparently very similar to asceticism and meditation, through this general resemblance, one can arrive at very different results. Doubtlessly because there have been techniques for things that are necessarily different. That's the first point, and the second point would in fact be to find some people in an Far Eastern country who are also interested in this type of problem, in order to carry out some studies, if that's possible, about the discipline of the body or the formation of individuality, if not simultaneously, then at least to











sexual matters and the incitement to a discourse on sex, this is the second phenomenon that is an essential element of the dispositif of power. Unfortunately, we don't have time to discuss the incitement to a discourse on sex nor to speak about the fairly archaic censorship, as a very Japanese phenomenon. But nevertheless, in a society that thinks of itself as saturated with information and knowledge, what role do you give to the intellectuals?

Foucault :

It's partly this topic that I want to talk about tomorrow at the Asahi;x [10] briefly, I would say that at the moment it’s not the intellectual’s duty to pronounce truths, to pronounce prophetic truths about the future. Maybe today’s diagnostician, as I said before, may try to make people grasp what is going on, in the areas of his competence. Through the slight gesture that entails shifting the gaze, he makes visible what can be seen, he brings to the surface what is so closely, so directly and so intimately connected to us that we don't see it. His role is much closer to what in the 18th century was called “the philosopher”.









This interview was published under the title: “La Scène de la Philosophie”. In: Michel Foucault: Dits et Écrits, Volume III (1976-1979), ed. by Daniel Defert and François Ewald. Paris: Gallimard 1994. P. 571-595.

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Copyright © Éditions Gallimard, Paris, www.gallimard.fr New York Magazine of Contemporary Art and Theory in collaboration with Alwin Franke would like to thank Moriaki Watanabe, Rosa Eidelpes, Kevin Kennedy, and Éditions Gallimard

Jan Van Woensel (founder, curator & editor-in-chief), Alwin Franke (editor)









xvi [6] Critique, 343 (December 1975), p. 1207-1227. („A New Cartographer (Discipline and Punish)“. Gilles Deleuze, Foucault , New York, Athlone Press 1988, p. 21-38.) xvii [7] Allusion to a feast of sexual education, organized by Basedow in 1776 in his philanthropical school. xviii [8]

Paris, Grasset, 1976.

xix [9] Dits et Écrits, Volume II (1970-175), ed. by Daniel Defert and François Ewald, Paris, Gallimard, 1994, p. 136-156. („Nietzsche, Genealogy, History“. The Foucault Reader , ed. by Paul Rabinow, New York, Pantheon Books 1984, p. 76-100. xx [10] Cf.: „Gendai no kenryoku wo tou“ („La philosophie analytique de la politique“). Michel Foucault, Dits et Écrits, Volume III (1976-1979), ed. by Daniel Defert and François Ewald, Paris, Gallimard, 1994, p. 534-551.

The Stage of Philosophy. “Tetsugaku no butai” (“La scène de la philosophie”; interview with M. Watanabe, April 22, 1978), Sekai, July 1978, p. 312-332.

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