Introduction

Recent years have seen influential ‘left’ theorists such as Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek¹ join with earlier ‘right’ theorists of normativity to argue that poststructuralism’s particular form of privileging the other and difference leads to the “dispersion” of the self as ethical agent,² as well as to resignation and cynicism concerning politics and the political. Precipitating a growing crisis of poststructuralism, they variously call for a renewed attention to the ‘singularity’ of the self and of events in a ‘return of the real’. That is, against what they take to be the ambiguities and deferrals of poststructuralism, they deploy practices of thought, inspired in significant ways by the work of Jacques Lacan (among others), which variously posit a singular Real decisive for the interpretation and negotiation of the infinite differences of the present situation – this the better to recognise and resist the specific unfreedoms that characterise it.

This paper considers the later work of Michel Foucault against this backdrop, proposing that the announcement of the incipient eclipse, or end, of poststructuralism may prove premature, insofar as Foucault’s work engages with such questions of singularity and the real in ways that challenge the trajectories of Badiou and Žižek – even as their critique challenges his poststructuralism to re-examine its ends and to re-position its concerns within an altered situation. In particular, it proposes that Foucault, in his later work concerning practices of the self, situates the drive toward ‘becoming other’ in relation to a historically-constituted singularity of the self. In so doing, he implicitly connects the singularity of the self with his earlier analyses of specific prohibitions, exclusions, and disciplinary productions of individuals, in a thought, it is argued, which is not unsympathetic to the call for the ‘return of the real’. At the same time, it will be proposed, that Foucault’s attention to the ambiguity involved in what he termed “événementialisation”, the analysis of discourse and practices as dimensions of events, complicates the relation of the singularity of the event and the self to the specific and material.³ In Peter Hallward’s terms, the critical question, then, becomes that of how to formulate adequately the singular in its relation (or non-relation) to the specific.⁴ As such, the paper proposes that the important debate between poststructuralism, at least in its Foucauldian form, and these more recent theorists concerns modes of singularity and their ethical and political implications.

Before turning to Foucault, a brief consideration of the basic coordinates of Badiou’s and Žižek’s deployment of the Lacanian Real is in order.

Badiou, Žižek and the Return of the Real

Crucial to both Badiou and Žižek is Jacques Lacan’s move in the 1960’s beyond a psychoanalytic therapeutics focussed upon understanding and negotiating identity and subjectivity as ‘Imaginary’ constructs that are constituted within, and in relation to, the ‘Symbolic’ system of societal signifiers – the unconscious big Other, to which individuals must give themselves over if they are to achieve being. At that point, Lacan began to formulate his conception of the ‘Real’, as that which is prior to and lies outside of the Symbolic, resists symbolisation, and, hence, is unrepresentable within it. The Real emerges as that which is irreducibly repressed by the Symbolic.

With this development, the focus of Lacanian psychoanalysis shifted to a discernment of those points at which the Real is encountered as the void of gaps in the Symbolic, revealed by symptoms and revealing of the contingency (or “contingent necessity”) and repressions of the Symbolic. In particular, Lacan’s attention turned from negotiating the Imaginary identity of the subject within the Symbolic to a notion of the subject as the split and void that separates the Imaginary ego from its Symbolic unconscious.⁵ Later still, he would point to those relatively rare moments of “subjectivation”, when individuals attend to, and identify with, the cause of their desire – what he termed “traversing the fundamental fantasy”.⁶ That is to say, by attending to the remainder of a unity possessed prior to the split engendered in becoming in the big Other – a remainder expressed as a fundamental fantasy, Lacan’s petit objet a – the individual achieves an encounter with the Real and gains a certain subjective power over the split which alienates them, by subjectifying the desires shaped by that split.

For his part, Žižek pursues a more or less direct mapping of Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory onto the political sphere, the trajectory of his work mirroring in important respects that of Lacan himself.⁷ Hence, in his earlier work he attempts to demonstrate how the postmodern obsession with the play of signifiers and the infinite possibilities of deconstruction obscures those ‘symptoms’ that point to the Imaginary-Symbolic-Real structure of the contemporary socio-cultural and discursive situation.⁸ Indeed, he considers postmodernism (and poststructuralism in its resonances with the postmodern) to be a particularly insidious subordination to the cultural superego, which in its Lacanian conception operates not merely by prohibition, but additionally through the injunction to “enjoy your symptom”. In Žižek’s view, the ironic distance from and cynicism toward commitment and action are the correlate of our postmodern enjoyment of difference predicted by Lacanian theory.

Drawing on Lacan’s later notion of the “sinthome”, he attempts to bring into focus those specific socio-cultural and discursive ‘symptoms’, the enjoyment of which, function to hold together the Symbolic against irruptions of the Real – irruptions which reveal the former’s necessity to be a radical contingency and thus point to the inherent instability of the Symbolic. In this context, mirroring Lacan’s “traversing the fantasy”, Žižek advocates and performs, as a political strategy, an “overidentification” with those decisive cultural and political ‘symptoms’ that he uncovers, in a complex “acting out” of society’s neurotic, psychotic and hysterical symptoms, designed to provoke readers into a confrontation with the Real of our socio-cultural context.⁹

More recently, Žižek has acknowledged his excessive dependence on Lacan’s early conceptualisation of the Real as a kind of quasi-Kantian noumenal Thing, positing instead a Real that better resonates with Lacan’s later emphasis upon “traversing the fantasy”.¹⁰ Hence, Žižek now posits a Real that is thoroughly immanent and reveals itself not as the void of the Symbolic, but as the “minimal difference” by which things differ from themselves within it. In this framework, one encounters not only a “real Real”, but a “symbolic Real” and an “imaginary Real” as well, such that the Real is woven into the fabric of the Imaginary-Symbolic-Real framework as its internal self-difference. If the first is the early Lacanian “horrifying Thing”, the symbolic Real is constituted by those points where our significations of reality can no longer be translated into everyday terms (Žižek gives the example of quantum representations of reality), while the imaginary Real refers to the quality which allows the sublime to shine through ordinary objects.¹¹ This nuancing of his position notwithstanding, he nonetheless continues to argue for the singularity of the Real in relation to the Symbolic and Imaginary, the encounter with which offers us the possibility of radically and effectively engaging the complexities and ambiguities of the present.

For Badiou, by contrast, the importance of Lacan lies more indirectly in the resources toward a theory of the event offered by the conception of the Real as a void which irrupts into the Symbolic. At the same time, Badiou rejects as “antiphilosophy” Lacan’s notion that such decisive events are centred upon the drives generated by quasi-originary constructions of identity. Rather, Badiou focuses upon events as “haphazard” occurrences that interrupt a given situation, allowing for genuinely new beginnings. At the same time, he retains the Lacanian notion of the Real as that which is irreducibly repressed by the Symbolic. While the event is of the same order of being as the elements of the situation in which it irrupts, it counts as nothing in the situation and is unrepresentable within it. Moreover, for Badiou, subjectivity does not coincide with the void of such an irruption, but is constituted after the event, in fidelity to it, when the unpresentable event must be asserted.¹²

Specifically, subjectivation takes place in the naming of the event, that is, in a subjective deciding upon its intrinsic undecidability – a naming which avoids reduction to decisionism by grounding itself in the event. This subjective naming involves the endless labour of clarifying the specific truth of an event, by identifying its “evental site” within the situation – the site of the event within the situation, which is nonetheless not specified by the situation, but rather which reveals the void of the situation. In particular, this process involves tracing the “edge of the void” where the event irrupts upon each specific element of the situation. Truth emerges, not as a contribution to prevailing systems of knowledge, but in its singularity as the specific truth of the event, a truth nonetheless universal to the situation. This truth can be arrived at only through the ‘subtraction’ of all elements specific to the situation, the event constituting that which is present but unrepresented within each of the situational elements.

Even as Badiou departs significantly from Lacan, he adopts elements of the deep structure of his thought. Indeed, against the differing and deferrals of poststructuralist difference both Badiou and Žižek variously forge the possibility of articulating singular symptoms or events of the Real and the singular truth of current situations or events. And for both, a singular self – a subjectivation in fidelity to the event of the Real or a subjectivation coincident with it – is integral to intellectual practice.

Thinking differently and the Aging Relationship with the Self

Against this backdrop, the later Foucault’s conception of the care of the self, especially conceived as an “aesthetics of existence”, appears to be vulnerable of the criticisms of Badiou and Žižek. This is particularly so when Foucault, in his account of an aesthetics of existence, draws explicitly upon Baudelaire’s dandy moving through a succession of fleeting moments in his evocations of a contemporary care of the self.¹³ Not only does Foucault appear to remain firmly within the co-ordinates of the Imaginary-Symbolic framework that dominated the work of the early Lacan, as Fabio Vighi and Heiko Feldner argue, but he appears to celebrate the pursuit of a difference without a Real.¹⁴ In this regard, Žižek claims that the later Foucault remains enmeshed in a humanist elitism which holds that the Imaginary self is capable of adequately negotiating in itself all of the signifying forces of the Symbolic.¹⁵ Indeed, in his introduction to his revised history of sexuality project in 1984, reflecting on the complex set of transformations, which his work had undergone in that period, not least his reorientation of his history of sexuality to resurrect a question of the self, Foucault stresses that the underlying philosophical problematic is one of a radical becoming other: “to know how and to what extent it might be possible to think differently, instead of legitimating what is already known”.¹⁶ Deploying several metaphors, he stresses and valorises thought as a pure becoming other: it is an “essay” after difference, irreducible to our prevailing categories of thought, a ‘becoming other’ in a philosophical “askesis” brought to bear on the self, and a decisive Ausgang from prevailing modes of thought.

Having taken pains to stress this dimension of thought, however, he unexpectedly states:

There is irony in these efforts one makes to alter one’s way of looking at things, to change the boundaries of what one knows and to venture out a ways from there. Did mine actually result in a different way of thinking? Perhaps at most they made it possible to go back through what I was already thinking, to think it differently, and to see what I had done from a new vantage point and in a clearer light. Sure of having travelled far, one finds that one is looking down on oneself from above. The journey rejuvenates things, and ages the relationship with oneself.¹⁷

At one level these comments simply state that the work of his final years has greater continuity with his earlier formulation of the project of a history of sexuality than might be expected in view of the eight years of reformulation and rewriting of what Hervé Guibert, in his fictionalised account of Foucault’s later years, termed his “endless book”.¹⁸ However, the precise formulation is provocative in its implications for his philosophical practice. Indeed, it bears similarities to other, apparently incidental asides that Foucault tended to deploy when he wished to indicate unexpected consequences of a given analysis that might well call for a radical revision of his prior presuppositions.¹⁹

To grasp the import of these comments it is worth recalling Rudi Visker’s view that the “decentred self” of poststructuralist thought is not finally fully decentred but finds that it “is attached to ‘something’ to which it does not find access and from which it cannot rid itself.”²⁰ Foucault evokes precisely such a sense of the circumscription of the possibility of thinking differently and so of becoming other – a sense that the relation to oneself circles about a distribution of more or less fixed points, about certain specific problematics, without that ‘something’ to which it is attached ever becoming accessible. Insofar as he describes finding himself at a height looking down upon himself, it might be said that if the sites of becoming other constitute a finite “constellation” (on a horizontal plane, as it were) about an inaccessible singularity – even permitting a diversity of experience or intentions over a lifetime – then, ‘becoming other’ is constituted by a vector, a trajectory, in another (vertical) plane. As such, the notion of the aging of the relation to oneself would point to a qualitatively different relation, a different perspective, a useful distance from oneself.²¹

The notion that such a singular ‘something’ might be signalled in this aside is given credence by an anecdote recounted by Foucault’s colleague at the Collège de France, Paul Veyne. Veyne recalls watching television with Foucault one evening in the 1980s. On a programme that they watched, a man caught up in the midst of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict (on which side Veyne does not remember) spoke directly, with passion of what drove him on. The man concluded, “I don’t know where this passion comes from, but there it is”. Veyne tells how Foucault declared, “There we have it at last…everything has been said, there’s nothing more to say.”²² It is reasonable to suppose that Foucault might consider such an inaccessible passion to underlie and find expression in the constellation of problematics about which he finds his own work circling, even as he pursues a radical strategy of becoming other.

Indeed, a broadly similar practice of thought, simultaneously committed to a radical becoming other yet driven by a singular passion, is found in the work of Foucault’s fellow-poststructuralist, Michel de Certeau – specifically his later notion of the mystic as a ‘nomadic self’.²³ Inspired by Lacan no less than Badiou or Žižek, de Certeau posits a self driven by a singular “primary passion”, that is, by a lack (of the lost Real), that can only recover the Real fleetingly in performing its primary passion upon ‘other’ contexts – contexts, which may prove opaque to that primary passion. That is to say, de Certeau’s nomadic self can only attain to the Real in a radical becoming other which must risk the loss of identity and the total loss of that lost object toward which it strives, in a repeated saying “yes, in foreign land”.²⁴ (Strictly, for the Christian de Certeau, this primary passion finds fulfilment in Jesus Christ, but since (for de Certeau) the risen Christ is paradoxically encountered in the empty tomb, this fulfilment itself functions as a Lacanian Real, a lacking or lost object, to be encountered in the performance of the Christian text in ‘other’ contexts.) Moreover, for de Certeau, as for Foucault, this performance of one’s (primary) passion leads to a discernable ‘constellation’ of effects of the Real emerging: those marks that accumulate and crystallise on the body of the nomad as a consequence of his or her experiences reflect the singularity of the passion that drove it. Indeed, for the later de Certeau, those bodily marks become, if anything, more important than the Real as such.

Although Foucault’s comments do not bear the specific Lacanian sense of Certeau’s “primary passion”, they point to a similar poststructuralist practice of thought whose radical becoming other is informed and driven by a fundamental passion or passions, which are articulated in the constellation of the elements of one’s thought, its problematics, and preoccupations, even as that passion or those passions are not reducible to them.²⁵ If it is thus possible to conceive of a singularity of self in the later Foucault, questions arise as to the precise extent to which such a conception suggests an image of thought additionally attentive to the singularity of events and of the Real, and, the relation of Foucauldian singularity to that of Badiou and Žižek. To answer these questions, it is necessary to consider Foucault’s elaboration of the ethics of care of the self.

Care of the self

Foucault took inspiration for his discovery of an ethics of care of the self in ancient Greek texts from Pierre Hadot, who, in a seminal 1977 essay, had posited that philosophical activity in the ancient world could not be adequately encapsulated in the notions of either “thought exercises” or “ethical exercises”, but only by the range of significations implied by “spiritual exercises” – that is, exercises that involve not merely “thought but...the individual’s entire psychism”.²⁶ The breakthrough in formulating an ethics of care of the self, came for Foucault, when, departing from Hadot’s view that such spiritual exercises were integrally oriented to the individual’s participation in universal truth, he conceived of the “care of the self” as a phenomenon distinct from such participation. While acknowledging that care of the self had never fully resolved itself within Greek culture, he nonetheless argued that beginning from Plato’s Alcibiades, in which care of the self served as a preparation for the young male citizen toward entering into public life, the gradual emergence of a whole “culture of the self” could be discerned. While still retaining the dimension of being a counterpoint to public leadership, this more developed care of the self would be exercised daily throughout one’s life as a thoroughgoing “practice of the self” or “art of existence” – perhaps under the guidance of a master or supported by friendship.²⁷

In particular, he contrasted the care of the self with two major notions of conversion in the ancient world, which Hadot had identified in an early essay: Platonic epistrophē and Christian metanoia. Platonic epistrophē consists in “a movement leading us from this world to the other”, a liberation from immanent experience toward knowledge, whose primary mode is “recollection”.²⁸ By contrast, Foucault argues, ‘conversion’ within the “culture of the self” is characterised by the movement toward the “complete, perfect, and adequate relation of the self to the self”, and is concerned with practices of the self rather than “recollection” of an external truth – with knowledge as spiritual practices rather than as knowledge of a field of study.

In turn, Christian metanoia consists in a “sudden, dramatic, historical-metahistorical upheaval of the subject…a transition from one type of being to another” – in a “break” in the subject, “a renunciation of oneself, dying to oneself” – what Foucault terms a “trans-subjectivation”.²⁹ By contrast, in conversion within the culture of the self “there is not exactly a break”. Or rather, more precisely, “there is not a caesura within the self by which the self tears itself away from itself…The break must be carried out with what surrounds itself so that it is not enslaved, dependent, and constrained”.³⁰ Foucault describes a whole movement of “withdrawal” from the world, a “return to port”, which is at one and the same time a turning toward the self as “toward an end” in a movement of the self - an “askēsis”, an exercise upon the self which precisely signifies a rejoining of the self, rather than the renunciation of the self the term will signify within Christianity.³¹ The care of the self comes to constitute a continuous movement toward the self, by which the relation to the self and freedom are perfected – what Foucault terms a process of “self-subjectivation”. Insofar as the self falls subject to the multiple forces within which it must daily operate within the polis, the relation or return to the self is simultaneously a freeing of oneself from oneself (se déprendre de soi-même).

Foucault thus argues that “self-subjectivation” is not the process of “objectification of the self in a true discourse” as found either in the Platonic reconciliation of individual will with the universal, through the recollection of the true, or in the Christian confession of the real within oneself in obedience to an external authority, which comes to be central to the (permanent) process of metanoia. Rather, it is “the subjectivation of a true discourse in a practice of oneself on oneself” in which one becomes a “subject of veridiction”.³²

In view of its evocativeness for intellectual practice, Foucault places considerable importance upon the practice of utilising hupomnēmata, or aids to memory, especially among the Stoics and Epicureans, as a means of recalling the master’s discourse in exercises of the self.³³ While acknowledging that the term, hupomnēmata, had a wide range of reference, Foucault focuses upon the specific sense it bore of quotations heard or remembered, especially those of one’s master, which one wrote down to be used subsequently as a resource in meditation upon specific personal difficulties or theoretical problems. In Foucault’s view, the principal purpose of these quotations was neither as an aid to memory as such, nor as fragments of a personal narrative or journal. Rather, they were used as a means of recollecting the self in the midst of the disparate fragments of culture and discourse which one encountered in everyday life. Through them one might (re)establish a relationship of oneself to oneself, which would support an ethical, ‘recollected’ path through life, enabling one to resist being buffeted about in a diffusion of one’s energies by these disparate fragments.³⁴

Once more, the focus is not upon a true discourse of which the individual is object, but of the subjectivation of the individual through the use of elements of discourse. Foucault emphasises, in particular, how writing – whether in the direct writing of hupomnēmata or within correspondence – formed a dimension of ascetic exercises of the self, having what he termed an “ethopoietic” function: that is to say, it functions as “an agent of the transformation of truth into ethos,” a veritable “self writing”. Citing Seneca, in particular, Foucault points out how this process both respects the heterogeneity of these disparate elements and engages in a process of unification. This unification is, however, neither formal nor systematic, relating not to the unity of discourse, but to the unity of the process of subjectivation. It constitutes a formation of the subject in and through these elements, yet is thoroughly a unity of the ‘author’ of these notebooks.³⁵

When overlaid with his notion of an “aesthetics of existence”, Foucault’s ethics of care of the self again appears susceptible to Žižek’s critique (that it reflects a humanist-elitist self capable of constituting the site of integrating of the multiple, divergent forces that constitute the socio-cultural sphere), or alternatively to Badiou’s implicit criticism of Foucault’s tendency to separate subjectivation from truth, and to constitute the former as an aesthetic rather than an evental process. While it may be possible to understand the “return to self” as pointing to a certain singularity of self, it is rather more difficult to ascertain how this relation to the self might support or stand in relation to singular events and the Real.

Two critical points are to be noted here, however. First, Foucault’s death in 1984 shortly after the publication of the second and third volumes of his history of sexuality means that he never had an opportunity to clarify how these practices of care of the self stand in relation to his preceding work. That they did, and in a complex fashion, is highlighted by Veyne when he suggests that Foucault’s reading of these ancient texts served for him as a practice of care of his own self, of developing a relation to his own self and his preceding work.³⁶ Second, although Foucault discovers something distinctively different and important in the notion of the care of the self from what he had discovered in early Christian practices, it will only be in his analysis of cynic practices of care of the self in his Collège de France lecture courses in 1983 and 1984 that he discovers practices of the self whose political and ethical tenor are closer to his own. Among the cynics he found a practice of care of the self conducted, not in quiet recollection apart from the bustle of the polis, but in a public frank-speaking (parrhesia) which risks all, even perhaps life itself, in revealing to the polis the absurdities of its rationality.³⁷ Even here, however, the deeper resonances with Foucault’s own practice of thought should not be mistaken for a simple identification with what he termed the “philosophical grimace” of the cynics.³⁸ That is to say, not only does he perform the care of the self he discovers in these texts, he does so at varying degrees of distance from their ancient forms. (On being asked what he thought of the Greeks, Foucault responded, “Not very much”.)³⁹ It is thus important to reconstruct what a contemporary Foucauldian practice of care of the self might entail, and how such a practice evolves in light of his final lecture courses.

Care of the Self as Modulation of Foucault’s Earlier Practice

In his later articles and interviews, it is possible to see outward signs of Foucault pursuing the kind of care of himself and self writing of which Veyne speaks. As he reads these ancient texts, he is enabled to arrive at a renewed appreciation of what his archaeologies of the 1960s work and his genealogies of the 1970s had involved and to gain a critical distance from it – in a simultaneous movement of returning to and of freeing himself from himself. In particular, beyond his earlier preoccupations with the death of the subject, he is able to re-conceive his thought as having always revolved around three critical problematics: namely ‘knowledge’, ‘power’, and ‘subjectivity’. It is not that he retroactively interprets his earlier analyses to have been all along practices of the self – although traces of such practices, marginal within modern culture, may have informed his practice, such that his discursive performances of the death of the subject may have fragmentarily constituted a kind of paradoxical care of the self. Instead, his primary concern is to imagine how such a notion of care of the self might have offered him a richer and less problematic approach to the problems of thought with which he engaged in the 1960s and 1970s. His reading of ancient Greek texts now not only offers him conceptual tools to this end, but enables him to perform this distance from himself, in the sustained analysis demanded by these ancient texts.

Already in the late 1970s, as he began to rethink the question of the subject, Foucault notes how his analyses had always taken their point of departure and inspiration from certain key experiences: experiences of marginalisation and exclusion, experiences of being the subject of ‘productive’ discipline and discourse. However, he also came to recognise that these experiences all had a strongly autobiographical dimension for him.⁴⁰ For instance, he worked for a period in a mental institution (and though he does not mention it, had his own early experiences of mental illness). As a homosexual man he had quite a specific experience of marginalisations and exclusions, as well as possibilities associated with homosexual life and relationships for escaping the modern discourse of “true sex”.⁴¹ He worked on the prison reform group, the G.I.P, in the 1970s, but as James Bernauer indicates he had, more generally, a deep sensitivity to the multiple “prisons of man” in modern society.⁴²

In light of this, he conceived of his analyses as “fictions” that “become true” insofar as they enable others to establish new relationships to the truth that marginalises, excludes or, indeed, produces them.⁴³ That is to say, his analyses insofar as they seek to demonstrate the relationship of what is excluded and marginalised to truth, will necessarily fall outside of what counts as true: they can be no more than ‘fictions’. Such fictions “become true” insofar as they enable individuals to establish in their thought and lives a new relation between their experience of exclusion or marginalisation and truth, insofar as that which is excluded from the true is brought to bear upon the latter.

Moreover, Foucault recognised that each such fiction would be a specific confrontation of the true by that which is excluded from it. Indeed, even should they would become true his fictions would remain in a relation of confrontation with prevailing systems of knowledge, complicating and destabilising their operation. In view of their specificity and indeed autobiographical roots, what gives these analyses their more general force – what Foucault would come to call their “generality”, their “systematicity” and their “stakes”⁴⁴ – is the extent to which they intersect with and reveal certain ‘fault lines’ within the contemporary situation between inside and outside. In addition, if he was to avoid positing an absolute outside of thought, Foucault came to recognise (in response to Derrida’s criticisms concerning his conception of madness as an outside of thought), that in any given context such fictions can become true, only because they are becoming possibilities of thought within the complex contemporary socio-cultural and discursive situation.

This structure of becoming is most strikingly demonstrated in Foucault’s The Order of Things (1966). There Foucault is careful to suggest that the death of man is a probability on the horizon of the present. The burden of his argument is how this death might be intelligible and, in particular, how his own discourse remains possible if its subject of enunciation is apparently disappearing. Critical, for Foucault, is the “return of language”, that is, the restoration to language (albeit in a new form) of the density and exteriority it possessed prior to the modern period – a return which both precipitates the “death of man” and renders discourse after this death possible.⁴⁵ It is possible to think the “death of man” only because this death is already taking place in the specific mode of the return of language.

The important conclusion to be drawn from Foucault’s reconsideration of his project in the late 1970s is that he began to conceive of his thought as centred upon what following Badiou and Žižek might be termed certain experiences of the Real of the contemporary situation. And he recognises that it becomes possible to think these experiences in relation to the prevailing systems of truth only because certain changes are taking place within the situation, which render them thinkable. Indeed, as has been noted, Foucault at this time indicated that his analysis was of discourse and practices as they evolve within and are interrupted by an ongoing complex of evental processes. What Foucault lacked, however, was an adequate manner of conceptualising this intellectual activity as an activity capable of supporting individual freedom.

Not least, as the 1970s progressed, his conception of the ubiquity of power, together with its dynamic capacity to assimilate resistance, meant only the most dynamic, tactical and sophisticated practice of thought would be capable of discerning its paths and the momentary opportunities for resistance. In his lecture course at the Collège de France, in 1976, such thought is clearly a task for the intellectual, and one whose effectiveness lies in its capacity to disrupt power through a direct contestation of its functioning, rather than in its capacity to enable others to develop new relations to truth.⁴⁶

The practice of the care of the self enables Foucault to escape the dilemmas of a conception of the subject as simply the subject of power, and the paradoxical appeal to the genius of the intellectual as point of resistance. Acknowledging the dominance within the Western tradition of the constitution of the subject as a subject to truth, Foucault can exploit the marginal role of the care of the self, the ambiguity of its status, as both an element of the constitution of the subject to truth within the genealogical history of the modern subject and yet an element that does not always appear integral or whose resources have not been fully exploited. As such, the care of the self suggests a mode of subjectivation that lies largely dormant at the edges of our Western modes of subjectivity, yet not already entirely assimilated to them, and hence capable, at least potentially, of being deployed effectively in relation to those dominant modes.

Moreover, the nature of the “break” inaugurated by the care of the self proves remarkably consistent with the ambiguous space to which it has been consigned historically. It neither constitutes a recollective movement into an ‘other’ world nor an absolute commitment to turning away from the self. Instead, care of the self functions as that liminal space between self and its becoming other, in which establishing a relation to the self constitutes a return to the self that is at one and the same time a freeing oneself from oneself and vice versa. One neither identifies with oneself as the singular foundation of thought, but at the same time neither can one depart the self in the assurance of becoming other. Rather one becomes other in the movement about a singularity of the self that remains undefined and indefinable. The notion of care of the self, in its detail, involves precisely the kind of dynamic of singularity and becoming other evoked by Foucault comments on the aging relation to the self.

By activating the dormant possibilities associated with care of the self, Foucault hopes to finds a practice resonant with his autobiographically-inspired fictions, which become true in the new relationship to truth that they make possible. Not least, he can re-imagine the ancient use of ‘hupomnēmata’ within the care of the self, as the choice, shaped by specific experiences, of elements of the archaeologico-genealogical ‘archive’, reflection upon which enable one to generate a new relation to truth and a renewed relation to oneself. Foucault’s wager as ever is that forces underlying the death of the subject make such a contemporary practice of the care of the self possible and politically effective. His sustained analyses of care of the self are themselves ‘hupomnēmata’ by which he hopes to achieve a renewed relation to his self. His engagement with the notion of a care of the self has the quality, for Foucault, less of a theory of subjectivation than of an expérience: an experience and experiment in thought, which cannot anticipate whether it will prove successful. Although it resolves a number of theoretical difficulties, the care of the self nonetheless constitutes one more ‘fiction’ that Foucault hopes will become true in its performance, in the new relationships to self and truth it makes possible. More generally, the care of the self as a practice, insofar as it is defined neither by the brilliant intervention of the intellectual or even solely in intellectual terms, restores to Foucault’s work the possibility that, while others may benefit from the intellectual’s work, they do so within their own processes of care of the self, thus generating wider and more sustainable sites of resistance.

Foucauldian Singularity

The deployment of the care of the self as a means of “self writing” upon and in relation to his earlier practice thus suggests that Foucault does not intend simply the kind of humanist-elitist subjectifying discourse that Žižek supposes. Neither does Foucault rupture the relation between subjectivation and truth (with which Badiou is particularly concerned), trading event for mere difference. Instead, the preceding analysis suggests a sophisticated, if under-elaborated, conception of the singular within Foucault’s practice. To connect that analysis with more typically Foucauldian terms, it might be said that he envisages the present as an assemblage of discursive formations, relations of power and various institutional apparatuses (dispositifs), which together constitute the “positive unconscious” of the contemporary situation. Within and in relation to this ‘Symbolic’ system of signifying discourse and practice, a whole ‘Imaginary’ multiplicity of identities is formed. In line with Foucault’s Nietzschean notion of genealogical history, this assemblage of elements constantly undergoing changes – evental changes that are more or less local, and hence more or less general. (For Foucault, the local is conceptualised as a point on a map: a local point may reveal much about the general topography if it is a geographically and/or strategically significant point. At the same time, any given local point will not be able to anticipate all features of the broader terrain.) While Foucault’s early work proposed dramatic transformations in episteme or of genealogical periods, his later analysis of care of the self in the ancient world acknowledges that change happens more gradually, often more partially and less than uniformly, and typically with unclear and not unambiguous consequences. This evental reality is the space upon which power and resistance, knowledge and truth, subjection and subjectivation are played out. In other words, for Foucault, we can only ever encounter events within the ambiguities of the field of power and resistance.

Within this space, specific experiences of exclusion and marginalisation, the experience of being imprisoned by the constitution of one’s subjectivity or sexuality, by discourse and practices, reflect what Badiou and Žižek term encounters with the singularity of the Real within this Symbolic-Imaginary space. The perception of that which is excluded or marginalised (e.g. madness) approaches something close to Žižek’s notion of the “real Real”, a horrifying Thing which the Symbolic cannot entertain. The perception of the contingent productions of identity within the Symbolic reflects more Žižek’s notion of the three-fold Real (real, imaginary and symbolic) woven into the fabric of things.

Foucault is closer to Badiou nevertheless, in his emphasis, upon the process of subjectivation as a source of resistance to power, where Žižek is more attuned to the extent to which we are each implicated and not simply victims of the specific Symbolic order of reality. At the same time, the Foucauldian singularity of the self differs in important respects from Badiou’s notion of the self in fidelity to the singular event. In the first instance, the sensitivity of the self to the Real derives from the interplay between the individual that one is and the exclusions and marginalisation of the socio-cultural sphere. As has been seen, it would seem that, for Foucault, it is not simply a question of an ahistorical, originary self and its subsequent socio-cultural formation, but that the individual that one is emerges in the encounter with the socio-cultural sphere: the singularity of the self is decisively finalised by its history. Indeed, it is precisely this inaccessibility of the ground of singularity, which enables a relation to the self which can simultaneously constitute a radical critique of any dimension of the self. In any case, what is accessible to the individual is the passion they experience for certain causes, questions and problems, their sensitivity to certain issues and so on – a passion that they cannot quite decipher.

In this context, Foucault’s conception of subjectivation is that it not only occurs in relation to the event, but in a certain sense the preceding singularity of the self shapes our sensitivity to these events and our capacity to exploit the novel possibilities that emerge through them. This too has implications for the truth of the event as Badiou describes it. For in a sense, while the event and the subjectivation performed in fidelity to it may point to elements of the Real of our contemporary situation that bears upon everyone, Foucault recognises the truth of the event will have a differing intensity, texture and significance for individuals insofar as their singular passions differ. Equally, if Foucault implicitly supposes something approaching a Symbolic-Imaginary-Real conception of reality, his conception of the Real is more differentiated than that of Žižek. In other words, for Foucault, the Real is encountered fragmentarily in subjective experience and in relation to specific subjective experience. It is encountered locally, in Foucault’s sense of the term. Hence, without denying that the present situation stands in relation to the singularity of the Real, and while recognising that every specific-subjective encounter with the Real will have a more general significance, Foucault argues that we cannot know with any certainty the extent to which our specific encounters with the Real anticipate its singularity.

Where Foucault differs most fundamentally from both Žižek and Badiou in all of this is perhaps in the ambiguity that he associates with the event as well as in the political significance he ascribes to this ambiguity. Badiou, for instance, stresses firstly that there are events, which, although they do not differ significantly from the order of being of other dimensions of reality, are nonetheless distinct. Moreover, he believes that events make possibility genuine possibilities of subjectivation in fidelity to them and, in turn, a truth universal to the given situation. He does so even as he acknowledges that the subjective naming of an event can never be founded on secure calculation, but must assert that which is incalculable and unpresentable as such. The importance of the event to thought and (political) practice, when it occurs, is such that it is better to assert an event, even though one cannot be certain that an event has taken place. That is to say, Badiou advocates that thought and action be directed toward the putative event, and that such an orientation to the event is worth the risk that the event shall prove illusory.

For Foucault by contrast, there is an unavoidable gap between ontology and politics that it is dangerous to bridge. Events certainly occur, which have the capacity to interrupt and alter the current order of reality. However, for Foucault, such events are rather more ambiguous and are always already within the field of power and resistance as soon as subjectivation is activated in relation to them. Hence, for Foucault, his deployment of the care of the self is not linked as in Badiou to an ontology that would correctly orient us to the event, but is rather a strategic effort, uncertain concerning its capacity to evade the powers of subjection. One can be certain of the value of one’s strategy only in light of the new modes of subjectivation and the new relations to truth, which that strategy makes possible. Indeed, a strategy that is of value today may well lose its value tomorrow, as the context of its deployment changes, or indeed, there are subtle shifts in how it is deployed.

For Foucault, such uncertainty is integral to any strategic practice, as we can never fully bring to consciousness either the “positive unconscious” of the present or our encounters with the Real. As a consequence, Foucault pursues a practice which, in Gilles Deleuze’s terms, proceeds by crisis. For if it is possible only partially to attain to the complex interplay of what Lacan terms the Symbolic, Imaginary and Real, then thought must repeatedly strive anew to develop a framework of thought adequate to the that encounter, and any given framework will not be capable of anticipating new encounters of the event. Hence, where Žižek considers that Lacanian theory offers a key to critically analysing the present, Foucault’s impulse will be to fundamentally question whether thought can remain within a Lacanian, or indeed any other system of thought.

Indeed, it is worthwhile pausing here over Žižek’s and Foucault’s respective readings of Lacan. Foucault has a rather tenuous relationship to Lacan compared with Žižek. Nonetheless, as Didier Eribon points out, in the 1950s and early 1960s was enthusiastic about Lacan’s work, particularly the recently-elaborated notion of the mirror stage⁴⁷ – a concept he appropriated for his lecture on the “heterotopias” of contemporary society in 1966.⁴⁸ More generally, he took from Lacan the possibility of a broadly “structuralist” discourse, at a distance from scientific structuralism, in which “the subject has a genesis, the subject has a formation, the subject has a history; the subject is not originary”.⁴⁹ Although in later years his references to Lacan are minimal, in the early 1970s his work was close to that of Deleuze and Guattari. As Foucault himself acknowledges, their 1972 Anti-Oedipus involved a sustained dialogue with Lacan, which sought, however, to free Lacan’s psychoanalytic framework from the limits of the Oedipal family. They pursued a refiguring of desire, in Lacan associated with lack, in affirmative terms. They did so against the Oedipal structure’s control of desire and its investment, and in light of their view that a conception of desire as lack mirrors and facilitates such Oedipal control.⁵⁰ While Foucault ultimately distances himself from Deleuze’s and Guattari’s affirmative analysis of desire, what endures for Foucault of their analysis is that we must not only always be ready to recognise broader, more complex, more insidious forces shaping desire – something Žižek has pursued par excellence – but we must equally recognise that the very desire we would liberate may itself by constituted by the situation in question. As such, we may have to liberate ourselves from our desire.

For Foucault, then, one cannot deploy Lacan’s thought without radically calling into question the degree of its implication within the situation it would be deployed as a critical tool. Again, it should be noted that Žižek does not simply proffer Lacan’s thought as a theory of the contemporary context, but engages in a sophisticated and paradoxical performance of Lacan’s thought, which in important respects, constructs a socio-cultural Lacan for today. If Žižek has discovered a seminal vector of contemporary critique, the question posed by Foucault concerns the capacity of his thought to depart from the terms of Lacan’s thought to do justice to the complexities of contemporary thought.

By way of conclusion

The points made here are not intended to suggest that Foucault’s thought answers the criticisms of Badiou and Žižek, and indeed that his work is already more adequately engaged than theirs with the Real. Rather, the point is to suggest that a careful reading of Foucault’s later work suggests a differing economy of ‘singularity’ at play in his work in its relation to the specific, to the ambiguities of politics, ethics and knowledge, as well as to the possibility of significant liberatory change. Indeed, it is well to note that Badiou (implicitly) and Žižek are mutually critical of one another’s conceptions of the singularity of self, the event and the Real. Badiou is closer to Foucault and implicitly critical of Žižek in wishing to move beyond the strict coordinates of Lacanian thought to restore to the event its thoroughly historical character. In turn, Žižek argues that Badiou’s attempt to secure the event as singular event introduces a pre-critical dimension into his thought. In other words, while the focus of Badiou, Žižek and others is upon establishing the return of Real as a key problematic for contemporary thought, the question must also arise as to what formulations of this return of the Real are adequate to contemporary concerns.

In this context, Foucault’s engagement with such questions is certainly under-developed, and the work of these thinkers challenges those writing after Foucault to reconsider the ends of poststructuralism. In particular, those writing after Foucault are challenged to eradicate those remnants of a postmodern celebration of difference for its own sake which limit its attention to the problematic of the singularity of the Real, the event and the self. Nevertheless, Foucault’s poststructuralism, insofar as it ultimately proves closer to the return of the Real than to the postmodern celebration of difference, raises important questions about the challenges facing any articulation of singularity of the self or event. Not least, Foucault challenges contemporary thought to attend to the radical ambiguity that cannot be excised from subjectivation, historical events, or political action.

Endnotes