self-using as acting, visiting, walking, loving. Hence difficulties and aporias of
every kind. The problem of the Foucauldian subject is the problem of the au-
toconstitution of being, and a correct understanding of ethics here necessarily
entails a definition of its ontological status. When was something like a “sub-
ject” separated off and hypostatized in being in a constituent position? Western
ontology is from the very beginning articulated and run through by scissions
and caesurae, which divide and coordinate in being subject ( hypokeimenon) and
essence ( ousia), primary substances and secondary substances, essence and exis-
tence, potential and act, and only a preliminary interrogation of these caesurae
can allow for the comprehension of the problem that we call “subject.”
14. Precisely because the theory of the subject entails an ontological problem,
we find here the aporias that have marked from the very beginning its status in
first philosophy. The relation with the self determines, as we have seen, the way
in which the individual is constituted as subject of its own moral actions. The
self, however, according to Foucault does not have any substantial consistency
but coincides with the relationship itself, is absolutely immanent in it. But then
how can this self, which is nothing but a relation, be constituted as subject of its
own actions in order to govern them and define a style of life and a “true life”?
The self, insofar as it coincides with the relationship with the self, can never be
posited as subject of the relationship nor be identified with the subject that has
been constituted in it. It can only constitute itself as constituent but never iden-
tify itself with what it has constituted. And yet, as constituted subject, it is, so to
speak, the Gnostic or Neoplatonic hypostasis that the practice of the self allows
to subsist outside itself as an ineliminable remainder.
What happens in the relationship between the self and the moral subject is
something like what Sartre described in the relationship between consciousness
and the ego: the self, which has constituted the subject, allows itself to be hypno-
tized and reabsorbed in it and by it. Or again, it is like what, according to Rudolf
Boehm, happens in the Aristotelian scission between essence and existence: this
pair, which was supposed to define the unity of being, in the last analysis splits
it up into an inexistent essence and an inessential existence, which ceaselessly
refer to one another and endlessly fall outside one another. That is to say that self
and subject are circularly linked in a constituent relation, and at the same time,
precisely for this reason they find themselves in an absolute impossibility of co-
inciding once and for all. The subject, which must govern and direct its actions
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in a form of life, has been constituted in a practice of the self that is nothing
other than this very constitution and this form of life.
15. The ontological aporia is found in Foucault, as one could have foreseen,
on the level of practice, in the theory of power relations and of the governance
of human beings that is actualized in it. Power relations, unlike states of domi-
nation, necessarily entail a free subject, which it is a matter of “conducting” and
governing and which, as free, stubbornly resists power. And yet, precisely insofar
as the subject “freely” conducts and governs itself, it will inevitably enter into
power relations, which consist in conducting the conduct of others (or allowing
one’s own to be conducted by others). The one who, by “conducting” his life,
has been constituted as subject of his own actions, will thus be “conducted”
by other subjects or will seek to conduct others: subjectivation into a certain
form of life is, to the same extent, subjection to a power relation. The aporia of
democracy and its governance of human beings—the identity of the governors
and the governed, absolutely separated and yet to the same degree indissolubly
united in an indivisible relation—is an ontological aporia, which concerns the
constitution of the subject as such. As constituent power and constituted power,
the relation with the self and the subject are simultaneously transcendent and
immanent to one another. And yet it is precisely the immanence between self
and subject in a form of life that Foucault persistently sought to think up to
the end, tangling himself in ever more difficult aporias and, at the same time,
forcefully pointing in the only direction in which something like an ethics could
become possible for him.
16. In the interview given to Les nouvelles littéraires less than a month before
his death and posthumously published on June 28, 1984, Foucault turns to the
question of the subject and, in defining his final investigations, writes that in
these latter for him it was a matter “of reintroducing the problem of the subject
that I had more or less left aside in my first studies . . . to show how the problem
of the subject has not ceased to exist throughout this question of sexuality” (Fou-
cault 2, p. 705/Lotringer, p. 472). Immediately after, however, he specifies that in
classical antiquity, the problem of the care of the self was forcefully posed, while
a theory of the subject was entirely lacking:
This doesn’t mean that the Greeks didn’t strive to define the conditions of an
experience, but it wasn’t an experience of the subject; rather, it was of the indi-
vidual, insofar as he sought to constitute himself through self-mastery. Classical
antiquity never problematized the constitution of the self as subject; inversely,
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beginning with Christianity, there is an appropriation of morality through the
theory of the subject. Yet a moral experience centered essentially on the subject
no longer seems to me satisfactory today. (Ibid., p. 706/Lotringer, p. 473)
If antiquity offers the example of a care and of a constitution of the self without
the subject and Christianity that of a morality that entirely absorbs the ethical
relation with the self into the subject, Foucault’s wager is thus to keep hold of
the reciprocal co-belonging of the two elements.
17. From this perspective, one can understand the interest that the sadomas-
ochistic experience could take on in his eyes. Sadomasochism for Foucault is first
of all an experiment in fluidifying power relations. “One can say,” he declares in
a 1982 interview,
that S&M is the eroticization of power, the eroticization of strategic relations.
What strikes me with regard to S&M is how it differs from social power. What
characterizes power is the fact that it is a strategic relationship which has been sta-
bilized through institutions. So the mobility in power relations is limited . . . the
strategic relations of people are made rigid. At this point, the S&M game is very
interesting because it is a strategic relation, but it is always fluid. Of course, there
are roles, but everyone knows very well that those roles can be reversed. Some-
times the scene begins with the master and slave, and at the end the slave has
become the master. Or, e
ven when the roles are stabilized, you know very well
that it is always a game. Either the rules are transgressed, or there is an agreement,
either explicit or tacit, that makes them aware of certain boundaries. (Foucault 2,
pp. 742–743/Rabinow, p. 169)
The sadomasochistic relation is, in this sense, entirely immanent to a power
relation (“S&M is not the relationship between one who suffers and the one
who inflicts suffering, but between a master and the one over whom the master
exercises mastery”; ibid., p. 331/Rabinow, p. 151), which uses and transforms it
into a function of power. “S&M is the utilization of a strategic relationship as a
source of pleasure (physical pleasure)” (p. 743/Rabinow, p. 170).
If sadomasochism interests Foucault, this is because it shows that it is possi-
ble to act on these relations, whether in order to fluidify them and invert their
roles or to displace them from the social level to the sexual or corporeal level,
using them for the invention of new pleasures. But in any case, the power rela-
tion remains, even if it is opened in this way to a new dialectic, different from
that between power and resistance whose structure Foucault had defined. The
horizon of power relations and governmentality remains not only unsurpassable
but also, in some way, inseparable from ethics (“la notion de gouvernementalité,”
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he wrote in a long interview from January 1984, “permet de faire valoir la liberté
du sujet et le rapport aux autres, c’est-à-dire ce qui constitue la matière même
de l’éthique [the concept of governmentality makes it possible to bring out the
freedom of the subject and its relationship to others—which constitutes the very
stuff of ethics],” p. 729/Rabinow, p. 300).
Nevertheless, the transformation of power relations that occurs in sadomas-
ochism cannot fail to entail a transformation on the level of ontology. The S&M
relation, with its two poles in mutual exchange, is an ontological relation, for
which the Foucauldian thesis according to which “the self with which one has
the relationship is nothing but the relationship itself” holds in a paradigmatic
way. Foucault did not unfold all the implications of the “ontological adequa-
tion of the self to the relationship,” which he nonetheless caught a glimpse of.
Certainly the subject, the self of which he speaks, cannot be inscribed into the
tradition of the Aristotelian hypokeimenon, and yet Foucault—likely for good
reasons—constantly avoided the direct confrontation with the history of ontol-
ogy that Heidegger had laid out as a preliminary task.
What Foucault does not seem to see, despite the fact that antiquity would
seem to offer an example in some way, is the possibility of a relation with the self
and of a form of life that never assumes the figure of a free subject—which is to
say, if power relations necessarily refer to a subject, of a zone of ethics entirely
subtracted from strategic relationships, of an Ungovernable that is situated be-
yond states of domination and power relations.
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PART TWO
An Archeology of Ontology
IN the pages that follow we propose to ascertain whether access to a first phi-
losophy, that is, to an ontology, is today still—or once again—possible. For
reasons that we will seek to clarify, at least since Kant, this access has become so
problematic that it is not thinkable except in the form of an archeology. First
philosophy is not, in fact, an ensemble of conceptual formulations that, however
complex and refined, do not escape from the limits of a doctrine: it opens and
defines each time the space of human acting and knowing, of what the human
being can do and of what it can know and say. Ontology is laden with the histor-
ical destiny of the West not because an inexplicable and metahistorical magical
power belongs to being but just the contrary, because ontology is the originary
place of the historical articulation between language and world, which preserves
in itself the memory of anthropogenesis, of the moment when that articulation
was produced. To every change in ontology there corresponds, therefore, not a
change in the “destiny” but in the complex of possibilities that the articulation
between language and world has disclosed as “history” to the living beings of the
species Homo sapiens.
Anthropogenesis, the becoming human of the human being, is not in fact
an event that was completed once and for all in the past: rather, it is the event
that never stops happening, a process still under way in which the human being
is always in the act of becoming human and of remaining (or becoming) inhu-
man. First philosophy is the memory and repetition of this event: in this sense,
it watches over the historical a priori of Homo sapiens, and it is to this historical a priori that archeological research always seeks to reach back.
א In the preface to Les mots et les choses (1966), Foucault uses the term “historical a priori” to define that which, in a determinate historical epoch, conditions the possibilities of the formation and development of knowledges. The expression is problematic, because
it brings together two elements that are at least apparently contradictory: the a priori, which entails a paradigmatic and transcendental dimension, and history, which refers to
an eminently factual reality. It is probable that Foucault had drawn the term from Husserl’s 1127
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Origin of Geometry, which Derrida had translated into French in 1962, but certainly not the concept, because while in Husserl the historisches Apriori designates a sort of universal a priori of history, it instead always refers in Foucault to a determinate knowledge and to a determinate time. And yet, if it does not in any way refer back to an archetypal dimension beyond history but remains immanent to it, its contradictory formulation brings
to expression the fact that every historical study inevitably runs up against a constitutive dishomogeneity: that between the ensemble of facts and documents on which it labors
and a level that we can define as archeological, which though not transcending it, remains irreducible to it and permits its comprehension. Overbeck has expressed this heterogeneity by means of the distinction, in every study, between prehistory ( Urgeschichte) and history ( Geschichte), where prehistory does not designate what we usually understand by this term—that is, something chronologically archaic ( uralt)—but rather the history of the point of emergence ( Entstehungsgeschichte), in which the researcher must settle accounts with an originary phenomenon (an Urphänomen in Goethe’s sense) and at the same time with the tradition that, while it seems to transmit the past to us, ceaselessly covers up the fact of its emergence (It., sorgività) and renders it inaccessible.
One can define philosophical archeology as the attempt to bring to light the various
historical a priori s that condition the history of humanity and define its epochs. It is possible, in this sense, to construct a hierarchy of the various historical a priori s, which ascends in time toward more and more general forms. Ontology or first philosophy has
constituted for centuries the fundamental historical a priori of Western thought.
The archeology that attempts to reopen access to a first philosophy must
nevertheless first of all settle accounts with the striking fact t
hat, beginning from
a moment for which the name of Kant can serve as a signpost, it is precisely the
impossibility of a first philosophy that has become the historical a priori of the time in which we still in some way live. The true Copernican turn of Kantian
critique does not concern the position of the subject so much as the impossibil-
ity of a first philosophy, which Kant calls metaphysics. As Foucault had intuited
early on, “it is probable that we belong to an age of critique whose lack of a
first philosophy reminds us at every moment of its reign and its fatality” (Fou-
cault 6, pp. xi–xii/xv). Certainly Kant, at the very moment when he sanctioned
the impossibility of metaphysics, sought to secure its survival by giving it refuge
in the stronghold of the transcendental. But the transcendental—which in me-
dieval logic designated what is always already said and known when one says
“being”—necessarily entails a displacement of the historical a priori from the
anthropogenetic event (the articulation between language and world) to knowl-
edge, from a being that is no longer animal but not yet human to a knowing
subject. Ontology is thus transformed into gnoseology and first philosophy be-
comes philosophy of knowledge.
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Up to Heidegger, all or almost all post-Kantian professional philosophers
had kept to the transcendental dimension as if it went without saying, and in
this way, believing themselves to be saving the prestige of philosophy, they in
fact enslaved it to those sciences and knowledges of which they thought they
could define the conditions of possibility, precisely when these latter, projected
toward a technological development without limits, demonstrated that they did
not actually have any need of it. It fell to non-professional philosophers, like
Nietzsche, Benjamin, and Foucault, and in a different sense a linguist like Émile
Benveniste, to seek a way out of the transcendental. And they have done this by
shifting the historical a priori back from knowledge to language: and in this, by
not attending to the level of meaningful propositions but by isolating each time
a dimension that called into question the pure fact of language, the pure being
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