It is a hazardous business to use Michel Foucault's interviews as a key to understanding his thought. One cannot be sure when he is speaking seriously and when tongue in cheek. For instance, although he seldom cites Heidegger in his studies and refers nowhere to the ontological difference, he claimed in an interview that, “Heidegger has always been for me the essential philosopher. . . .My whole philosophical development was determined by my reading of Heidegger.” What exactly are we to make of that? If Foucault's interviews are offered as self-interpretations of his work, it is best to approach those interpretations with one's own interpretive care.

In The History of Sexuality, Volume I, Foucault claimed to have definitively refuted the basic claims of psychoanalysis. However, a year after its publication, when a young acquaintance asked him to recommend a form of therapy, Foucault gave rather unexpected advice. Instead of suggesting something avant garde, like Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalysis, he replied, “Freudian will be fine.” This incident - as well as a consideration of his oeuvre - indicates the intensely conflicted and complex nature of Foucault's relation to analysis. Just as Moses haunted Freud “like an unlaid ghost,” so Foucault could never successfully exorcise the specter of Freud. He kept returning to Freud throughout his career. Indeed, the persistence of Foucault's comings and goings with respect to the Freud led Derrida to remark sardonically that he was engaged in an “interminable and inexhaustible” fort-da game with the founder of psychoanalysis.

All of Foucault's major works are histories of a sort, which is enough to make him a historian of a sort. The challenge is to determine what sort of history he does and thus what kind of historian he is. It is fortunate that Foucault adopted distinctive terms for his specific approaches at different phases of his career. His early works, the ones that earned him his reputation, were called “archaeologies” and the subsequent ones “genealogies”; the volumes on the history of sexuality that appeared at the time of his death he called “problematizations.” These approaches do not exclude each other. Rather, like successive waves breaking on the sand, each is discovered after the fact to have been an implicit interest of the earlier one, for which it served as the moving force. Thus Foucault insisted that the question of power relations, which characterizes his genealogies, was what his archaeologies were really about, and, subsequently, that the issue of truth and subjectivity, the explicit focus of his final works, had been his basic concern all along. Although these avowals reveal a greater desire for consistency and coherence than Foucault is supposed to have possessed, much less to have been able to warrant, they hypothesize a unity among the three approaches that enables us to present each in more than sequential order. Accordingly, after a survey of these three modes of “history” in their turn, I shall address four issues that give Foucault's approach to history its distinctive character, namely, the topics of nominalism, the historical event, the spatialization of reason, and the nature of problematization.

These approaches do not exclude each other. Rather, like successive waves breaking on the sand, each is discovered after the fact to have been an implicit interest of the earlier one, for which it served as the moving force. Thus Foucault insisted that the question of power relations, which characterizes his genealogies, was what his archaeologies were really about, and, subsequently, that the issue of truth and subjectivity, the explicit focus of his final works, had been his basic concern all along. Although these avowals reveal a greater desire for consistency and coherence than Foucault is supposed to have possessed, much less to have been able to warrant, they hypothesize a unity among the three approaches that enables us to present each in more than sequential order. Accordingly, after a survey of these three modes of “history” in their turn, I shall address four issues that give Foucault’s approach to history its distinctive character, namely, the topics of nominalism, the historical event, the spatialization of reason, and the nature of problematization.

In presenting the topic of Michel Foucault's significance as a writer of the history of ethics, I have two main goals. First, I hope to be able to elucidate Foucault's aims in shifting his attention, in his last writings, to what he called “ethics.” These aims, in my opinion, have been widely misinterpreted and even more widely ignored, and the result has been a failure to come to terms with the conceptual and philosophical distinctiveness of Foucault's last works. Volumes 2 and 3 of The History of Sexuality are about sex in roughly the way that Discipline and Punish is about the prison. As the modern prison serves as a reference point for Foucault to work out his analytics of power, so ancient sex functions as the material around which Foucault elaborates his conception of ethics. Although the history of sex is, obviously, sexier than the history of ethics, it is this latter history that oriented Foucault's last writings. Foucault once remarked to me, as he had to others, that “sex is so boring.” He used this remark in different ways on different occasions, but one thing he meant by it was that what made sex so interesting to him had little to do with sex itself. His focus on the history of ancient sex, its interest for him, was part of his interest in the history of ancient ethics.

An ethics textbook aimed at university-level students, in listing the presuppositions of any ethical system, begins, “Singular moral judgments are never merely singular.” By their very nature moral judgments are implicitly universalizable, and only “a peculiar kind of irrationality” that “has come to infect contemporary thinking” could allow one to dispute this self-evident truth. Aristotle was mystified by those who claimed that a characteristic function could be found for an eye, a hand, a foot, a carpenter, or a tanner, but that none could be found for human beings in general. An ethical principle, according to Kant, must be universally applicable if it is to be considered as having any validity whatsoever.

Foucault, however, disconcerts. By claiming that there are no universally applicable principles, no normative standards, “no order of human life, or way we are, or human nature, that one can appeal to in order to judge or evaluate between ways of life,” Foucault, according to Charles Taylor, relinquishes any critical power that his historical analyses might have. Without such a “normative yardstick,” according to Jürgen Habermas, Foucault’s historical analyses cannot be genuinely critical. Indeed, Foucault’s skepticism with regard to the notions of universal human nature or universal rationality is clear. He associates universal human nature with the Enlightenment doctrine of humanism, which provides a vision of the human essence with which men and women are expected to conform, thus offering a universal criterion of moral judgment.

Nietzsche once said: “I am not a man; I am dynamite!” - an image that suggests that in overcoming ascetic ideals he was destroying himself as well. Despite the influence of Nietzsche and his own interests in self-overcoming, when referring to his own work Foucault preferred the less explosive metaphor of the toolkit. Foucault invited his readers - after all, in order to use him we must read him - to pick up what they found usable and ignore or discard the rest.

To be sure, self-overcoming was a central feature of Foucault’s project as he described it toward the end of his life. Moreover, in the Nietzschean vein, he privileged critique over efforts to establish procedures and norms necessary to legitimate social and political order – destabilizing rather than securing our identities as human beings. In referring to his works as part of his biography, he was suggesting not only that the problems he targeted were based on his own experiences, but also that the very practice of doing archival research and writing genealogies altered his self-understanding – his works literally “worked” to transform the self.

MODERNISM

The word “modernism” is most often used as a covering term for the period of Western literary and artistic innovation that extends from the late nineteenth century until about the 1960s, although arguably it is a conceptually more complex and open-ended phenomenon - a type of historical disposition (which might condition philosophy or politics as well as art) characterized by a belief in the inevitable and even desirable obsolescence of human traditions, institutions, and conventions, and perhaps even the concept of the human itself. Nietzsche's name comes to mind. In fact as a concept “modernism” has seldom been adequately clarified. The International Review of Modernism urges the method of “thick description” as an approach to the subject because modernism is made of heterogeneous cultural practices invisible to views from above. As Fredric Jameson says, modernism is not so much a concept as it is a “narrative category” in which topics like nineteenth-century realism, self-reflexive language, and the impersonality of the artist get articulated and rearticulated in multifarious ways. It is certainly the case that modernism is defined more often by examples than by theories - serial music, nonlinear writings like Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons, antiaesthetic objects like Marcel Duchamp's Fountain, as well as avantgarde groups like the Surrealists whose aim was often less to produce works of art than to develop new forms of experience and new dimensions of human subjectivity. In English the term “high modernism” is reserved for overshadowing monuments like Joyce's Ulysses and Pound's Cantos. I'm not sure there is a corresponding term among the French, who are apt to take their guidance less from Proust's Grand CEuvre than from the theater visionary Antonin Artaud, who thought that the task of the artist is not to produce masterpieces but to set in motion processes that dislocate rational, integrated, or otherwise settled forms of consciousness. On a certain view modernism is made of events, not of works. A museum of modern art might arguably count as a defeat of modernism.

AGAINST INTERPRETATION

For all of Foucault's reservations about modernity and authorship, his writings are typical of those of a modernist author in their demand for interpretation. Any writing, of course, requires some interpretation as part of our efforts to evaluate, refine, extend, or appreciate its achievement or to provide special background that readers outside the author's culture or historical period may require. But certain authors - in literature, the twentieth-century modernists are among the best examples - present themselves as so immediately and intrinsically “difficult” as to require special interpretative efforts even for those well equipped to understand them. The Wasteland, Cantos, and Finnegans Wake, for example, require explanation, even for culturally and historically attuned readers, in a way that Paradise Lost, the Essay on Man, and Emma do not. Philosophy, at least since Kant and Hegel, has also provided its share of “intrinsically obscure” writing. Although it may not be easy to formulate the precise difference, it is clear that Wittgenstein, the later Heidegger, and Derrida require a sort of interpretation that Russell, Dewey, and Quine do not.

Foucault’s penchant, particularly prior to Discipline and Punish, for the modernist obscure explains much of the demand for interpretations of his work. But the need to interpret Foucault sits ill with his desire to escape general interpretative categories. More important, as the enterprise of interpretation is usually understood, interpreting Foucault is guaranteed to distort his thought. Interpretation typically means finding a unifying schema through which we can make overall sense of an author’s works.

How fruitful is it to relate Foucault to Heidegger and Nietzsche? What can be learned about the genesis of Foucault's thought from such a comparison? How does it illuminate the nature and content of his thought? How does it expand our understanding of the phenomena that Foucault explores? Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow have shown us how much one can gain from reading Foucault and Heidegger together. Their book inspired Foucault to say to an interviewer, “Two of my friends in Berkeley wrote something about me and said that Heidegger was influential. Of course it was quite true, but no one in France has ever perceived it.” That does not mean, however, that Foucault should be read as a genuinely Heideggerian thinker, for one must also remember that he told the same interviewer that “Nietzsche was a revelation to me. . . I read him with great passion and broke with my life, left my job in the asylum, left France.” He never attributed an equally crucial role to Heidegger. In contrast to the thesis put forward by Dreyfus and Rabinow, I consider it, in fact, more fruitful to read Foucault in Nietzschean terms. One must remember what he said in his last interview in 1984:

I confess a deep reluctance to commenting on Foucault in light of his astute observation that commentaries only “say what has already been said and repeat tirelessly what was nevertheless never said.” How much truer this is when the commentator proposes to repeat an earlier commentary, as I propose to do here.

The vanity of my undertaking will, I hope, be offset by the modesty of my aim: to revisit the debate between Foucault and Habermas in order to dispel the notion that they are engaged in incompatible rather than complementary acts of social critique. Accepted wisdom has it that Foucault is an anti-humanist who rejects the emancipatory ideals of the Enlightenment. Habermas, by contrast, is portrayed as the arch defender of those ideals. Again, “common knowledge” holds that Foucault is a historical relativist with strong “anarchist” leanings, whereas Habermas is a “transcendental” philosopher in the Kantian vein engaged in rationally deducing universal and necessary norms.

In truth, both are humanists – despite their divergent takes on the philosophical coherence of humanism. Both readily accede to the value of such things as rights and democratic institutions in shaping and protecting modern critical aptitudes, and both accept the ambivalent nature of rights and democratic institutions in simultaneously constraining and enabling individual acts of non-conformism and resistance. Where they principally differ is on their choice of priorities: Foucault can be understood as a modern-day virtue ethicist fighting to liberate the capacity of individual self-choice and personal self-formation from oppressive conformism, whereas Habermas can be seen as a political theorist concerned with justifying and promoting a more just conception of democracy based upon an ethics of discourse.

FOUCAULT AMONG THE HISTORIANS. PART I

Michel Foucault's work always had an ambivalent relation to established academic disciplines, but almost all his books are at least superficially classifiable as histories. His first major work, in particular, seems to proclaim its status in the title: Histoire de la folie a` l'âge classique. One plausible way of trying to understand and evaluate this seminal book is by assessing its status as a work of history.

The reactions of professional historians to Histoire de la foile seem, at first reading, sharply polarized. There are many acknowledgments of its seminal role, beginning with Robert Mandrou's early review in Annales, characterizing it as a “beautiful book” that will be “of central importance for our understanding of the Classical period.” Twenty years later, Michael MacDonald confirmed Mandrou's prophecy: “Anyone who writes about the history of insanity in early modern Europe must travel in the spreading wake of Michel Foucault's famous book, Madness and Civilization.” Later endorsements have been even stronger. Jan Goldstein: “For both their empirical content and their powerful theoretical perspectives, the works of Michel Foucault occupy a special and central place in the historiography of psychiatry.” Roy Porter: “Time has proved Madness and Civilization far the most penetrating work ever written on the history of madness.”

Michel Foucault wrote extensively about historical reconfigurations of knowledge in what would now be called the human sciences. During the 1970s, however, he argued (most notably in Discipline and Punish [DP] and the first volume of The History of Sexuality [HS]) that these reorganizations of knowledge were also intertwined with new forms of power and domination. Foucault's works from this period have often yielded contradictory responses from readers. His detailed historical remarks on the emergence of disciplinary and regulatory biopower have been widely influential. Yet these detailed studies are connected to a more general conception of power, and of the epistemic and political positioning of the criticism of power, which many critics have found less satisfactory. Foucault's discussions of the relation between truth and power have similarly provoked concerns about their reflexive implications for his own analysis.

The principal purpose of this essay is to offer a sympathetic interpretation of the understanding of power and of knowledge that informs Foucault’s historical studies of prisons and of the construction of a scientific discourse about sexuality. Since Foucault discussed power in this period rather more thematically than he did knowledge, my discussion of knowledge will build extensively upon his remarks about power. The essay will proceed in three parts. First I will briefly recapitulate Foucault’s account of the interconnected emergence of new forms of power and knowledge in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Karl Rahner's accomplishment consisted in putting Catholic philosophy and theology on a transcendental footing. The undertaking spanned some fifty years, from his matriculation in philosophy at Freiburg University in 1934 to his death at Innsbruck in 1984. From beginning to end, the driving force behind the project was the seriousness with which Rahner regarded the transcendental turn in modern philosophy.

THE PROGRAM

Rahner’s program unfolded in two stages, the first philosophical and the second theological. (Only the former is the focus of this essay.) The first stage occupied him from 1934 to about 1941 and found expression in two works, Geist in Welt (1939) and Hürer des Wortes (1941). The first of those two texts marshaled central elements of the work of Kant, Rousselot, Mare´chal, and Heidegger for the goal of reformulating Thomism – its epistemology, philosophical anthropology, and metaphysics – as transcendental philosophy. In the second stage, which occupied him from the 1940s onward, Rahner used the transcendental Thomism of the first stage as the basis for rewriting Catholic doctrine as transcendental theology.

Speaking at a conference on December 7, 1968 on questions concerning the diaconate, Karl Rahner stressed that while the ministerial office (Amt) of the Church must always be affirmed as one, its division into different ministerial offices is much more flexible than has been imagined, particularly over the last few centuries. Less than eight years later, in July 1976, focusing on the theme of the spirituality of the priest today, he highlighted the extraordinarily complex historical dimension of ministerial office that was always a part of his theological reflection. And the following year, 1977, in an article that first appeared in the journal Stimmen der Zeit, he reiterated that the multiplicity of ministerial offices in the Church are fundamentally rooted and draw their meaning as part of the Church's one ministerial office.

The 1966 lecture and publication, The Meaning of Ecclesiastical Office, is essential for understanding how Rahner views church ministry or ministerial office (kirchliches Amt). He explicitly states in the preface to the 1967 publication, Knechte Christi. Meditationen zum Priestertum, which was translated into English in 1968 as Servants of the Lord, that this lecture must be used as a hermeneutical key to interpret the essays, written over a thirty-year period, that have been collected in Knechte Christi. Ministerial office itself, he argues, can only be understood within the context of the fact that God has united God’s own self in a direct way with humanity, and that this unity is necessarily historically manifested.

It may come as a surprise to include an article on Rahner's contribution to a theological aesthetics in this Companion. This theme in Rahner has hitherto received only little attention. However, it seems timely to consider this aspect of his writings here, as it will throw new light on Rahner's theology as such and demonstrate his continued relevance in theology and, in particular, in the current development of the dialogue between theology and the arts.

The quest for a theological aesthetics, including a theology of art, has become a significant theme in theology since the early 1980s. The numerous publications on theology and art, literature, music, and film, etc. and the setting up of whole programs and departments in theological faculties witness to this development. The overall aim in such endeavors is to investigate how the arts are sources of, and can play an active role in, theology. It is precisely such questions that Rahner addressed in his articles on the arts.

Rahner was in many ways a prophetic voice in twentieth century Christianity. His idea that the Christian of the future would need to be a mystic is reflected in today’s interest in diverse forms of spirituality, i.e., in the search for and reflection on religious experience in an age of pluralism. Rahner’s leitmotif is the God who reveals Godself in all realms of life, in human experience, as holy mystery, the God who communicates Godself through grace, yet who remains always wholly Other. Rahner saw the whole of human existence and of history as embraced by God’s transforming love and presence. In his many essays, meditations, and sermons he tried to bring across to the most diverse audiences, including those with serious doubts about Church and faith, this mystery of a loving God. In this context it does not surprise that he would engage with the question of the arts as sources of revelation and meaning and their role in theology.