PROBLEMATIZATION IN FOUCAULT’S GENEALOGY AND DELEUZE’S SYMPTOMATOLOGY

Abstract

The work of Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze frequently gave rise to a practice of philosophy as a form of critical problematization. Critical problematization both resonates between their thought and is also generative for contemporary philosophy in their wake. To examine critical problematization in each, a shared theme of inquiry provides a useful focal point. Foucault and Deleuze each deployed critical problematization in the context of studies of sexuality, a site of excited contestation that remains as crucial for us today as it was for them four decades ago. Foucault’s well-known History of Sexuality, Volume 1 and Deleuze’s little-discussed text Coldness and Cruelty thus provide us with exemplary instances of the critical problematization of sexuality. An examination of these two texts, and their broader resonance, illuminates the potential of Foucauldian genealogy and Deleuzian symptomatology as methods for critical problematization today. It is argued that they provide compelling alternatives to modern critical moods that would want to interpret sexuality through a series of oppositions.

Keywords:

• Michel Foucault
• Gilles Deleuze
• problematization
• critique
• sexuality

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

For instructive comments on an earlier version of this paper I thank Sean Bowden, Bonnie Sheehey, and an anonymous reviewer. I also thank audience members at a workshop at Deakin University in Melbourne in 2015 (where I benefited especially from discussions with Adinva Arvatu, Sean Bowden, Mark G.E. Kelly, Craig Lundy, Knox Peden, and Jack Reynolds) and at a presentation at SPEP in 2016 (where I benefited especially from discussions with Nicolae Morar, Henry Somers-Hall, and Brad Stone, who deserves an extra thanks for reminding me to consult the chapter in Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge discussed above).

1 See instructive discussions by Hallward (“Limits of Individuation”) and Grace (“Faux Amis”) on divergences; more broadly for comparative work on Foucault and Deleuze exploring both differences and resonances two recent collections by Morar, Nail, and Smith (Between Deleuze and Foucault and Foucault and Deleuze), as well as work by Kelly (“Discipline is Control”).

2 To forestall the most obvious objection to my description of genealogy and symptomatology as methods, I note at the outset that “methodology” is construed here as a term of modesty (in contrast to metaphysics), rather than as a term of bravado (connoting a failsafe procedure or a guaranteed recipe). Despite misgivings on the part of both Foucault and Deleuze about this term, I take courage from their occasional positive uses. Deleuze, in my focal text of Coldness and Cruelty, introduces the question of the masochistic method of disavowal by asking, immediately after exposing the negativity of sadistic method, “whether there is not yet another ‘method’ besides the speculative sadistic one” (31). Perhaps more poignant for my argument here is Deleuze’s description of Bergson’s “essentially problematizing method” (Bergsonism 35). In my focal text for Foucault, The Will to Know (i.e., The History of Sexuality, Volume 1), there is, of course, an entire chapter devoted to “method” (92–102).

3 I thus wish to forestall an initial objection by noting that my argument here can tolerate the fact that Deleuze himself frequently stumbled onto the garden paths of metaphysics. For that fact does nothing to prevent me from prioritizing texts here in which he does not do so. My approach thus raises the question of what Deleuze’s thought would look like were we to discard the old robes of metaphysics in which he sometimes sought to dress it. Scholars might object that such an approach is untenable insofar as the metaphysics of, say, Difference and Repetition seems to somehow undergird the analyses undertaken in other texts such as that which I focus on here, namely Coldness and Cruelty. Against such an objection I would maintain that Deleuze’s symptomatological writings not only do not themselves engage in metaphysics but also stand in no need of a metaphysics. When comparing two texts like this by the same author, one cannot simply assume that the more metaphysical-sounding texts have default priority. Instead of insisting that a metaphysics underwrites Coldness and Cruelty, why could we not say instead that this text develops an ethics and aesthetics that is also expressible by the metaphysical arguments of Difference and Repetition? Such a reading, which I only suggest as an untested possibility, might begin, for instance, with Deleuze’s claim that “beneath the sound and the fury of sadism and masochism the terrible force of repetition is at work” (Coldness and Cruelty 120).

4 See similar themes in Deleuze (“Jean Hyppolite’s Logic and Existence”). The most influential works that both felt the need to push past were Kojève (Introduction to the Reading of Hegel) and Hyppolite (Genesis and Structure). See Roth (Knowing and History) for a useful intellectual history of mid-century French Hegelianism, a book whose final chapter traces that moment’s meanings for both Foucault and Deleuze.

5 It must be noted that in some texts (including Coldness and Cruelty analyzed below) Deleuze attempted to retain the term “dialectics” by way of recuperating it into what we might call “differential dialectics.” Terminology notwithstanding, what is clear is that Deleuze’s work requires a difference between dialectical negation and the non-negative work of what I am calling experimentation. Here, I take myself to be following Dan Smith’s suggestion that Difference and Repetition “attempts to develop a new concept of dialectics, which is more or less synonymous with the concept of ‘problematics’” (“Hegel” 69; cf. “Dialectics” 107).

6 See also Hegel’s Phenomenology on this theme (§92, 59).

7 Though resonant in this way, it is also clear that Deleuze’s category of the problematic is by far the more general of the two insofar as Foucault’s notion of problematization is always meant to describe the complex singularities in virtue of which regional dispositifs are developed. Yet for the fact that Deleuze sought to save space for a more metaphysically robust notion of problems there is no reason to think that he did not also clear space for problematics that are regional (or empirical) in the same way as those that primarily interested Foucault. Paul Patton highlights the status of problems as potentially regional in stating that Deleuze “defended a transcendental empiricism according to which what problems exist is an open question to be answered by the exploration of the field of thought in a given society at a given time” (151).

8 I invoke the term “abduction” from Charles Peirce, for whom “Abduction consists in studying facts and devising a theory to explain them” (205).

9 There is, in other words, an element of pragmatism in both Deleuze and Foucault, as commentators on each have noted; see Rajchman (Deleuze Connections) in Deleuze’s case and Rabinow (“Dewey and Foucault”) in Foucault’s.

10 On dispositif, see Foucault (“The Confession of the Flesh” 194); on agencement, see Deleuze and Guattari (A Thousand Plateaus 7).

11 See Colwell (“Deleuze and Foucault”) and Gilson (“Ethics and the Ontology of Freedom”) for two exceptions; for a third, see my own discussion of Deleuze’s influence on Foucault’s notion of problematization (Koopman, Genealogy as Critique 133–40).

12 No method is appropriate for all possible inquiries. To think otherwise is to stumble onto the garden path of turning a methodological contribution into a metaphysical-ism; for instance, some ugly thing like difference-ism or perhaps even problematization-ism. We should rather accept that there are many ways (in the humbled sense of “way” that is already connoted in “method” and the Greek methodos) of problematizing.

13 This is a theme I develop further in forthcoming work (Koopman, “Critique without Judgment”).

14 For other iterations of clinical symptomatology across a wide swath of Deleuze’s work, see Smith’s survey (“‘A Life of Pure Immanence’” xi, 175 n. 6).

15 My focus on Coldness and Cruelty resonates with Smith’s claim in “‘A Life of Pure Immanence’” that this work “provides one of the clearest examples of what might be termed Deleuze’s ‘symptomatological’ approach” (xviii) as well as with his observation that this book offers the first linkage of “the ‘critical’ and the ‘clinical’ in Deleuze’s thought” (xi).

16 This pairing of etiology and symptomatology compares to Foucault’s use of the same two terms in his 1973–74 Collège de France lectures, titled Psychiatric Power. There, Foucault spoke of “the organization of the symptomatological scenario” (309) and the psychiatric search “to discover the etiology” (318). That these terms are also contrastive for Foucault is motivated earlier in the text (133–37). Surveying other work, we find a discussion of symptomatology and etiology in the next year’s 1974–75 Abnormal lecture series, but without explicit pairing (241). Earlier, symptomatology as a form of medical analysis is present in many places in Foucault’s 1963 The Birth of the Clinic, although medical etiology does not appear there. I shall have to leave it for another occasion to explore the comparison of Foucault’s early 1970s discussion of this contrast to Deleuze’s contrast of the same in the late 1960s.

17 Deleuze explicitly distinguishes etiology from symptomatology in Coldness (58). There he also writes, in a passage that reads as genealogical avant la lettre:

We should avoid falling into “evolutionism” by aligning in a single chain results which are approximately continuous but which imply irreducible and heterogeneous formations. An eye, for example, could be produced in several independent ways, as the outcome of different sequences, the analogous product of completely different mechanisms. I suggest that this is also true of sadism and masochism and of the pleasure–pain complex as their allegedly common organ. The concurrence of sadism and masochism is fundamentally one of analogy only; their processes and their formations are entirely different. (46)