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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 May 2017
The figure of Oedipus haunted the thought of Michel Foucault from the outset of his tenure at the Collège de France, in association with several key philosophical and historical projects, and enduring until the conclusion of his career. However, it was with Foucault's account of an “Oedipus complex”—one that operated “not at the individual level but at the collective level; not in connection with desire and the unconscious but in connection with power and knowledge” (“Truth and Juridical Forms,” 1973)—that Foucault was able to enlist Oedipus for a genealogy of “sexuality” and, furthermore, of “governmentality,” such as would increasingly preoccupy him through the mid- to late 1970s. Foucault's attention to classical texts—in particular the Oedipus Tyrannos of Sophocles and the Republic of Plato—thereby helped to clear a critical pathway through the conventional Marxism embraced by the “repressive hypothesis,” and to arrive at a Nietzschean genealogy of sexuality and power.
I am most grateful to Tracie M. Matysik and Sophia Rosenfeld for their guidance and support, and to the anonymous reviewers of Modern Intellectual History for stimulating and helpful comments. My understanding of these texts and issues has benefited greatly from discussions with students and faculty of the UBC Arts One Program, and special thanks are due to my colleagues Thomas Kemple, Susanna Braund, and Renisa Mawani for their insightful comments on the manuscript. Finally, I owe particular gratitude to Barry Segal and Arcadi Konoval for their contributions to this work.
1 Oedipus was a popular subject for ancient Greek drama, but Sophocles’ Oidipous tyrannos is the only version to have survived in complete form.
2 Throughout this discussion I will use the translation prepared by Ahl, Frederick for Two Faces of Oedipus: Sophocles’ “Oedipus Tyrannus” and Seneca's “Oedipus” (Ithaca, 2008)Google Scholar.
3 See Jory, David’s introductory comments to his critical edition of the Oedipe trajédie (Seconde edition) in Les oeuvres complets de Voltaire, vol. 1A, Oeuvres de 1711–1722, ed. Mason, Haydn and Cronk, Nicholas (Oxford, 2001), 17–163, at 17Google Scholar. Given his proclivity for questioning his parentage, Voltaire's use of this play to publicly rename himself was most apt.
4 Susanna Braund, Seneca: Oedipus (London, 2016), 95.
5 Ibid., 95–6. For fuller treatment see Biet, Christian, Oedipe en monarchie: Tragédie et théorie juridique à l’âge classique (Paris, 1994)Google Scholar. See also Edmunds, Lowell, Oedipus (London and New York, 2006), 90CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
6 Foucault, Michel, Histoire de la sexualité: La volonté de savoir (Paris, 1976)Google Scholar; Foucault, , The History of Sexuality, vol. I, An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York, 1978)Google Scholar. Further reference to the History of Sexuality will be cited in notes as HS, assume the first of the three-volume series, and remove the article “the” when referred to in the main text, observing Foucault's original title.
7 Foucault specifically targets Marcus, Stephen, The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-Nineteenth Century England (New York, 1964)Google Scholar, but such an account is not exclusive to Marcus. Foucault had correspondingly targeted both Wilhelm Reich and Reimut Reiche in his lectures of 1976 immediately preceding publication of the first volume of the History of Sexuality; indeed, Foucault evidently chose to highlight the “repressive hypothesis” at least in part in response to Reimut Reiche's Sexualität und Klassenkampf: Zur Abwehr repressiver Entsublimierung (Frankfurt am Main, 1968; French translation 1969 as Sexualité et lutte de classe). See the lectures of 7 and 14 Jan. 1976 in Foucault, Michel, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976, trans. David Macey (New York, 2003), 1–41 (hereafter SMBD)Google Scholar.
8 Foucault, Michel, Lectures on the Will to Know: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1970–1971, trans. Graham Burchell (Houndmills, 2013) (hereafter WTK)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
9 See, for example, “Oedipal Knowledge,” delivered twice in the United States in 1972 (WTK, 229–57); and the second part of “Truth and Juridical Forms,” delivered at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro in May 1973, in Foucault, Power, ed. Faubion, James D. (New York, 2000), 16–32Google Scholar.
10 Foucault, “Truth and Juridical Forms,” 16.
11 Ibid., 16.
12 HS, 127.
13 Foucault himself explicitly characterizes it as a “genealogy” of sexuality in The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979, trans. Graham Burchell (New York, 2008), 35 (lecture of 17 Jan. 1979).
14 Just as Thebes was long recognized as an originary city, more ancient even than Troy (Lucretius, De rerum natura, 5.324–7), the Oedipal family might be correspondingly recognized as a founding family. I am indebted to Susanna Braund for this insight.
15 The birth of “governmentality studies” is conventionally associated with Burchell, G., Gordon, C., and Miller, P., eds., The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (Chicago, 1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, although Hacking, Ian’s “Biopower and the Avalanche of Printed Numbers,” Humanities in Society 5 (1982), 279–95, is a clear precursorGoogle Scholar.
16 Although Hacking's use of “biopower” has become a scholarly norm in English, English translations vary in orthography. Foucault consistently uses “bio-pouvoir” in the original French for Histoire de la sexualité and “Il faut défendre la société”, which is observed in the standard English translation for HS (“bio-power”) but not for SMBD. For consistency with actual quoted sources, and reflecting Foucault's original orthography in HS and SMBD, this discussion will use “bio-power.” For a recent collection of perspectives that includes Hacking's classic article see Cisney, V. W. and Morar, N., eds., Biopower: Foucault and Beyond (Chicago, 2016)Google Scholar. On the possible association of Foucault's “bio-pouvoir” with the concept of “biocratie” in the writings of Auguste Comte and the psychiatrist Edouard Toulouse (1865–1947), see Bertani, Mauro, “Sur la généalogie du biopouvoir,” in Lectures de Michel Foucault, vol. 1, A propos de “Il faut défendre la société”, ed. Bertani, Maruo, Defert, Daniel, Fontana, Aessandro, and Holt, Thomas C. (Lyon, 2001), 19Google Scholar.
17 “Je n'ai jamais été freudien, je n'ai jamais été marxiste.” Foucault, Michel, “Structuralisme et poststructuralisme,” in Foucault, , Dits et écrits: 1954–1988, 4 vols. (Paris, 1994), vol. 4 (1980–1988), 431–57, at 435Google Scholar.
18 Foucault, Michel, “Prison Talk,” in Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews & Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. Gordon, Colin (New York 1980), 37–54, at 52, 53 (hereafter PK)Google Scholar. The original interview was published in June 1975, in Magazine littéraire.
19 HS, 77.
20 On “le dogmatisme marxiste” cf. Foucault, “Structuralisme et poststructuralisme,” 432–3. Foucault was acutely conscious of the need to distance himself from Marxist orthodoxy: “I often quote concepts, texts and phrases from Marx, but without feeling obliged to add the authenticating label of a footnote with a laudatory phrase to accompany the quotation. As long as one does that, one is regarded as someone who knows and reveres Marx, and will be suitably honoured in the so-called Marxist journals” (PK, 52). On the relationship between Foucault's interest in neoliberalism, and fatigue with Marxism, see Behrendt, Michael C., “Liberalism without Humanism: Michel Foucault and the Free-Market Creed, 1976–79,” Modern Intellectual History 6/3 (2009), 539–68, at 547CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
21 Concerning Nietzsche's marked influence on the History of Sexuality and associated works and lectures see Konoval, Brandon, “Toward a Psycho-analytics of Power: Nietzsche's Ascetic Priest in Foucault's Genealogy of Sexuality,” Nietzsche-Studien 42 (Nov. 2013), 204–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
22 Foucault, Michel, “What Is an Author?”, in The Essential Foucault: Selections from the Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, ed. Rabinow, Paul and Rose, Nikolas (New York, 2003), 377–91, at 387 (hereafter EF)Google Scholar.
23 Ibid.
24 HS, 145.
25 Scholars have understandably engaged with Foucault's attention to Oedipus in the context of Freud and psychoanalysis: see Forrester, John, “Michel Foucault and the History of Psychoanalysis,” in Forrester, , The Seductions of Psychoanalysis: Freud, Lacan and Derrida (Cambridge, 1990), 286–316Google Scholar; Benauer, James W. and Mahon, Michael, “Michel Foucault's Ethical Imagination,” in Gutting, Gary, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, 2nd edn (Cambridge, 2003), 149–75, esp. 156–60Google Scholar.
26 Foucault, “Truth and Juridical Forms,” 17.
27 Ibid.
28 A distilled treatment was undertaken by Foucault for the Tanner Lectures delivered at Stanford University in October 1979, under the title “‘Omnes et singulatim’: Toward a Critique of Political Reason,” in EF, 180–201.
29 Foucault, Michel, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–1978, trans. Graham Burchell (New York, 2004) (hereafter STP)Google Scholar.
30 Cf. Hacking, “Biopower and the Avalanche of Printed Numbers.”
31 STP, lecture of 22 Feb. 1978, 165.
32 SMBD, lecture of 14 Jan. 1976, 27–8.
33 HS, 142.
34 Ibid.
35 STP, lecture of 25 Jan. 1978, 64. Foucault distinguishes “normalization in the strict sense” from “normation” (63).
36 Ibid., 64.
37 See note 7 above.
38 HS, 142–3, emphasis added.
39 STP, lecture of 15 Feb. 1978, 148, 150.
40 HS, 88–9.
41 Foucault does not offer this explicit connection in the History of Sexuality itself, but it demonstrably guides his thinking there: see SMBD, lecture of 14 Jan. 1976, 28–9.
42 HS, 136, emphasis added.
43 Ibid., 138, emphasis added.
44 Ahl, Two Faces of Oedipus, 22, observes that Sophocles’ Oedipus, “though called a tyrant (Greek tyrannos), behaves more like an elected or appointed official conscious of his need to defer to the people.” A key irony of the Republic is the virtual enslavement of the supposedly all-powerful tyrant to the demands of demagoguery.
45 Plato, Republic, trans. G. M. A. Grube and C. D. C. Reeve (Indianapolis and Cambridge, 1992), 163. All quotations will assume the Grube–Reeve translation, with Stephanus citations provided.
46 Foucault's bald assertion in the lecture of 8 Feb. 1978, that the theme of pastoral power, “this power of the shepherd . . . is foreign to Greek thought” (STP, 125), evidently raised more than a few eyebrows, occasioning a more careful survey of Platonic political thought in general and the Republic in particular in the ensuing lecture of 15 Feb.—as well as some admirably deft analytic back-pedaling. In “Omnes et singulatim,” Foucault emphasizes the critique of the shepherd of men promoted by the Statesman, effectively removing the Republic from any sustained discussion in that appreciably constrained context.
47 Nietzsche, Friedrich, “Homer's Contest,” in Nietzsche, On The Genealogy of Morality (1887), ed. Ansell-Pearson, Keith, trans. Carol Diethe (Cambridge, 2007), 174–80, at 179, original emphasisGoogle Scholar.
48 The reputedly humble, communitarian lifestyle of the Pythagoreans would appear to be parodied by Socrates’ “pigopolis.”
49 All biblical quotations are taken from The Jerusalem Bible (New York, 1966).
50 Cf. STP, lecture of 15 Feb. 1978, 140.
51 STP, 138.
52 Ibid., 139–40.
53 HS, 86.
54 STP, lecture of 8 March, 1978, 235–6.
55 Or, one might add, of Voltaire.
56 SMBD, lecture of 25 Feb. 1976, 174–5.
57 Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morality, Prelude, §1.
58 “Truth and Juridical Forms,” 17.
59 Cf. Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” in EF, 126–44.
60 Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich, The Communist Manifesto (1848), trans. Samuel Moore (London, 2002), 224Google Scholar.
61 Cf. HS, 60.
62 Ibid., 59. We might correspondingly observe a confessional impetus behind social media.
63 Ibid., 122.
64 Ibid., 5.
65 Ibid., 6.
66 Cf. note 20 above.
67 HS, 126, original emphasis. Here Foucault cites Marx, “The Greed for Surplus Labor.”
68 Foucault addressed this ambition in the lectures of 3 and 10 March 1976 in “Society Must Be Defended,” above all in light of the historiography of Sieyès, Thierry, and Guizot.
69 Friedrich Nietzsche, On The Genealogy of Morality, ed. and trans. Maudemarie Clarke and Alan J. Swensen (Indianapolis, 1998), III, §8, 78/KSA 5.355 (hereafter GM), original emphasis.
70 HS, 123, emphasis added.
71 GM I, §2, 10/KSA 5.259, original emphasis.
72 HS, 123, emphasis added.
73 Ibid., 121, emphasis added.
74 Ibid., 125, emphasis added.
75 Ibid., 124. The “nobility of sexuality” recasts the “nobility of municipality” introduced in “Society Must Be Defended”: “the bourgeoisie will be able to recuperate—in the form of the Gallo-Roman municeps—a Romanity that supplies . . . its letters of nobility” (lecture of 3 March 206).
76 HS, 108.
77 Ibid., 120.
78 Characterizing Sieyès's line of argument, Foucault observed in the lecture of 10 March 1976 (SMBD, 215–38, at 221), “Where, then, are we to find the historical core of a nation that can become ‘the’ nation? In the Third Estate, and only in the Third Estate.”
79 HS, 111.
80 Cf. Donzelot, Jacques, La police des familles (Paris, 1977)Google Scholar; on the disciplinary character of the modern state and its religious underpinnings more generally see Gorski, Philip S., The Disciplinary Revolution: Calvinism and the Rise of the State in Early Modern Europe (Chicago, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
81 Joel Whitebook, “Against Interiority: Foucault's Struggle with Psychoanalysis,” in Gutting, The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, 312–47, at 320.
82 HS, 59.
83 Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York, 1978), 203.
84 Ibid., 202.
85 HS, 79. Note the turning or circulatory component of the ring to engage its powers, a suggestive parallel with the ring of Gyges.
86 Ibid.
87 Ibid.
88 Foucault initiates this discussion in the lecture of 3 March 1976 (SMBD, 189–214).
89 HS, 146.
90 Socrates offers his own tale of Oedipus at Rep. 571c–d (242): recounting the waking nightmare of tyrannical life, the tyrant “has permanently become while awake what he used to become occasionally [only] while asleep,” namely a slave of “the beastly and savage” part of the soul, prepared to “commit any foul murder” and “to have sex with a mother.”
91 Although already playing a significant role in the final part of the History of Sexuality, “population” is highlighted in STP, lectures of 25 Jan. and 1 Feb. 1978.
92 The communitarian “family” of the guardians is particular to that caste, and not a structure for the kallipolis as a whole.
93 HS, 106–7.
94 Ibid.
95 Ibid., 107.
96 Ibid., 107–8, emphasis added.
97 Ibid., 108–9.
98 Ibid., 109.
99 Ibid., 109–10, emphasis added.
100 Ibid., 113.
101 Ibid., 127, emphasis added.
102 Ibid., 129.
103 Ibid.
104 Ibid., 130.
105 “Oedipal knowledge” as characteristically “transgressive” or “fearsome” knowledge is a key theme addressed by Foucault in the “Will to Knowledge” lectures of 1970–71; see in particular the lecture of 9 Dec. 1970, 13.
106 HS, 34–5, original emphasis.
107 “I pronounce myself to be the child of Chance! /I'll not be disinherited.” Sophocles, Oedipus tyrannus, 1080–81.
108 Cf. Nietzsche, GM II, §12, §13. In his well-known 1971 article “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” (EF, 351–69), Foucault emphasizes the fundamentally stochastic nature of genealogy; thus “a genealogy of value, morality, asceticism, and knowledge will never confuse itself with a quest for ‘origins,’ will never neglect as inaccessible the vicissitudes of history” (at 354).
109 HS, 149–50.
110 Ibid., 156.
