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 Understanding Foucault,
Understanding Modernism
 Understanding Philosophy, Understanding Modernism

The aim of each volume in Understanding Philosophy,

Understanding Modernism is to understand a philosophical
thinker more fully through literary and cultural modernism and
consequently to understand literary modernism better through a key
philosophical figure. In this way, the series also rethinks the limits of
modernism, calling attention to lacunae in modernist studies and
sometimes in the philosophical work under examination.
Series Editors:
Paul Ardoin, S. E. Gontarski, and Laci Mattison
Volumes in the Series:

Understanding Bergson, Understanding Modernism

edited by Paul Ardoin, S. E. Gontarski, and Laci Mattison
Understanding Deleuze, Understanding Modernismedited by Paul
Ardoin, S. E. Gontarski, and Laci Mattison
Understanding Wittgenstein, Understanding Modernismedited by
Anat Matar
Understanding Foucault, Understanding Modernismedited by David
Scott
Understanding Rancière, Understanding Modernism
(forthcoming)edited by Patrick M. Bray
Understanding James, Understanding Modernism
(forthcoming)edited by David H. Evans
Understanding Cavell, Understanding Modernism
(forthcoming)edited by Paola Marrati
Understanding Blanchot, Understanding Modernism
(forthcoming)edited by Christopher Langlois
Understanding Merleau-Ponty, Understanding Modernism
(forthcoming)edited by Ariane Mildenberg
Understanding Derrida, Understanding Modernism
(forthcoming)edited by Jean-Michel Rabaté
 Understanding Foucault,
Understanding Modernism

Edited by
David Scott

Bloomsbury Academic
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc
 Contents

Series Preface
Abbreviations

Introduction: Foucault’s Modernisms David Scott

Part 1 Conceptualizing Foucault

1 The Origin of Parrēsia in Foucault’s Thinking: Truth and Freedom
in the History of Madness
Leonard Lawlor and Daniel J. Palumbo
2 The Secret of the Corpse-Language Machine: The Birth of the
Clinic and Raymond Roussel
David Scott
3 Intersections of the Concept and Literature in The Order of
Things: Foucault and Canguilhem
Samuel Talcott
4 Archaeology of Knowledge: Foucault and the Time of Discourse
Heath Massey
5 Carceral, Capital, Power: The “Dark Side” of the Enlightenment
in Discipline and Punish
Christopher Penfield
6 Foucault’s The History of Sexuality
Chloë Taylor

Part 2 Foucault and Aesthetics

7 Technologies of Modernism: Historicism in Foucault and Dos
Passos
 Christopher Breu
8 Thought as Spirituality in Raymond Roussel
Ann Burlein
9 Life Escaping: Foucault, Vitalism, and Gertrude Stein’s Life-
Writing
Sarah Posman
10 The Specter of Manet: A Contribution to the Archaeology of
Painting
Joseph J. Tanke
11 The Hermaphroditic Image: Modern Art, Thought, and
Expérience in Michel Foucault
Nicole Ridgway

Part 3 Glossary Essays

Archaeology Heath Massey
The “Author-Function” Seth Forrest
Biopower Chloë Taylor
Discipline Steve Tammelleo
Episteme Samuel Talcott
Genealogy Brad Elliott Stone
Power Brad Elliott Stone
Problematization Daniele Lorenzini
Transgression Janae Sholtz
Truth Marc De Kesel
Subjectivation Mark Murphy

Notes on Contributors
Index
Name Index
 Series Preface

Sometime in the late twentieth century, modernism, like philosophy

itself, underwent something of an unmooring from (at least) linear
literary history in favor of the multi-perspectival history implicit in
“new historicism” or, say, varieties of “presentism.” Amid current
reassessments of modernism and modernity, critics have posited
various “new” or alternative modernisms—postcolonial,
cosmopolitan, transatlantic, transnational, geomodernism, or even
“bad” modernisms. In doing so, they have not only reassessed
modernism as a category, but also, more broadly, rethought
epistemology and ontology, aesthetics, metaphysics, materialism,
history, and being itself, opening possibilities of rethinking not only
which texts we read as modernist, but also how we read those texts.
Much of this new conversation constitutes something of a critique
of the periodization of modernism or modernist studies in favor of
modernism as mode (or mode of production) or concept.
Understanding Philosophy, Understanding Modernism situates itself
amid the plurality of discourses, offering collections focused on key
philosophical thinkers influential both to the moment of modernism
and to our current understanding of that moment’s geneology,
archeology, and becomings. Such critiques of modernism(s) and
modernity afford opportunities to rethink and reassess the overlaps,
folds, interrelationships, interleavings, or cross-pollinations of
modernism and philosophy. Our goal in each volume of the series is
to understand literary modernism better through philosophy as we
also better understand a philosopher through literary modernism.
The first two volumes of the series, those on Henri Bergson and
Gilles Deleuze, have established a tripartite structure that serves to
offer both accessibility to the philosopher’s principle texts and to
current new research. Each volume opens with a section focused on
“conceptualizing” the philosopher through close readings of seminal
texts in the thinker’s oeuvre. A second section, on aesthetics, maps
connections between modernist works and the philosophical figure,
often surveying key modernist trends and shedding new light on
authors and texts. The final section of each volume serves as an
extended glossary of principal terms in the philosopher’s work, each
treated at length, allowing a fuller engagement with and
examination of the many, sometimes contradictory ways terms are
deployed. The series is thus designed both to introduce philosophers
and to rethink their relationship to modernist studies, revising our
understandings of both modernism and philosophy, and offering
resources that will be of use across disciplines, from philosophy,
theory, and literature, to religion, the visual and performing arts, and
often to the sciences as well.
 Abbreviations

Texts by Michel Foucault in English Translation

EAK The Archeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on

Language. Trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York:
Pantheon Books, 1971.
EBC The Birth of the Clinic: An Archeology of Medical
Perception. Trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Vintage
Books, 1994.
ECF- Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France 1974–1975.
AB Trans. Graham Burchell. New York: Picador, 2003.
ECF- The Courage of Truth: The Government of Self and Others
COT II. Lectures at the Collège de France 1983–1984. Trans.
Graham Burchell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.
ECF- The Government of Self and Others. Lectures at the Collège
GSO de France 1982–1983. Trans. Graham Burchell. New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
ECF- The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège
HOS de France, 1981–1982. Trans. Graham Burchell. New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
ECF- Psychiatric Power: Lectures at the Collège de France 1973–
PP 1974. Trans. Graham Burchell. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2006.
ECF- “Society Must Be Defended.” Lectures at the Collège de
SMD France 1975–1976. Trans. David Macey. New York: Picador,
2003.
ECF- Security, Territory, Population. Lectures at the Collège de
STP France 1977–1978. Trans. Graham Burchell. New York:
 Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
EDL Death and the Labyrinth: The World of Raymond Roussel.
Trans. Charles Ruas. New York: Continuum, 2007.
EDP Discipline and Punish. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York:
Vintage, 1995.
EEF The Essential Foucault. Ed. Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose.
New York: The New Press, 2003.
EEW1 Ethics, Subjectivity, and Truth: Essential Works of Foucault,
1954–1984. Ed. James D. Faubion. New York: The New
Press, 1997.
EEW2 Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology: Essential Works of
Foucault, 1954–1984. Ed. James D. Faubion. New York: The
New Press, 1998.
EEW3 Power: Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984. Ed. James
D. Faubion. New York: The New Press, 2000.
EFB Foucault/Blanchot. Maurice Blanchot: The Thought from
Outside, by Michel Foucault, and Michel Foucault as I
Imagine Him, by Maurice Blanchot. Trans. Jeffrey Mehlman
and Brian Massumi. New York: Zone Books, 1987.
EFL Foucault Live: Collected Interviews, 1961–1984. Ed. Sylvère
Lotringer. New York: Semiotexte, 1996.
EFR The Foucault Reader. Ed. Paul Rabinow. New York:
Pantheon Books, 1984.
EFS Fearless Speech. Ed. Joseph Pearson. Los Angeles,
Semiotexte, 2001.
EHM History of Madness. Trans. Jonathan Murphy and Jean
Khalfa. London: Routledge, 2006.
EHS1 The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Volume 1. Trans.
Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage, 1990.
EHS2 The Use of Pleasure. The History of Sexuality, Volume 2.
Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Random House, 1985.
EHS3 The Care of the Self. The History of Sexuality, Volume 3.
Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage, 1988.
EIKA Introduction to Kant’s Anthropology. Trans. Roberto Nigro
and Kate Briggs. Los Angeles: Semiotexte, 2008.
EINP Georges Canguilhem. The Normal and the Pathological,
with an Introduction by Michel Foucault. Zone Books: New
York, 1991.
ELCP Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and
Interviews by Michel Foucault. Ed. Donald F. Bouchard.
Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977.
EMP Manet and the Object of Painting. Trans. Nicolas Bourriaud.
London: Tate Publishing, 2009.
EOT The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human
Sciences. New York: Vintage, 1994.
EPGP “Photogenic Painting.” Trans. Dafydd Roberts, in Gilles
Deleuze and Michel Foucault, Revisions 2: Photogenic
Painting. London: Black Dog Publishing, 1999. 81–104.
EPK Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings,
1972–1977. Ed. Colin Gordon. New York: Pantheon Books,
1980.
EPPC Michel Foucault. Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interview and
Other Writings, 1977–1984. Ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman. New
York: Routledge, 1988.
EPT The Politics of Truth. Trans. Lysa Hochroth and Catherine
Porter. Los Angeles: Semiotexte, 2007.
ERM Remarks on Marx. Trans. R. James Goldstein and James
Cascaito. New York: Semiotexte, 1991.

Text by Michel Foucault in French

FAS L’archéologie du savoir. Paris: NRF Gallimard, 1969.

FBD Le beau danger: Entretien avec Claude Bonnefoy. Paris:
Éditions de l’École des hautes études en sciences sociales,
2011.
FCF- Les anormaux, Cours au Collège de France, 1974–1975.
ANO Paris: Seuil Gallimard, 1999.
FCF-CV Le courage de la vérité, le gouvernement de soi et des
autres II, Cours au Collège de France, 1984. Paris: Seuil
Gallimard, 2009.
FCF- “Il faut défendre la société,” Cours au Collège de France,
FDS 1976. Paris: Seuil Gallimard, 1997.
FCF- Le gouvernement de soi et des autres, Cours au Collège
GSA de France, 1982–1983. Paris: Seuil Gallimard, 2008.
FCF- L’Herméneutique du sujet, Cours au Collège de France,
HDS 1981–1982. Paris: Seuil Gallimard, 2001.
FCF- Leçons sur la volonté de savoir: Cours au Collège de
LSV France.1970-1071. Suivi de Le savoir d’Œdipe. Paris:
Gallimard Seuil, 2011.
FCF- Naissance de la biopolitique, Cours au Collège de
NBIO France,1978–1979. Paris: Seuil Gallimard, 2004.
FCF- Le pouvoir psychiatrique, Cours au Collège de France,
PSY 1973–1974. Paris: Seuil Gallimard, 2003.
FCF- Sécurité, territoire, population, Cours au Collège de
STP France, 1977–78. Paris: Seuil Gallimard, 2004.
FDE1 Dits et écrits, I, 1954–1969. Paris: NRF Gallimard, 1994.
FDE2 Dits et écrits, II, 1970–1976. Paris: NRF Gallimard, 1994.
FDE3 Dits et écrits, IV, 1976–1979. Paris: NRF Gallimard, 1994.
FDE4 Dits et écrits, IV, 1980–1988. Paris: NRF Gallimard, 1994.
FDE1a Dits et écrits, I, 1954–1975. Paris: Quarto Gallimard, 2001.
FDE2a Dits et écrits, II, 1976–1988. Paris: Quarto Gallimard,
2001.
FFD Folie et déraison. Paris: Plon, 1961.
FHF Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique. Paris: Tel Gallimard,
1972.
FHS1 Histoire de la sexualité 1, la volonté de savoir. Paris: Tel
Gallimard, 1976.
FHS2 Histoire de la sexualité 2, l’usage des plaisirs. Paris: Tel
Gallimard, 1984.
FHS3 Histoire de la sexualité 3, le souci de soi. Paris: Tel
Gallimard, 1984.
FKF Kant, Anthropologie du point de vue pragmatique &
Foucault Introduction à l’Anthropologie. Paris: Vrin, 2009.
FMC Les mots et les choses. Paris: Tel Gallimard, 1966.
FMFE Michel Foucault, entretiens. Ed. Roger-Pol Droit. Paris:
Odile Jacob, 2004.
FNC Naissance de la Clinique. Paris: Quadrige Presses
Universitaires de France, 1963.
FOD L’ordre du discours. Paris: NRF Gallimard, 1971.
FPM La peinture de Manet, suivi de Michel Foucault, un regard,
sous la direction de Maryvonne Saison. Paris: Seuil, 2004.
FRR Raymond Roussel. Paris: NRF Gallimard, 1963.
FSP Surveiller et punir. Paris: Tel Gallimard, 1975.
 I would bathe myself in strangeness:
These comforts heaped upon me, smother me!
I burn, I scald so for the new,
New friends, new faces,
Places!
Oh to be out of this,
This that is all I wanted
— save the new.
“The Plunge,” Ezra Pound

Pour moi vous êtes celui qui, dans notre génération, fait une œuvre
admirable et vraiment nouvelle.
Gilles Deleuze in a letter written to Michel Foucault, 1970
 Introduction: Foucault’s Modernisms
David Scott

Understanding Foucault, Understanding Modernism belongs to the

series devoted to philosophers who continue to have a formative
impact on our understanding of modernism, philosophically certainly,
as well as more broadly, in culture and politics. This volume is
organized into three parts.
The expository essays making up the first part, Conceptualizing
Foucault, adopt a threefold approach. First, each essay tries to
identify and develop the primary concepts of the framework
structuring whichever particular work that is the focus of the essay.
So, for example, the “Panopticon” functions structurally and,
perhaps, speculatively to address the analysis of the disciplinary
society. Quite briefly, a comment should be made as to why there is
no one essay devoted to Foucault’s recent posthumously published
lectures. Certainly, we scholars and philosophers are grateful for
their being brought before the public finally, most especially his
incredibly significant Collège de France lectures. Nonetheless, the
editing of this work must be weighted by more pragmatic and
logistical considerations. As a result, there has been a restricting of
the focus in this volume’s first part to only those works Foucault
oversaw into publication himself. Of course, this has not prohibited
either the writers in this or the other two parts in this volume from
using Foucault’s lectures to supplement the analysis of his primary
works. Second, the essays of Conceptualizing Foucault address how
Foucault’s concepts are in dialogue with the history of philosophy
considered more broadly (Kant, Nietzsche, etc.). And, third, there
should be an exploration of how his concepts and the specific work
fit within the larger system of Foucault’s thought. In other words,
the implicit question to be asked is how does the specific work
chosen by the authors in this volume demonstrate Foucault’s
ongoing concern with the problem of modernity or modernism.
Foucault and Aesthetics, the second part, brings together new
research from various international scholars aimed at mapping
relationships between Foucault’s thought and the literary and artistic
works of a number of presumed modernists. No longer restricted to
those books, most particularly, whose publication Foucault oversaw,
the essays are free to operate at different levels: some take a survey
approach toward identifying key modernist trends, others offer
specific comparative readings of modernist texts using Foucault’s
work either as support or counterbalance; yet others seek to apply
and even extend beyond any particular one of Foucault’s texts to
engage with the modernist problematic, all the while remaining true
to its Foucaultian origins. In all of them, Foucault’s engagement with
the question of modernism is explored through bringing a focus to
his analysis of the plastic arts and literature. In either case, the
essays, which make up this part, consider the practical application of
his question “What is Enlightenment?” as it helps our understanding
of modernism both within and without his work. I consider this
introduction as belonging to Foucault and Aesthetics, at least, insofar
as I attempt to bring Foucault’s question into the same orbit as Ezra
Pound. As I hope will become clearer below, this introduction uses
Pound’s formation of modernism and, more specifically, his
promoting the work of Ernest Fenollosa as a way to frame how the
authors in this second part address a Foucaultian modernism.
This volume’s third and final part is a glossary of Foucault’s key
terms. Since these pieces are short essays in and of themselves, we
hope that this feature will permit a full engagement and examination
of the many, often contradictory, ways Foucault’s terms have been
applied. In this way, we believe we might satisfy readers at all levels
of familiarity with this philosopher’s work by introducing terms in a
comprehensible way to the neophyte, while also mapping their
various permutations throughout Foucault’s corpus for the more
experienced reader of his work.
It is entirely fitting that this volume should follow closely the one
in the series dedicated to Foucault’s one-time colleague and friend,
Gilles Deleuze. If Foucault declares: “perhaps, one day, this century
will be known as Deleuzian” (EEW2, 343), for his part, Deleuze
refers to Foucault as “the greatest thinker of our time.”1 The mutual
admiration the two philosophers have for the thought of one another
is built not only on personal familiarity but as well a particular
attitude toward Kant, filtered through a shared Nietzschean
skepticism. And it is a strange Kantian-Nietzschean hybridity that
forms their respective interrogations of modernity. Yet, perhaps,
more directly than Deleuze, Foucault addresses the problem of
modernity. Foucault’s work discovers within the problem of
modernity great potential for breaking open the relationship between
things and words. What is more, he implants a critical gaze,
necessary if one is to overthrow representation and the logical and
metaphysical imperatives imbedded within the discourse, divulging,
as a result, the void at the center of language.

What of the Enlightenment? The modern

question and the Frankfurt School
Among the characteristics insuring Foucault’s influence on
contemporary thought, not only for philosophers but also for art and
literary theorists, sociologists, political theorists, and the like, is his
thought’s blurring of the border separating philosophy, literature,
and the arts. However, this transdisciplinary approach is only carried
out on the basis of Foucault’s taking as his fundamental objective
the diagnosis of complexities of modernity, not simply as a given,
but in the form of a problem yet to be fully construed. After all, I
would suggest that if there is any disagreement among the scholars
making up this volume, it is over how or what Foucault calls the
“modern.” Is it a historical period, idea? Is it a kind of practice? Is it
grouping of works, a line of thought, a state of mind? Is it the
exterior manifestation of a transformation carried out at the level of
the formation of knowledge, or aesthetically, is it definable by its
products? Or is it what compels the transformation itself? Still, all
seem to fully agree—at least implicitly—that more generally
Foucault’s modernist project is the outcome of the reclamation by
transformation of the Enlightenment legacy.
Prior to Foucault, the Frankfurt School theorists engaged most
directly with the idea of modernity and took it as a problem
fundamental to how they defined their methods and goals; and,
indeed, it was they who saw themselves as transforming Kant’s
critical heritage, while placing the engagement with remnants of the
Enlightenment (Aufklärung) at the center of their philosophical and
aesthetic projects. Foucault confessed his admiration. For Adorno
and Horkheimer, the stakes for how the Enlightenment must be
interpreted become all the more greater when revaluating its legacy
in the shade of human ruin left after the Second World War. Even
though obviously Kantian, Foucault specifically highlighted the
question Adorno and Horkheimer asked, which placed Kantian
rationalism under direct threat: “Couldn’t it be concluded that the
promise of Aufklärung, of attaining freedom through the exercise of
reason, has been, on the contrary, overturned within the domain of
Reason itself, that it is taking more and more space away from
freedom” (ERM, 118)? After all, might one reach the conclusion that
this promise of freedom won through the exercise of reason has
instead been lost because of reason? Might reason—and the
Enlightenment by extension—be almost solely responsible for
providing the conditions which make possible the mechanisms,
procedures, and techniques giving birth to the variant forms of
oppression that naturally follow capitalist societies and socialist
societies alike—Nazism and Fascism being just two of the obvious
examples? The Frankfurt School, Foucault stresses, “measured its
relationship with Marx” on the basis of the hypothesis that the
legacy of the Enlightenment, that is, the promotion of reason
reduced to its positivist instrumental uses, beyond all else, is to
blame for the horrors and absurdities of totalitarianism (ERM, 117–
18). Perhaps, as Horkheimer argues, the “eclipse of reason” is
required.2 Horkheimer and Adorno, in fact, were unyielding in their
assertion that the “Enlightenment is as totalitarian as any system.”3
Nevertheless, while Foucault agrees with the Frankfurt School on
the primary question that must be asked and answered, he
disagrees with them as to the means by and the end to which Kant’s
formulation of critique must be directed. And, more specifically, this
difference is reflected in the differing characterizations Foucault and
the Frankfurt School give of the question—“What is
Enlightenment?”—corresponding respectively to the different forms
the critical project assumes for them. Horkheimer and Adorno, for
their part, see the “the program of the Enlightenment” as “the
disenchantment of the world; the dissolution of myths and the
substitution of knowledge for fancy.”4 The critique of the
“technologically educated masses,” controlled by despotic forces
outlined in Dialectic of Enlightenment, is based on playing out the
self-destructiveness of the Enlightenment, leading to popular
paranoia. So it goes that “the metamorphoses of criticism into
affirmation” require a direct challenge to the modern technological
faculty, the knowledge privileged by Enlightenment, which refers to
the “method, the exploitation of others’ work, and capital.”5
Where universality supremely reigns, language serves the
conditions which assure capitalist domination; abstraction, both
metaphysical and scientific, is privileged above all else by bourgeois
society. Once authority is granted to the language of science, the
means for reinforcing the social power is established, inequality is
validated, and, Horkheimer and Adorno claim, the path is laid for the
final desuetude of ideas. For it is this abstract language, with its
reduction of dissimilarity to abstract quantities, which bourgeois
society takes to be ideally suited for how it organizes itself in terms
of the equivalences that language universally enshrines.6 For
Horkheimer and Adorno, the Enlightenment is the return of reason
to mythology. And in this regard, it ultimately contains within itself a
profoundly antimodernist impulse: a desire for timelessness, for the
universal, the buttress against the forces of history. That which is
expressed is subsumed by the “culture industry,” as they call it,7 into
the language of popular music, film, and television, mercilessly
criticized by Adorno on the grounds that these forms of
entertainment promote the mythologizing hope that all will be and
(must be) reconciled “with the idea of true generality.”8 The
Enlightenment provides the conditions for the emergence of culture
as it contains “in embryo that schematization and process of
cataloging and classification,” which brings it “within the sphere of
administration.”9
The outcome of Enlightenment thinking is that “domination
survives as an end in itself, in the form of economic power.”10
Economic power becomes political power (and potentially fascism)
with the creation of a unified, systematic, scientific order. Its
principles are the principles of self-preservation, of mastery over
Nature. Reason constitutes “the court of judgment of calculation,”
which adjusts the world to serve the ends of human self-
preservation; self-preservation is the “constitutive principle” of
Enlightenment rationality. And Truth? It is made identical with
scientific systematization: “far removed from reflective consideration
of its own goal as are other forms of labor under the pressure of the
system.”11
Foucault, like the Frankfurt School theorists, characterizes as an
interminable task the striving to comprehend the nature of
modernity. However, unlike the Frankfurt School theorists, his
approach is more total; for each of his specific works—from History
of Madness to Discipline and Punishment to the volumes of the
History of Sexuality and the brilliant Collège de France lectures of his
final years—fit within the genealogy of modernism Foucault
constructs. Perhaps, the impetus only slowly reveals itself as
Foucault progresses, which is fully on display with his return to
Kant’s question. And yet, here, we find Foucault’s interests and the
goals of the Frankfurt School converging once again: “What is
Enlightenment?” as raising to the foreground the countervailing
forces of intolerance and oppression, which provides the conditions
for the birth of antimodernity, in particular the rise of radical
neofascist perspectives, religious and political, that, although
differing in ideology, are allied by anti-intellectualism and the
rejection of critique. As it is for Horkheimer and Adorno, the
Enlightenment per se is not the issue for Foucault. It is the very act
of asking the question “What is the Enlightenment?” as a way for
Kant to reflect upon the reality of today, which draws Foucault’s
interest. And it is critique, finally, which Foucault takes to be most
fundamental to his advocating for reclamation of the legacy of the
Enlightenment.
Foucault’s engagement with the problem of modernity
complicates the analyses of the Frankfurt School. Unlike Horkheimer
and Adorno, who specify that fascism is unsurprisingly the logical
outcome of Enlightenment rationalism, Foucault looks to critique and
Kant’s analysis of the Enlightenment as the model and catalyst for
developing practices, laying the groundwork for organizing a “non-
fascist life” (EEW3). His seeking to reclaim “the right to criticism”
indirectly requests a more robust Kantian sense of critique (even if,
politically, it might lead to profoundly anti-Kantian results). Instead
of presuming that criticism is the unavoidable royal path leading to
the transformation of reason into a tool for the instrumental
subjugation of human beings and Nature (as the Frankfurt School
worried), Foucault embraced it as “the precondition for the exercise
of autonomy and, if not the pursuit of absolute truth, then the
rectification of error.”12 In the end, the fight over modernity is for
Foucault largely a fight over the form Critique assumes today.

Foucault’s questions
Basically, I only have a sole object of historical study: the threshold of
modernity. Who are we, we who speak this language such that it has powers
that we impose on ourselves in our society, and other societies? What is this
language that one is able to turn against us, that we can turn against
ourselves? What is this formidable burst of enthusiasm for the passage to the
universality of Occidental discourse? There you have it: my historical
problem. (FMFE 2004, 127)13

Despite Foucault’s “zigzagging” [zigzagant] path of thought (FMFE

2004, 123),14 the thread connecting nearly every one of Foucault’s
major and minor works is the issue of modernity, acquiring its most
explicit declaration in the writings gathering around the question,
“Was ist Aufklärung?” “I believe the question that has never stopped
occupying me was the philosophical question: What is
Enlightenment?” He continues, “All my books have been a response
to this question.”15 It is the question that modern philosophy “has
not been capable of answering, but that it has never managed to get
rid of, either,” Foucault never tires of repeating. This is why he
believes that we feel the relevance of Kant’s asking this question
even now. We too seek for ourselves answers to “what we are, what
we think, and what we do today.”16 Foucault establishes a line of
continuity through this question from his archaeologies to his
genealogies to his final preoccupation with truth and his later ethical
turn (the “hermeneutics of self,” and focus on the ethics of the “care
for the self”)—best demonstrated by the series of lectures which he
gives in the 1980s at Berkeley and the Collège de France.
But in order for us to understand properly the great weight
Foucault places on the question “Was ist Aufklärung?” [What is
Enlightenment?], it must be made clear how this question refashions
Kant heralding what Foucault believes to be the nascence of
philosophical “modernity.” Kant’s text “What is Enlightenment?”
interrogates the present philosophical event in which the
philosopher, who speaks of it, belongs. Foucault believes Kant’s
“What is Enlightenment?” first ratified this question as the modern
directive. This is why I would describe the entire series of texts
coalescing around “Was ist Aufklärung?” in their different manners
as making up a kind genealogy “of modernity as a question” (ECF-
GSO, 14). Philosophy fulfills one of its most primary functions when
it speaks to, and speaks as, “modern,” Foucault claims. It does this
when it carries out its most essential function: “to deliberate upon its
own actuality” (FCF-GSA, 14). For Kant, this deliberation is carried
out in response to his posing “Was ist Aufklärung?” for himself and
to himself. It is the question of his time. In doing so, Kant
demonstrates for Foucault that philosophical discourse must “take its
own present reality into account in order, [first], to find its own place
in it, second to express its meaning, and third to designate and
specify the mode of action, the mode of effectuation that it realizes
with this present reality” (ECF-GSO, 14). This is why Foucault claims
that nearly all of modern philosophy since the nineteenth century
continues to be haunted by this question.17
Here Foucault identifies a largely unacknowledged and still
clandestine fork in the road of the post-Kantian legacy, one that
demands a choice be made. Instead of this question leading to an
analytic of truth, it is a question that points Foucault in the direction
of “an ontology of the present, an ontology of actuality, an ontology
of modernity, an ontology of ourselves” (ECF-GSO, 21). Kant’s asking
and answering this question, Foucault believes, give the practice of
philosophy its raison d’être and the condition making it possible.
Philosophy as the surface of emergence of an actuality, as a questioning of
the philosophical meaning of present reality [actualité] of which it is a part,
and philosophy as the philosopher’s questioning of this “we” to which it
belongs and in relation to which he has to situate himself. It is a distinctive
 feature of philosophy as discourse of modernity and on modernity. (ECF-
GSO, 13)

It follows that a philosopher cannot avoid posing to herself the

question of this practice in tandem with how she belongs to the
present. Accordingly, philosophical practice no longer is simply a
matter of adherence to a doctrine or a tradition. Foucault wants the
philosopher to be brought to question whatever certain “we” to
which she belongs. It is the actual “we”—this social, cultural, or
political ensemble, and how it individuates itself—that becomes for
Foucault the object of his own self-reflection.
According to Foucault, Classicism presupposed the transparency
of language, if only so that language found its preassigned place in
the classical project of the taxonomic distribution of identities and
differences, to be assigned translucently across the surface of a
predetermined “homogenous field of orderable representation”
(EOT, 243). With modernism, conversely, “representation has lost
the power to provide a foundation—with its own being, its own
deployment and its power of doubling over itself” (EOT, 238).
Language is freed to disclose to us its density, its obstinate
materiality. “Language begins to fold in upon itself, to acquire its
own particular density, to deploy a history, an objectivity, and laws of
its own,” Foucault writes in The Order of Things (EOT, 296). It is the
advent of “literature,” or rather the particular engagement with
language defined as a literary “event,” when “language acquires a
being proper to itself” (EOT, 295), that signals the advent of
modernism. This volume, and in particular the specific essays
composing Foucault and Aesthetics in the second part, presume that
Foucault’s engagement with aesthetic Modernism (Joyce, Magritte,
Beckett, Mallarmé, etc.), both how it constitutes and defines itself as
a formal event, presents useful possibilities for how modernity might
be framed. But what are we to make of Foucault’s relative consistent
“periodization” of it, spanning the History of Madness to the late
Dartmouth and Berkeley lectures; that is, his establishing and largely
holding to the historical narrative, which describes the arc of
movement of Classical thought, until finally tipping into what he calls
“modernity” with late eighteenth century and early nineteenth
century?
This is even more complicated when we consider the challenge of
literature and philosophy defining modernism in distinct ways—not
only formally but also historically. If we adopt the perspective of
literary studies, 1922 must be the watershed moment: the year
James Joyce’s Ulysses, T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, Rainer Maria
Rilke’s Duino Elegies, and Cesar Vallejo’s Trilce were all published.
These works have become for their respective genres and societies
the aesthetic summation in word, image, and sound of the
contemporary moment, encapsulating those modernizing impulses
evident at that time: Einsteinian physics as well as the potency of
Freudian unconscious, the thrust of urbanization and the new
mercantilism. And yet, this dating of artistic or literary modernism
remains at odds with how the history of philosophy conceptualizes
modernism beginning as early as the seventeenth century and
concluding somewhere during the twentieth century. The invention
of literary modernism disables representation previously governing
Classicism. A faith in the immediate correspondence between what is
spoken and is spoken of, as it was in Classicism, is made absurd. But
what is gained in return is the opportunity for the emergence of the
“dark, concave, inner side of visibility” (EOT, 237). As Foucault
writes, speaking of Mallarmé and Artaud, Modernism finally achieves
“the revelation of language in its crude being” (EOT, 298).
In the end, Foucault’s work always circles back to the question
“What is modernism?” even if sometimes the question lies beneath
unrecognizable guises and acute angles. Certainly, he asks “What is
the Enlightenment?” but we discern as well that other questions are
motivated by this one question: What is sexuality? What is madness?
What is criminality? When Foucault interrogates modernity, is he not
also asking “what is our contemporaneity?” As Foucault argues, is it
not this act of resolute self-interrogation that precisely identifies
what is modern in modernism? The schism between the two
historical notions of modernism—on the one hand, literary or artistic,
and, on the other, philosophical—regardless of how we date their
appearance on the historical scene, offers two distinct though not
necessarily opposed viewpoints. Whether they converge or not, or at
least discover for themselves a point of convergence with the other,
is but the productive impetus for the ongoing, perhaps, most
modernist of modernism’s practices. It is less a period in history than
an attitude; a disposition that must be cultivated in order to
reexamine the contemporary in the struggles against what Foucault
calls the attitude of “counter-modernity.” We must not deny our
present, Foucault argues; we must “face the task of a permanent
critique of our historical era” (EPT, 109), in short, of ourselves. And
perhaps it is here that we might find the irresolvable, though useful,
tension that exists between literature and philosophy in the attempt
to construct for ourselves the idea of modernism today.

An unrecognized precursor: Fenollosa

In the rest of this introduction, I would like to bring the conception
of modernisms that Foucault develops into a greater focus by
opening a path of negotiation with the established notion of
Modernism. My reason for doing this is that I would like to not only
build a frame for the more general project to which Understanding
Foucault, Understanding Modernism belongs but also provide a
frame for the specific chosen approaches and objects adopted by the
essays making up Foucault and Aesthetics. In order to carry out this
task, I will turn to Ezra Pound and, most especially, Ernest Fenollosa,
who inspired not only Pound’s Modernist poetics but also his critique
of the contemporary culture and society, which for Pound is an
action that must be fulfilled if there is to be any hope of making
something “New.” Ultimately, what connects Foucault and Pound, I
would argue, is a shared acknowledgment of the power and poetry
of the act of “fiction-making,” blurring the line between literature
and history, lie and truth. And it is the blurring of the two, I believe,
which defines Foucault’s and Pound’s modernity, because it
foregrounds the problem of writing. For both, writing not only is the
obvious means by which literature and history are fashioned; it also
serves as a motive, as well as gives the poet and the philosopher
their subject matter.
The Enlightenment, perhaps, might explain the quixotic and often
dangerously idiotic battles Ezra Pound wages to the end of his life,
which lead him into the calamitous bosom of racists and totalitarian
absurdities and the strange inanities of anticapitalist, antidemocratic
libertarianism. Perhaps. But the Frankfurt School’s critique of the
Enlightenment leaves unexplained the nature of Pound’s modernity.
In fact, on several points Pound might agree with Horkheimer and
Adorno—an incongruity Adorno might be too repulsed to consider.
Pound, after all, in no sense endorses rationalism. On the contrary,
Pound’s failures, I believe, are more the result of the perils of
Romanticism than the faults of the Enlightenment. Indeed, Pound’s
modernity can more usefully be grasped as the consequence of the
battle he wages against the Western attitude toward generalization
and abstraction in language, that is, the transformation of “positive
verbal conceptions ... into so-called negatives.”18
And it is Ernest Fenollosa’s essay “The Chinese Written Character
as a Medium for Poetry” that became, with Pound’s ceaseless
propagandizing, the central modernist document enshrining
Fenollosa’s characterization of “ideogramic thinking,”19 an
imagistically based speculative model and a practice of writing. This
is not only poetically significant for modernist poetics but also, for
Pound, it offers to the West a kind metaphysical-poetic cure-all for
the cultural malaise he believes afflicts it. Pound, like Nietzsche,
proclaims that poetry must cultivate a kind of “historical spirit,”
identical to a “milder and continuous hygiene.”20 Without irony,
Pound takes this to be wholly compatible with his suggestion that
Europe must become more Chinese, more Confucian. “I reply that I
am writing on the ‘need for Confucius,’” Pound claims. “I am trying
to diagnose Western disease. Western disease has raged for over
two centuries.”21 Elsewhere Pound asserts: “If only for the sake of
understanding and valuating our own European past, we have need
of the Master Kung.”22 Fenollosa’s importance, therefore, is to
instigate a new poetics and a new kind of thought, which Pound
hopes will provide the necessary catalyst for Europe’s self-renewal.
Here, a point of intersection linking Pound and Foucault opens
before us, where a comparison between them is not only possible
but also necessary.
Fenollosa’s analysis of Chinese writing stresses its inextricable
association to the kind of idiomatic thought, which evades the
abstract and embraces the concrete in language through image. It is
a “kind of thought,” Pound believes, “that is now atrophied in the
Occident,”23 because the Occident has not yet “recognized the limits
of knowledge transmissible by verbal definitions.”24 The path modern
poetry must follow, according to Pound, is first laid down by this
“different modality of thought” captured within the gestures on the
page of the Chinese written character.25
Fenollosa’s goal, therefore, is less an accurate representation of
Chinese culture than the dramatization of the act of translation. The
translation into English of the Chinese characters, Pound argues, is
both a diagnostic and therapeutic practice, critical and clinical at
once.26 Translation is not the returning of language to what is
familiar, recognizable; instead, it opens a path to where language
must reflect on those conditions presumed when it is being written,
or when history is being fabricated, following the linguistic
imperatives it obligates itself to adhere to. Our contemporary
François Jullien expands on Fenollosa’s injunction. Jullien makes the
claim that the European must “rework his own language there,
recast it and put it back under construction: with a view to making it
more receptive and opening it to what it would not dream of saying,
by making new possibilities arise there.” Translation is a powerful
tool, Jullien insists, precisely because it de-assimilates as it
assimilates, de-categorizes as it re-categorizes language.27 And so it
is for Pound that Fenollosa’s essay is an “écart,” as Jullien describes
it, a gap or fissure, opening the European language itself to the birth
of modernism out of the encounter with the so-called “East.”
Fenollosa reminds us his “subject is poetry, not language.” And
yet he also admits, “the roots of poetry are in language.”28 One
begins to fully appreciate the nature of poetry upon directly
engaging with the nature and operation of language; and, indeed,
the very practice of poetics—in this case, written—reveals the way
the poet is structured by the language he structures. Fenollosa
argues that the Chinese language (like all languages) structures
itself on the basis of “universal elements of form.” But to experience
language at this level requires acquiescing to how it operates, most
effectively displayed in the written form of poetry. Pound seems at
first to echo Martin Heidegger’s (or vice versa) late obsession with
poetry and translation. However, the impulse behind Heidegger’s
retreat to Classical sources is the belief that the true experience of
the nature of language as given by poetry, once it happens, is “too
much for us moderns.”29 Pound and Fenollosa, on the contrary, make
exactly the opposite claim: Modernism is born once we finally allow
ourselves to fully experience language through poetry. Only the
Chinese ideogram makes possible the experiencing of the “awesome
materiality” of language, or as Foucault’s describes it, the “thickness”
of language (EAK 216; EWII 265).
It is uncontestable today, as was the case in his day, that Pound’s
work—aesthetically and morally—is first and foremost compelled by
the question: “What is my actuality?” In other words: “What is my
modernity?” Pound is for this reason the central figure of Anglo-
European aesthetic modernism; his work embodies all its beauties
and ambiguities, its idealism and worst possible ugliness. And it is
Ernest Fenollosa’s essay, which Pound transformed by radically
editing it to suit his intentions, which allows the grasping of the
Modernist attitude as it pertains to its treatment of language; the
opportunity for comparing Fenollosa’s text with Foucault’s own
discussion of language and literary modernism becomes possible.

The fiction-making of history, the epic of critique

“For the attitude of modernity, the high value of the present is
indissociable from a desperate eagerness to imagine it otherwise
than it is and to transform it not by destroying it but by grasping it in
what it is,” Foucault writes (EPT, 108). Escaping History through
history exploits what History has always been: the coconspirator of
fiction-ing or fiction-making. Hence, “I have never written anything
except fictions,” Foucault declares.
I don’t want to go so far and say it’s outside truth. It seems to me that there
is a possibility of making work fiction in truth, of inducing some effects of
truth with a discourse of fiction, and of making from it a sort of discourse of
truth provoking, fabricating something which doesn’t exist yet, therefore
“fiction” [fictionne]. One “fictions” [fictionne] history beginning with a
political reality that renders it true; we “fiction” [fictionne] a politics that
doesn’t exist yet starting from an historical truth. (FDE3, 236)

Once the Aufklärung becomes for Foucault the central problem to be

addressed, it makes sense that Foucault will feel the need to become
more forthcoming about the risks affecting his historical-
philosophical practice and reflected in his relationship to his own
practice of writing. That is, Foucault from the beginning engages a
particular kind of historical and philosophical practice, which seeks to
distance his thought from philosophy of history or history of
philosophy. But to do so Foucault must expose the fiction-making
aspect of his practice: “In this historical-philosophical practice, one
has to make one’s own history, fabricate history, as if through fiction,
in terms of how it would be traversed by the question of the
relationships between structures of rationality which articulate true
discourse and the mechanisms of subjugation which are linked to it”
(EPT, 56). This is how we must understand Foucault’s historical-
philosophical practice, particularly in comparing his approach to that
of the Frankfurt School. One writes of oneself as one writes history.
It is written “as if through fiction” (EPT, 56); the writing of history is
traversed by the questions Foucault puts to himself, necessitating his
questioning how he conceives the relationship between structures of
rationality, making his own discourse possible and those mechanisms
of subjugation he struggles against only revealed through the de-
subjugatifying practice of writing itself.
“I am an artificer [artificier]” (FMFE 2004, 92),30 Foucault says
with obvious satisfaction. He is indifferent to the objections of
historians. He wants us to appreciate how “real subjection is born
from [the] fictitious relation” (EDP, 202). As a result, Foucault
requires a new practice and the honest acknowledgment of his
dependence on the mode of fiction-making: “to desubjectify the
philosophical question by way of historical contents, to liberate
historical contents by examining the effects of power whose truth
affects them and from which they supposedly derive” (EPT, 57). In
this regard, fiction is to history for Foucault what history is to poetry
for Pound.
Pound famously describes the epic as “a poem including history.”31
Before Foucault, Pound defines the goal of every poem to be the
creation of a response to the question: “What is literature?” Thus, if
aesthetic modernism is born with this question, still this question
belongs to a series of questions: “What is Critique?” “What is
Revolution?” “What is Enlightenment?” In nearly all his works, most
especially the Cantos, and his Confucian “translations,” Pound blurs
history and literature, the historical and literary modes of discourse.
Both satisfying and subverting “tradition,” Pound’s Cantos in every
sense is critique: the critique of the economics of usury, the politics
of democracy, the critique of modernist poetics. The subject of
Pound’s epic is the fiction-making of history, the history of fiction-
making. Reflecting on the very practice of writing, Pound’s epic “not
only says what it says, what it narrates, its story, its fable, but also,
it says what literature is.”32 That is, if modernity is born with the
ascent of the problem of writing, as Pound and Foucault establish it,
“as if through fiction” (EPT, 56), then “all ages are
contemporaneous.”33 A new historical perspective establishes itself,
where literature takes its place in Foucault’s constructing of a
genealogy of the Modern with the purpose of disclosing by
presenting the “thickness of language” (FDE1a, 502; EEW2, 265),
namely, the multitudinous chatter, the anomalous murmur feeding
every word of Pound’s epic.

The obligation to write: From modern literature

and the hermeneutic of self
What is modern in Kant’s question is that it forces the foregrounding
of the practice of writing. Insistent, Kant’s question “What is
Enlightenment?” returns. Already I have tried to demonstrate
Foucault’s argument that this question dramatizes the modernist
moment in philosophy precisely because here we observe how Kant
philosophically addresses his “now” as the model for our speaking to
“the ‘now’ in which we all live and which is the site, the point [from
which] I am writing” (ECF-GSO, 13). Thus, the question, which
Foucault argues lays the groundwork for how modernism
philosophically defines itself, is the same one that pushes philosophy
to explore the practice of writing. Writing—this “raw and naked act”
(FDE1, 556)—raises language to the point where its “ponderous,
awesome materiality” (EAK, 216) stands nakedly revealed to be an
active participant in fiction-making, inseparable, as Foucault
understands it, from the obligation to write.
Literature is the direct interrogation of language itself in its
prescribed or normalized uses; it issues a challenge to the
prerogatives knowledge insists on, most especially the reduction of
language to it being the carrier of meaning and the vehicle for
communication. Thus, in a passage from The Order of Things,
Foucault describes how, by the end of the nineteenth century with
the revelation of the “crude being of language,” literature becomes
the destroyer of syntax, shattering “tyrannical modes of speech, to
turn words around in order to perceive all that is being said through
them and despite them” (EOT, 298). The birth of the “Pound Era” is
this moment when words are liberated as words, crudely insisting on
their self-prepossessed autonomy:
“Words, similarly, without loss of precision, have ceased to specify in the
manner of words that deliver one by one those concepts we call ‘meanings’
... The words so raised by prosody to attention assent themselves as words,
and make a numinous claim on our attention, from which visual, tactile and
mythic associations radiate.”34

The simple act of writing forces language to directly confront the

“precipitous existence” of words, to see itself as parallel with the
abruptness of human existence, obliging language, consequently, to
fold back upon itself not only so that the writer can reflect on the
specific role and goal it has in fabricating knowledge but also to
“address itself to itself as a writing subjectivity” (EOT, 300). In the
pure and simple act of writing, through the process and imperative it
requires, not only is fiction-making validated, but the finitude of the
subject writing is expressed. This fully ratifies Foucault’s
pronouncement that “man is a recent invention,” insofar as we are
brought to comprehend that “man” is a figment of knowledge
because “man” is a written figment meant to perish “as the being of
language continues to shine ever brighter upon our horizon” (EOT,
386).35
One day, following a lecture, Foucault is asked a question: “Can
one consider what is happening in modern literature (the overthrow
of narrative discourse, the subject’s disintegration, etc.), reflecting
the attempt at getting rid of the hermeneutics of the self?” In other
words, might modern literature be a reaction against the
hermeneutics of self, traceable to Christian and Classical origins,
which must then be determined to be antimodern? Foucault’s
response is fascinating; it provides insight into how a connecting
thread might be found to make sense of the course his later thought
will take. He assures the questioner that it is a “very important and
very difficult” question. Foucault then responds, “Modern literature
began, I believe, when the hermeneutics of self gave place to a
certain type of writing.” The development of the hermeneutic of the
self, with connections to Martin Luther and the Counter-Reformation,
nourishes the “roots of modern literature,” as Foucault understands
it. Not surprisingly, the interlocutor incredulously tries to remind him
that in fact the question aims at getting Foucault to acknowledge the
obvious incongruity between modern literature and the hermeneutic
of self. Foucault complicates the interlocutor’s question by
suggesting that, on the contrary, these modes of writing are
complementary. Foucault argues that what makes them modern
(less a period than an ethos, an extending of the critical attitude) is
their reflecting on what must be confronted by the problem of
writing: “it is the relation between this hermeneutics of self and the
sacrifice of self or at the same time a sacrifice of self and the
transposition of self into another order of things, into another time,
beneath another light, etc.” For this reason, it is through the writing
mode that Foucault genealogically situates the modern writer
directly in line with the first Christian ascetic. He writes, “I believe
that the same problem of relations between the hermeneutic of self
and the disappearance of self, the sacrifice, the negation of self, is
the nucleus of the literary experience into the modern world.”36 What
is more, the contemporary relevance of his chosen Christian and
Classical sources, therefore, lies not simply in how they appear to
build a case against modernity; rather, within their texts, Foucault
discloses a counter-modernity not hostile to his engagement with the
problem of modernity, beginning with the question of the Aufklärung
and sustaining the arc the questioning follows.
Foucault draws upon the Stoic concept of askēsis to define the
nature of writing, the primary role it assumes as a technique of self.
Foucault intends it to be understood as “the progressive
consideration of self, or mastery over oneself, obtained not through
the renunciation of reality but through the acquisition and
assimilation of truth” (EEW1, 238). Referencing Plutarch, Foucault
assigns to writing an ethopoietic function to the extent that through
it the subject acquires agency by the “transformation of truth into
ethos” (EEW1, 209). Writing offers a practice that is the
“intensification of subjectivity” (EEW1, 239); it orients and directs
the care of the self. And so we find Foucault, yet again, raising the
question—“What is our present?”—in the foreground of the question
“What is our modernity?,” compelling him to reflect on those
conditions which have led to his acceptance of the obligation to
write.
And his adopting the Stoic technical understanding of the role of
writing is analogous at least in its modernist impulse, I would argue,
with Pound’s translating Confucius’ Analects: both, self-consciously,
are exercises in preparing the writer-translator for the inevitability of
his death. Or as it states in one of the Analects Pound translates,
“You are alive, how should I venture to die?”37 If Foucault’s own
relation to writing, and through it his relation to the mode of
literature, is predicated on finding in this practice a kind of askēsis
that presents its relation to language as “a way of making death
actual in life;”38 accordingly, the relation between the hermeneutic of
self and modern literature is brought full circle, connecting early
works like Raymond Roussel with Foucault’s later works like History
of Sexuality. As Foucault describes his writing: “I’m trying to absorb
my own existence into the distance that separates it from death and,
probably, by that same gesture, guides it toward death.”39

Conclusion
Inspiring the essays in this volume, especially those making up part
two, Foucault and Aesthetics, is the idea that the best way to clarify
the uncertainty infecting the term modernism is through an appraisal
of Foucault’s own struggles with trying to define it. The formulation
of the notion of modernism that Christopher Breu presents in his
essay (Chapter 7),“Technologies of Modernism: Historicism in
Foucault and Dos Passos,” sets itself against the largely uncontested
hylemorphism lurking behind its definition. Breu stresses that in
order to begin to rethink modernism through Foucault’s writings, the
categories of form and content must be abandoned. He argues that
this is required because these categories bear within themselves
unacknowledged epistemological and metaphysical presumptions. If
one is to “engender thinking” (to use Deleuze’s language), one must
instead progress along the path constituted by technologies, and the
discourses and truths, which govern the development of technology,
disrupting and shaping, as a result, whatever historical conjuncture.
Once we follow Foucault’s lead, Breu argues, a reconceptualized idea
of a modernism emerges, irreducible to its being employed in
opposition to realism.40 Formal innovations do not define it, which
privilege the aesthetic and the linguistic over the representational; in
its place a modernism is conceived that addresses the various
technologies, discourses, and practices that inform and are informed
by the constitution of the specific historical moment. Gerald Brun’s
essay, “Foucault’s Modernism “(which several essays in this volume
directly reference), on the other hand, puts the claim forward that
Foucault requires his interpreters to accept the idea that
“modernism” is more akin to “a type of historical disposition” (which
might condition philosophy, art, or politics).41 As a result, Brun feels
compelled to wonder if there is actually a fully developed concept of
modernism of any kind that plays a substantive role within Foucault’s
thought.
In the way literature transforms language into an “object,” equally
Foucault argues that modernism is ushered into the visual arts, in
particular by Édouard Manet, with the reinvention (or invention) of
the “picture-object,” which raises to its highest intensity the “pure
materiality” of invisible forces at the very interior of the picture’s
representation (EMP, 31, 30). In his essay “The Specter of Manet: A
Contribution to the Archaeology of Painting,” Joseph Tanke (Chapter
10) focuses on Foucault’s analysis of this painter and how Foucault’s
interpretation of Manet’s works complicate perception. Nicole
Ridgway (Chapter 11), on the other hand, in her essay “The
Hermaphroditic Image: Modern Art, Thought, and Expérience in
Michel Foucault,” which takes up Foucault’s largely neglected
analysis of the paintings of Gérard Fromanger, accordingly offers a
much different discussion of perception filtered through the
formation of the “hermaphroditic image,” a figure that Foucault
conceptualizes in order to contain and suspend meaning, reserving
rather than negating it. But because the hermaphroditic image acts
as a prodigious reserve of sense, Ridgeway argues it leads us to see
the visible invisible, orienting perception to where language and
categories (aesthetic) and norms (political) implicate one another,
organizing a perceptual experience that speaks of nothing other than
this otherwise mute relationship. Foucault conceptualizes this figure
as pointing to what motivates his determination to discern the
category, to reveal the constitutive practices of categorization, of
representation, and normalization. Both Ridgway and Tanke support
one of the primary assumptions, which I take to motivate the editing
of this volume: if we are to fully appreciate Foucault’s too rare
discussions of art, we must likewise acknowledge that they only
emerge in relation to his abiding interests in how truthful discourse
successively reshapes history through the desire in society to explain
and conceptualize modernity.
Ann Burlein’s (Chapter 8) “Thought as Spirituality in Raymond
Roussel,” for example, engages Foucault’s analysis (borrowing from
Bataille) of Roussel’s writing as a “limit-experience.” As such, she
argues that Roussel’s works, through their experimentation with the
noninstrumental materiality of language, become for Foucault a
sustained mediation with and through death. In doing so, she
addresses Bataille and Blanchot within the wider context of modern
thinking of spirituality.42 What becomes clear, as a result, is that it
has only ever been the case that Foucault infuses ethical and
spiritual imperatives into his conception of writing: it is there where
“language experiences a death that clings to life, and its very life is
prolonged in death” (EDL, 56). Writing enacts the “constant attitude
that one must take toward oneself” (EHS3, 63), which, Foucault
argues, discloses as having always assumed responsibility for
presenting indefinite possibilities of transforming the subject, of
transforming ourselves. Writing brings Foucault, as he understands
it, truly and most directly into a negotiation with death, and so
productively contributes to how one might construct for oneself a
writing-life. Sarah Posman’s (Chapter 9) focus on the concept of life
and on Gertrude Stein, in this regard, is not opposed but rather is
the obverse to the one presented by Burlein.
In the end, Foucault frames the entire problem of modernity
around the protean and multifarious practice of writing, impeding
our looking for a clearly distinguished idea to explain the one
modernism in his work. Instead, more generally, as we begin to
think through its implications, Foucault invites the idea that there are
in fact several modernisms. All of the essays present in this volume
take full advantage of the freedom offered by Foucault’s thinking
through the problem of modernism. Each in its fashion confronts the
challenge of finding a way to explore the variant forms modernity
assumes in his work, while preserving the ambiguity and slippages in
the meaning he invites. How must the idea of modernity play a
structural role in the manner Foucault orients the philosophical goals
he sets for himself? The other task confronting this volume relates to
how Foucault might apply these numerous and variant definitions
(sometimes contradictory even) to make sense of this, our shared
contemporary moment. Whatever the instance or mode of cultural
expression, at issue is the ethical obligation Foucault discovers by
speaking of and to modernity: to tell the truth oneself, to explore
those effects of power compelling the fabrication of oneself as an
object of this question and, in doing so, fabricating for oneself a
subjectivity that claims this right to ask the question: “What is our
today?”

Notes
1 Gilles Deleuze. Negotiations, 1972–1990. Trans. Martin Joughin. New York:
Columbia University Press, 1995. 102. Cf. especially Deleuze, Gilles. Foucault.
Trans. Seán Hand. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988.
2 This is the title of, perhaps, Max Horkheimer’s most famous work.
3 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans.
John Cumming. New York: Seabury Press, 1972. 24.
4 Ibid. 3.
5 Ibid. 4.
6 “Abstraction, the tool of enlightenment, treats its objects as did fate, the notion
of which it rejects: it liquidates them. Under the leveling domination of
abstraction (which makes everything in nature repeatable), and of industry (for
which abstraction ordains repetition), the freedom themselves finally came to
form that ‘herd’ which Hegel has declared to be the result of the
Enlightenment” (Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment. 13).
7 Horkheimer and Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment. 37.
8 Ibid. 130.
9 Ibid. 131.
10 Ibid. 104.
11 Ibid. 85.
12 Stephen Eric Bronner. Reclaiming the Enlightenment: Toward a Politics of
Radical Engagement. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. 67.
13 My translation and italics.
14 My translation.
15 Michel Foucault. L’origine De L’hermèneutique De Soi: Confèrences
Prononcèes À Dartmouth College, 1980. Paris: J. Vrin, 2013. 128. My
translation and italics. Foucault discusses Kant’s essay in a number of articles,
interviews, and lectures referenced directly and indirectly in this introduction:
most obviously, in “What is Enlightenment?” but as well in “For a morality of
Discomfort,” “Subject and Power,” “Structuralism and Poststructuralism,” “What
is Critique?,” “What is Revolution?,” “Life: Experience and Science,” “Omnes et
Singulatim: Toward a Critique of Political Reason,” and the first lecture of the
1982–1983 Collège de France lectures.
16 Michel Foucault. L’origine De L’hermèneutique De Soi: Confèrences Prononcèes
À Dartmouth College, 1980. 97. My translation.
17 “After all, the Aufklärung, at once as singular event inaugurating European
modernity and as permanent process which emerges and converts itself into
the history of reason, the development and instauration of the forms of
rationality and technique, autonomy and authority of knowledge [savoir], all
this, this question of Aufklärung—if you want again: of reason and the use of
reason as historical problem—has, it seems to me, traversed all philosophical
thought since Kant until now” (FGSA, 21). My translation.
18 Ernest Fenollosa and Ezra Pound. The Chinese Written Character as a Medium
for Poetry: A Critical Edition. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008. 49.
19 Ezra Pound. Selected Prose, 1909–1965. New York: New Directions Pub, 1973.
78.
20 Ibid. 79.
21 Ibid.
22 Ibid.
23 Ibid. 78.
24 Ibid.
25 Ezra Pound. Machine Art and Other Writings: The Lost Thought of the Italian
Years. Trans. Maria Luisa Ardizzone. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996. 88.
26 This idea of the critical and clinical, of course, is borrowed from Gilles Deleuze
[cf. Deleuze, Gilles. Essays Critical and Clinical. Trans. Daniel W. Smith and
Michael A. Greco. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.]
27 Francois Jullien. The Book of Beginnings. Trans. Jody Gladding. New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2015. 111.
28 Fenollosa and Pound. The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry.
43.
29 Martin Heidegger. On the Way to Language. Trans. Peter D. Hertz. San
Francisco: Harper & Row, 1982. 58.
30 My translation.
31 Ezra Pound. Literary Essays of Ezra Pound. New York: New Directions, 1968.
26.
32 Foucault, Michel. Language, Madness, and Desire: On Literature. Trans. Robert
Bononno. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2015. 55.
33 Ezra Pound. The Spirit of Romance. New York: New Directions, 2005. 6.
34 Hugh Kenner. The Pound Era. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973.
187.
35 Writing is “a process that pushes the real to the limits of inexistence”
(Foucault, Michel. La Grande Étrangère: À Propos De Littérature. Paris: EHESS,
2013. 164.) It extends the imagination, what permits it to multiply, to cross
from frontiers and reduce the real to nearly nothing. “Writing is what is in a
way going to allow to repel much further from the frontiers of the imagination
the principle of reality; or rather writing, is what by forcing to repel, to shift
always beyond the imagination the moment of knowledge, writing is what
forces working on the imagination and bringing a delay to the moment of the
real, is going to finally substitute for the principle of reality. Thanks to writing,
the imaginary will not have to cross what was until then for it absolutely
indispensible, the step of reality. Writing is going to resist reality to the point of
being as unreal as the imagination itself; writing is what takes the place of the
principle of reality and what absolves the imagination from never reaching
reality” (Foucault. La Grande Étrangère: À Propos De Littérature. 164).
36 Foucault. L’origine De L’hermèneutique De Soi: Confèrences Prononcèes À
Dartmouth College, 1980. 125, 126.
37 Ezra Pound. Poems and Translations. New York: Library of America, 2003. 704.
38 Michel Foucault. “The Hermeneutic of the Subject.” Ethics: Subjectivity and
Truth. Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984. Ed. Paul Rabinow. New York:
New Press, 1998. 104.
39 Michel Foucault and Claude Bonnefoy. Speech Begins after Death. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2013. 75.
40 For a recent account of the complex relationship between modernism and
realism, see Fredric Jameson. The Antinomies of Realism. London: Verso, 2013.
195–231.
41 Gerald Bruns. “Foucault’s Modernism.” The Cambridge Companioin to Foucault.
Ed. Gary Gutting. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 348.
42 Although not a primary focus in Burlein’s essay in this volume, she inspires,
nevertheless, further research into Foucault’s relationship to Pierre Hadot
(especially, Philosophy as Way of Life) as an inspiration for his use of Hellenistic
resources in defining the role of writing as a spiritual exercise.
 Part One

Conceptualizing Foucault
 1

The Origin of Parrēsia in Foucault’s Thinking: Truth

and Freedom in the History of Madness
Leonard Lawlor and Daniel J. Palumbo

Published in 1961, the History of Madness is a monumental study of

madness in the “Classical Age” (that is, in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, primarily in France). In its original form, the
History of Madness displays a debt to phenomenology as it was
interpreted in France after the Second World War. This debt is most
apparent in Foucault’s use of the word “experience,” a use that
Foucault later will call “enigmatic” (FHF, 16) and “floating” (EFR,
336). It is perhaps the vestiges of phenomenological thinking in the
History of Madness that leads to Derrida’s 1963 criticism of Foucault,
a criticism that makes Foucault remove the book’s original title
(“Folie et déraison”; “Madness and Unreason”) and its original
preface for the History of Madness’ 1972 reissue.1 In his 1973 course
at the Collège de France, Psychiatric Power, Foucault himself states
that the History of Madness made use of three notions that were not
very helpful for the investigation of madness: violence; institution;
and the family. All of these notions, Foucault says, should be
replaced with notions of power (ECF-PP, 14–15).2 Self-criticisms such
as these found in Psychiatric Power have led commentators to speak
of periods in Foucault’s thinking, indicating thereby that one must
understand the trajectory of Foucault’s thinking as discontinuous.
Despite the debt to phenomenology, the History of Madness
displays a remarkable level of innovation. In the History of Madness,
we find a restructuring of the relation of theory and practice, a
restructuring that anticipates Foucault’s idea of an apparatus
Another random document with
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shallow waters: first, such as are in immediate connection with larger
rivers, and often run parallel to them, and which most appropriately
deserve to be called backwaters; and, secondly, those which are
quite independent, and form a small water-system by themselves. To
the latter kind seems to belong this swampy sheet of water, or
“ngáljam,” of Díggera, although I heard some Shúwa affirm that it
extended to the Tsád.
I first turned my steps eastward, where the encampment extended
to the very foot of the beautiful trees, which, forming a rich border of
the finest embroidery from the hand of nature, girt the water. Most of
them were either fig (sycamore) or tamarind-trees. The aspect of the
scenery was most interesting, and under almost every tamarind-tree
a group of people was encamped. The cavity where this sheet of
water had collected formed a very slight depression in the meadow-
ground, it being almost flat; the water, to all appearance, had already
decreased considerably, and only in a few places presented an open
sheet, being in general closely overgrown with rank grass and tall
reeds. I followed it to a considerable distance towards the north-
north-west, till I was obliged by the thick covert to retrace my steps,
and then turned westward. The far larger extension of the water
during the rainy season was sufficiently indicated by the luxuriant
growth of trees. I crossed it at a spot where it was not so extensive,
and found the bottom of it extremely muddy, which made the
passage rather difficult, though the water was only two and a half
feet deep. The intended outlines of its shores greatly distinguished it
from those more complete and regular-shaped ngáljams, which, in
the course of time, I had an opportunity of visiting, not only in those
extensive plains between the river Bénuwé and Shári, but also in the
regions of the middle course of the so-called Niger; for, in the
quarters just mentioned, these shallow waters, or meadow-waters,
often stretch out, in a straight or regularly sweeping line, like artificial
canals, to an immense distance,—especially that most interesting
sheet of water three days west of Timbúktu, the “Áraf-n-áman,” or
Rás el má.
Of quite a different nature is the character of the famous Bahar el
Ghazál, which joins the Tsád on the north-eastern side, being a
broad sandy valley girt by a rich border of vegetation. This peculiar
valley, which it was not our destiny to become acquainted with by
ocular inspection, formed the subject of conversation with the vizier
on Sunday evening; and a disputation arose, of so scientific a
character that it might have silenced all those who scoff at the
uncivilized state of the population of these regions. To be sure, the
two principal persons in this conversation were Arabs; but their
forefathers had been settled in these regions for at least ten
generations.
Here in Díggera, where we were only one good day’s march
distant from the capital of Mándará, our friends were obliged to come
to a decision upon the future destination of the expedition. After the
news which had arrived some days previously, that the petty chief of
Mándará, whose ancestor once completely defeated a countless
host of the Bórnu people, had decided upon making resistance, they
had been very silent and dejected, and were therefore extremely
delighted when at length, to-day, a servant of the obstinate vassal
made his appearance with a present of ten beautiful female slaves,
and the offer of complete submission. So at least we were told; but
the affair seemed very doubtful, and a native of Mándará, or, as they
say, Ár-Wándalá, afterwards assured me that his master, the
powerful “Tuksé” of Khákh-Úndala, had been so far from making his
submission to the insolent “Móthaké” (by this name they call the
Bórnu people), that, on the contrary, he had treated them with
contempt. Which of the two assertions was correct I do not know; but
it is probable that the chief of Mándará thought it prudent to consent
to some sort of compromise—perhaps through the intermediation of
ʿAbd eʾ Rahmán, the sheikh’s brother.
Whatever may have been the case, the vizier informed us in the
evening, in a very cheerful manner, that the affair with Mándará had
taken the most favourable turn, and that in consequence the sheikh,
with a small part of the army, was to retrace his steps, while he
himself, with the far larger portion, was to undertake an expedition
into the Músgu country, and that we, of course, were to accompany
him. Now we were well aware that the object of this expedition was
partly to make slaves, and that, in our character as messengers of
the British Government, we ought to endeavour to keep aloof from
anything connected with the infamous subject of slavery; but as we
could not hinder it if we kept back, and as by accompanying the
expedition we might prevent a deal of mischief, and might likewise
have a fair opportunity of convincing ourselves whether what was
related of the cruelty of the Mohammedans in these expeditions was
true or exaggerated, we decided upon accompanying the vizier. At
the same time it was of the utmost importance to visit that very
region which was the object of the expedition, as it was the only way
to decide upon the relation between the central basin of the Tsád
and the great western river, with its eastern branch, while there was
no possibility of visiting it by ourselves. We had already convinced
ourselves that the country of the Músgu is not, as Major Denham has
represented it, a mountainous, inaccessible tract; but we were
puzzled at the number of watercourses of which our informants had
spoken, and we could not have the least idea how fertile a country it
was, and how far remote its inhabitants were from that state of
barbarism which had been imputed to them. We therefore, although
reluctantly, and not without scruple, at length determined upon
accompanying the expedition; and I hope that every considerate
person who takes into account all the circumstances in which we
were placed, will approve of our resolution.
Wednesday, Dec. 17.—At length we proceeded onwards, entering
new regions never trodden by European foot. Our departure having
been delayed in the morning, owing to the separating of the army,
we started rather late, leaving the sheikh, with the rest of the “kebú,”
behind. The country at once presented a new and interesting
feature. Already in Bórnu a considerable proportion of our diet had
consisted of native rice, and we had been rather astonished at its
black colour and bad quality. We had heard that it grew wild in the
southern provinces of the country; but we had never yet seen it, and
it was only this morning, after we had left Díggera and had traversed
extensive stubble-fields of millet intermixed with beans, that we
obtained a first view of a “shinkáfaram,” or wild rice-field, in the midst
of the forest. We were then no longer surprised at the quality of the
rice brought to the market in Kúkawa being so bad, as we felt
justified in presuming that the elephant would have sense enough to
take the best for himself, and leave the rest for the people. As we
proceeded we found the whole wilderness, although not thickly
wooded, full of pools of water and dense rice-fields.
The country to-day presented a truly tropical aspect; and our
encampment, lying near an extensive pond, or small lagoon,
surrounded with a luxuriant growth of rice and a dense border of
spreading trees, was so full of the footprints of the elephant, that
scarcely a level spot of two or three feet in diameter could be found.
This was by no means pleasant, in our present mode of living, as we
were without a camp-stool, or anything to sit or lie upon; for the
argillaceous soil is so excessively hard, that the borders of these
holes produced by the unwieldy foot of the elephant cause a great
deal of pain to a person lying on the ground with nothing but a mat or
carpet. The most essential instrument on this whole journey was the
“láteram,” the digging-instrument (from “langin,” “I dig”), consisting of
a large piece of wood about three feet long, with a heavy iron point;
for without the láteram it would have been impossible to fix the
dáteram (from “dangin,” “I fasten, stop”), or the pole to which the
horses are fastened during the night. In general, every horseman
digs the hole in which the pole is fastened with his own spear; but
this soil was so hard that it was scarcely possible to make the
smallest hole in it. Of course, during the rainy season, it is just as
soft and muddy as it is hard in the dry season, and scarcely
passable in consequence.
A giraffe was caught to-day. I had been of opinion that this
timorous animal was not found in the thickly inhabited regions near
the equator; but I soon learned from experience that it is not at all
rare in the wildernesses which alternate with the densely populated
regions of these districts. The elephant, however, is the predominant
animal of these quarters; and the large market-place, Fátawel, which
I have mentioned on my journey to Ádamáwa, and the Logón town
Jéna, or rather Jínna, seem to be of considerable importance for
their ivory-trade.
In the evening I had the misfortune to be stung by a scorpion,
which had got into my bernús. As I had not noticed the animal in the
dark, and thinking that it was nothing but one of the formidable black
ants, the bite of which is very painful, I neglected the wound at first,
so that the poison penetrated to the shoulder, and rendered my right
arm useless for two days.
Thursday, Dec. 18.—Seeing that we were now entirely in the
hands of the vizier, my companion and I used to present ourselves at
his tent every morning, and to ride for some time near him. I,
however, soon found it pleasanter to keep more in the rear of the
army, a little in advance of his female slaves; and in the narrow paths
in the midst of the forest, where the crowding became very
disagreeable, I used to keep behind his led-horses. Of female slaves
on horseback and led-horses the vizier had with him the moderate
number of eight of each kind, while the sheikh had twelve; but this
appeared to me a small number when I afterwards saw the king of
Bagírmi returning from the expedition with a string of forty-five
mounted female partners. These black damsels were all clothed in
white woollen bernúses, with their faces completely veiled, and were
closely watched. To-day we had a more complete specimen of that
peculiar kind of shallow water which I have mentioned above; and
the army, while they were winding around it on the fresh green
meadow-lands, closely hemmed in on their left by a grove of fine
trees, presented a highly interesting scene. From thence, passing
through a thick covert, we entered the beautiful open district of
Wolóje, which comprises several hamlets. Here I was amused at
seeing the head man of a village successfully putting to flight, with a
large branch of a tree, a troop of pilfering horsemen. A little beyond
these hamlets the encampment was chosen, at some little distance
from a very extensive “ngáljam.”
Our conversation with the vizier in the evening again took a
geographical turn, owing to the presence of his spy or scout, who
had just returned from delivering his message to the Músgu prince
Ádishén. The vizier was as yet undecided in which direction to turn
his steps; and we heard a native chief, of the name of Puss, or Fuss,
mentioned in a manner that assured us our friends were afraid to
attack him. Ádishén, the chief just mentioned, was in a certain
degree subject to the rulers of Bórnu; but it seemed rather an ironical
assertion that this prince would be pleased with the arrival of the
expedition. While describing his reception at the court of the chief,
the scout indulged in a lively description of the customs prevalent
among these people, whose chief had only outwardly adopted Islám.
His Majesty, he said, used to indulge in amorous intercourse with his
female slaves, of whom he had two hundred, before the eyes of his
people; an account which was rather confirmed by Kashélla Belál,
who had been his host several times. Belál, who was a very jovial
old fellow, also stated that this little prince was not jealous of the
favours bestowed by his female partners upon his guests; but, on the
contrary, that he himself voluntarily gave them up to them. Such a
degrading custom may indeed be followed by this petty chief, who
has betrayed his country in order that, by the influence of his more
powerful neighbours, he might rule over his countrymen; but we
need not draw a conclusion from him as to the customs of the whole
tribe, although, of course, they regard the relation of the sexes in a
simpler point of view than we do.
Friday, Dec. 19.—The country through which we passed, on
leaving our encampment in the morning, was most charming, and of
a most expansive bound, and exactly suited for pastoral tribes like
the Shúwa and Fúlbe; but traces of cultivation also, and even of
cotton-fields, were not wanting: while further on, the dúm-bush
appeared, and was after a while succeeded by the tall fan-shaped
dúm-palm itself. The country being open, and without any
obstruction whatever, the “kibú,” or army, marched in an extended
line of battle, “báta,” separated into groups of the most varied
description in attire and appearance: the heavy cavalry, clad in thick
wadded clothing, others in their coats of mail, with their tin helmets
glittering in the sun, and mounted on large heavy chargers, which
appeared almost oppressed by the weight of their riders and their
own warlike accoutrements; the light Shúwa horsemen, clad only in
a loose shirt, and mounted upon their weak unseemly nags; the self-
conceited slaves, decked out gaudily in red bernúses or silken
dresses of various colours; the Kánembú spearmen, almost naked,
with their large wooden shields, their half-torn aprons round their
loins, their barbarous head-dresses, and their bundles of spears;
then, in the distance behind, the continuous train of camels and
pack-oxen: all the people full of spirits, and in the expectation of rich
booty, pressing onward to the unknown regions towards the south-
east.
It was an exalted feeling of unrestrained liberty which animated me
while, mounted on my noble charger, I rode silently along at the side
of this motley host, contemplating now the fine, beautiful country,
now the rich scenes of human life, which were illumined by a bright
morning sun. As yet no blood had been shed by this army, and
neither misery, devastation, nor the horrors of people torn from their
homes, cried out against it. Every one seemed to think only of sport
and amusement. Now and then a stir would be raised in the whole
army when a gazelle started forth from the thicket, endeavouring to
escape from her pursuers, but soon found herself hemmed in on
every side, while Shúwa horsemen and Kánembú spearmen, each
endeavouring to possess himself of the prize, cried out to his rivals in
the pursuit, “Kólle, kólle!” (“Leave off, leave off!”) as if the prey was
already his own, while others animated their companions by shouting
out, “Góne, góne!” (“Chase, chase!”) the sounds re-echoing from one
troop to another; or when a fat Guinea-fowl, “káji,” or a partridge,
“kwíye,” roused from its secure covert, took to its wings, but, trying to
fly over those widely scattered troops of hostile men, and frightened
by their cries, was soon obliged to look for a moment’s respite, and,
after a vain struggle, fell a prey to its pursuers, who often, while they
laid hold of it, tore it actually into pieces.
The wide open country seemed to invite the traveller into the far
distance; but to-day our march was only of short duration, and before
eight o’clock in the morning a new encampment, upon a fresh spot,
was again springing up. This whole country is still included in the
extensive district of Wolóje; but the water, which was close to the
side of the encampment, has the peculiar name of Kodásalé. The
whole of the inhabitants of the district belong to the Shúwa tribe of
the Bénesé. To the east of Kodásalé lies the place Lawári, towards
the west Súggemé, beyond Úlba, and south-west of the latter Memé,
and north-west Momó. All these villages are inhabited by Shúwa and
Kanúri in common; beyond is the wilderness or karága.
I, too, had my little daily “nógona,” or divan, in which Kashélla
Bíllama, my friend from Ádamáwa, and Háj Edrís, formed my
principal courtiers, or “kokanáwa,” though occasionally other people
attended. All these people I kept attached to me by presents of a few
needles, with which they supplied their wants in the neighbouring
villages. Bíllama informed me to-day that for three needles he had
bought sufficient provision for his horse for one day; for two he had
bought a wooden bowl, or “búkuru”; and for six more a good supply
of meat. Thus this insignificant production of European industry
became of the highest value to me; and it obtained still more value
and importance, in the course of my journey to Bagírmi, when it
constituted my only wealth, and in consequence procured me the
noble title of “needle-prince,” (“malaríbra”). We remained here the
following day, as the army had to provide itself with corn, or rather
Negro grain, as we were told that we should enter upon a wild
uncultivated tract, the border-region between the seats of the
Mohammedans and those of the pagan tribes, which, as is generally
the case in these parts of the world, has been reduced to desolation.
Each of the surrounding villages had to send two ox-loads of grain,
which, however, did not benefit the army in general, but fell entirely
to the share of the friends and followers of Lamíno, the remainder of
this immense host being thrown upon their own resources. All the
grain was carried on asses. It was in this encampment that the vizier
made a present to Mr. Overweg of a small lion. He had given him, on
a former occasion, a “súmmoli.” This is a very ferocious cat, of rather
rare occurrence, which is said not only to attack gazelles, but young
cattle or calves. It was of a light brown colour, the hind part, however,
being black, and had very pointed, upright ears, “súmmo,” a
circumstance from which the name has been derived. The ears,
moreover, are ornamented with a black stripe. A great many curious
stories are related by the people with regard to the ferocity of this
animal, and from what we ourselves had an opportunity of observing,
it seems to be a marvellous little creature: for, though still very young
and small, it was nevertheless extremely fierce, and was quite
master of the young lion. Both animals were fed with boiled milk, of
which they were very fond; but the continual swinging motion which
they had to endure on the back of the camels in the heat of the day,
caused their death very soon.
 Sunday, Dec. 21.—The crowding and thronging was excessive
when we started in order to pursue our march. The wilderness at first
was tolerably clear, being at times evidently a place of resort for
numerous herds of elephants, as the quantity of dung, and the
uninterrupted tracks of deep footprints, which gave to the soil the
appearance of a colossal chessboard, amply testified. After a march
of about six miles the wilderness became more thickly overgrown,
and presented a fine forest scenery; but, as is generally the case on
such warlike expeditions, there is no leisure to pay attention to
special phenomena, especially as the Bórnu horses are in general
very wild and vicious, and in the throng everybody was continually
liable to come into collision with his neighbour’s horse, which,
perchance, might be a furious kicker.
The general character of this jungle was this. The ground was
covered with dúm-bush, which formed a thick brushwood, and here
and there with rank grass, while the forest in general consisted of
middle-sized trees, chiefly mimosas and kálgos, though there were
other specimens, especially the kókia-tree, which I had first seen on
my journey from Gezáwa to Kátsena, the trees of smaller size being
separated into groups by large spreading specimens of the
vegetable kingdom, mostly of the ficus kind; for monkey-bread-trees
seemed to be wanting entirely, and altogether I saw few specimens
of this tree in the Músgu country. Very remarkable nests of birds,
suspended from the branches, were observed, not unlike a purse,
with a long narrow neck hanging down and forming the entrance; or
rather like a chemist’s retort suspended from the head, the shank
being several inches long, and the whole beautifully fabricated with
the most surprising skill. Of the skilful manufacturers of these fine
dwellings we did not obtain a sight; but probably it is a species of
loxia. In this thick covert, several young elephants were hunted
down, and even the giraffe seemed frequent.
The place which we chose for our encampment was adorned by
numerous fan-palms, which, although in general identical with the
species called Chamærops humilis, nevertheless by their height
appeared to be a distinct variety, and gave to the encampment a
very picturesque appearance. This forest was here so dense, that
only the spot where the vizier himself encamped together with his
own followers was free from brushwood, while all the other people
were first obliged to clear the ground with much trouble. This was the
first day, since our setting out, that we made a tolerable march. The
whole manner in which the expedition was conducted was an
unmistakable proof of an effeminate court, especially if we take into
account the principle of carrying on war in these countries, where
only sudden inroads can insure any great success. In the evening
there arrived a small complimentary present from Ádishén, the
tributary Músgu chief, consisting of five horses and twenty oxen. But
while in this manner the more influential men in the army were well
supplied with food, the greater part were very badly off, and most of
them were reduced to the core of the dúm-bush or ngílle, which by
the Bórnu people is facetiously called “kúmbu bíllabe” (“the food of
the country town”). But a good sportsman might have obtained better
food for himself, and we even got a small ostrich egg from the vizier.
It was a great pity that we had purposely avoided the more
frequented and general road, which passes by several settlements of
the Fúlbe or Felláta, in order not to give any trouble to the latter; for
no doubt that tract would have been far more interesting, as well
from a natural point of view, as with regard to the political state of the
country, as it would have given us the clearest insight into the way in
which that enterprising and restless people is pushing on every day
more and more, and strangling, as it were, the little kingdom of
Mándará.
Monday, Dec. 22.—Dense forest continued to prevail during the
first five miles of our march. It then cleared, and was succeeded by
considerable fields of wild rice, most of which was burnt down; for, as
I have repeatedly had occasion to mention, all these wildernesses of
Central Africa are set on fire after the rainy season. The whole
ground in this district was one uninterrupted succession of holes
made by the foot of the elephant, which obstructed the march of the
army very considerably, and was the reason of several horses being
lamed. Sálah, a younger brother of the vizier, a very intelligent man,
broke his arm. A herd of six elephants was in the neighbourhood,
and after a great deal of confusion, one animal, which got between
the horsemen, was killed. It is no wonder that these regions are so
frequented by them, as they find here plenty of the choicest food.
The jungles of wild rice were only interrupted for a short time by a
tract covered with dúm-bush. Water was plentiful, every now and
then a considerable pond appearing, girt by beautiful trees, and at
present enlivened by groups of horsemen, who were watering their
animals.
After a march of about fifteen miles we encamped close to a larger
sheet of water, which was full of fish of the species called “bégeli,”
and enabled us to give to our food that day more variety, the forest,
as well as the water, contributing its share; for, besides the fish, we
had roast hare and elephant’s flesh, which was very palatable, and
much like pork.
Tuesday, Dec. 23.—Three heavy strokes upon the drum, at the
dawn of day, set our motley host once more in motion. It was an
important day, and many of the principal people had exchanged their
common dress for a more splendid attire. We entered the Músgu
country, and at the same time came into contact with fragments of
that nation, who, having spread from the far west over the one-half of
Africa, are restlessly pushing forward and overwhelming the pagan
tribes in the interior. These are the Fúlbe or Felláta, the most
interesting of all African tribes, who, having been driven from Bórnu,
have here laid the foundation of a new empire.
Twice on our march we were obliged to make a halt: the first time
owing to the arrival of Ádishén, the Músgu chief, with a troop of
naked horsemen mounted on a breed of small, unseemly, but strong
ponies, without saddles and bridles, and presenting altogether a
most barbarous and savage spectacle. The second halt was caused
by the appearance of a Púllo or Felláta chief, with two hundred
horsemen of his nation, who, by their shirts and shawls, their saddles
and bridles, certainly claimed a higher degree of civilization, but who,
nevertheless, were far from exhibiting a grand appearance. This
chief was an officer of Khúrsu, the ruler of the town or principality of
Fétte or Pétte, which we had left at a short distance to the west. He
came to join this expedition, the object of which was to weaken the
Músgu tribes, who, behind their natural defences of rivers and
swamps, had hitherto been able to maintain their independence. Of
course, on this occasion the policy of these Fúlbe chiefs went hand
in hand with that of the Bórnu people, although it is not a little
remarkable, and serves to show the slight political unity existing
between the integral parts of these empires, that while the governor
of Ádamáwa was at present on a hostile footing with the ruler of
Bórnu, one of his vassals was allowed to enter into an alliance with
the latter.
After these interruptions we pursued our march, and reached,
about half an hour before noon, the northernmost of the Músgu
villages, which is called Gábari, surrounded by rich fields of native
grain; but everything presented a sad appearance of pillage and
desolation. None of the inhabitants were to be seen; for, although
subjects of Ádishén, who enjoyed the friendship and protection of the
rulers of Bórnu, they had thought it more prudent to take care of their
own safety by flight than to trust themselves to the discretion of the
undisciplined army of their friends and protectors. The preceding
evening the order had been issued through the encampment that all
the property in the villages of Ádishén should be respected, and
nothing touched, from a cow to a fowl, grain only excepted, which
was declared to be at the disposal of everybody.
It was rather remarkable that the greatest part of the crops were
still standing, although we had been lingering so long on our road,
and had given sufficient time for the people to secure them for
themselves. All the grain consisted of the red species of holcus,
called by the Bórnu people “ngáberi kemé,” which grows here to the
exclusion of the white species and that of millet. All the people of the
army were busy in threshing the grain which they had just gathered
at the expense of their friends, and loading their horses with it. Even
the fine nutritive grass from the borders of the swamp, which, woven
into long festoons, the natives had stored up in the trees as a
provision against the dry season, was carried off, and,
notwithstanding the express order to the contrary, many a goat, fowl,
and even articles of furniture which had been left behind by the
natives, fell a prey to the greedy host.
 The spectacle of this pillage was the more saddening, as the
village not only presented an appearance of comfort, but exhibited in
a certain degree the industry of its inhabitants. In general each
courtyard contained a group of from three to six huts, according to
the number of wives of the owner. The walls of the dwellings, without
a single exception, were built of clay, which in the courtyards of the
richer people even formed the building material of the fences. The
roofs of the cottages were thatched with great care, and at least as
well as in any house or village in Bórnu, and far superior to the
thatching of the Shúwa. The roofs even exhibited traces of various
styles, and perhaps a certain gradation in the scale of society.
Almost every courtyard enclosed a shed, besides the huts, and one
granary built of clay, and from twelve to fifteen feet high, with an
arched roof, likewise of clay, there being an opening at the top which
was protected by a small cover of thatching, as the accompanying
woodcut shows. The way in which the natives had stored up their
supply of hay for the dry season was very remarkable, the rank
grass being woven into festoons of about fifteen feet in length, and
hung up in the kórna-trees which adorned the fields.
Having roved about at my leisure, I pursued my march, and,
emerging from the cornfields, entered upon open meadow-grounds,
partly under water, which spread out to a considerable extent, and
which, with their fresh green turf, formed a beautiful contrast to the
tall yellow crops which I had just left behind. Ascending a little, we
kept straight towards a group of splendid trees which adorned the
fields in front of another village. The village was called Kórom, and
belonged to a chief under the authority of Ádishén, while Kadé, the
residence of the latter, was only at a short distance. In these fields
the vizier had dismounted and chosen the place for the
encampment; and it was with a sad, sympathetic feeling that I
witnessed the lopping of the rich branches of the fine trees, which
were without doubt, the most splendid specimens of the karáge-tree
which I had seen in Negroland, not excepting those in the Marghí
country. The largest among them measured not less than eighty feet
in height, and the diameter of their crown could scarcely be less; but
the foliage of this tree is by no means so dense and so regularly
shaped as that of the fig or tamarind-tree. None of these fine trees,
which had adorned the
landscape, escaped
destruction, in order to provide
fences for the larger tents; but
the few monkey-bread-trees
which here appeared, owing to
the scanty foliage with which
their gigantic branches were
decked out, escaped unhurt.
Here we remained the two
following days, and the
encampment became very
confined, the more so as the
ground was rather uneven. The
delay could scarcely be
defended in a strategical point
of view, as it could not but
serve to put all the
neighbouring chiefs, who were
hostile to Ádishén, on their
guard against any sudden inroad. But it was well that they did so, as
by a sudden inroad the poor persecuted natives might have been
totally annihilated.
In order to employ my leisure hours, I looked about for information
respecting the country we had just entered, and was fortunate
enough to collect some valuable data.
The Músgu, or Músekú, are a division of the great nation of the
Mása, which comprises the Kótoko, or Mákari, the people of Logón,
or Lógone, the Mándará, or Úr Wándalá, with the Gámerghú, and
the large tribe of the Bátta, and probably even that of the Mbána. Of
these tribes the most intimately related to the Músgu are the people
of Logón, who, as we shall soon have occasion to show, are nothing
but a section which has quite recently separated from the parent
stock, and constituted itself as a distinct community, owing to its
higher state of civilization. Amongst the various divisions of the
Kótoko, Ngála and Klésem seem to be most nearly related to the
Músgu.
However insignificant the tribe of the Músgu may appear in the
eyes of the European, the dialects of the various communities into
which it is split, owing to the hostile manner in which they are
opposed to one another, and their entire want of friendly intercourse,
differ so much that, as I was assured the people of Lúggoy have
great difficulty in understanding those of Wúliya and Démmo.
Unfortunately I had no opportunity of collecting specimens of the
other dialects besides that spoken by the people of Lúggoy. Their
principal “sáfi,” or fetish, consists in a long spear-like pole, similar to
that of the Marghí; but nevertheless there seems to be a
considerable difference in their superstitious worship, for, while with
the Marghí the pole appears to be rather a symbol than an image of
the deity, and the real worship is attached to the sacred locality, with
the Músgu tribes I did not see a single specimen of a sacred grove.
The Músgu call their fetish “kefé.”
In the afternoon I attended some time at the vizier’s, and here
made the acquaintance of an interesting and adventurous old man of
the name of Mállem Jémme, or Jýmma, who took the principal part
in the conversation. The history of this man is highly characteristic,
as showing what a large field is open to the ambition of enterprising
Mohammedans in the pagan states to the south. Threatened with
capital punishment by the old sheikh, that is to say, Mohammed el
Amín el Kánemi, on account of his disobedience, this Shúwa
chieftain had fled to the pagans, and had there succeeded in
establishing gradually, by his own energy and mental superiority, a
small principality; but at present, for some reason or other, he had
been expelled and had recourse to the vizier of Bórnu for assistance
to recover his former power. His great knowledge of the country and
the different tribes which inhabited it, made him a welcome guest;
but as for himself, he did not succeed in his ambitious projects. In
reference to my expedition to Ádamáwa, I have already made use of
the authority of this man, in giving an account of the route which
connects the southernmost point on our expedition to Músgu with the
places fixed by me along the river Bénuwé.
 The mállem was not very communicative; and unfortunately I had
no handsome present to make him, or else I might have learned
from him an immense deal with regard to the geography and
character of these countries, which I have no doubt, not long hence,
will become of considerable importance to Europeans. For while
these regions, situated between the rivers Bénuwé and Shári, seem
to be extremely rich and fertile, and capable—on account of the
uniform level of their unbroken plains—of the highest state of
cultivation, they are the most accessible on account of the extensive
water-communication, which, rendered available by the application
of a very small degree of art and industry, will open an easy access
into the heart of Central Africa. Of course, after the rainy season,
when all these countless watercourses, which intersect the country
in every direction, and, without any apparent inclination, inundate the
country, the climate in the plains cannot be very healthy; but isolated
mountains and hills are scattered by the hand of nature through
these luxuriant plains, capable of affording more healthy localities for
settlements.
Owing to the presence of the adventurer just mentioned, the
conversation that evening was very animated, till at length the
courtiers, or “kokanáwa,” withdrew behind the curtains of the vizier’s
tent, in order to take a little refreshment. I then took my leave; but I
had only gone a short distance when I was called back, being
informed that it would no doubt be interesting to me to witness an
audience of Ádishén, the Músgu chief, who was just about to pay his
respects to the commander-in-chief. I therefore returned to the
vizier’s tent, where the courtiers had again taken their post,
according to their rank and station, on each side of their leader.
After a short time the Músgu chief arrived, accompanied by his
three brothers, mounted, as is their custom, upon horses without
saddle or bridle. Great numbers of people had collected in front of
the tent, and saluted him with scoffs and importunities; but the pagan
chief did not allow himself to be put out of countenance by the
insolence of the slaves, but preserved his princely dignity. At length
the curtains of the spacious tent were drawn back, and in came the
native prince. He was of a short stout figure, and rather mild, but not
very prepossessing features, and apparently between fifty and sixty
years of age. He wore a black tobe, but no trousers, and was bare-
headed. Kneeling on the ground, and clapping his hands, while he
repeated the complimentary words, “Alla ngúbberu degá!” (“God give
you long life”), according to the custom of the “katí gótsin,” he took
up sand and sprinkled it upon his head; but as soon as he had gone
through this form of abject submission, he assumed his character as
a native chief. Thus, at once he complained of his western
neighbours, the Fúlbe or Felláta, or, as the Músgu people call them,
Chógchogo; for they, he said, had anticipated the vizier of Bórnu,
carrying off cattle and other things from his territory. The Bórnu chief
assured him that for the future he should not be exposed to such
injustice, but that he was entirely under the protection of Bórnu. He
then made a sign, and some parcels were opened, and Ádishén was
officially installed as a vassal and officer of Bórnu. First, he was
dressed in an elephant-shirt—the large black shirt from Núfe,—over
which a rich silk tobe was thrown, and over all an Egyptian shawl,
while the self-conceited courtiers, in their proud consciousness of a
higher state of civilization, treated him with contempt and scorn. My
cheerful old friend Kashélla Belál, who had decked him out in this
finery, paid him the usual compliments, exclaiming “Ngúbberu degá
maína, ngúbberu degá maína,” maína being the title of the governor
of a province.
Thus this petty pagan chief had become, in an official style, a kind
of officer of Bórnu, and in this manner was alone capable of
preserving his unenviable existence, at what sacrifices we shall soon
see. The Músgu nation is situated so unfavourably, surrounded by
enemies on all sides, that, even if they were linked together by the
strictest unity, they would scarcely be able to preserve their
independence. How, then, should they be able to withstand their
enemies, separated as they are into numerous petty dominions, and
having no further object than to enslave and pillage their neighbours
and kinsmen? Nothing but the number of swampy watercourses
which intersect the country in all directions, and during the greater
part of the year render it impassable for hostile armies, while even
during the remaining part the principal rivers afford natural lines of
defence, behind which the inhabitants may seek refuge, can explain
how the country is so well peopled as it is, although the intervening
tracts have been already laid waste.
Towards the north there are the Kanúri, powerful by their
numerous cavalry and the advantage of firearms; towards the west
and south-west the restless Fúlbe continually advancing; towards the
north-east the people of Logón, originally their near kinsmen, but at
present opposed to them by difference of religion; towards the east,
the wild Bágrimma people, proud of their supposed pre-eminence in
religion, and eager for the profits of the slave-trade. All these people
hunting them down from every quarter, and carrying away yearly
hundreds, nay even thousands of slaves, must in the course of time
exterminate this unfortunate tribe.
To-day was Christmas-day; and my companion and I, in conformity
with a custom of our native town, tried in vain to procure some fish
for a more luxurious entertainment in the evening. The meat of
giraffes, which formed the greatest of our African luxuries, was not to
be obtained; and as for elephant’s flesh, which we were able to get,
although we both liked it, we had too sadly experienced its bad effect
upon the weak state of our bowels to try it again. Hence, in order to
celebrate the evening, we were reduced to coffee and milk, with
which we regaled ourselves. We remained here the following day,
under the pretext that the Fúlbe, who had joined us, had not yet had
an audience; but although the effeminate courtiers were averse to
any great exertion, the bulk of the army, who had neither pay, nor
were allowed to plunder in order to obtain their necessary supplies,
were not very well pleased with this delay, and caused a great
uproar while marching in battle-order before the tents of their chiefs,
and giving vent to their feelings by shaking and beating their shields.
On former expeditions the light troops of the Shúwa and Kánembú
had always been allowed to march some distance in advance of the
army in order to supply their wants; but on this occasion a strict order
had been issued that no one should go in advance.
In the afternoon Mr. Overweg went to pay a visit to Ádishén at his
residence in Kadé, which was about half-an-hour’s march distant
towards the south. He returned in the evening with a present of a
goat, but did not seem to be greatly pleased with his excursion; and
it could scarcely be otherwise, for while these pagans, who were
obliged to disown all national feeling, could scarcely show
themselves in their true character, and unreserved in their national
manners, in the presence of such an army, it could not but lower us
in the eyes of our companions to have too many dealings with these
pagans, as they were apt to confound us with them. To be regarded
as a “kerdi” my companion cared little about: but I was not much
inclined to be identified as such, and it could certainly reflect no
honour on the character of our mission.
 CHAPTER XLIV.
THE COUNTRY OF THE SHALLOW RIVERS.—
WATER-PARTING BETWEEN THE RIVERS
BÉNUWÉ AND SHARI.

Friday, Dec. 26.—At length we went onward to pursue our march,

turning considerably out of our road towards the east, in order to
avoid the residence of Ádishén, and to prevent its being pillaged.
The army, proceeding in several large detachments, presented an
interesting aspect. Here also green crops of the winter corn, or
“másakwá,” were still standing in the fields. Further on we came to
open pasture-grounds, and after a march of about ten miles we
reached a village called Bógo, where we encamped. All the
inhabitants had made their escape, although their chief, whose name
is Bakshámi, was an ally and friend of Ádishén. The cottages were
well built, but there was a great scarcity of trees. Amongst the
furniture was a fishing-basket, or, as the Kanúri call it, “káyan”; and
some of them were filled with dry paste of the red species of holcus,
which however the people were afraid to touch, lest it might be
poisoned. On a former expedition several people had been poisoned
by a pot of honey which had been left behind, on purpose, by the
natives in their flight. Already on this day’s march we had observed,
in the distance towards the west, an isolated rocky mount; and here
we saw it in more distinct outlines, while beyond, at a greater
distance, the continuous mountain chain of Mándará became slightly
visible.
Saturday Dec. 27.—Our march at first led through a dense forest,
after which we emerged upon more open swampy meadow-lands
covered with rank grass, and full of holes caused by the footprints of
the elephant. Great quantities of Guinea-fowl were caught. Only here
and there an isolated mimosa interrupted the unbroken line of the