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Foucault's response to Freud: sado-masochism and the aestheticization ofpower - Michel Foucault; Sigmund Freud

Style, Fall, 1995 by Suzanne Gearheart

I. FOUCAULT'S SADO-MASOCHISTIC PARADIGM: THE "UNTHOUGHT" OF FREUD'STHEORY OF THE UNCONSCIOUS?

Among the numerous modern theorists who have attempted to bring the insights ofpsychoanalysis to bear on political and social theory, Michel Foucault is one of the names thatcertainly comes readily to mind. But while few would see one critic as doing more than stating theobvious when he wrote that Foucault, like other leading French theorists of his generation, was"deeply affected by Marx and . . . Freud" (Said 2), most of Foucault's interpreters have had little tosay about his relation to psychoanalysis and have focused almost exclusively on his contributionsto historiography and social theory. The relative lack of interest in the psychoanalytic dimensionand implications of Foucault's work can be explained and even justified in various ways. First,there is the fact that Foucault wrote very little that explicitly concerned Freud. Second, the littlehe did write on psychoanalysis was principally focused on its status as an institution and itscontributions to the creation of what Foucault called "disciplinary society." In addition, Foucault'scritique of the central psychoanalytic concept of repression in volume one of The History ofSexuality could be evoked to justify the view that Foucault was only peripherally or even negativelyinvolved in a discussion of psychoanalysis.(1)

Factors such as these, however, even if they help explain the relative neglect of the psychoanalyticdimension of Foucault's work, are perhaps ultimately less important than the nature of thepsychoanalytic concept that represented for Foucault the central contribution of psychoanalysis tothe theory of power and of the socio-political: sado-masochism. It is true that the term sado-

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masochism was rarely, if ever, used by Foucault in his discussion of political power. But even if itremains implicit in his work, a concept of sado-masochism is nonetheless central to both thesocial and psychological dimension of Foucault's theory. In neglecting the psychoanalyticdimension of Foucault's works, his interpreters may unwittingly have confirmed the truth of whatFoucault in his histories and genealogies often claimed: that the "dirty secret" of power has longbeen hidden from us by a form of repression or censorship as strong as or stronger than the onethat relates to sexuality per se and that the deepest critical implications of his own work lie in atransgression of this other, deeper form of censorship.(2)

One aim of this essay is to bring to light and analyze critically Foucault's implicit "dialogue" withFreud, in particular that part of the dialogue that has to do with the concept of sado-masochism.In the process I shall explore the critical implications for psychoanalysis of an approach to sado-masochism that does not limit its significance by treating it as characteristic only of a particularstage of development or form of neurosis, as Freud most frequently did. What I shall try to show isthe force and implications of Foucault's critique of one of the central components of Freudianpsychoanalytic theory, but I do not seek to test the rigor of Foucault's critique of Freud through anextended discussion and analysis of Freud's work as a whole. It may be worth noting at the start,however, that a fuller discussion of Foucault's dialogue with Freud would reveal the problematicaldimension of a number of Foucault's assertions when they are confronted with the entirety of theFreudian corpus.

A second aim of this analysis relates more narrowly to Foucault's work and the psycho-socialmodel it proposes. As I have already suggested, my approach to Foucault stems from a sense thatboth his critics and defenders have failed to recognize the critical impact of Foucault's concept ofsado-masochism and in the process missed one of the most significant elements of his work inrelation both to psychoanalytical and social theory. But I will argue as well that these samedefenders and critics may have also missed what is one of the most serious limitations of his work,a limitation that becomes fully evident in Foucault's History of Sexuality. In this last work onsexuality and power, Foucault not only uses the concept of sado-masochism as part of a criticalstrategy aimed at psychological theories based on a reductive notion of repression. He alsogeneralizes the concept and thus privileges sado-masochism as the model for the social and thepsychological in general. The question here is whether such a privilege can be justified not just interms of Freudian or other forms of psycho-analytic theory, but also ultimately in terms of TheHistory of Sexuality itself and the analysis it offers of the psychic dimension of social life inAncient Greece.

The importance to Foucault of a concept of sado-masochism to his critical project is evident whenone considers his critique of another Freudian concept he discusses explicitly and repeatedly: theconcept of repression. Even the most cursory reader of Foucault would have difficulty missing thepoint that for Foucault himself it was his approach to the problem of repression that distinguishedhis work from that not only of Freud, but also that of "para-Marxists like Marcuse" and Reich whosimilarly sought to combine the insights of psychoanalysis and Marxist analysis (seePower/Knowledge 58, 90). Nor is it easy to overlook what for Foucault is the decisive point indistinguishing his work from theirs. As Foucault was to state more than once, their chieflimitation lies in the fact that they have "given the notion of repression an exaggerated role -

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because power would be a fragile thing if its only function were to repress" (59). In other words,their limitation - and also the limitation of Freud before them - lies in the reductive, narrowlyrepressive or negative nature of their concept of repression, as contrasted with his own emphasison the positive or productive aspects of this process (118-19).(3)