Michon-Sobre El Temps A Foucault-2002-Time Society

Time & Society
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Strata, Blocks, Pieces, Spirals, Elastics and Verticals : Six figures of

time in Michel Foucault
Pascal Michon
Time Society 2002 11: 163
DOI: 10.1177/0961463X02011002001
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Strata, Blocks, Pieces, Spirals,
Elastics and Verticals
Six figures of time in Michel Foucault
Pascal Michon
ABSTRACT. In a genuine Nietzschean way, Michel Foucault

always refused to develop a definitive theory of time and preferred to
produce local and non-explicit theories, adapted to each one of the
objects that he was studying. As much as being, time cannot be but
interpreted and subjected to a multiplicity of perspectives. I tried to
reconstruct these various conceptions of time following Foucault
from book to book and situating his work among some of the great
modern philosophical movements (historicism and phenomen-
ology), but also according to the internal logic of his research. KEY
WORDS Foucault genealogy historicity modernity Nietzsche
One perhaps remembers the controversies provoked in the middle of the 1960s
by the publication of The Order of Things. Sartre and, following him, almost the
entire Left under Marxist influence saw in the book a refusal of history.1 At
that time, nobody was afraid of oversimplifications: time was left wing and
space right wing.2 Structuralism received a bad press. Now many years have
passed, but the question of Foucaults relation to time remains a source of mis-
understanding. If he wrote enough history to silence his most superficial critics,
the concepts he coined and the images he used in his works have often led to the
conclusion that the concern for space and visible prevailed in Foucault, in spite
of everything, over the concern for time and sensible. It is true that Foucault
himself, because of his style and his theoretical choices, might have reinforced
that impression. Table of representations in The Order of Things, dispersion
plane of statements in Archaeology of Knowledge, planning of town, map-
ping of society, panopticism in Discipline and Punish: there is in the
Foucaldian texts an abundance of visual and spatial metaphors on which the
Time & Society copyright 2002 SAGE (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)
VOL. 11 No. 2/3 (2002), pp. 163192 0961-463X[200209]11:2/3;163192; 027926
164 time & society 11(2/3)
commentators have insisted a lot, reinforcing, though unwillingly, the image of

Foucault subjecting time to space.3
Yet the question of time has probably been one of the matrices of his work,
one of the problems from which it arose. As he himself explains in The Order of
Things, our experience of temporality developed at the turn of the 18th and the
19th centuries, when people began, with both amazement and a lot of confusion,
to contemplate its radical historicity:
At the very moment when it became possible for it to denounce as fantasies
the ideal geneses described in the eighteenth century, modern thought was
establishing a problematic of the origin at once extremely complex and extremely
tangled; this problematic has served as the foundation for our experience of time,
and, since the nineteenth century, as the starting-point of all our attempts to
re-apprehend what beginning and re-beginning, the recession and the presence of
the beginning, the return and the end, could be in the human sphere. (Foucault,
1966: 333)
Since then, the entirety of modern thought has been taking up the challenge of
its historical situation and of its dependence on an originary which constantly
overtakes the thought, endangering its constituting unity:
The originary, as modern thought has never ceased to describe it since The
phenomenology of mind, [. . .] the originary in man is that which articulates him
from the very outset upon something other than man himself; it is that which intro-
duces into his experience contents and forms older than him, which he cannot
master; it is that which, by binding him to multiple, intersecting, often mutually
irreducible chronologies, scatters him through time and pinions him at the centre
of the duration of things. (Foucault, 1966: 331).4
Certainly, we have to read Foucaults work in light of this description. Like
all modern thinkers, he confronted the difficulties that arise from the funda-
mental temporality of the human being, and had to face the disturbing question
of the originary. Yet, something differentiates his position from those of many
of his predecessors. Most of them aimed at building dams against the flow,
which submerge the thought, and at restoring, by every possible means, its lost
unity. The radical historicity of humankind has been accepted reluctantly as a
dangerous situation, against which we have to protect the thought, because it
risks losing any links with truth and good. From Hegel to Merleau-Ponty, from
historicism to phenomenology, most of the philosophers tried to reassure the
thought over its cognitive and moral capacities, to reestablish a lost confidence,
to exorcize its fall into finitude and the ruin of its almighty power. As for
Foucault, he holds quite a different position. It is not because, as it has often
been said, he would simply have inversed the attitude of the thought of master-
ing the time and embraced the relativist view of its dispersion within history, but
because he decided to say a definite goodbye to the period during which the
thought was considered as immediately appropriate to the world and thus
michon: michel foucault 165
totally assured of its cognitive and moral powers. He sought to reconsider the
question of time and of his relation to thought without regret or resentment.
This probably explains why Foucault is one of the most original thinkers of
the 20th century regarding the question of time, and why some critics have
compared him to Heidegger. The struggle engaged by Foucault against the
transcendental subject and the deepening of the theme of finitude, the full
acceptation of the historicity of thought and of all of its consequences would
have drawn him close to the Heideggerian ontology (Dreyfus and Rabinow,
1982; Ijsseling, 1986; Dreyfus, 1989). I think, however, that this interpretation
is questionable and doesnt give a full understanding of Foucaults work.
Certainly, Foucault builds a post-phenomenology philosophy, which opens new
ways for the thought, but that doesnt lead him to adopt an attitude of retreat and
to regard time as sacred, as Heidegger did at the end of his life. In this article, I
would like to show the full originality of the Foucaldian conception of time:
what differentiates it both from historicism and from its subsequent critique by
the phenomenology, but also from the Heideggerian attempt to supersede the
latter as well as the former.
The Stratified Time of History According to Les Annales
The project of Histoire de la folie lge classique (Madness and Civilization)

(1961), Naissance de la clinique (The Birth of the Clinic) (1963) and Les mots et
les choses (The Order of Things) (1966), as one may know, lies within the
framework of the history of science, as it was practised at that time by
Bachelard and Canguilhem (Canguilhem, 1967; Machado, 1989; Eribon, 1991),
and reflects philosophical choices against historicism and phenomenology
inspired by the new developments of psychoanalysis, anthropology and linguis-
tics. But there is another source of Foucaults work that is often forgotten
nowadays and which has been at the base of his first conception of time: the
historical research developed in France since the 1930s.5 We must then recall, to
begin with, the intellectual impact of his relations with the historians, at first
with those of the French school of Les Annales, but also later with Paul Veyne,
Arlette Farge and Peter Brown, to cite only some of them.
Concerning his early books, the repeated tributes to Lvi-Strauss, Dumezil
and Lacan that they contain are always pointed out. Nevertheless, Foucault
swiftly rejected the structuralist tag, too deeply linked according to him to the
semiotic model of the Classical Age, while he never repudiated his debt to
Braudel. His first studies on madness and clinic are actually influenced much
more by the historical model of stratified temporalities and by the slow and
unconscious evolutions typical of la longue dure, than by the differencialism
inspired by the phonology, the common basis of structuralist studies.6 The
splitting of the past into unchanging time blocks, which he advocates at the end
of the 1960s in his studies in history of science, is not very different from the
concept of immobile history that already surfaces in Braudel and which will
be fully elaborated a few years later by Le Roy Ladurie.7 Likewise, the idea of
discontinuity, of swift destruction of structural orders, which are very slowly
altering, inherits certainly the tradition of the Bachelardian history of science
(the famous epistemological split), but it has already appeared in Labrousse
and Braudel.8 Thus, it is of great significance that the two first pages of
Archaeology of Knowledge are dedicated to a tribute to Les Annales and to an
analysis of their methodological contribution:
For many years now historians have preferred to turn their attention to long
periods, as if beneath the shifts and changes of political events, they were trying
to reveal the stable, almost indestructible system of checks and balances, the
irreversible processes, the constant readjustments, the underlying tendencies that
gather force, and are then suddenly reversed after centuries of continuity, the
movements of accumulation and slow saturation, the great silent, motionless bases
that traditional history has covered with a thick layer of events [. . .]. These tools
have enabled workers in the historical field to distinguish various sedimentary
strata; linear successions, which for so long have been the object of research, have
given way to discoveries in depth. (Foucault, 1969a: 3)
Later on, when the influence of Les Annales becomes less determining, the
dialogue with the historians will continue sotto voce. During the 1970s,
Foucault will engage a history of the event mostly inspired by Nietzsche, and
yet this reorientation wont be without relations with the historians new
objects. After having been dominated by the structuralist vision, by the slow,
indeed almost immobile evolution, the historians will progressively reintroduce
the explosive time of the event. The scope will be to reconstruct the events of
the past as if they were present, i.e. instead of replacing them in an explicative
historical continuity and looking for their origin, the historians will seek to show
all their ambiguities, their contradictory aspects and especially their potential
openness, their singularity and their power of breakthrough.9
The Time in Blocks of Archaeology
From The Order of Things one usually remembers the splitting of time in suc-
cessive epistema. For Foucault, as we know, the history of human sciences is
neither linear nor cumulative. It doesnt show any progress. It doesnt link, as
traditional historians of science do, the diversity of its contents to a transcen-
dental pole be it the subject or the man whose expression would be always
more precisely grasped. But it follows a succession of periods consisting of as
many regulating systems of discourse production rules and as many limited
spaces of communication (1969a: 126). Scientific topics such as labour, lan-

guage or life dont have any actual continuity and it is necessary, in order to
understand the meaning of these terms, not to reduce them to the so-called
identity of their anthropological conditions of possibility, but to replace them in
the general epistemic system, present in the various disciplines, which consti-
tutes the historical a priori (1969a: 127) of the period in which they are used.
Each epoch disappears abruptly, leaving space for a new form of knowledge and
the epistemic time is then split into almost immobile blocks separated by sudden
ruptures.
This stress put on the concept of episteme inconveniently underplayed what
was at stake in the making of an archaeology, without which one wouldnt be
able to understand its full originality. In The Order of Things, Foucault tries to
escape not only from the 19th century historicism (under its positivist as well
Hegelian form), but also which is more interesting for us from the phenom-
enological critique of this historicism which has been elaborated during the last
century on the grounds of another conception of time. His strategy is Kantian:
he tries to disclose the conditions of possibility, the common matrix of both
traditions, which he calls the analytic of finitude. According to him the princi-
pal aporia of modern thought, since Kant, consists of seeking to determine the
foundation of all possible knowledge from the very limits of man, which are due
to his temporality. All post-Kantian philosophies and all human sciences that
developed simultaneously should thus be read as a succession of attempts,
necessarily unstable and incomplete, to clear the difficulty generated by a con-
tradictory demand: to put temporality at the very basis of the transcendental, to
start from the empirical dispersion of history, but in order to extract from it the
synthetic unity of man. Husserl and Heidegger (at that period Foucault only
cites Sein und Zeit) or Merleau-Ponty are comparable to Hegel, Marx and
Comte. They all grow out of the same archaeological ground and are burdened
by the same ambiguities.
The historicist strategies nowadays show all their navet. Postulating an
objective or an eschatological nature of time, they have dogmatically got rid of
the difficulty that arises from the folding of the transcendental upon the empiri-
cal, or they have attempted to overcome it dialectically but without actually
being able to reduce it: positivism found the warrant of the truth of thought in
the truth of history or of nature, postulated independent; Hegelianisms, on the
contrary, favoured the continuity of thought and its participation in nature or
history. Thus neither the former nor the latter could escape from the aporia
caused by Kantian dualism. But the subtle critics who, since the end of the 19th
century, attempted to oppose historicism and its reduction of temporality to an
objective flow or to a progress, didnt allow us to escape from the anthropolog-
ical paradox.
The Husserlian phenomenology sought, through an analysis of the actually
experienced temporality, to articulate the possible objectivity of a knowledge

of nature upon the original experience of which the body provides an outline;
and to articulate the possible history of a culture upon the semantic density
which is both hidden and revealed in actual experience (vcu) (Foucault, 1966:
321). Immersing itself in the intimate consciousness of time, phenomenology
has tried to find a ground that would allow maintenance of the separation
between empirical and transcendental, but which could, nevertheless, allow to
aim at them both together. It has then believed to be able to analyse man both as
subject, i.e. as a substratum of empirical knowledge, and as a form immediately
present in these contents through the mediation of body and culture revealed by
the actual experience. But instead, it has only been able to swing indefinitely
between these two poles:
The analysis of actual experience is a discourse of mixed nature: it is directed to a
specific yet ambiguous stratum, concrete enough for it to be possible to apply to it
a meticulous and descriptive language, yet sufficiently removed from the posi-
tivity of things for it to be possible, from that starting-point, to escape from that
navet, to contest it and seek foundations for it. (Foucault, 1966: 321)
Husserl and later Merleau-Ponty have oscillated between the assertion that
the background practices (the implicit, the inactual, the sedimented, the non-
effected) on which the thought rests, since it is intricate in temporality, are not
representable and the other assertion that these practices can be controlled and
made explicit by the exercise of reflection between an ontology of the
Lebenswelt and a transcendental analysis of time.
When Heidegger tried, in turn, to break the objectivist and eschatological
conceptions of time, he wanted to radicalize the Husserlian project founding his
conception of temporality no longer on the actually experienced but on the
Dasein as ek-sistent. Henceforth, it was no longer the depths of the conscious-
ness but the being-in-the-world of the Dasein itself which allows definition of
time and thus its relation to being. This strategy allowed demolition of the
historicist conception of historicity, which, in order to oppose the disintegration
of man by the originary, had promised him plenitude and achievement, and the
contrasting of it with a conception which, restoring to the Dasein the void or at
least the extreme recession of the origin made out of the historicity a ceasless
rending open which frees the origin in exactly that degree to which it recedes
(Foucault, 1966: 334). However, this analytic, even though it aimed at describ-
ing time in its ontological purity, remained imprisoned in the anthropological
paradigm from which it tried to escape. In Sein und Zeit, as Heidegger himself
acknowledged later, the man, thanks to the retreat he maintains respectively to
the retreat of things back to their origin, is still the one who allows them to
develop into their being. Man is always the clearing [Lichtung] that allows
access to all things of the world: [Man] is the opening from which time in
general can be reconstituted, duration can flow, and things, at the appropriate
moment, can make their appearance (1966: 332). Thus, the work of Heidegger
remains an attempt to connect the two separate yet solidary aspects of anthro-
pology: the positive (the temporal beginning) and the fundamental (the
temporalizing clearing) (Dreyfus and Rabinow, 1982). And the reproach made
by Foucault to this strategy is of the same type as the one made against Husserl.
This solution is unstable: as soon as the origin is understood as the historicity of
practices, it retreats again and disappears, because these practices, which are
constitutive, are actually out of reach for the practicians.
Thus the phenomenology, like the historicism, which the former criticizes,
are not anything but symmetrical products of the epistemic conditions of their
epoch. Both have looked at the question of time from the anthropocentric, con-
tradictory and always unbalanced form of knowledge of the modern episteme.
And that is why they appeared as an insatiable and invading will to truth, whose
conditions of possibilities are shown by the archaeology.
The Time in Pieces of Genealogy
The conception of time that Foucault wants to oppose both to historicism and
phenomenology is undergoing a great transformation at the beginning of the
1970s. In Archaeology of Knowledge (1969a), Foucault systematizes his
epistemic conception and extends it to his former studies on madness and clinic,
that were designed in quite a different spirit:
The unity of the discourses on madness would not be based upon the existence of
the object madness, or the constitution of a single horizon of objectivity; it
would be the interplay of the rules that made possible that appearance of objects
during a given period of time. (1969a: 35)
But beside the temporal categories inspired by Les Annales and by Lvi-Strauss
appear new notions. To Braudelian principles of discontinuity (rupture and
branching of processes described traditionally as linear), of multiplicity (tempo-
rality contains differing chronologies which cannot be unified), Foucault adds
the Nietzschean principles of discreteness (irruption and temporal spreading of
the events) and of contingency (no necessity of the events).10
In his inaugural address at the Collge de France, LOrdre du discours (The
Order of Discourse) (1971a), and in the essay entitled Nietzsche, la gnalogie,
lhistoire (Nietzsche, Genealogy, History) (1971b/1994), Foucault explains
that he wants to genealogically rework the question of the conditions of possi-
bility regarding the insatiable deployment of modern knowledge, structurally
studied in The Order of Things. He wants to try to describe the entanglement of
desires and powers that have been at its origin:
True discourse, liberated by the nature of its form from desire and power, is
incapable of recognizing the will to truth which pervades it; and the will to truth,
having imposed itself upon us for so long, is such that the truth it seeks to reveal
cannot fail to mask it. (Foucault, 1971a: 219)
Nietzsche offers, henceforth, the model for a use of history and a conception of
time which are no longer organized by metaphysical concepts. Unlike a great
part of the history written during the 19th century, which was organized around
notions such as unity of meaning, continuity, development and progress, the
Nietzschean genealogy proposes to restore the dispersion, the proliferation, the
heterogeneity, the difference of the event:
The wirkliche Historie transposes the relationship ordinarily established between
the eruption of an event and necessary continuity. An entire historical tradition
(theological or rationalistic) aims at dissolving the singular event into an ideal
continuity as a teleological movement or a natural process. Effective history,
however, deals with events in terms of their most unique characteristics, their
most acute manifestations. An event, consequently, is not a decision, a treaty, a
reign, or a battle, but the reversal of a relationship of forces, the usurpation of
power, the appropriation of a vocabulary turned against those who have once used
it. (Foucault, 1971b/1994: 88)
Thus the deconstruction of linear, continuing and progressive conception of

time is furthered. Time couldnt be unified by reference to synthetic entities
such as subject or man. Now the reference to synthetic and a priori units of truth,
previously patiently reconstructed in The Order of Things, collapses in turn and
the successive blocks, which composed time, are transformed in a kaleido-
scope,11 destroying any unity. Conscious of the fact that the structuralized time
of archaeology still remains moulded in the belief of a lasting truth, Foucault
adopts the time in pieces of the Nietzschean genealogy. The traditional history
both deludes and reassures itself trying to find spiritual units and continuities,
while it actually faces the multiplicity and the discontinuity of a body-time:
History is the concrete body of a development, with its moments of intensity,
its lapses, its extended periods of feverish agitation, its fainting spells; and only
a metaphysician would seek its soul in the distant ideality of the origin
(Foucault, 1971b/1994: 80). History of knowledge appears to have known a
series of intricate conflicts between desires and powers which carried various
wills to truth. And thus these desires and powers are the ones essential to iden-
tify behind each claim to truthfulness.
As we know, this transformation of Foucaults thought leads, in Discipline
and Punish (1975), to a critique of the traditional representations of political
science and philosophy. Far from being at the origin of a development of indi-
vidual liberties and having guaranteed them, the building of modern state, the
constitution of social contract, the development of law would have masked, and
in a certain way reinforced, the actual transformation of domination forms. The
entire juridical discourse and especially the discourse of human rights, would
have been used to hide the generalization and intensification of the detailed play
of subjecting forces, the microphysics of power and the body disciplines that
were imposed at the same time in factories, worker accommodation, barracks,
schools, hospitals and prisons. These assertions sparked off a disapproval as
spectacular as the one provoked by the structuralist-styled analysis, which he
had been developing a few years before against humanism, historicist Marxism
and existentialist philosophy. Ironically, Foucault, who was condemned for his
refusal of history, was now rebuked by critics reproaching him for liking
history too much and disintegrating the transcendental, man and the subject in
the chaos of time. The relativist epistemological and ethical position, which
would have been adopted by Foucault as his critique of democracy, would take
their roots in a vitalist and metaphysical conception of historicity and time,
inherited directly from Nietzsche.12
If we look more closely, the matter seems to be less simple than what his
critics say. Nietzsche refers all representations, science, philosophy and
morality, but also art, to the interplay of forces and the will to power that
expresses itself through them. From this viewpoint, there is no more thing-in-
itself; only phenomena instituted by a perspective and without any vis--vis in a
background-world. There are only events dispersed in time. The thing-in-itself
and the transcendental that faces it seem to be fantasies made up by a will gone
astray, which tries to stop the becoming and to give itself the feeling of control-
ling its proliferation. But at the same time, the world can appear as this surface
without depth, only because it is perceived as deployment of the will to power.
In his last texts, particularly in those edited by his sister, Nietzsche seems to find
again an explanatory systematicity. Then the will to power regains simultane-
ously both roles of the thing in itself, which just disappeared: its critical role of
limit of human knowledge and its ontological role of substratum of the reality.
The will to power means both the disappearance and the reappearance of the
thing in itself in the plane of immanence.
This phenomenon explains why Nietzsches thought can be interpreted in two
absolutely different ways and why we must be cautious not to impute to
Foucault a vitalist thought. Some critics such as Gtz,13 Jaspers14 or Heidegger
(1961), reading mostly from The Will to Power and arguing that the critical role
of the thing-in-itself cannot be detached from its ontological role, consider that
Nietzsche, repatriating the latter in the plane of immanence, builds dogmatic-
ally, whatever one may say, a doctrine of being which aims at establishing the
most general feature of all beings, as when he claims that the most intimate
essence of being is the will to power (cited in Granier, 1966: 372 et seq.).
Nietzsche seems to be then as the one thinker who, inverting the Platonism and
getting rid of the suprasensible lining of the world, actually brought forth the
exact contrary of what he was looking for and put the metaphysical dualism of
the transcendental and the empirical to its climax. But others, no less numerous,
like Deleuze (1962), Granier (1966) or Foucault himself, who refer only to the
greatest of Nietzsches texts and reject the very suspicious edition of his last
writings made up by his sister,15 see, in his thought on the contrary, a critical
radicalization and argue that it aims at the way the essence of being accom-
plishes itself as Being-interpreted (Granier, 1966: 378), i.e. necessarily split or
differentiated. The Nietzschean view is then understood as an antimetaphysical
hyper-Kantism emancipating the thought of any transcendence, as a philosophy
of temporality freed of any synthetic vis--vis.
For not having taken this renewal into account and for not having under-
stood its critical force, in particular, regarding Heidegger his censors, inspired
by the latter, have attributed a questionable interpretation to him. Thus, in a
double irony, they remained blind to the Foucaldian hyper-Kantism,16 which
should have satisfied them, and they unconsciously adopted a philosophy which
they rejected on the other hand. Instead of understanding the critical force of the
new Foucaldian approach, the permanent split that it postulates inside of the
being and the new conception of time that it implies, they only saw in it, like
Heidegger in Nietzsche, a new metaphysics of force, an energetism generalizing
dogmatically to the globality of being a particular quality of human experi-
ence.17
The Time in Spirals of the Power-knowledge Apparatus
To understand the originality of the new conception of time developed by

Foucault, we must not tack onto his work a conception of Nietzsche which he
himself challenges. If we take this precaution, it is then possible to look at this
conception for itself, within its own logic. We will see that the time in pieces of
genealogy is actually not totally chaotic. This time has a particular form, seg-
mented and composed of beams which interplay and divert each other.
In The History of Sexuality I (1976), the temporality of the production of
society and individual is no longer reflected in terms of structural generation,
or in terms of a dialectical or a cumulative development, but like a history of
mutual reinforcement or conflicting movements of practices and knowledge:
The distributions of power and the appropriations of knowledge never repre-
sent only instantaneous slices taken from processes involving, for example, a
cumulative reinforcement of the strongest factor, or a reversal of relationship, or
again, a simultaneous increase of the two terms. (Foucault, 1976: 99)
The apparatus [dispositif] of sexuality that appeared in the West at the end of
the 18th century and in which we have been living since then, neither consists of
a system of rules, nor is generated by a vital, natural, already given entity,
subjected to repression. It is a dynamic, historically limited organization of

powers (clergymen, physicians, parents, educators, social workers, psycholo-
gists), knowledge (psychology, psychiatry, criminology, sociology, demogra-
phy, statistics) and bodies. Sexuality
is the name that can be given to a historical construct (dispositif): not a furtive
reality that is difficult to grasp, but a great surface network in which the
stimulation of bodies, the intensification of pleasures, the incitement to discourse,
the formation of special knowledge, the strengthening of controls and resistances,
are linked to one another, in accordance with a few major strategies of knowledge
and power. (Foucault, 1976: 1056)
Through the historical study of the interplays of power-knowledge apparatus

and of the succession of their conflicts, Foucault reintroduces movement in his
descriptions, although without mobilizing a dialectical logic that would trans-
form history into a process suited for the coming of the transcendence. His new
conception of history is based on the notion of contradiction, but he rejects the
Hegelian idea of Aufhebung.18 Since there is no exterior teleological determina-
tion of the elements of a relation, which would unite them and which could
organize them into a hierarchy, the process of history results from the reciprocal
action of many terms, among which none takes the upper hand and incorporates
definitively their diversity into a superior synthesis. Power and resistance, for
example, are linked by an irreducible tension. There is no power without resist-
ance as there is no resistance without power: Resistances do not derive from a
few heterogeneous principles; but neither are they a lure or a promise that is of
necessity betrayed. They are the odd term in relations of power; they are
inscribed in the latter as an irreducible opposite (Foucault, 1976: 96). Similarly,
there is a reciprocal influence, yet without reduction of their differences,
between the local sources of power-knowledge (relationships between parents
and children, penitents and confessors, etc.) and the general movements of
history (development of disciplinary knowledge, building of controls, institu-
tions, etc.). Between the former and the latter, there is, as Foucault says, no dis-
continuity [. . .] but neither is there homogeneity (1976: 99100). He describes
this contradictory situation as a double conditioning of a strategy by the speci-
ficity of possible tactics, and of tactics by the strategic envelope that makes
them work (1976: 100).
Observed in this way, temporality certainly loses the order and the continuity
that are often attributed to it. However, we would be wrong in dramatically
seeing a pure chaos in it. This vision, through its very excess, shows to what
purpose traditional representations of history are used. Foucault doesnt slip
into a complete fluidification of the description, perceiving only movements,
mobility and multiplicity where he was previously seeing only the stability and
the unity of the rule. Certainly, the historical transformations of powers and
knowledge cannot be reduced either to the progressiveness of dialectical pro-

duction, or to the regularity of structural generation, but we can single out
configurations having their own internal dynamism each time: Relations of
power-knowledge are not static forms of distribution, they are matrices of
transformations (Foucault, 1976: 99). There are local settings, which produce
organized sequences of time, and we can seek rather the pattern of the modifi-
cations which the relationships of force imply by the very nature of their
process (1976: 99). In the transformations of the relation between power and
sex that occurred in the 19th century, there was no doubt an increase of
the efficiency of control but, adds Foucault, there was above all a reciprocal
reinforcement of power and pleasure, a sensualization of power and a gain of
pleasure (1976: 44). Using a mechanical metaphor, he compares these pro-
cesses to
mechanisms with a double impetus: pleasure and power. The pleasure that comes
of exercising a power [. . .] the pleasure that kindles at having to evade this power
[. . .] The power that lets itself be invaded by the pleasure it is pursuing; and
opposite it, power asserting itself in the pleasure of showing off, scandalizing, or
resisting. (Foucault, 1976: 45)
All these changes form a series of comings and goings, which progressively
increase or decrease the tension: capture and seduction, confrontation and
mutual reinforcement (1976: 45). After each step the respective places shift and
the general form of temporal processes looks like a bouquet of rising or
descending spirals: These attractions, these evasions, these circular incitements
have traced around bodies and sexes, not boundaries not to be crossed, but
perpetual spirals of power and pleasure (1976: 45). Further on in the book, the
same idea: It [the power] attracts its varieties by means of spirals in which
pleasure and power reinforce one another; it does not set up a barrier; it pro-
vided places of maximum saturation (1976: 47). Still further on: Pleasure and
power do not cancel or turn back against one another; they seek out, overlap,
and reinforce one another. They are linked together by complex mechanisms
and devices of excitation and incitement (1976: 48).
The Elastic Time of the History of Moral Subject
In The Use of Pleasure (1984a) and The Care of the Self (1984b), Foucault
abandoned the history of sexuality for a history of the forms and modalities of
the relation to self by which the individual constitutes and recognizes himself
qua subject (1984a: 6), a history thanks to which he hoped to be able to under-
stand the birth of the subject of desire (1984a: 6). But this new turn in his work
gave rise once again to many critiques. The fact that the individual, at the same
time both subjugates and subjectivizes himself seemed to many, at best para-
doxical, at worst a useless complication to bring to light the fact that the
individual possesses a priori an ethical subjectivity. Seeking to understand how
the individual institutes himself as a subject, Foucault would play with words
and hide under the cloak of the individual and his practices, the classical
patterns of the subject (it is he who observes and understands his own state,
imagines what he could be, wants to transform himself and then acts according-
ly). According to others, since the subject is simultaneously constituting and
constituted, free and produced by practices, Foucault would repeat the error for
which he has blamed Husserl and he would give a transcendental value to
empirical contents. The surprising reappearence of a theme which was until
then at the neuralgic centre of Foucaults own critiques and refusals would be
the symptom of the failure of the archeological and genealogical methods to
supersede the phenomenology and the aporia of the analytic of finitude.
Foucault would have ended up to be very close, in his last years, to Heidegerrian
hermeneutics and ontology of time (Dreyfus and Rabinow, 1982), which could
be read as the unthought of Foucaults work not what he wouldnt have
thought of, or what he would have forgotten, but what functions in it without
being clearly formulated and thus demands an exterior elaboration (Han, 1998:
27). Finally, the truth of Foucaults conception of time would thus be found in
Heidegger.
With the passing of time, we can judge better both the continuity and the
articulations of his thought. His last approach remains fundamentally genealogi-
cal: the aim is not only to demystify the pseudo-evidence of the cogito on which
we lean, by showing the historical construction of what we take for natural and
transcendental,19 but also to find in the past other forms of subjectivation,
which, Foucault hopes, could be used as basis for an alternative definition of the
subject, usable today (Foucault, 1984c/1994: 343, 34950). On the other hand,
Foucault doesnt aim at a genealogy of the subject conceived as a unitary entity,
but he contents himself by following only the history of the moral subject. As
far as the epistemic and the political subjects are concerned, he refers to his
former studies (Foucault, 1982a/1994: 2223; 1984c/1994: 352). That implies
that there is not one but many subjects to which the individuals have access
according to various ways (epistemic rules, mechanisms of knowledge-power,
practices of the self) and varying temporalities (the epistema, the apparatus and
the practices of the self have different chronologies).20 Thus to affirm that the
individual sets himself up as moral subject doesnt imply the autonomy of his
sensibility or of his reason, nor even of his will or of his imagination. Both the
former and the latter are all instituted, but in various ways and within interfering
histories. What distinguishes moral from epistemic and political subjects is
that it is instituted by a folding of the forces upon themselves;21 whereas the
epistemic subject is cast within a system of rules and the political subject
emerges in the midst of a field of force relations. Thus we must see the indi-
vidual as the seat of an ill-assorted bouquet of processes of subjectivation,
which lean on each other according to an irregular and changing pattern.
It is true that the incompletion of Foucaults work certainly played a great
role in the misconception of his effort to build an ethics yet maintaining the
same spirit as in his former studies. And I must say a few words about that. If
he explicitly contemplated its possibility, Foucault didnt have enough time to
present a complete and organized historical description of all these modes of
subjectivation. His last two books do concentrate essentially on the relation
between practices of the self and problematizations, between working on ones
own life and games of truth. But they leave their relations with the technolo-
gies of power a little bit in the darkness, without anywhere considering either
their relations with the epistemic systems. The former are not absent, as, for
example, in the reflection on the power belonging, in Greece, to the master of
the house over his wife and his people, but the problem is only tackled in other
contemporary texts.22 I cannot but ask the reader to look at these texts, most of
which are unfortunately still inaccessible, but which are essential for an under-
standing of the global meaning of Foucaults thought in its last stage. While
restricting myself to the published texts and knowing that this limitation entails
an under-representation of the theme of power (except the very particular topic
of the power over oneself), which we must keep in mind, it is still possible to
grasp the principal characteristics of the last Foucaldian conceptions of time.
First of all, there is, in these studies, a type of temporality familiar to
Foucaults readers, which seems to bring them some years back. The ancient
subjectivation patterns have known, between the fifth century bc and the third
century ad, a long and relatively stable period of time, during which, as we
shall see, lifestyles were subjected to very slow mutations. When Christianity
prevailed in the fourth century in the entire Graeco-Roman world, a deep trans-
formation made the old culture fall apart and a new era of the history of subjec-
tivation began the one we are still living in characterized by the constitution
of individuals as subjects of desire.
Looking more closely though, we can see that these outlines differ from the
epistemic patterns, which they recall, by a few aspects, which are important.
1. If Foucault gives very few explanations about the practical reasons that
provoked this rupture, these reasons are not absent. There is, as we have already
seen, a number of unpublished essays, which we shall have to take into account
one day. But, without waiting for these publications, we can figure out what
Foucault had in mind through what Paul Veyne says on a very similar issue. It is
probable that, like his friend and interlocutor, Foucault first thinks of the change
in the modes of domination that occurred under Constantine with the Christian-
ization of the imperial power. Veyne provides as example the cessation of the
gladiator fights, in the late Roman empire, and their reproblematization. This
phenomenon, according to him, is directly linked to the installation, in post-

Constantine Rome, of a new type of power. The sovereign doesnt treat the
people as a herd of sheep over which he has to watch, but henceforth as a group
of children requiring education. Since the power acts in a paternal way and no
longer in a pastoral way, the gladiator performances, which exalted the animal
force and energy, are doomed to disappear. Thus the sudden transformation of
the customs in the fourth century is directly linked to the growth of new domi-
nation technologies (Veyne, 1978: 20410).
2. Foucault restores two great ethical models which have converged in the
radical reformulation of the subjectivation modes as subject of desire: This
Hellenistic model, which I would like to analyse with you through the
Epicurean, Cynic and Stoic texts has been historically and for the subsequent
culture recovered, I believe, by two other great models: the Platonic and the
Christian models (Foucault, 19812/2001: 244). The first of these models
appears in Plato and will later spread largely throughout the Neoplatonic
schools, which will participate for a long time in the training of the elites, as
well as in the Gnostic movements (Foucault, 1984a: fr256, 19812/2001: 244).
From the fourth century bc, the Platonic texts do clearly break with some of the
common conceptions of their time, and set a new pattern for the care of the self,
organized by the relation to truth: from the Alcibiades, the care of the self will
consist mainly of knowing oneself. The whole surface of the care of the self
is occupied by this task of knowing ourselves, knowledge which takes, as you
know, the form of the capture by the soul of its own being (19812/2001: 244).
The Symposium and the Phaedrus indicate, as far as they are concerned, a tran-
sition from an erotics structured in terms of courtship practice and recognition
of the others freedom, to an erotics centered on an ascesis of the subject and a
common access to truth (1984a: 244). The second source of the great divide of
the fourth century is the Christian model, particularly in its ascetic-monastic
form, born in Egypt and in Syria, of which Foucault suggests some characteris-
tics in the published volumes of The History of Sexuality and which should have
been the heart of its last volume entitled The Confessions of the Flesh. This
model also entails the reduction of the relation to ones self to the knowledge of
this self. But it differs from the Platonic model because this knowledge occurs
not as a reminiscence but as an exegesis or a deciphering of the secret move-
ments of the soul (19812/2001: 245). In Christianity there is a whole range of
hermeneutical technologies, which consider the soul as a domain of potential
knowledge where barely discernible traces of desire would need to be read and
interpreted (1984a: 89). Because the individual is only aware of himself in the
recognition that his truth escapes from him and in the interpretation of the signs,
which his hidden part sends to him, he is then instituted as subject of desire
(1984a: 89).
3. The long and relatively homogeneous period of time that covers the main
part of Antiquity does not have the immobility of an episteme. It goes through a
type of mutation, which implies, for Foucault, a new conception of temporality.
He notes that there is, from the models of ancient Greece (fourth century bc) to
those of the climax of the Roman Empire (third century ad) a whole set of
recommendations, prohibitions or social norms that remains remarkably con-
stant. The main dietetic precepts change very little (Foucault, 1984b: 104). The
advice concerning the sexual life remains more or less the same (1984b: 237).
The new reflections on marriage, which appear in particular in the Stoic texts of
the Imperial era seek to define a mode of coexistence between husband and
wife, a modality of relations between them, and a way of living together that are
rather different from what was proposed in the classical texts (1984b: 150), but
they do so without calling the traditional structures into question (1984b: 150),
especially without ever thinking of proposing to fit the marriage into a different
legal framework (1984b: 150). Last but not least, the new valorization of love
for boys is partly conserved in spite of a new valorization of the theme of love
between sexes (1984b: 2023).
Yet Foucault spots, on this almost immobile ground, variations that drag the
lifestyles into a slow mutation, into a kind of continental drift of ethics.23 The
transformations, during the Roman Empire, of the problematizations and tech-
nologies of the self developed by the Greeks must be read as an inner mutation
of a relatively stable order and a new appreciation of the elements of this order,
as a shift, a change of orientation, a difference in emphasis (Foucault, 1984b:
67). Regarding dietetics and the problematization of health, the change is
marked by an increased apprehension, a broader and more detailed definition of
the correlations between the sexual act and the body, a closer attention to the
ambivalence of its effects and its disturbing consequences (1984b: 238).
Foucault notes that there is a greater preoccupation with the body (1984b:
238), but also a different way of thinking about sexual activity, and of fearing
it (1984b: 238). Regarding wives and marriage, the transformation concerns
the valorization of the conjugal bond and the dual relation that constitutes it
(1984b: 238). Finally, regarding boys, there is, on the contrary, a deproblemati-
zation and a weakening of the value of friendship bonds. Generally, the art of
taking care of the self is modified by a series of little strokes which finally
change its colours: This art of the self no longer focuses so much on the
excesses that one can indulge in [. . .] it gives increasing emphasis to the frailty
of the individual faced with the manifold ills that sexual activity can give rise to.
It also underscores the need to subject that activity to a universal form by which
one is bound (1984b: 238).
Thus the technologies of the self and the problematizations that are linked to
them undergo transformations whose logic is no longer linked to the play of
interacting forces. These transformations rather occur in accordance with a
model which can be, strictly speaking, labelled as stylistic or rhetorical, a model
opposing relatively constant norms to deviations from these norms provoked by

changes of accentuation. The time that Foucault discovers, while studying the
technologies of the self during Antiquity, seems to be characterized by the slow
drift of the lifestyles, which the spreading of Christianity brutally ended around
the fourth century ad.
If we combine these descriptions, we can see that the temporality of the moral
subject history is once again described by Foucault as organized around a
rupture and as a swift transformation of a relatively stable pattern. Yet there are
at least two differences with the epistemic model. First, despite the incomplete-
ness of his work, we see that Foucault seeks to bridge his archaeological and
his genealogical conceptions. Certainly, the genealogical model of spiralling
movements, which link knowledge, powers and bodies, and which sometimes
accumulate catastrophically their whirls, this model remains valid even if it is
not used much in the last texts. But it gives the impression that these effects
cannot by themselves explain the shift from an ethical world to the next one.
Actually, a slow mutation of the ethical model occurred previously, a mutation
which already greatly transformed it from within. Thus Foucault now sees the
notion of discontinuity as a change of configuration prepared by a slow dis-
placement of accents among the various elements composing the ethical order
of an epoch, provoked by the activity of problematization.
Second, this rupture doesnt occur, as was the case in the theory of epistema,
in a temporality that is homogeneous and which remains as immobile before as
after the rupture. The break doesnt only entail the change of the prevailing form
of subjectification, but also of the form of temporality itself, which acquires a
new rhythm and follows a new mode of transformation. Time gains a kind of
plasticity or elasticity giving to it changing aspects. Before the Christianization
of the Empire, there was an almost invisible mutation of lifestyles. The regime
of historicity was determined by the repetition of the same gestures and the
same maxims, which left very little room for variation. Times are changing very
slowly. Since the victory of Christianity, given that life is no longer an object of
stylization, but the target of a hermeneutics, a new type of historicity or at
least its ethical condition of possibility dominates. Because the individual no
longer has the task to elaborate himself, to model his behaviour, his feelings and
his existence, but to discover himself, his interior secrets and his hidden truth,
and because he has to relate to his body, more like a discourse to which he
listens than an object that he looks at and fashions from outside, time cannot
consist of a series of efforts to intensify the present and its slow drift. Instead it
becomes a journey that has to be covered, and a present always attracted by
the future. With the institution of the subject of desire and want appears the
oriented and always unbalanced historicity in which we are still living now-
adays.
The Vertical Time of Modernity
The elaboration of a genealogy of ethics in the last years of Foucaults life led
him to a philosophy of present and modernity. One of the objectives aimed by
the use of genealogy, during the 1970s, was to make a history of present.
Foucault understood these terms in a very different way than did the historians,
who, following Pierre Nora, began to use them concurrently.24 According to
him, it was not a matter of making the history of the most contemporary period,
insisting on the acceleration of history and on the reevaluation of the event.
Rather, it was a question of reversing our nave understanding of the present by
a circle going through a diagnosis of the current condition of our societies,
based on the identification of their political body technologies (1975: 35), and
the genealogy of the latter which confirms their hidden significance. The
question was to understand correctly what kind of world we are living in and the
genealogy was used to overcome the apparently obvious facts on which we are
resting.25 Discipline and Punish aimed at showing, for example, starting from
the problem of prison and from its genealogy, the large panel of technologies
that were used to discipline the bodies in our modern societies. In The History of
Sexuality I, the confession, the psychoanalytic cure, were singled out as occa-
sions for the elaboration of the technologies of the body experienced every-
where today and yet not known as such.
But this problematic of present has been transformed by the study of the
building of moral subject. This view, according to which our action is a con-
sequence of our correct knowledge of the present, has been replaced by the
complementary view, tracing the roots of our actions back to our temporal con-
dition of being-present itself. In one of his last texts, dedicated partly to Kant (as
curiously his first one too), What is Enlightenment? (Foucault, 1984e/1994),
Foucault no longer contemplates the present as a question of knowledge, but as
a question of ethics, what he calls une ontologie de lactualit. Asking himself
about the meaning of what he is experiencing, the Aufklrung, notes Foucault,
Kant no longer considers the present as one of those revolutions of the world in
which the world is turning backwards (as did Plato in The Stateman), either as
an attempt to decipher in it the heralding signs of a forthcomming event (as did
Augustine), or as a point of transition towards the dawning of a new world (as
did Vico) (1984e/1994: 33). He is probably the first philosopher to try to under-
stand what is the contemporary status [actualit] of his own enterprise, that is
certainly still how the present is placed in the global movement of history, with
its fundamental directions, but also how the individuals are responsible for this
global process:
It is in the reflection on today as difference in history and as motive for a par-
ticular philosophical task that the novelty of this text appears to me to lie. And, by
looking at it in this way, it seems to me we may recognize a point of departure: the

outline of what one might call the attitude of modernity. (Foucault, 1984e/
1994:38)
We understand why the reflection on the present leads Foucault to join the
panel of thinkers who, having abandoned the criteria for action that were pro-
vided by the various historicisms, collided with the question of the ethics:
Nietzsche, Weber, Sartre and the existentialist thinkers, Heidegger, Bataille,
Benjamin, Derrida and the postmodern philosophers. And it is very interesting
to see what kind of solution he proposes. If he rejects those such as Marx and
Habermas, who think that the modernity is the historical period in which uni-
versal emancipation was promised to humankind and that we just have to realize
that not-yet-fulfilled promise, he refuses, on the other hand, to adopt the theme
of postmodernity developed by some thinkers who see, in Heideggers wake,
modernity as an ordinary epoch of the history of being arriving to its end.
Criticizing Lyotard, without spelling things out, he writes:
I know that the modernity is often spoken of as an epoch, or at least as a set of
features characteristic of an epoch; situated on a calendar, it would be preceded by
a more or less naive or archaic premodernity, and followed by an enigmatic and
troubling postmodernity. (. . .) Thinking back on Kants text, I wonder whether
we may not envisage modernity rather as an attitude than as a period of history.
(Foucault, 1984e/1994: 39)
Against the flight of postmodern thinkers into a philosophy of language games,

actually closer to Heidegger than to Wittgenstein, and against the relativism that
threatens them, Foucault keeps the criterion of modernity while giving to it a
meaning other than the one it possesses in the modern humanist tradition.26
According to him, modernity is above all an attitude whose early features he
traces back not only to Kant, but also to Nietzsche, to the Greeks and to
Baudelaire27: To be modern is not to accept oneself as one is in the flux of
the passing moments; it is to take oneself as object of a complex and difficult
elaboration: what Baudelaire, in the vocabulary of his day, calls dandysme.
(1984e/1994: 41). Thus, for Foucault, modernity is not a historical period but
the project, the task and the work of making of his body, his behavior, his
feelings and passions, his very existence, a work of art (1984e/1994: 41). It
requires us to oppose the hermeneutical way of subjectivation that dominates
our culture, and to adopt an attitude close to that of the Greeks.
This last idea presented by Foucault hasnt provoked fewer reactions than the
preceding ones. Numerous voices have reproached him for following the flow
of the individualism of the 1980s. After having been one of the most influential
ideologists of Parisian leftism, he would have pulled back out of the fight for
emancipation. He would have adopted the attitude of an aesthete, of a dandy, of
a postmodern without postmodernity. He would have surfed on the hedonist and
narcissistic wave, which submerged the entire Occident during those years.28
But here, once again, it seems that these objections go in the wrong direction.29
First, Foucault was not unconscious of the risks of misinterpretation of an
ethics, which wants to be an aesthetics of existence. We know that very early
on, he read and appreciated Christopher Laschs (1979) book, The Culture of
Narcissism, one of the first studies on contemporary narcissism (whose begin-
ning Lasch traces, besides, much before the 1980s) (Martin et al., 1988: 4).
Second, if the practices of liberty, which Foucault now refers to, are not
practices of liberation or emancipation, it is not because these practices are
not sometimes, indeed often, necessary, but because they are not sufficient by
themselves and because their mottos are still greatly inspired by metaphysical
humanist concerns (Foucault, 1984f/1994: 710). The practices of liberty cannot
use any transcendental criteria as guides, be they transcendental markers emerg-
ing gradually out of the historical actions, or a vanishing transcendence as in the
phenomenology. They are condemned to permanently invent and spring up, as
untimely verticals, perpendicular to the flow of history, in order to break
through the walls of the passing time. In this morality, which is closer to Walter
Benjamins than to Sartres, the present opens onto a multiplicity of forms of
action in which authenticity has less worth than autonomy (Foucault, 1984c/
1994: 351).
Third, Foucault avoids a simple return of the transcendental subject or the
glorification of the I, because he considers the ethical subject in a very new
way, i.e. not hermeneutically, as assert Dreyfus, Rabinow and Han, but from a
poetics viewpoint. The analysis dedicated to Baudelaire escapes from the
genealogy versus phenomenology dilemma and shows what very few philo-
sophers or specialists in human sciences have been able to see.30 Baudelaire
invents, from his own literary practice, a conception of modernity which is
not historicist or simply aesthetic, or aimed at flattering the sensibility, nor
defined by the Heideggerian experience of the Sprache. He sees that modernity
is not, as contend numerous philosophers, historians and sociologists, a never
satisfied will to break with the tradition and a sterile attraction for the new. It is
not even an epoch dominated by the subjectivity or the science. For Baudelaire,
it is first of all an ethical attitude, an ethos, a twofold mode of existence: on the
first hand, it is imagining the present different as it is, it is criticizing it intransi-
gently and transforming it through practices of liberty (Foucault, 1984e/1994:
41); on the other hand, it is looking very carefully at it, and attempting to
extract from fashion whatever element it may contain of poetry within history
(Baudelaire, 1976: 693), that is to say, it is looking for something lasting and
transmissible:
For him, being modern does not lie in recognizing and accepting this perpetual
movement; on the contrary, it lies in adopting a certain attitude with respect to this
movement; and this deliberate, difficult attitude consists in recapturing something

eternal that is not beyond the present instant, nor behind it, within it. (Foucault,
1984e/1994: 39)
Thus this ethics of modernity blasts the individualist opposition between

individual and society, between the I and the Other, between future and present,
present and past. Indeed the literature necessarily escapes out of the biographic
framework and addresses potentially everybody. In this new meaning, as
Rimbaud would say I is an other and the present a transpresent.
Conclusion
Substituting the systematic spirit by the Nietzschean essay [Versuch], and

the transcendental analysis by the genealogy, Foucault has thus produced no
general theory of time. Yet, as we have seen, we can certainly classify his work
among the few works, which count on that matter, not only because of the rich-
ness and the diversity of its models of temporalities, but also because of its
critical force against the models, which have been dominating in turn our intel-
lectual life for the last two centuries.
Thanks to the development of the archaeological and genealogical methods,
Foucault first got rid of both the philosophies of history developed during the
19th century and of the main philosophies of historicity that contested them
subsequently. The former as well as the latter tried to face the challenge of the
originary and of the radical historicity of thought, but they all tripped on the
difficulty, whether by anthropocentrism or by lack of radicalism in the critique:
some adopted a nave solution reducing time to an objective flow or to an
eschatology (positivism, Hegelianisms); some others looked for, in actual
experience or in existence, a finer solution, but they couldnt escape from
their oscillations between an ontology of life and a transcendental conception of
time (Husserlian and existentialist phenomenology).
Some critics, as we have seen, consider that this critical endeavour led
Foucault to adopt, at the end of his life, a perspective very close to the
Heideggerian hermeneutics (Dreyfus and Rabinow, 1982; Ijsseling, 1986;
Dreyfus, 1989). Having learnt a lesson from the failure of the attempt to
supersede the phenomenology by the archaeology, Foucault would have
then reached a superior degree of understanding of the question of time and
would have adopted solutions close to the ones proposed by Heidegger. The
Foucauldian concept of power would be equivalent to the concept of being as
time elaborated by his predecessor. It would institute the Lichtung from which
the objects and the actions would spread out. Thus the genealogy of power
would be parallel to the Heideggerian history of being. It would allow a history
of truth to be made, whose phases would be close to those identified by

Heidegger, and the association of each one of these phases with a particular
definition of the essence of man, analysed by Foucault as a form of subjectiva-
tion. Other critics, while seeing some common points between the two thinkers,
have challenged this interpretation and have read in the late Foucault a return to
the Sartrian subject, reflexivity and metaphysics of liberty, which would herald,
this time, the failure of his entire work. Far from getting closer to Heidegger,
Foucault would have missed both the deepening of his own Nietzscheanism and
the adoption of a hermeneutical ontology towards which, it seems, he was point-
ing (Han, 1998).
As far as I am concerned, I think, on the contrary, that the Foucauldian con-
ception of time doesnt find its truth and meaning in Heidegger, be it positively
or negatively, and that Foucault indeed proposes a convincing alternative to
the temporal mystics to which the Heideggerian interpretation of the radical
historicity of thought finally reaches.31 Foucault doesnt return at the end of his
life, as Han claims through a not always precise reading of the texts, to the
classical conscious, reflective and auto-instituted subject. He proposes a real
history of subjectivation processes, without postulating a transhistorical subjec-
tive entity. He fully historicizes the subject, the body and the truth. But, on the
other hand, he is far from explaining this history, as Dreyfus and Ijsseling say,
as a result of the sending of the being, of an erratic history of truth in time,
which man would only passively receive and of whose actions he would be the
result. Foucault certainly proposes to historicize the concept of man, to dissolve
any transcendental principle through genealogy and archaeology, but this
doesnt lead him, in contrast to Heidegger, to abandon the notion of human
liberty for the only liberty of the being.
Actually, Foucault draws from Nietzsches undertaking very different con-
clusions than did Heidegger. That is why his entire work since the 1970s implies
a virulent critique of the Heideggerian ontological conception and sketches
the outlines of a new theory of time and history. In Sein und Zeit, Heidegger,
who still remained under the influence of the Husserlian programme, affirmed
that time was the transcendental horizon of any understanding of the being,
generally speaking, i.e. the archcondition of possibility of any knowledge and
of any practice, since precisely it was the essential aspect of the one being who
understands, the Dasein. Subsequently, while criticizing the rest of the anthro-
pological presuppositions that still marked this conception, breaking definitive-
ly with Husserl, he radicalized this description of the essence of being and
argued that time must not be defined from the Dasein, but the Dasein from
time. Thus, time would be the place for an erratic veiling and unveiling of
being, which wouldnt depend at all on man, and which would, on the contrary,
impose its mutations on him. Our condition of temporal beings wouldnt leave
any other choice to us than to try to listen to what is coming from the being to
us, especially, Heidegger added in the last part of his life, through language
[Sprache].
To these statements, Foucault answers that if time cannot indeed be con-
ceived phenomenologically as a mere transcendental and immutable condition
of possibility of any human knowledge and practice, it cannot either be thought
of ontologically as a horizon of a multiple and erratic spreading of the original
essence of truth, which would be independent of the human beings and their
fights. The very idea of an originary, constantly setting back, such as the one
described through the figure of the ontological difference, or the idea of a pri-
mordial opening which would allow all openings by its very obscurity, badly
masks the will and the moral perspectives that motivated them successively.
Behind the radically and willingly destroying concept of a disappearing arche,
we can perceive Heideggers revolutionary desires, experienced between the
wars, whether on the ethical level (against Judaism, Christianity and humanism)
or on the political level (against democracy, capitalism and bolshevism).
Destroying metaphysics is to participate in the destruction of the various worlds,
which are founded on it. Similarly, the language-based reinterpretation of the
relation between being and time proposed by Heidegger after the war doesnt
completely hide the new moral and political viewpoint adopted by the philo-
sopher after the failure of his former political commitment. Thus, the idea that
only the language speaks [nur die Sprache spricht] and that man says and
understands in history only the aspects of the being that the language uncovers
for him, this idea is linked to his search of Gelassenheit, i.e. interior serenity,
mystical wait of the coming of the word, retreat and passivity regarding history.
Thus, the ontology of time, even in the very particular meaning Heidegger
gives to that term, is nothing but a viewpoint about time. The latter, as well as
the being, is actually always interpreted, constituted by the perspective and the
force that apply to it. It only receives form and meaning from the various moral
perspectives, which solicit it in the midst of the current struggles.32 Therefore, it
can be conceived in multiple ways, which correspond each time to a position in
an existing conflict, as shown by the various complaints Foucault had to face
each time he changed his conception of time. For example, time can be seen as
a stratified flow composed of temporalities proceeding at various speeds, as a
string of immobile blocks separated by swift breaks, as a succession of explod-
ing events, as a series of sequences progressing in spirals, as an oriented length
of time following another length of time subjected to a slow systemic drift, or as
a present which raises vertically its practices of liberty. Time has changing faces
according to the objects whose transformation it measures (dividing practices of
reason, rules of knowledge generation, apparatus of power-knowledge disci-
plining the bodies, productions of moral subjects), but these objects are them-
selves chosen accordingly to moral and political projects. That is why our
radical historicity and the critique of the anthropological illusion that it implies
dont indicate that we have to imprison ourselves in the only temporality of the
Sprache and adopt an attitude of retreat and of quasi-mystical waiting. On the
contrary, our historicity opens to us infinite possibilities of interpretations of
time and as many practices of liberty.
Notes
1. Certainly Foucaults perspective remains historical, declared Sartre. He distin-

guishes different periods, a before and an after. But he replaces cinema by magic
lantern, movement by a succession of immobile states (Sartre, 1966, cited in
Eribon, 1991: 191).
NB: As far as Foucaults works are concerned, I give only the dates of the French
editions; but the page numbers are given from the English translations, when I could
find them (see list of references). Otherwise, they refer to the French editions.
2. According to Foucault himself (1982b/1994: 282).
3. See, for example Serres (1962/1969) or Deleuze (1986).
4. In 1984, Foucault adds The Critique of Judgement to the clues of the substitution of
the classical world by the modern world (see 1985a/1994: 775).
5. This obliteration of the role played by Les Annales is one of the flaws of the inter-
esting study by Dreyfus and Rabinow (1982), as in many of the same type.
6. The Braudelian model emphasizes the plurality of the social time. It distinguishes
between the short and fast time of the event, which suits the individuals, the
slower time of social transformations, and the long and not much mobile time of
economic and mental structures. With Braudel and Labrousse, and later Duby,
Goubert, Le Goff, Le Roy Ladurie, and independently Aris, a new kind of history
prevails, which gets rid of the fascination typical of the former history writing, for
the transient time of events, usually of a strictly political or military nature and
which concentrates more and more on the lower and the slower levels of the tempo-
rality. Even if Foucault rejects the concept of mentality, his first studies on the
birth of the psychiatric and medical institutions, as well as those on history of
science, fit very well in the new frame proposed by Les Annales. Besides, Madness
and Civilization was well received in the journal Annales E.S.C. by Robert Mandrou
and Fernand Braudel himself. On the longue dure and the stratified temporality
see the pioneering article of Braudel (1958/1969) and Vovelle (1978).
7. The concept of immobile history radicalizes the Braudelian concept of long time.
Just as in Foucault the notion of episteme doesnt imply any absence of changes, but
does establish their regulated mode of appearance, in Le Roy Ladurie (1974/1978,
1995) the idea surfaces that the societies of the Ancien Rgime have experienced,
because of the immobility of the agriculture techniques, only superficial transforma-
tions without any growth. During this long agrarian cycle, lasting between the 11th
and the 18th centuries, the phases of expansion, contraction and resumption suc-
ceeded one another without ever destabilizing the system.
8. According to Labrousse, the crisis represents a period of time when the tension
between structures and circumstances reaches its climax, and when the dialectic of
disorder can deliver a new order. On this topic, see Labrousse, 1933, 1944. As early
as 1950, Braudel writes: Then, what is a social discontinuity, if not in historical lan-
guage one of those structural ruptures, one of these deep, silent, painless breaks, as
they say. One was born within one particular state of society (that is to say, simulta-
neously, a mentality, some frames, a civilization and especially an economic
civilization), which several generations have known before us, but everything can
collapse before our life ends (Braudel, 1950/1969: 132). A few years later: Still
more significant than the deep structures of life are their breaking points, their swift
or slow deterioration under the pressure of contradictory forces (Braudel, 1958/
1969: 71).
9. The theme of the return of the event is launched by an historian of the contempo-
rary period (Pierre Nora), but is rapidly adopted by the Marxist historians of the
modern period (Michel Vovelle), who want to keep alive the idea of revolutionary
rupture attacked by the supporters of a more right wing conception of the longue
dure (Franois Furet). It is developed as well by the historians inspired by the
1968 events, more attached to restore the speech of the unknowns or of the not
remembered by the history than the one of the masses (Arlette Farge). This trend
is parallel to the Italian development of the micro-history with Carlo Ginzburg and
Giovanni Levi. On history of event, see Nora (1974) and for a good presentation of
the spirit of this period, Farge (1997). Foucault participates in these changes with
works, which are less read than others, but which are not less interesting (Foucault,
1973; Farge and Foucault, 1982).
10. Daddabo (1998) accurately lists these categories.
11. According to a very appropriate metaphor coined by Veyne (1978: 225).
12. The most explicit expression of this thesis can be found in the text Foucault
and Deleuze: the Vitalism against the Law (Ferry and Renaut, 1987: 77 et seq.). But
it supports many other critiques made about Foucault on different grounds. See for
example, Gauchet and Swain (1980), Habermas (1985) and Honneth (1986).
13. One can see that the will to power becomes a substitute for what the early meta-
physics called God. It is a formula, a simple word for something that cannot be
expressed with a formula or word.
14. Jaspers writes about Jenseits von Gut und Bse: So Nietzsche ends up with a
determination in the old metaphysical way. The universe seen from within, the
universe defined and described through its intelligible characteristics wont be any-
thing else than the will to power (Jaspers, 1936/1961: 298, cited in Granier, 1966:
375).
15. In one of his last interviews, Foucault explains: My relation to Nietzsche, or what I
owe Nietzsche, derives mostly from the texts of around 1880, where the question of
the truth, the history of the truth and the will to truth were central to his work
(1983/1994: 32). And later on, he adds: I think there is a perceptible displacement in
Nietzsches texts between those which are broadly preoccupied with the question
of will to knowledge and those which are preoccupied with the will to power
(1983/1994: 33).
16. Franois Ewald, who at that time was his assistant at The Collge de France, writes
under his control: If Foucault certainly belongs to the philosophical tradition, it is to
the critical tradition which begins with Kant and one could name its project Critical
History of the Thought (Foucault, 1984d/1994: 631).
17. Certainly, it is not difficult to find in Foucaults works numerous statements which
have vitalist undertones. One finds, for example, especially in the texts written
during the 1970s, a whole set of metaphors linked to generation. He speaks about
perpetual inventiveness and about a steady burgeoning of methods and proce-

dures (1976: 119). He refers to sexuality as the proliferating meaning that had
always to be taken control of again lest it escape (1976: 148). But these statements
are integrated into a large strategy which renounced very consciously to vitalism and
to any forms of the primacy of immediacy which sustained his first books. Foucault
says it to Bernard-Henri Lvy: What you call naturalism refers, I believe, to two
things. A certain theory, the idea that under power, with its acts of violence and its
artifice, we should be able to rediscover the things themselves in their primitive
vivacity: behind the asylum walls, the spontaneity of madness; through the penal
system, the generous fever of delinquency; under the sexual interdict, the freshness
of desire. And also a certain aesthetic and moral choice: power is bad, ugly, poor,
sterile, monotonous and dead; and what power is exercised upon is right, good and
rich (1977/1994: 120).
18. This rejection is clearly inspired by Nietzsche, but is also very close to the concept
of Wechselwirkung developed by Humboldt.
19. Foucault often spoke on this topic: In the first place, I do indeed believe that there is
no sovereign, founding subject, a universal form of subject to be found everywhere.
I am very sceptical of this view of the subject and very hostile to it. I believe, on the
contrary, that the subject is constituted through practices of subjection, or, in a more
autonomous way, through practices of liberation, of liberty, as in Antiquity, on the
basis of course, of a number of rules, styles, inventions to be found in the cultural
environment (1984g/1994: 501). For a more precise assessment of this idea, see
also (1984f/1994: 718).
20. The idea of the multiplicity of types of subjectivation available to the individuals
appears very early in Foucaults work. See for example, Foucault (1969b/1994:
118).
21. That is what the Greeks have done: they have folded up the force upon itself, with-
out destroying it. They have related it to itself. Far from ignoring interiority, indi-
viduality and subjectivity, they have invented the subject, but as a byproduct, as the
result of a process of subjectivation (Deleuze, 1986: 106).
22. See his analysis of Platos Alcibiades, where Foucault shows the relation between
the problematization of power upon oneself and that of power upon others
(19812/2001). See also, his studies on the Parrhesia and on the Cynics for whom
the free speech is always in a certain way a risky critique of the power (1985b). See
also the careful descriptions of the Christian penitence practices, which link search
for truth and direction of conscience (197980, 1981).
23. It would be interesting to compare this Foucaldian idea with the slow drift of the
demographic and economic system of the European agrarian world between 1320
and 1720, described by Le Roy Ladurie (1995), as well with the recent critiques
attacking, on the contrary, the explanatory potential of the homoeostatic principle
for the history of population (Lee, 1992). One would see how Foucault remains
close to Les Annales even in his last period.
24. On the history of present according to the historians, see Nora (1978). For
Foucault, see The history of present and the interpretative analytic in Dreyfus and
Rabinow (1982).
25. In an interview given in 1977 in the aftermath of the publication of The History of
the Sexuality I, the question of what we are in our present [actualit] is presented as
the question of a correct analysis of what we are living (1977/1994: 121).
26. For a historical and conceptual distinction of modernity and the modern see
Michon (1999).
27. This interpretation of Kant, which could seem strange to some readers, follows the
lines of the interpretation of Nietzsche as hyper-Kantian explained above.
28. See, for example, the question asked by Dreyfus and Rabinow (Foucault, 1984c/
1994: 350; Ferry and Renaut, 1985, 1987; Hadot, 1989: 267).
29. Except those of Pierre Hadot, who reads Foucault all at once with sympathy and
without leniency (Michon, 2002).
30. As far as we know, Henri Meschonnic is the only one thinker, with Foucault, to give
their full significance to Baudelaires intuitions of the necessity to reconceptualize
the concepts of modernity and present them from the viewpoint of the poetics
(Meschonnic, 1988/1993).
31. For a critique of the Heideggerian conception of time and history, see Michon
(2000).
32. Unfortunately, I discovered after writing this paper Leonardo Daddabbos book
(1999) dedicated to the question of time in Foucault. Daddabbo explains the diver-
sity of Foucaults conceptions by the project of thinking the time through the body.
It is an interesting hypothesis, which should be discussed seriously, and I regret not
having been able to do it here.
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PASCAL MICHON is Director of Program at the Collge International de

Philosophie (Paris), PhD in History (dir. J. Le Goff.), former student of the
cole Normale Suprieure. He published two books, on the anti-historicist
thought between the wars (Mauss, Huizinga, Groethuysen) and on herme-
neutics (Gadamer). He is preparing a new book on Michel Foucault. He
tries to construct theoretical tools for a history of the subject. ADDRESS:
Collge International de Philosophie, 1 rue Descartes, F-75005 Paris,
France.
[email: [email protected].]

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Time & Society

Strata, Blocks, Pieces, Spirals, Elastics and Verticals : Six figures of

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ABSTRACT. In a genuine Nietzschean way, Michel Foucault

commentators have insisted a lot, reinforcing, though unwillingly, the image of

The Stratified Time of History According to Les Annales

The project of Histoire de la folie lge classique (Madness and Civilization)

The Time in Blocks of Archaeology

spaces of communication (1969a: 126). Scientific topics such as labour, lan-

experienced temporality, to articulate the possible objectivity of a knowledge

The Time in Pieces of Genealogy

Thus the deconstruction of linear, continuing and progressive conception of

The Time in Spirals of the Power-knowledge Apparatus

To understand the originality of the new conception of time developed by

subjected to repression. It is a dynamic, historically limited organization of

Through the historical study of the interplays of power-knowledge apparatus

knowledge cannot be reduced either to the progressiveness of dialectical pro-

The Elastic Time of the History of Moral Subject

phenomenon, according to him, is directly linked to the installation, in post-

opposing relatively constant norms to deviations from these norms provoked by

The Vertical Time of Modernity

looking at it in this way, it seems to me we may recognize a point of departure: the

Against the flight of postmodern thinkers into a philosophy of language games,

movement; and this deliberate, difficult attitude consists in recapturing something

Thus this ethics of modernity blasts the individualist opposition between

Substituting the systematic spirit by the Nietzschean essay [Versuch], and

of truth to be made, whose phases would be close to those identified by

1. Certainly Foucaults perspective remains historical, declared Sartre. He distin-

perpetual inventiveness and about a steady burgeoning of methods and proce-

Foucault, M. (1961) Histoire de la folie lge classique. Paris: Gallimard.

Foucault, M. (1984f/1994) Lthique du souci de soi comme pratique de la libert, in

Nora, P. (1974) Le retour de lvnement, in J. Le Goff and P. Nora (eds) Faire de

PASCAL MICHON is Director of Program at the Collge International de

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