Michel
Foucault, “Nietzsche, Freud, Marx” (1964)
“Nietzsche, Freud, Marx,” in Nietzsche, Cahiers du Royaumont.
Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1964, 183-200 (based on a “round
table ” discussion held at Royaumont, July 4-8, 1964); trans.
“Nietzsche, Freud, Marx,” In Gayle L. Ormiston, Alan D.
Schrift (eds). Transforming the Hermeneutic Context. Albany,
NY: State University of New York Press, 1990, 59-67.
French and German theory has produced a kind of composite of construct
of Nietzsche, Freud, Marx which we might call NFM. Foucault was one
of the first to group them together as “masters of suspicion”
in his essay, “Nietzsche, Freud, Marx”(1964). A year later,
the same NFM construct, the same “masters of suspicion,”
appear in Paul Ricoeur’s De l’interpretations: Essai sur
Freud (trans. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation). By
‘masters of suspicion’ Foucault and Ricoeur mean that all
three approach culture, discourse and text suspiciously, as distorted
communication for an underlying, concealed motive, whether it be the
will to power (Nietzsche), sexual desire (Freud) or class interest (Marx).
Outline
Introduction: (pp. 59-61.1)
Language gives rise to two kinds of suspicion:
- language does not say exactly what it means; it transmits another
meaning beneath it
- many things in the world speak that are not language
I. Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx founded a new of possibility
of interpreting signs
Nietzsche (Birth of Tragedy), Freud (Interpretation of Dreams) and
Marx (Capital, Book 1) caused three “inexhaustible wounds,”
the last of which was Freud’s discovering that consciousness was
based on the unconscious. The supposed depth of signs is only a game;
signs are not enigmatic; instead examine the “exteriority”
of signs.
II. Consequences: with NFM, interpretation became an endless
task (pp. 63.2-64.2)
Interpretation is always fragmented; it always denies access to origin.
Foucault describes the experience that is so important for hermeneutics:
“The further one goes in interpretation, the closer one approaches
at the same time an absolutely dangerous region where interpretation
is not only going to find its points of no return but where it is going
to disappear itself as interpretation, bringing perhaps the disappearance
of the interpreter himself.” (63.3)
Interpretation is inexhaustible; it is never finished: Foucault compares
it to the “infinite and infinitely problematic character of the
relationship of the analyzed and the analyst” in psychotherapy.
The breaking point of interpretation is the experience of madness (cf.
p. 67).
There is no original signified; words are not primary enigmatic signs
to be interpreted; the interpreter does not make “himself a master
of a sleeping truth in order to utter it”. In fact, interpretation
precedes the sign; the sign is not “a simple benevolent thing”;
the sign has an ambiguous quality; it is a mask which covers up this
act of interpretation. Deleuze (Nietzsche et la philosophie) discusses
“the whole play of negative concepts, contradictions, oppositions,
in short, the ensemble of that play of reactive forces” (p. 64.2).
III. First characteristic of hermeneutics (pp. 64.3-66.3)
There is nothing primary to interpret; everything is already interpretation;
every sign is an interpretation of another sign.
IV. Second characteristic of hermeneutics (66.4-67)
Interpretation has the obligation of interpreting and correcting itself
endlessly.
Consequently:
- We must interpret who has posed the interpretation because the interpreter
is the origin of the interpretation
- Interpretation is circular; it must always interpret itself
• The death of interpretation is the result of belief in signs;
this death creates a “reign of terror where the marks rule”
• The life of interpretation depends upon believing that there
is nothing to interpret but interpretations
(The pagination refers to English translation in Transforming the
Hermeneutic Context)
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