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Cultural Values
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Modernist misapprehensions
of Foucault's aesthetics
Jon Simons

Lecturer in Critical Theory , University of

Nottingham
Published online: 17 Mar 2009.

To cite this article: Jon Simons (2000) Modernist misapprehensions of Foucault's

aesthetics, Cultural Values, 4:1, 40-57, DOI: 10.1080/14797580009367185
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Cultural Values ISSN 1362-5179

Volume 4 Number 1 2000 pp. 40-57

Modernist Misapprehensions of Foucault's

Aesthetics

Downloaded by [Universite Laval] at 18:59 06 October 2014

Jon Simons
University of Nottingham

Abstract. Several critics of Foucault, notably Alan Megill and Jrgen

Habermas, accuse Foucault of being an 'aestheticist'. As such, Foucault
fails to realise that the very appeal to aesthetics is made possible by
modernity's rationalization, which offers better resources for
emancipation than dangerous aestheticizations. This paper argues that
such criticisms mistakenly deploy only certain modernist notions of
aesthetics against Foucault. There are some fair grounds for holding that
Foucault does appeal to such conceptions of aesthetics in his theorization
of transgression, not least because of his interest in modernist, avantgarde writers and artists such as Roussel and Magritte. Yet, overall,
Foucault's interest in avant-garde aesthetics is not modernist in the
sense understood by his critics. Foucault tends to focus on modernist
illustration of the absence of foundations for representation and
language, adopting a paraesthetic angle of critique. The limiting
conditions that make representation possible can be seen in this light as
both contingent yet necessary. Foucault's model of critique is developed
in his early analyses of avant-garde art and then expanded to cover
subjectivity and the aesthetics of existence in his later philosophical
critical ethos of modernity. Foucault uses avant-garde art as a critical
mode of reflection, to analyse and rethink the limits of the present.

Introduction
Several critics of Foucault, notably Alan Megill and Jrgen Habermas,
accuse Foucault of being an 'aestheticist'. By this they mean that
Foucault makes an exaggerated and illegitimate appeal to one of
modernity's marginalized value spheres as a reaction against the
repressive consequences of modernity. Foucault's aestheticism is not one
of art for art's sake in which art is considered a higher reality aloof from
fallen reality. Rather, his is a Nietzschean pan-aestheticism that 'imposes
the aesthetic attitude on all spheres of life ... [and] refuses to respect the
separate "inner logics" in differentiated realms of human cognition, i.e.,
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Modernist Misapprehensions of Foucault's Aesthetics 41

science, morality, and art' (Wolin, 1986, p.73). In particular, Megill

argues that Foucault fails to distinguish between discourse and reality
(or imagination and cognition); and Habermas argues that Foucault fails
to realise that the very appeal to aesthetics is made possible by
modernity's rationalization, or differentiation of the value spheres,
which offers better resources for emancipation than dangerous
aestheticizations.
Much of the negative discussion about Foucault's aestheticism
focuses on his later work on 'arts of the self and aesthetics of existence.
For example, according to Terry Eagleton (1990) Foucault's selfreferential arts of the self are models of autonomous revolt against
subjection that follow the autotelic logic of aesthetics. But Foucault's
aestheticization of power as autonomous and self-referential,
exemplified by Greek aesthetics of existence, precludes any model of
society by celebrating nothing more than individual style (pp. 390-3). In
Eagleton's terms, Foucault simply asserts the ideological autonomous
subject of bourgeois aesthetic modernism. Wolin (1986) also argues that:
'Only with Foucault's later work ... does aesthetic decisionism become
the dominant leitmotif (p. 79). Greek aesthetics of existence, with their
relative freedom from normalization and emphasis instead on stylistic
criteria as a basis for ethics, are adopted by Foucault as a positive model.
Similarly, Baudelaire shows Foucault how 'art passes over into the sphere
of life' (p. 82). However, 'once an aestheticist outlook becomes the sole
determinant of life', no other constraints on action are acknowledged.
Hence, 'Foucault's standpoint favors either an attitude of narcissistic
self-absorption or one of outwardly directed, aggressive selfaggrandizement' (p. 85).
Such criticisms unfortunately overlook, for the most part, Foucault's
earlier work on modernist art, which would probably the best source for
evidence of his modernist aestheticism, as Wolin (1986, p. 73) observes.
Attention to this earlier work shows that it was in that context that
Foucault's critical ethos developed. The transgressive stance that
underlies his later work, including his notion of aesthetics of existence,
emerges from his critical relation to modernist art which is paraesthetic
rather than aestheticist (Carroll, 1987). Revisiting Foucault's writing on
the avant-garde not only brings to light the continuity of Foucault's
critical approach, but also rebuts the accusations of aestheticism. Critics
who make such charges mistakenly deploy only certain modernist
notions of aesthetics against Foucault, ones which centre on art as an
autonomous value sphere of culture.
There are some fair grounds for holding that Foucault does appeal to
such conceptions of aesthetics in his theorization of transgression, not
least because of his interest in modernist, avant-garde writers and artists
such as Roussel and Magritte. Yet, overall, Foucault's interest in avantgarde aesthetics is not modernist in the sense understood by his critics.

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42 Jon Simons

Even if he does sometimes mistake transgression of limits for their

transcendence, Foucault tends to focus on modernist illustration of the
absence of foundations for representation and language. The limiting
conditions that make representation possible can be seen in this light as
both contingent (as current limits are not the only possible ones) yet
necessary (as some limits or rules of language are required). I argue that
Foucault's model of critique is developed in his early analyses of avantgarde art and then expanded to cover subjectivity in his later
philosophical critical ethos of modernity. Closer attention to these earlier
critical analyses should moderate the critics' comments. Rather than
understanding modernist art as a realm of freedom without limitations,
as either an escape from modernity or a model for its emancipation,
Foucault uses avant-garde art as a critical tool, as a mode of critical
reflection, to analyse and rethink the limits of the present. While his later
work remains indebted to the critical approach developed in his
analyses of the avant-garde, Foucault is not an 'aestheticist' in the way
his critics suggest.

Modernist Critiques of Foucault's Aesthetics

Alan Megill
Megill (1985) places Foucault within an aestheticist critique of the
Enlightenment which rejects the Kantian separation of the practical,
theoretical and aesthetic realms. Such 'modernist Romantics' have 'a
tendency to see "art" or "language" or "discourse" or "text" as
constituting the primary realm of human experience' (p. 2). Foucault is
thus said to exploit the opening left by Kant when he established the
autonomy of aesthetic judgement in its assessments of a 'purposiveness
without purpose', unconstrained by moral purpose or sensual pleasure.1
Megill's basic argument with Foucault is that he produces art rather
than truth. He places considerable emphasis on Foucault's statement
that:
I have never written anything but fictions ... It seems to me that the
possibility exists for fiction to function in truth ... for a fictional discourse
to induce effects of truth, and for bringing it about that true discourse
engenders or 'manufactures' something that does not as yet exist.
(Foucault, 1980, p.193)

So, Megill says, Foucault writes 'useful myths ... that will disorder order
... break up what is extant ... turn the present into the past'. Or, as he
puts it more blatantly, 'Foucault is engaging in a legitimate rhetorical
tactic, telling us lies about the past in order to open our eyes to the

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Modernist Misapprehensions of Foucault's Aesthetics 43

reality of the present'. Foucault's tactic is sensible, as 'sometimes logical

and historical correctness may contribute to this aim [of] ... changing the
way things are ... but it is equally plausible that they may not' (Megill,
1985, pp. 235, 244, 245). Rhetoric has force as a form of prophecy,
expressing potentiality, which in Foucault's case is a potential to be
other than what we are.
Megill claims that 'Foucault is viewing the world as if it were
discourse ... if the world is discursive, the whole of the extant order is
discursive' (p. 238). This is said to follow from Foucault's aestheticist
outlook. The aestheticist ploy is to turn the confinement of the aesthetic
realm in the margins of the discursive formation and human experience,
into an attempt to dominate the other value spheres. It is a strategic
realignment within the modern episteme. Megill's objections to the
aestheticist approach mostly appear in his critique of Nietzsche.
According to Megill, Nietzsche did not merely elevate the value of the
aesthetic above morality and science, but claimed that the latter were
disguised versions of the former. Knowledge expresses a will to
falsification which is necessary as we could not act in the world if we
did not conceptualise it somehow. All truth is illusion. The powerful are
those who have the creative will to make their myth work, to make it
real. The world is a work of art that gives birth to itself. Megill argues
that the same ontological role ascribed to art or myth in Nietzsche is
given to language/discourse by Foucault.
In The Order of Things ... both subject and object disappear; here, finally,
the world is conceived as nothing but discourse ... For Foucault there are
no firm foundations, no original or transcendental signified to which all
signifiers can ultimately refer, (pp. 203-4, p. 211)
Megill's basic point is that there is no use in pretending it is discourse
that creates the world because we cannot avoid confronting the harsh
reality that discourse does not change. 'One can call everything 'illusion'
... 'discourse' or 'text'. But this does not abolish the distinction between,
say, an interpretation of being run over by a truck and the experience
itself (p. 42).
Having drawn an absolute distinction between discourse and reality,
Megill re-enacts the Kantian confinement of art to a limited sphere.
'There is one context ... in which the position embraced by Nietzsche
and Foucault makes sense: the aesthetic context... [where] we engage in
the willing suspension of disbelief (p. 42). Megill also mentions the sense
of loss involved in a turn to aesthetics, a sense of loss felt first by the
Romantics which they ascribed to the exclusion of spirit, imagination
and art by Reason. Central to Foucault's aestheticism is a sense of loss;
that the creative experience of the aesthetic realm has been marginalized
at great cost to humanity. For example, Foucault wrote that certain

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44 Jon Simons

experiences, such as madness, are only available to us now through

literature. In principle, Megill also recognises the existence and
legitimacy of this excluded realm, but only within prescribed
boundaries. The aesthetic must be limited because even if we were to
accept Nietzsche's unprovable and unfalsifiable ontological claim, the
most we can do is to 'visit the aesthetic world, we cannot live in it, for it
utterly lacks the structures necessary for human social life. It ignores,
that is, the natural and social needs of humankind for the unconstrained
freedom of the artist' (p. 102). These needs are the truck Foucault would
abolish with the stroke of his pen but which will hit him anyway.
Megill draws a sharp differentiation between discourse and reality,
interpretation and experience, and hence the aesthetic realm and the real
human world. His realist commitments are very problematic, because
Megill confuses a crucial distinction between the occurrence of events
and existence of objects (what we refer to as reality), and the human
experience, interpretation or understanding of such events and
occurrences. He also confuses Foucault's view that there is an
unbridgeable gap between words and things with a claim that there are
only words. Implicit in Megill's realism is belief in a form of knowledge
available to us which corresponds directly to 'brute experience' (Simons,
1999a, pp. 90-2). Such a form of knowledge is clearly distinguished from
the imaginary realm of the aesthetic, thereby accentuating the modernist
differentiation of the cognitive and aesthetic value spheres. A central
point about Nietzsche's and Foucault's claims about the relation
between a will to knowledge and a will to power, or the
power/knowledge nexus, is that these conceptual distinctions between
the value spheres do not hold. Yet Megill's argument works only on the
assumption that they do, treating the aesthetic turn of both as if it
applies only to the realm of the imagination.

Jrgen Habermas
Habermas (1987) claims that the motor of Foucault's genealogies is a
transcendental concept of power, 'a metaphysically isolated subject,
thrown back reflectively upon itself, toward restless self-mastery' (p.
269). He accepts that there is some aesthetic basis for political
argumentation. He conceptually divides modern Western culture into
cognitive-instrumental, moral-practical, and aesthetic-expressive value
spheres, each of which has its own validity claims and each of which
when connected with interests is institutionalised into different orders of
life and subjected to the rule of experts. Habermas' trisection of culture
and life orders is a systmatisation of Weber's account of rationalization
of religious world-views into autonomous spheres which pursue their
own logic in competition with each other (Habermas, 1984, pp. 234-41).
Disenchantment is for Weber an inevitable consequence of
rationalization, a theme which is clearly connected to that of the sense of

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Modernist Misapprehensions of Foucault's Aesthetics 45

loss of certain aspects of modern subjectivity. Habermas in turn is

acutely aware of the values of the cultural spheres that have lost out to
the objectivist scientific and political technologies.
In this context, aesthetic-expressive action is most sensitive to the
inner subjective world that is ignored by objectivizing instrumental and
strategic action. Emotional, unconscious and bodily aspects of life
belong to the aesthetic-expressive value sphere, recognition of which is
institutionalized in autonomous modern art, which has become a refuge
for needs that could not be satisfied by the system. In the Weberian
scheme the full pursuit of aesthetic life-styles, of absolute expressive
authenticity, is a form of protest against disenchantment. As protest,
aesthetic thought can correct some excessive features of modernization.
However, while aesthetic-expressive action serves as a legitimate protest
against the excesses of instrumental reason, its own autonomy is itself a
result of the rationalization of the modern world. The aestheticexpressive sphere on its own can provide no logic of social interaction,
and hence counter-cultural forms of life such as Bohemianism are
inherently unstable. There are thus dangers in overlooking the need for
communicative action aimed at reaching agreement which would result
from the over-extending of aesthetic claims, as in fascistic
aestheticization of politics (Habermas, 1983, pp. 10-12). Autonomous
modern art is as likely to degenerate into 'propagandists mass art or
into commercialized mass culture' as it is to 'transform itself into a
subversive counterculture' (Habermas, 1988, p. 86).
According to Stephen White (1986), who submits Foucault to a
trenchant Habermasian critique, Foucault's excluded other is an
aesthetic subject, which embodies our expressive, creative and bodily
qualities. White agrees with Foucault that during the process of
modernization these aspects of our lives have been devalued. Cognitive
truth claims to communicative validity have 'colonized' the interactive,
normative and aesthetic, authenticity claims. Correspondingly, the
scientific-technological sphere of life predominates over the moralpractical and aesthetic-expressive ones. Yet, we require appropriate
standards of judgement between competing claims for justice and
Tightness. Foucault's commitment to political fringe movements and
particular types of collective action forces him out of the 'detached
perspective' assumed in his archaeological-genealogical analysis of
modernity. Foucault speaks, claims White, from a critical aesthetic
perspective which can unexpectedly discover 'things exceeding the
confines of any rational, methodical, self-disciplining interrogatory
framework'. Though it contradicts his position that such a move would
be no more than 'another act in the endlessly repeated play of
domination', Foucault nonetheless 'offers an account of the aesthetic
subject' in terms of 'bodies and pleasures' and 'subjugated knowledges',
giving 'the haunting sense of a lost potential of human being'. 'The

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46 Jon Simons

implicit presence of a distinctive subject', bound up with 'pre-rational,

embodied otherness' is associated with the early Stoic aesthetics of
existence and Baudelairean dandyism (pp. 427,419,423,424).
White concurs with Habermas that Foucault's critical standards are
derived from the unspoken language of the body in pain, crushed by
oppressive power, and whose wholeness belongs to an aesthetic
tradition (Habermas, 1987, p. 284). As Eagleton (1990) points out, the
modern discourse of aesthetics begins as one of the body, referring to
physical perception and sensation (p. 13). In this broad sense, aesthetics
is associated with all human qualities escaping reason, such as instinct,
habit, creativity and the libido. White argues, on the one hand, that
Habermas is sensitive to the pre-rational other, recognising an
imbalance between the scientific-technological, moral-practical, and
aesthetic-expressive spheres in modern society which must be corrected.
On the other hand, Foucault seems to want to extend the aesthetic
spheres to cover the others, armed only with an ethics defined as a
relationship to the self. In general, while Foucault's critics may accept
that art expresses some legitimate protest against exclusion of human
creative and libidinal qualities, they cannot accept what Habermas calls
the terrorist over-extension of the aesthetic cultural order into domains
such as politics. Indeed, Habermas (1983) identifies Foucault as a Young
Conservative who turns to aesthetic modernity as a means to escape the
constraints of the modern world and its oppressive rationalization (p.
14). Such a turn must ultimately be self-defeating as it exploits the
autonomy of art culminating in the self-referentiality of 'art for art's
sake' which is a result of the rationalisation of the lifeworld. So,
Habermas' critique is also based on an understanding that the value
spheres really are differentiated.

Foucault's Aesthetics in Relation to Modernist Art

Foucault's critics do have some good grounds for holding that he
appeals to modernist conceptions of aesthetics. His writing on
modernist and particularly avant-garde art and literature do suggest in
parts that Foucault regards them as escape routes from the constraints of
modernity or as spaces of absolute transgression in their own right.
Modernist art is often associated by Foucault with transgression of
limits. Foucault relates to avant-garde literature as both a site of freedom
and as critical perspective, in both cases its power being derived from its
self-referentiality and reflexivity. It is therefore relevant to analyze his
attitude to avant-garde writing which, he says 'has freed itself from the
necessity of 'expression'; it only refers to itself (Foucault, 1977, p. 116).
This is not only a question of a self-conscious relationship with other
paintings and texts (Foucault, 1977, p. 92), but as David Carroll (1987)

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Modernist Misapprehensions of Foucault's Aesthetics 47

comments, it is also a question of a 'self-reflexive pursuit of the origin of

language [which] leads to the repeated discovery of the lack of
foundation of language, the "essential void" at its center' (p.115). Just as
'mad' art approaches the very edge of the abyss of madness, so does
modernist literature draw as close as possible to the void which is the
absence of its origin or foundation. Foucault often associates
transgression with awareness of and proximity to a void or an absence.
Modernist literature and art in general is considered by Foucault to
concern itself with the absence of a foundation of discourse or of
representation. It is thus conceivable that Foucault perceives the absence
of foundation as a condition of absolute autonomy or unconstrained
freedom, though as I will argue shortly he does not conceive of
transgression as the overcoming of all constraints.
In his book on Raymond Roussel, Foucault (1987) claims that the
author discovers that 'language speaks only from something essential
that is lacking' (p. 165). The first void, where a foundation should be, is
the failure of language to represent things. In his poetry Roussel shows
that his words are not a representation of things, though it is only
through words that things can be represented. Language can also render
visible things that are invisible because, like Roussel's creatures and
machines, they are impossible. 'Things are perceptible only through
language' (p. 121). Because language, as signification, is not a direct
designation of things, its meaning floats. The second absent foundation
is the sovereign role of the author, of his intention and consciousness.
Roussel employs language games 'which function independently,
pulling the author into a logic of which he is the occasion more than the
subject' (p. 65). It is language rhyming with itself that produces fantastic
creatures and objects, not Roussel's imagination (pp. 26-7).
In the absence of foundations of discourse, Roussel engages in
language games. He exploits the poverty of signifiers, the gap between
words and world, to introduce double meanings (pp. 14-16). One of his
books, Impressions d'Afrique, is an extended metagram, the filling in of
the space between two similar sounding sentences, like a game of
Chinese whispers.2 Roussel's other language game is the construction of
'machines' that produce improbable figures, impossible objects. The
most simple of these machines is the combination of two words which
do not belong together, such as 'crachat delta (delta of spittle)'. By
following obscure associations of words, distant objects can be linked by
words to establish 'a fantastic ontology ... a dynasty of the improbable'
(pp. 36-7). The play of associations, the 'horizontal diffusion' of words,
relies on tropological meanings, which is the diversion of words from
original to new but associated meanings, as in metaphors (pp. 34,15).3
The underlying condition of possibility of Roussel's work and basis
for his creativity is the absence of foundations on which it comments.
This absence is 'a void that has to be revealed and at the same time

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48 Jon Simons

filled' (p. 19). There is thus a temptation for Foucault to conceive of

Roussel's void, of the non-space of transgression, as a site of freedom.
Although 'the language in which transgression will find its space and
the illumination of its being lies almost entirely in the future', there is a
hint that it exists at least partially in the present. 'We must try to
assimilate ... these extreme forms of language in which Bataille,
Blanchot, and Klossowski have made their home' so that they might
'serve as the basis for finally liberating our language'. A new language
will arise from the absence of the philosophical subject at whose inner
core the 'mad philosopher' can find 'the transgression of his
philosophical being' (Foucault, 1977, pp. 33, 38-9, 41, 44). Foucault at
points privileges literature as if it were a site of absolute transgression, a
space in which thinking otherwise is automatic or natural. Literature
seems to be exterior to the modern episteme:
... throughout the nineteenth century and right up to our day - from
Hlderlin to Mallarm and on to Antonin Artaud - literature achieved
autonomous existence ... forming a sort of 'counter-discourse' ... This is
why literature is appearing more and more as that which must be
thought. (Foucault, 1973, pp. 43-4)
A similar void and lack of foundation for representation is exposed by
Magritte's visual games, according to Foucault (1983). The common
space in which words and images both signify objects, i.e., the calligram,
is destroyed. It is not surprising that Magritte's work interested
Foucault, and vice versa, as he pursued the same theme of the distance
between words and things, feeling an affinity with Roussel and
presenting an exhibition in New York entitled 'Words and Things'.
Traditionally, a calligram captures the object it represents both by
portraying its shape (using words as lines) and signifying its meaning
(using words as signs). Magritte's paintings, Ceci n'est pas une pipe, and
Les Deux mystres, unravel the calligram, 'disturbing all the traditional
bounds of language and the image' (p. 22).
The writing which proclaims beneath the image of what is evidently
a pipe that 'this is not a pipe' can be taken on several levels: (1) "This is
not a pipe but a drawing of a pipe', in which case we experience
something akin to the distance between words and things that
preoccupies Roussel; (2) "This is not a pipe but a sentence saying that
this is not a pipe' which is logically correct but disturbing in the context
where the sentence is expected to serve as a label; (3) 'The sentence 'this
is not a pipe' is not a pipe' which undermines the ability of any sentence
to serve as a label; (4) 'In the sentence 'this is not a pipe', this is not a
pipe', which focuses around the problem of designation, deliberately
confusing us as to what 'this' refers to: the painting, the written
sentence, or the drawing of the pipe; (5) As lines that function as part of

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Modernist Misapprehensions of Foucault's Aesthetics 49

an image, without bearing any meaning (pp. 22-30). Are words images?
Are the lines of images to be read? Is it a page or a picture (pp. 32-3)?
In other games Magritte creates new relations between words and
objects by replacing objects with a vague shape on which is written the
name of the object. We generally expect either to see an image of the
object or to read a text in which the objects are signified. The
accumulative effect of Magritte's games is to 'allow discourse to collapse
of its own weight' by becoming shape rather than signification (p. 38).
Other games undermine the task of resemblance and similitude to affirm
identity, thereby pointing to the lack of foundation for representation. In
some paintings it is unclear what image is a resemblance of the other,
while others make it unclear which part of the painting has been
transferred from elsewhere. This disturbs resemblance, whose function
is to establish a hierarchy of resemblance to an original, which we
cannot locate because the paintings play with similitude. Pictures are
continuous with, are similar to, that which they are supposed to
resemble. Magritte also toys with resemblance by exaggerating it,
making a pair of shoes resemble feet, pursuing a literalness whose
opposite can be found in Kandinsky's shapes that affirm themselves
even though they are not objects, in defiance of the traditional principle
that painting should affirm the representative bond of image and object
(pp. 34-5).
Similitude allows for differences between objects yet nonetheless
reveals identities (if not original ones), yet Magritte blends identities by
blending the identities of objects, by making leaves blend into the shape
of birds (pp. 43-52). Ultimately, and as Warhol shows, similitude can be
turned on itself to destroy identity, the point being not that everything is
the same, but that once categories have been evaded, multiplicity can
exist without reference to fixed identities. This self-multiplication of
similitudes that 'refer to nothing more than themselves' parallels
Roussel's and others' self-reflexive language that repeats itself to infinity
(Foucault, 1987, p. 54). In the cases of both Roussel and Magritte, then,
Foucault is interested in the way they take language and representation
to their limits in order to expose their absent foundations, while also
fashioning alternative modes of language and representation
themselves.

Avant-Garde Art and Transgression

Art, especially avant-garde modernist art, has a privileged place in
Foucault's work. But is that a place of inappropriately privileged
freedom that would then be extended to the rest of the world, as Megill
and Habermas claim; or is it a difficult approach to critique, as
suggested here? The discussion can be clarified by examining John

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50 Jon Simons

Rajchman's (1985) interpretation, as he seems to concur with the critics

that the early but not the later Foucault is an aestheticist. According to
Rajchman, Foucault's notion of transgression should be associated only
with a counter-discourse to be found in literary modernism in which he
sought a romantic alternative to an excessively rationalist and
anthropocentric society. So, Rajchman lends support to the view of
Foucault's critics discussed above that Foucault relies on a modernist
notion of art and aesthetics. Rajchman interprets the task of modernist
art to be the expression of what is excluded by ordinary discourse:
death, objectless angst, nameless desire, fitful eroticism, as well as
madness. But Rajchman claims there is a major shift in Foucault's work
when he abandons, around 1977, his own 'modernism' and faith in the
transgressive force of avant-garde literature. Such art is said to
transcend the limits of experience, to articulate the unarticulated. The
conversion is said to come when Foucault realises that scientific, moral
and aesthetic problems are not simply problems of language whose
limits can be overcome through transgression, by thinking the
unthought, but that the fundamental arrangements of history are about
power, not language. We therefore cannot free ourselves by going
beyond the limits of language, as modernist writers attempted to do.
While there is certainly something in Rajchman's interpretation
which would rescue Foucault from critiques such as Megill's, his
perception of a radical break is not justified. Rajchman argues that the
ethic of transgression is replaced by 'the ethic of constant disengagement
from constituted forms of experience, of freeing oneself for the invention
of new forms of life' (p. 37). He takes it that the notion of transgression is
equivalent to that of transcendence or liberation. Yet, according to
Carroll (1987), Foucault relies on disruptive literature and art to provide
alternative, transgressive perspectives of the present (pp. xvii-xviii). In
doing so, he relies on a genre of 'paraesthetic' critique, meaning 'an
aesthetics turned against itself or pushed beyond or outside itself (p.
xiv). A tension in his work arises because Foucault tends to identify too
closely with transgressive texts by romanticising the 'mad' poets as if
their disruption indicates not resistance to current limits on subjectivity
but the transcendence of all conditions of possibility. Foucault's work
can 'be considered to fluctuate between a negative but nonetheless
transcendent aestheticism - and a disruptive, critical paraesthetics' (p.
129). There is tension between artistic transgression understood as a site
of freedom and as critical perspective. The presentation of Foucault's
absolute transgressions of limits by means of aesthetic modernism is
therefore a one-sided view of his work. This partial understanding of
Foucault's aesthetics also informs the critiques of Megill and Habermas.
The tension in Foucault's work identified by Carroll can be described
as one between visions of artistic freedom where conditions of
subjectivity are entirely self-given, where self-referential art transcends

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Modernist Misapprehensions of Foucault's Aesthetics 51

its conditions of possibility in absolute transgression, and his realization

that transgression is always relative to context, that freedom is always a
question of more or less. When Foucault follows the tendency of
aesthetic transcendence, he arrives at the position wherein self-reflexive
thought and self-referential arts of the self appear to be completely
autonomous, without any limits or conditions of possibility. Such a view
would suggest that Foucault does subscribe to modernist aestheticism.
When he pursues the line of paraesthetic critique, Foucault indicates the
limits that can and should be transgressed because they are contingent
constraints.
If we concentrate on Foucault's paraesthetic tendency, we find that
he contradicts the possibility of an absolute transgression of limits. This
position explains Foucault's (1965) statement that 'madness is the
absolute break with the work of art', that neither Nietzsche nor Van
Gogh could produce paintings or philosophy in a state of madness. The
work is 'the sheer cliff over the abyss of the work's absence'; it is that
which 'coincides with the void'. This transgressive art takes us right up
to the void, the absence. 'It is the world that becomes culpable ... in
relation to the work of art' and that 'must justify itself before madness'
(pp. 287-9). It is forced to recognise that there is something beyond itself
of which it does not have the measure, which it does not control. The
'mad' philosophers and poets evoke the experience of madness in that
they teeter on its edge, indicate the limits of discourse, and celebrate the
presence of absence, refusing to avoid the void. Yet critics such as Wolin
(1986) insist that Foucault's references to the poets of madness indicate
that he is on the side of unreason, opposed to Enlightenment that
'deserves to perish in a paroxysm of violence' whereas the 'aesthetic
realm ... [becomes] the sovereign and exclusive source of value and
meaning in life' (78). To be sure, Madness and Civilization uses the
vocabulary of repression or confinement to characterise the relation
between reason or psychiatry and madness (Foucault, 1965, p. ix). Yet
the final chapter from which Wolin quotes makes it clear that madness
and the critical work of art through which it is mediated are
incompatible.
Roussel, an example of modernist self-referential literature, also
writes in response to the void which might be seen as a non-space of
transgression. If Foucault were completely seduced by the freedom of
art he would present Roussel's games as uninhibited creative play. It
would be a response of 'pure invention' to the absence of foundations
(Foucault, 1987, 16). Yet, in Foucault's view, Roussel's games are the
rules of his language that constitute its condition of possibility, and it is
his machinery that gives his work its unity. Despite the utter
improbability of what Roussel writes, even his monstrosities are the
result of strict laws of association (pp. 36-8). As these laws can be
deduced from his language games, 'Roussel appears as ... the inventor of

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52 Jon Simons

a language which only speaks about itself ... a language about language'
(p. 166). His is a self-reflexive critique of the limits that make his
discourse possible.4 Roussel's void is not the site of absolute
transgression but a source of anguish and 'an absolute emptiness of
being that he must surround, dominate and overwhelm with pure
invention' (p. 16). Roussel casts 'verses into the void' hoping 'to
construct a dam against this opening' where language falls apart,
pouring 'fantastic and meticulous figures' into the '"tropological" space'
(pp. 138,153). In part Roussel expresses the fear of the modernist whose
foundations have been undermined, but he also exemplifies the anxiety
of the postmodernist venturing beyond critique of existing conditions of
possibility in order to establish new ones.
Foucault's predominant view of transgressive literature is that it
reaches the limits of what can be said, rather than going beyond it.
However much Bataille may try to speak of the unconscious and taboo,
he is thrown 'upon the sands of that which he can no longer say',
exhausted by the attempt 'to speak of this experience' and to make 'it
speak from the depths where its language fails' (Foucault, 1977, 39-40).
In his treatment of modernist literature Foucault on the whole avoids
the danger of identifying freedom with disruptive force and regarding
art as naturally autonomous. Literary transgression is not a
transcendence of limits, but a recognition of finitude.5 Modernist
literature 'gives prominence ... to the fundamental forms of finitude'.
Extending language to its limits leaves man 'not at the very heart of
himself but at the brink of that which limits him' (Foucault, 1973, p. 383).
The finitude of language and hence of man can be experienced in those
experiences that limit him - death and madness. These experiences are
transgressive in so far as they reveal and define finitude, and not
because they are beyond it. Transgression is not a site beyond limits, but
a non-space devoid of positive content.
The transgression of limits, as understood by Foucault in his
readings of Bataille and Blanchot, defines the difficult, perhaps literally
inconceivable space, in which limits are transgressed without being
erased. This is the unstable space in which there must always be limits
that are both enabling and constraining. 'Transgression is an action
which involves the limit'. We only know that there are limits because
acts of transgression illustrate their location, revealing how far it is
possible to go. 'Transgression forces the limit ... to find itself in what it
excludes'. At the same time, transgression is relative to the limit it
violates: 'to what void does it owe the unrestrained fullness of its being,
if not that which it crosses in its violent act and which ... it crosses out in
the line it effaces?' Thus transgression is not the opposite of the limit,
but the illumination of limits, 'like a flash of lightning in the night which
... owes to the dark the stark clarity of its manifestation'. Transgression is
not 'a victory over limits', but a form of 'nonpositive affirmation', like

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Modernist Misapprehensions of Foucault's Aesthetics 53

Blanchot's 'contestation' according to which one proceeds 'until one

reaches the empty core where being achieves its limit and where the
limit defines being'. Transgression does not overcome limits, restore the
repressed, and instigate the rule of freedom, but shows that what we
are, our being, depends on the existence of limits. To overcome limits
would be to end being, which is necessarily finite (Foucault, 1977, pp.
33-8).
Transgression is more than the analysis of limits as it demonstrates
that no limits are absolute. The most absolute limit was embodied in the
existence of God, who revealed man's finitude while proclaiming his
own infinity and positively affirming a limitless being exterior to the
realm of limits. God was a 'word that surpasses all words', designating
something more than could be expressed in any language. The death of
God 'discloses ... the limitless reign of the Limit', by denying the
possibility of an existence beyond limits and nonpositively affirming the
limited nature of all being. Yet 'what does it mean to kill God if he does
not exist, to kill god who has never existed'? It means to transgress,
which is 'profanation in a world which no longer recognizes any
positive meaning in the sacred' (Foucault, 1977, pp. 30-2). The possibility
of transgression depends on recognition of the limitedness of the limit
and the practice of an excess, which like Bataille's language of sexuality,
breaks taboos whose holiness is hollow. Yet, it is not easy to experience
transgression because in the contemporary world the spheres of
transgression, in particular sexuality or eroticism, have been absorbed
by anthropological (or humanist) discourses. They confine transgression
to unilluminating reversals of prohibitions (Foucault, 1977, pp. 30, 50).
So Foucault turns to particular, self-reflective forms of art, literature and
philosophy that make transgressive moves by revealing the limits of
language and thought without attempting to exist beyond them.
Transgression, then, is not only difficult to conceive but is inherently
unstable. There are only acts and moments of transgression, rather than
firm grounds and secure sites. Transgression is a risky act of teetering on
the edge of an abyss into which one might fall. Foucault does on
occasion fall into this void, when he suggests the possibility of thinking,
living or creating without limits. He is tempted to leap into the abyss of
absolute transgression as if freedom were a safe place beyond all limits.
At those points, he can be considered an aestheticist who relates to the
whole world as a work of art to be created as one wills since there are no
limits. But in his overall perspective, 'the instantaneous play of the limit
and of transgression' is 'a Critique and an Ontology, an understanding
that comprehends both finitude and being '(Foucault, 1977, pp. 33,38).

54 Jon Simons

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Foucault's Critical Ethos

What is striking about Foucault's formulations about transgressive
avant-garde literature is that some twenty years later they continue to
provide him with a model for his critical thinking about discursive
regimes, power relations, subjectification and aesthetics of existence. In
his essay on Kant and Enlightenment, Foucault endorses in them 'not
faithfulness to doctrinal elements, but rather the permanent reactivation
of an attitude - that is, of a philosophical ethos that could be described
as a permanent critique of our historical era' (Foucault, 1984, p. 42).
Foucault defines this philosophical ethos as a 'limit attitude'. In this
respect, Kant had been concerned to clarify universal formal structures
that place necessary limits on the use of human reason, and to know
'what limits knowledge has to renounce transgressing'. Foucault
historicizes what Kant regards as universal, just as Magritte and Roussel
highlighted the contingency of the rules of representation. And just as
they worked reflexively to show the limits of the rules that made their
work possible and in doing so transgressed those rules by formulating
their own, so does Foucault advocate 'a practical critique that takes the
form of a possible transgression' (p. 45). Whereas the avant-garde artists
applied transgressive critique primarily to their work, Foucault applies
it more broadly to 'ourselves as subjects of what we are doing, thinking
and saying' ( p. 46):
The critical ontology of ourselves has to be considered ... as an attitude,
an ethos, a philosophical life in which the critique of what we are is at
one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits that are
imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond
them (p. 50).

Bracketing Foucault's work over two decades is the theme of a critical

ontology of ourselves, a critique of the limits on our being that is also an
experiment in transgressing those limits, while accepting that any being
entails limits. We must refuse to be seduced by the notion of a
transgression beyond all limits, and of an art that is free because of its
self-referential and autotelic nature. In political terms, this means that
there can be no transgressive politics as such, but transgressive political
moments when all systems and orders appear to be contingent
impositions.
Foucault (1984) links his notion of critical ontology, his critical ethos
of modernity, to Baudelaire's ascetic dandy, 'who makes of his body, his
behavior, his feelings and passions, his very existence, a work of art'
(pp.41-2). Aesthetics of existence or arts of the self are thus intrinsic to
the critical ethos that Foucault develops in relation to transgressive
artistic practice. Baudelaire valorizes the present through:

Modernist Misapprehensions of Foucault's Aesthetics 55

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... a desperate eagerness ... to imagine it otherwise than it is, and to

transform it not by destroying it but by grasping it in what it is ...
extreme attention to what is real is confronted with the practice of a
liberty that simultaneously respects this reality and violates it. (p.41)

Close attention to reality is critique: its violation is transgression that is

never 'beyond' the present but works with the corrupt materials it
presents. Foucault's arts of existence are also cognitive as well as
aesthetic, in that efforts at self-fashioning in the face of subjecting power
relations provide a great deal of critical experiential knowledge.6
Foucault's modernist critics would agree with him that an appeal to
certain types of art and aesthetics offers critical perspectives on
modernity, but only because they regard aesthetics as a distinct value
sphere, following Kant's designation that is reworked via Weber by
Habermas into the cognitive-instrument, moral-practical, and aestheticexpressive value spheres. For example, Wolin (1986) argues that the
Utopian worlds imagined through the aesthetic impulse 'are able to
present a powerful indictment of the existing world', but that critical
aesthetic function should have effect by means of 'the interpntration
of the aesthetic sphere with other realms - ethical and cognitive' (p. 85).
According to this tradition, it is only in so far as art is autonomous,
uncontaminated by instrumental reason, that it has critical force. At the
core of Megill's and especially Habermas' misapprehensions about
Foucault's aestheticism is a difference over the critical use-value of
avant-garde art. For Foucault, such art does not provide, even obliquely
or negatively, standards of critique against which to measure modernity.
Rather, it puts into practice the ethos of critique that characterizes
modernity. While this difference gives Foucault's critics the advantage
of being able to specify why what they found wrong with modernity is
wrong, it gives Foucault the advantage of connecting his philosophical
ethos to cultural practice.
Acknowledgements. A previous version of this paper was presented at the
Manchester Centre for Political Thought conference on Nietzsche and Foucault,
13 March 1998. I am grateful to participants at that conference for their
comments, and also to an anonymous reviewer at Cultural Values.

Notes
1. According to Megill, it was his contemporaries rather than Kant himself who
perceived an autonomous realm of the aesthetic. In his interpretation, Kant's
judgement of beauty is not an expression of Truth but of something
unavailable to our categories of knowledge, yet it should nonetheless be
necessary and universal, symbolising the morally good and grounded in the
purposiveness of nature. As I take it, the dominant interpretation holds that

56 Jon Simons

2.

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3.

4.
5.
6.

ultimately aesthetic judgement is subjective and ungrounded, as Kant's

contemporaries believed.
The two phrases are 'les lettres du blancs sur les bandes du vieux billard'
(the white letters on the cushions of the old billiard table) and 'les lettres du
blancs sur les bandes du vieux pillard' (the white man's letters on the hordes
of the old plunderer) (Foucault, 1987, p. 13). In this case, only one word need
be changed to radically alter the meaning of the sentence, but there are also
examples in which the similar sound of words is what connects completely
different phrases (see pp. 41-3). A classic comic pair of English phrases,
which I know from my father, that portrays the same duality of language is:
'send reinforcements: we're going to advance' and 'send three [shillings] and
fourpence: we're going to a dance.'
Roussel's parody of 'the classical treatise on grammar and logic' (Foucault,
1987, p. 148) might be compared with the classic Monty Python parrot
sketch, in which a disgruntled customer complains of the death of his new
pet by repeating the entries in a thesaurus for 'dead'. The shop owner's
disavowals that the bird is not dead but sleeping do not totally contradict the
complaint as 'asleep' is listed as a possible synonym for dead. The
metaphorical use of words, which is the basis of the uncanny humour here,
makes two words bear the same meaning while their users are trying to
insist on their difference.
Similarly, Foucault (1977) is interested in 'the fatal space in which language
speaks of itself to tell the story of its 'mirrored structure', repeating itself to
infinity in rare 'phenomena of self-representation' (pp. 54-8).
Foucault (1988) severely criticised the notion that literature itself was either
autonomous or in itself subversive (p. 309).
For a fuller account of the relation between Foucault's earlier work on
modernist art and his later aesthetics of existence, see Simons (1995, pp. 6880). For a fuller account of the departure of Foucault's aesthetics of existence
from some Left notions of the aestheticization of politics, see Simons (1999b).

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Jon Simons is Lecturer in Critical Theory, University of Nottingham. He
is the author of Foucault and the Political and several essays in political,
cultural and feminist theory. He is currently working on a project about
'thinking in images' that examines the relevance of both aesthetics and
epistemology to contemporary politics that is dominated by images.