Ah ! saleté ! le mauvais droit ne vaut-il pas le bon?/Ah, crap! Isn’t Wrong worth the same as Right?
Alfred Jarry, Ubu roi
We fascists are the only true anarchists, naturally, once we’re masters of the state. In fact, the one true anarchy is that of power.
Pier Paolo Pasolini, Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom
From …
Michel Foucault, Abnormal; Lectures at the College de France 1974-1975
(Verso Books, 2003 [first published as, Les Anormaux, Editions de Seuil/Gallimard, 1999])
I would like to dwell for a moment on this truth-justice relationship because it is, of course, one of the fundamental themes of Western philosophy.[19] It is, after all, one of the most immediate and fundamental presuppositions of all judicial, political, and critical discourse that there is an essential affiliation between stating the truth and the practice of justice. Where the institution appointed to govern justice and the institutions qualified to express the truth encounter each other, or more concisely, where the court and the expert encounter each other, where judicial institutions and medical knowledge, or scientific knowledge in general, intersect, statements are formulated having the status of true discourses with considerable judicial effects. However, these statements also have the curious property of being foreign to all, even the most elementary, rules for the formation of scientific discourse, as well as being foreign to the rules of law and of being, in the strict sense, grotesque, like the texts I have just read.
When I say these are grotesque texts I use the word grotesque, if not in an absolutely strict sense, at least in a somewhat restricted and serious sense. I am calling “grotesque” the fact that, by virtue of their status, a discourse or an individual can have effects of power that their intrinsic qualities should disqualify them from having. The grotesque, or, if you prefer, the “Ubu-esque,”[20] is not just a term of abuse or an insulting epithet, and I would not like to use it in that sense. I think that there is a precise category, or, in any case, that we should define a precise category of historico-political analysis, that would be the category of the grotesque or Ubu-esque. Ubu-esque terror, grotesque sovereignty, or, in starker terms, the maximization of effects of power on the basis of the disqualification of the one who produces them. I do not think this is an accident or mechanical failure in the history of power. It seems to me that it is one of the cogs that are an inherent part of the mechanisms of power. Political power, at least in some societies, and anyway in our society, can give itself, and has actually given itself, the possibility of conveying its effects and, even more, of finding their source, in a place that is manifestly, explicitly, and readily discredited as odious, despicable, or ridiculous. This grotesque mechanism of power, or this grotesque cog in the mechanism of power, has a long history in the structures and political functioning of our societies. There are striking examples of it in Roman history, especially in the history of the Roman Empire, where the almost theatrical disqualification of the origin of power in, and the coupling of every effect of power with, the person of the emperor was precisely a mode, if not of governing exactly, at least of domination: a disqualification that ensured that the person who possessed maiestas, that is to say, more power than any other power was, at the same time, in his person, his character, and his physical reality, in his costume, his gestures, his body, his sexuality and his way of life, a despicable, grotesque, and ridiculous individual. From Nero to Elagabalus, the mechanism of grotesque power, of vile sovereignty, was perennially brought into play in the functioning of the Roman Empire.[21]
The grotesque is one of the essential processes of arbitrary sovereignty. But you know also that the grotesque is a process inherent to assiduous bureaucracy. Since the nineteenth century, an essential feature of big Western bureaucracies has been that the administrative machine, with its unavoidable effects of power, works by using the mediocre, useless, imbecilic, superficial, ridiculous, worn-out, poor, and powerless functionary. The administrative grotesque has not been merely that kind of visionary perception of administration that we f ind in Balzac, Dostoyevsky, Courteline, or Kafka. The administrative grotesque is a real possibility for the bureaucracy. Ubu the “pen pusher” is a functional component of modern administration, just as being in the hands of a mad charlatan was a functional feature of Roman imperial power. And what I say about the Roman Empire, what I say about modern bureaucracy, could also be said about many other mechanical forms of power, such as Nazism or Fascism. The grotesque character of someone like Mussolini was absolutely inherent to the mechanism of power. Power provided itself with an image in which power derived from someone who was theatrically got up and depicted as a clown or a buffoon.
It seems to me that there is in this every degree of what could be called the unworthiness of power, from despicable sovereignty to ridiculous authority. We know that ethnologists – I am thinking in particular of Clastres’s very fine analyses[22] – have clearly identified the phenomenon in which the person to whom power is given is at the same time ridiculed or made abject or shown in an unfavorable light, through a number of rites and ceremonies. Is this a case of a ritual for limiting the effects of power in archaic or primitive societies? Perhaps. However, I would say that if these rituals still exist in our societies, their function is completely different. I do not think that explicitly showing power to be abject, despicable, Ubu-esque or simply ridiculous is a way of limiting its effects and of magically dethroning the person to whom one gives the crown. Rather, it seems to me to be a way of giving a striking form of expression to the unavoidability, the inevitability of power, which can function in its full rigor and at the extreme point of its rationality even when m the hands of someone who is effectively discredited. This problem of the infamy of sovereignty, of the discredited sovereign, is, after all, Shakespeare’s problem: It is precisely the problem posed by the royal tragedies, without, it seems to me, the sovereign’s infamy ever having been theorized.[23] But, once again, m our society, from Nero, perhaps the founding f igure of the despicable sovereign, down to the little man with trembling hands crowned with forty million deaths who, from deep in his bunker, asks only for two things, that everything else above him be destroyed and that he be given chocolate cakes until he bursts, you have the whole outrageous functioning of the despicable sovereign.[24]
[19] Cf. M. Foucault, “La verite et les formes juridiques,” 1974, in Dits et ecrits, 1954-1988, vol. 2: 1970-1975, pp. 538-623. English translation: “Truth and Judicial Forms” in The Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984, vol. 3: Power, edited by James D. Faubion, translated by Robert Hurley, et al. (New York: The New Press, 2000).
[20] The adjective Ubuesque was introduced in 1922 and derives from the play by Alfred Jarry, Ubu roi, Paris, 1896. English translation by Barbara Wright (London: Eyre Methuen, 1966). See the Grand Larousse, vol. 7 (Paris: Larousse, 1978): “The word describes someone who, by his grotesque, absurd, or ludicrous nature, recalls the figure of Ubu”; Le Grand Robert, 2d edition, vol. 9 (Paris: Dictionnaires Le Robert, 1985): “Someone resembling the figure of King Ubu (in his comically and extravagantly cruel, cynical, or cowardly character).”
[21] Allusion to the development of literature inspired by the opposition of the senatorial aristocracy to the strengthening of imperial power. It is illustrated most notably by the De vita Caesarum (The Lives of the Ceasars) by Suetonius in which virtuous emperors (principes) are contrasted with the vicious emperors (monstra) represented by Nero, Caligula, Vitellius, and Heliogabalus.
[22] Cf. P. Clastres, La Sociéte contre I’État: Recherches d’anthropologiepolitique (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1974). English translation: P. Clastres, Society Against the State: Essays in Political Anthropology, translated by Robert Hurley with Abe Stein (New York: Zone Books, 1989).
[23] Concerning the Shakespearean tragedies that raise the question of the transition from illegitimacy to law, see Michel Foucault, “Il faut defendre la société”: Cours au College de France, 1975-1976 (Paris: Editons de Seuil/Gallimard 1997), pp. 155-56. English translation: “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the College de France, 1975-1976 (New York: Picador, 2003).
[24] See Joachim C. Fest, Hitler, vol. 2: Le Führer, 7933-7945, (Paris: s.1., 1973), pp. 387-453. The original edition was published in Frankfurt-am-Main, Berlin, and Vienna by s.1., in 1973. English translation: Hitler (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1992).
Michel Foucault: Grotesque Power
Ah ! saleté ! le mauvais droit ne vaut-il pas le bon?/Ah, crap! Isn’t Wrong worth the same as Right?
Alfred Jarry, Ubu roi
We fascists are the only true anarchists, naturally, once we’re masters of the state. In fact, the one true anarchy is that of power.
Pier Paolo Pasolini, Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom
From …
Michel Foucault, Abnormal; Lectures at the College de France 1974-1975
(Verso Books, 2003 [first published as, Les Anormaux, Editions de Seuil/Gallimard, 1999])
I would like to dwell for a moment on this truth-justice relationship because it is, of course, one of the fundamental themes of Western philosophy.[19] It is, after all, one of the most immediate and fundamental presuppositions of all judicial, political, and critical discourse that there is an essential affiliation between stating the truth and the practice of justice. Where the institution appointed to govern justice and the institutions qualified to express the truth encounter each other, or more concisely, where the court and the expert encounter each other, where judicial institutions and medical knowledge, or scientific knowledge in general, intersect, statements are formulated having the status of true discourses with considerable judicial effects. However, these statements also have the curious property of being foreign to all, even the most elementary, rules for the formation of scientific discourse, as well as being foreign to the rules of law and of being, in the strict sense, grotesque, like the texts I have just read.
When I say these are grotesque texts I use the word grotesque, if not in an absolutely strict sense, at least in a somewhat restricted and serious sense. I am calling “grotesque” the fact that, by virtue of their status, a discourse or an individual can have effects of power that their intrinsic qualities should disqualify them from having. The grotesque, or, if you prefer, the “Ubu-esque,”[20] is not just a term of abuse or an insulting epithet, and I would not like to use it in that sense. I think that there is a precise category, or, in any case, that we should define a precise category of historico-political analysis, that would be the category of the grotesque or Ubu-esque. Ubu-esque terror, grotesque sovereignty, or, in starker terms, the maximization of effects of power on the basis of the disqualification of the one who produces them. I do not think this is an accident or mechanical failure in the history of power. It seems to me that it is one of the cogs that are an inherent part of the mechanisms of power. Political power, at least in some societies, and anyway in our society, can give itself, and has actually given itself, the possibility of conveying its effects and, even more, of finding their source, in a place that is manifestly, explicitly, and readily discredited as odious, despicable, or ridiculous. This grotesque mechanism of power, or this grotesque cog in the mechanism of power, has a long history in the structures and political functioning of our societies. There are striking examples of it in Roman history, especially in the history of the Roman Empire, where the almost theatrical disqualification of the origin of power in, and the coupling of every effect of power with, the person of the emperor was precisely a mode, if not of governing exactly, at least of domination: a disqualification that ensured that the person who possessed maiestas, that is to say, more power than any other power was, at the same time, in his person, his character, and his physical reality, in his costume, his gestures, his body, his sexuality and his way of life, a despicable, grotesque, and ridiculous individual. From Nero to Elagabalus, the mechanism of grotesque power, of vile sovereignty, was perennially brought into play in the functioning of the Roman Empire.[21]
The grotesque is one of the essential processes of arbitrary sovereignty. But you know also that the grotesque is a process inherent to assiduous bureaucracy. Since the nineteenth century, an essential feature of big Western bureaucracies has been that the administrative machine, with its unavoidable effects of power, works by using the mediocre, useless, imbecilic, superficial, ridiculous, worn-out, poor, and powerless functionary. The administrative grotesque has not been merely that kind of visionary perception of administration that we f ind in Balzac, Dostoyevsky, Courteline, or Kafka. The administrative grotesque is a real possibility for the bureaucracy. Ubu the “pen pusher” is a functional component of modern administration, just as being in the hands of a mad charlatan was a functional feature of Roman imperial power. And what I say about the Roman Empire, what I say about modern bureaucracy, could also be said about many other mechanical forms of power, such as Nazism or Fascism. The grotesque character of someone like Mussolini was absolutely inherent to the mechanism of power. Power provided itself with an image in which power derived from someone who was theatrically got up and depicted as a clown or a buffoon.
It seems to me that there is in this every degree of what could be called the unworthiness of power, from despicable sovereignty to ridiculous authority. We know that ethnologists – I am thinking in particular of Clastres’s very fine analyses[22] – have clearly identified the phenomenon in which the person to whom power is given is at the same time ridiculed or made abject or shown in an unfavorable light, through a number of rites and ceremonies. Is this a case of a ritual for limiting the effects of power in archaic or primitive societies? Perhaps. However, I would say that if these rituals still exist in our societies, their function is completely different. I do not think that explicitly showing power to be abject, despicable, Ubu-esque or simply ridiculous is a way of limiting its effects and of magically dethroning the person to whom one gives the crown. Rather, it seems to me to be a way of giving a striking form of expression to the unavoidability, the inevitability of power, which can function in its full rigor and at the extreme point of its rationality even when m the hands of someone who is effectively discredited. This problem of the infamy of sovereignty, of the discredited sovereign, is, after all, Shakespeare’s problem: It is precisely the problem posed by the royal tragedies, without, it seems to me, the sovereign’s infamy ever having been theorized.[23] But, once again, m our society, from Nero, perhaps the founding f igure of the despicable sovereign, down to the little man with trembling hands crowned with forty million deaths who, from deep in his bunker, asks only for two things, that everything else above him be destroyed and that he be given chocolate cakes until he bursts, you have the whole outrageous functioning of the despicable sovereign.[24]
[19] Cf. M. Foucault, “La verite et les formes juridiques,” 1974, in Dits et ecrits, 1954-1988, vol. 2: 1970-1975, pp. 538-623. English translation: “Truth and Judicial Forms” in The Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984, vol. 3: Power, edited by James D. Faubion, translated by Robert Hurley, et al. (New York: The New Press, 2000).
[20] The adjective Ubuesque was introduced in 1922 and derives from the play by Alfred Jarry, Ubu roi, Paris, 1896. English translation by Barbara Wright (London: Eyre Methuen, 1966). See the Grand Larousse, vol. 7 (Paris: Larousse, 1978): “The word describes someone who, by his grotesque, absurd, or ludicrous nature, recalls the figure of Ubu”; Le Grand Robert, 2d edition, vol. 9 (Paris: Dictionnaires Le Robert, 1985): “Someone resembling the figure of King Ubu (in his comically and extravagantly cruel, cynical, or cowardly character).”
[21] Allusion to the development of literature inspired by the opposition of the senatorial aristocracy to the strengthening of imperial power. It is illustrated most notably by the De vita Caesarum (The Lives of the Ceasars) by Suetonius in which virtuous emperors (principes) are contrasted with the vicious emperors (monstra) represented by Nero, Caligula, Vitellius, and Heliogabalus.
[22] Cf. P. Clastres, La Sociéte contre I’État: Recherches d’anthropologiepolitique (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1974). English translation: P. Clastres, Society Against the State: Essays in Political Anthropology, translated by Robert Hurley with Abe Stein (New York: Zone Books, 1989).
[23] Concerning the Shakespearean tragedies that raise the question of the transition from illegitimacy to law, see Michel Foucault, “Il faut defendre la société”: Cours au College de France, 1975-1976 (Paris: Editons de Seuil/Gallimard 1997), pp. 155-56. English translation: “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the College de France, 1975-1976 (New York: Picador, 2003).
[24] See Joachim C. Fest, Hitler, vol. 2: Le Führer, 7933-7945, (Paris: s.1., 1973), pp. 387-453. The original edition was published in Frankfurt-am-Main, Berlin, and Vienna by s.1., in 1973. English translation: Hitler (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1992).