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seeks to define the meaning of chresthai, with considerations not very different
from what we have already seen in connection with Redard’s mémoire.
Of course, chraomai means: I use, I utilize (an instrument, a tool). But equally
chraomai may designate my behavior or my attitude. For example, in the ex-
pression ubrikhos chresthai, the meaning is: behaving violently (as when we say,
“using violence,” when “using” does not mean utilizing, but rather behaving
violently). So chraomai is also a certain attitude. Chresthai also designates a certain type of relationship with other people. When one says, for example, theois
chresthai (using the gods), this does not mean that one utilizes the gods for any
end whatever. It means having appropriate and legitimate relationships with the
gods. . . . Chraomai, chresthai also designate a certain attitude towards oneself.
In the expression epithumiais chresthai, the meaning is not “to use one’s passions for something” but quite simply “to give way to one’s passions.” (Foucault 1,
pp. 55–56/56)
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The insistence on the specification of the semantic sphere of chresthai is not by
chance. According to Foucault, in fact, this verb develops a strategic function in
Plato’s argumentation, insofar as Socrates makes use of it to respond to the ques-
tion of what this “oneself” is that is the object of care-of-oneself (“in what way
will it be possible to find the self itself”— auto tauto, a technical formula for the expression of the idea: the “itself in itself”; 129b). By concentrating his examples
on the verb chresthai, that is to say, Plato intends to suggest that taking care of the self means, in reality, to concern oneself with the subject of a series of “uses.”
And here the attempt to define the meaning of chresthai shows its full perti-
nence. When Plato—Foucault suggests—makes use of the notion of chresthai/
chresis to identify the heauton in the expression “to take care of oneself,” in reality he intends to designate “not an instrumental relationship of the soul to the rest
of the world or to the body, but rather the subject’s singular, transcendent po-
sition, as it were, with regard to what surrounds him, to the objects available to
him, but also to other people with whom he has a relationship, to his body itself,
and finally to himself” (Foucault 1, p. 56/56–57). What Plato discovers in this
way is not, that is to say, “the soul-substance” but “the soul-subject”:
Taking care of oneself will be to take care of the self insofar as it is the “subject
of” a certain number of things: the subject of instrumental action, of relation-
ships with other people, of behavior and attitudes in general, and the subject
also of relationships to oneself. It is insofar as one is this subject who uses, who
has certain attitudes, and who has certain relationships, etc., that one must take
care of oneself. It is a question of taking care of oneself as subject of chresis (with all that word’s polysemy: subject of actions, behavior, relationships, attitudes).
(Ibid., p. 56/57)
3.2. Anyone who has any familiarity with the investigations of the late Fou-
cault will have recognized in this passage one of the essential characteristics of
the ethical subjectivity that they seek to define. If Foucault returns so insistently
in his courses to Plato’s Alcibiades, it is not only because one of the central
themes of the dialogue is care-of-oneself, with which he was very concerned
in those years. In the Foucauldian laboratory, the Alcibiades above all furnishes
the occasion to articulate in all its complexity and in all its aporias that notion
of the subject with which, according to his testimony, he had never ceased to
concern himself.
Just as the subject is not a substance for Foucault but a process, so also does
the ethical dimension—care-of-oneself—not have an autonomous substance:
it has no other place and no other consistency than the relation of use between
the human being and the world. Care-of-oneself presupposes chresis, and the self
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that names the ethical subject is not something other with respect to the subject
of use but remains immanent to it. For this reason Foucault, in his reading of the
Alcibiades, insists on the distinction between soul-substance and soul-subject,
and for this reason he can write, in the notes published by Frédéric Gros at the
end of the course, that “the self with which one has the relationship is nothing
other than the relationship itself . . . it is in short the immanence, or better, the
ontology adequation of the self to the relationship” (ibid., p. 514/533).
The difficulty with which these feverish remarks seek to settle accounts is
decisive: if that of which one takes care is the very subject of relations of use with
others, the risk here is that the active subject of care will be configured in its turn
in a transcendent position as subject with respect to an object or that, in any case,
ethical subjectivity will be drawn into a regressio ad infinitum (the one that takes care of the subject of use will demand in its turn another subject that takes care
of it, etc.).
The question is all the more urgent and delicate insofar as it is precisely here
that we see the reappearance of that problem of governmentality that constitutes
the privileged object of Foucault’s courses beginning from the mid-1970s. The
theme of care-of-oneself in this way risks resolving itself entirely into that of the
governance of the self and of others, just as, in the passage from the Alcibiades, the theme of the use of the body on the part of the soul is resolved at a certain
point into that of the command ( archè) of the soul over the body (130a).
What is crucial here is the way in which one thinks the relationship between
care and use, between care-of-oneself and use-of-oneself. As we have seen, in
connection with use, Foucault evokes the relationship with oneself, but while
the concept of care-of-oneself remains at the center of his analyses, that of “use-
of-oneself” is almost never thematized as such. The relation of use, which consti-
tutes precisely the primary dimension in which subjectivity is constituted, thus
remains in the shadows and gives way to a primacy of care over use that seems
to repeat the Platonic gesture in which chresis was resolved into care ( epimeleia) and command ( archè). This is all the more fraught with consequences insofar as
the separation between care-of-oneself and use-of-oneself is at the root of that
between ethics and politics, which is as alien to classical thought at least up to
Aristotle as it is to the preoccupations of the late Foucault.
3.3. The relation between care and use seems to entail something like a circle.
The formula “to concern oneself with oneself as subject of chresis” suggests, in
fact, a genetico-chronological primacy of the relations of use over care-of- oneself.
It is only insofar as a human being is introduced as subject into a series of relations
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of use that a care-of-oneself may perhaps become possible. On the other hand, if
“the self with which one has a relationship is nothing other than the relationship
&nb
sp; itself,” the subject of chresis and that of care are the same subject. It is this coincidence that the enigmatic expression “the immanence or ontological adequation
of the self to the relationship” seems to want to express (Foucault 1, p. 514/533).
The subject of use must take care of itself insofar as it is in a relationship of use
with things or persons: that is to say, it must put itself into relationship with the
self insofar as it is in a relationship of use with another. But a relationship with
the self—or an affection of the self—is already implicit, as we have seen, in the
middle-voice meaning of the verb chresthai, and this seems to call into question
the very possibility of distinguishing between care-of-oneself and use. If “to use”
means “to enter into a relationship with the self insofar as one is in relationship
with another,” in what way could something like a care-of-oneself legitimately
claim to define a dimension other than use? That is to say, how would ethics dis-
tinguish itself from use and obtain a primacy over it? And why and how has use
been transformed into care? This is all the more the case given that, as Foucault
suggests many times, the subject of chresis can enter into a relationship of use also with itself, can constitute a “use-of-oneself.”
It is perhaps out of awareness of these aporias that, alongside the theme
of care-of-oneself, we see the appearance in the late Foucault of the at least
apparently contrary motif that he designates with the formula: se déprendre de
soi-même. Care-of-oneself here gives place to a dispossession and abandonment
of the self, where it again becomes mixed up with use.
3.4. It is from this perspective that Foucault’s interest in sadomasochistic
practices can be properly situated. It is not only a matter of the fact that here,
as Foucault emphasizes many times, the slave can in the end find himself in the
position of the master, and vice versa: rather, what defines sadomasochism is the
very structure of subjectivation, its ethos, insofar as the one whose body is (or
seems to be) used is actually constituted to the same extent as subject of its being
used, assumes it and experiences pleasure in it (even here what is in question, in
the terms of the course on L’herméneutique du sujet, is the relationship that one
has with the self as subject of one’s own sexual relations). Vice versa, the one who
seems to use the body of the other can in some way be used by the other for his
own pleasure. Master and slave, sadist and masochist here are not two incommu-
nicable substances, but in being taken up into the reciprocal use of their bodies,
they pass into one another and are incessantly indeterminated. As the language
expresses so well, the masochist “causes to be done to him” what he suffers, is
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active in his very passivity. That is to say, sadomasochism exhibits the truth of use, which does not know subject and object, agent and patient. And in being taken up
in this indetermination, pleasure is also made non-despotic and common.
It is striking that the analyses of sadomasochism from the Freudian per-
spective, despite noting the inversion of roles between the two subjects, do
not mention the master/slave relation. Thus, in the by-now classic monograph
that he dedicated to masochism, Theodor Reik notes many times the reciprocal
transformation of the active element into the passive element and the reversal
toward the ego of what is originally a sadistic tendency; but the terms “master”
and “slave” never appear. By contrast, Foucault not only makes use of these
terms but seems to suggest that it is precisely the assumption of these two roles
that allows for a new and more enjoyable relation to the body. “I think it’s a
kind of creation,” he writes in connection with his experience in California
bathhouses, “a creative enterprise, which has as one of its main features what I
call the desexualization of pleasure. . . .” (Foucault 2, p. 738/Rabinow, p. 165);
“. . . wouldn’t it be marvelous . . . to encounter bodies that are both present and fleeting? Places where you desubjectivize and desexualize yourself . . . ?” (Foucault and Le Bitoux, p. 399).
It is possible, then, that what is in question in sadomasochism is a ritual-
ized re-creation of the master/slave relation, insofar as this relation paradoxically
seems to allow access to a freer and fuller use of bodies. By means of this, the
subject pursues the traces of a “use of the body” beyond the subject/object and
active/passive scissions: in the words of Foucault, he has an experience of his
own desubjectivation.
And if it is true, as Deleuze observed, that masochism always entails a neu-
tralization of the juridical order by means of its parodic exaggeration, then one
can form the hypothesis that the master/slave relation as we know it represents
the capture in the juridical order of the use of bodies as an originary prejurid-
ical relation, on whose exclusive inclusion the juridical order finds its proper
foundation. In use, the subjects whom we call master and slave are in such a
“community of life” that the juridical definition of their relationship in terms
of property is rendered necessary, almost as if otherwise they would slide into a
confusion and a kononia tes zoes that the juridical order cannot admit except in
the striking and despotic intimacy between master and slave. And what seems so
scandalous to us moderns—namely, property rights over persons—could in fact
be the originary form of property, the capture (the ex-ceptio) of the use of bodies in the juridical order.
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א The ancient world knew of festivals in which the originary indetermination that
defines the use of bodies reemerged into the light by means of the role reversal between
master and slave. Thus, during the Saturnalia, which was celebrated on December 17, not
only did masters serve the slaves, but the entire order of social life was transformed and subverted. It is possible to see in these anomic festivals not only a state of suspension of the law that characterizes certain archaic juridical institutions but also, by means of this suspension, the reemergence of a sphere of human action in which not only master and
slave but also subject and object, agent and patient are indeterminated.
3.5. One can therefore understand why in the Phenomenology of Spirit, the
dialectic between master and slave and the recognition that is in question in it
has a constitutive anthropological function. What is decisive here is not only, as
Hegel never stops reminding us, that the recognition of self-consciousness can
happen only by means of another self-consciousness but also that, in the rela-
tionship between master and slave, what is at stake is what Hegel unreservedly
calls enjoyment ( der Genuss):
The master relates himself mediately to the thing through the slave; the slave,
qua self-consciousness in general, also relates himself negatively to the thing and abolishes it [ hebt es auf ]; but at the same time the thing is independent vis-à-
vis the slave, whose negating of it, therefore, cannot go to the length of being
altogether done with it to the point of annihilation; in other words, he only
works on it. For the master, on the other hand, the
immediate relation becomes
through this mediation the sheer negation of the thing, or the enjoyment of it.
What desire failed to achieve, he succeeds in doing, viz., to have done with the
thing altogether, and to achieve satisfaction in the enjoyment of it. Desire failed
to do this because of the thing’s independence; but the master, who has interposed
the slave between it and himself, takes to himself only the dependent aspect of
the thing and has the pure enjoyment of it. . . .
In both of these moments [ scil. the slave’s labor and the enjoyment that it
renders possible] the master achieves his recognition through another conscious-
ness. . . . (Hegel, pp. 115–116)
Hegel sees the intimate relation between master and slave that we have sought
to define as use of the body; however, while in the koinonia tes zoes that is here in question, the body of the master and that of the slave, distinct in the juridical
order, tend to become undecidable. Hegel dwells upon precisely what makes it
possible to separate and recognize the two positions: the distinction between
the labor of the slave and the enjoyment of the master. Naturally, as in sado-
masochism according to Foucault, the two roles tend to be reversed, and, in
the end, since “the truth of the master’s consciousness is servile consciousness”
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(Hegel, p. 117), the labor of the servant, as “desire held in check and fleetingness
staved off ” (p. 118), acquires its independence with respect to the fleeting enjoy-
ment of the master.
Even in this dialectical reversal, what is nonetheless lost is the possibility
of another figure of human praxis, in which enjoyment and labor (which is
restrained desire) are in the last analysis unassignable. From this perspective,
sadomasochism appears as an insufficient attempt to render inoperative the dia-
lectic between master and slave by parodically finding in it the traces of that use
of bodies to which modernity seems to have lost all access.
4
The Use of the World
4.1. Despite his boutade on not reading Being and Time, it is difficult
to imagine that Foucault was not familiar with the chapter that
bears the significant title “Dasein’s Being as Care [ die Sorge],” which concludes