Carnivals of Atrocity: Foucault, Nietzsche, Cruelty

Carnivals of Atrocity: Foucault, Nietzsche, Cruelty
Author(s): James Miller

Source: Political Theory, Vol. 18, No. 3 (Aug., 1990), pp. 470-491
Published by: Sage Publications, Inc.
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CARNIVALS OF ATROCITY
Foucault, Nietzsche, Cruelty
JAMES MILLER
Brown University
It might be said that all knowledge is linked to the essential forms of cruelty.
- Michel Foucault (1962)
M ICHEL FOUCAULT'S GREATEST WORK, Surveiller et punir

ostensibly a history of penal practices, starts like this: "Damiens had been
condemned, on March 2, 1757, 'to make honorable amends before the main
door of the Church of Paris,' where he was to be 'brought on a cart, naked

but for a shirt, holding a torch of burning wax weighing two pounds;' then,
'in said cart taken to the Place de Greve, where, on a scaffold that will be
erected there, the flesh will be torn from his breasts, arms, thighs, and calves
with red-hot pincers, his right hand, holding the knife with which he com-
mitted the said [regicide], burned with sulphur, and, on those places where
the flesh will be torn away, poured molten lead, boiling oil, burning resin,
wax and sulphur melted together and then his body drawn and quartered by
four horses and his limbs and body consumed by fire, reduced to ashes and
his ashes thrown to the wind.' "
In the event - and the text spares nothing in the document it cites - the
condemned man suffered horribly. Four horses tethered to each limb proved
unable to dismember Damiens. Next, six horses tried - and failed. "'After
two or three attempts,"' the executioner drew a knife "' and cut the body at
the thighs instead of severing the legs at the joints; the . . . horses gave a tug
and carried off the two thighs after them, namely, that of the right side first,
the other following; then the same was done to the arms, the shoulders, the
arm-pits and the four limbs; the flesh had to be cut almost to the bone."'2
Reading, we recoil: The scene provokes nausea, disgust, revulsion -but
also a perverse fascination with the details. These are rehearsed in a language
of great economy and precision. Slow, meticulous, ceremonial, it is a kind of

POLITICAL THEORY, Vol. 18 No. 3, August 1990 470-491
? 1990 Sage Publications, Inc.

470
Miller / CARNIVALS OF ATROCITY 471
pomography -a pomography of murderous pleasures, and, on the printed

page, mute pain: "It is probably this that can be called the horror: to an
unsuspecting glance, the encounter with dead things which are laid open, a
certain tortuousness of being, where open mouths do not cry out."3
Damiens' death introduces a miscellany of documents, a starkly drawn
chronology, a kaleidescope of striking images, a meticulously multilayered
network of surprising anecdotes, unexpected hypotheses, and patches of

plain narrative. Threading through the different layers and tying them to-
gether is one central story: as the book's subtitle puts it, a story about "the
birth of the prison." In this context, Damiens' death by torture illustrates what
kind of cruel and unusual punishment the modern prison was designed to
replace. In the hands of another storyteller, the main plot line might even
offer a kind of consolation. It is common, after all, to attribute the disappearance of torture as a public spectacle to a process of "humanization" that has
softened the often savage violence of premodem societies.
But Foucault in Surveiller et punir famously does nothing of the sort.
Instead, the central narrative is, in the words of his admiring expositors
Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, a "somber recounting," an austere,
sometimes antiseptic description of how "a disciplinary technology and a
normative social science," displacing the old public rituals of violent expiation, came to exercise an ubiquitous, deadening power not only over con-
victed criminals but over the entire surface of modern society.4 The book's
pivotal image, Jeremy Bentham's panopticon, Foucault treats as a sinister
symbol of unlimited surveillance, a utopian fantasy of a painlessly coercive
kind of social machine geared to produce "docile bodies" and obedient souls.
The scene that opens the book therefore turns out to be doubly disturbing.
For if the text that follows is designed to arouse the most profound skepticism
about the virtues of the modern penal system, it simultaneously invites the
reader to contemplate with unwonted sympathy what Foucault calls l'eclat

des supplices -the splendor and explosive glory of death by torture.S
This strange double transvaluation - which provokes skepticism about
reforms intended to lessen pain and simultaneously arouses sympathy for
institutions that promote visible displays of cruelty-goes a long way, I
believe, toward explaining the disquiet a reader may feel on finishing
Foucault's remarkable book. Thinking through the issues raised in Surveiller
et punir is like walking into a fiendishly clever kind of philosophical fun

house: It is a very creepy experience. To express bland admiration for the
book's imposing edifice of erudition and methodological sophistication is to
diminish the disturbing impact of this shadowy interior; ultimately, it is to
treat the work as a trivial display of intellectual fireworks.
472 POLITICAL THEORY / AUGUST 1990
Fireworks, of course, there certainly are: Among other things, S
et punir offers readers a provocative new approach to the history
institutions; a seductive new jargon that promises to define, as nev

an insidious "micro-physics of power"; and, last but not least, an avowed
"genealogy of the modem 'soul'," showing how an institution like the

modern prison, through its "micro-physics," "dissociates power from the
body," creating a set of aptitudes that explain, "no doubt," how "the man of
modern humanism was born" - and how the modem soul became a "prison"
of the body.6
At the same time, Surveiller et punir is a singularly difficult text. While

negotiating its labyrinthine twists and tums, trying to avoid dead ends and
patiently exploring detours in pursuit of answers to the many riddles it

poses - about chronology, about method, about genealogy - it is easy to let
slip from view the troubling substantive issues to which the book nevertheless keeps circling back.
What, for example, are we to make of Foucault's apparent fascination with

death by torture? Or, to pose the question more bluntly, in the kind of simple
form that is fundamentally foreign to Foucault's way of thinking: What, if

any, role ought cruelty to play in society?
On the face of it, this may seem a bizarre, even grotesque, topic to pursue. Political theorists have tended to skirt the issue of cruelty, despite the
large amount of merciless violence connected with the exercise of political

power -a connection that persists to this day, as witness the annual reports
issued by Amnesty Intemational. It is symptomatic of how matters stand in
modern psychology that the word "cruelty" appears only once in the new
Oxford Companion to the Mind, and then - tellingly enough - only in the
brief entry on "sadism." Philosophers have also generally avoided the topic,
as Judith Shklar has recently pointed out in one of the few good essays I know
of on cruelty. Why this silence surrounding the phenomenon? Perhaps, as

Shklar speculates, cruelty "is too deep a threat to reason for most philosophers to contemplate it at all."7
This circumstance makes Foucault's views on the subject all the more
interesting. But illuminating these views is tricky. The first challenge is to
sketch an interpretation that renders explicit what Foucault has left largely
implicit.
I will begin with what, at first, must seem like a long digression.
Midway through Surveiller etpunir occurs one of the blind references that
Foucault sometimes uses to mark the spot where a less circuitous philosopher
might produce a straightforward argument. In the book's central chapter, on

what Foucault calls "panopticism," in a brief disgression on Napoleon as a
transitional figure, we read the following: "As a monarch who is at one and
the same time a usurper of the ancient throne and the organizer of the new
state, he combined into a single symbolic, ultimate figure the whole of the
long process by which sovereignty, the necessarily spectacular manifestations of power" - of which public death-by-torture was one aspect - "were
extinguished one by one in the daily exercise of surveillance, in a panopticism

in which the vigilance of intersecting gazes was soon to render useless both
the eagle and the sun."8
Eagle? Sun?
What at first glance may seem a non sequitur is not. Different possibilities
spring to mind: The eagle was Napoleon's imperial herald; and the sun, of
course, was the cognizance of King Louis XIV. But there is more: The same
symbols figure prominently in Nietzsche's prologue to Thus Spoke Zarathustra. At the outset of this prologue, Zarathustra rises with the dawn, steps
before the sun, and delivers a speech: "You great star," declares Nietzsche's
prophet, "what would your happiness be had you not those for whom you
shine? For ten years you have climbed to my cave: you would have tired of
your light and of the journey had it not been for me and my eagle and my
serpent." At the close of this prologue, the sun stands high at noon and
Zarathustra hears the sharp call of a bird: "An eagle soared through the sky
in wide circles, and on him there hung a serpent, not like prey but like a
friend."9
The eagle - bird of prey, classical image of sovereign power - Zarathustra
declares "the proudest animal under the sun." His "friend," the serpent, is,
among other things, a biblical symbol of evil, sin, diabolical temptation,
conventionally associated with the Fall -not flight. Spiraling upward, en-
tertwined, the two animals, as Heidegger comments in his lectures on

Nietzsche, form "a magnificent emblem that scintillates for all who have the
eyes to see," even though, as Heidegger adds, these animals augur "the most
hair-raising and hazardous things." These intertwined animal-omens of evil
and power - and the eternal recurrence of the same - are Zarathustra's com-
panions and guides, as is that "great star," the sun. Traditionally a Platonic
image of the True and the Good, the sun also suggests the immateriality and
otherworldliness of God. Elsewhere in his work, Nietzsche subverts the

monotheistic and supernatural implications of the image by speaking of an
"eclipse of the sun," "a starry sky," a constellation of "different moralities"

that presage a new dawn. Similarly, in the heart of the prologue to Thus Spoke
Zarathustra, warning of a world where "everybody wants the same, every-
body is the same" and "whoever feels different goes into a madhouse,"
Nietzsche's fictive alter ego declares: "I say unto you, one must still have
chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star. I say unto you: you
still have chaos in yourselves. Alas, the time is coming when man will no
longer give birth to a star. Alas, the time of the most despicable man is
coming, he that is no longer able to despise himself. Behold, I show you the
last man. "10
As we have seen, Foucault, at the outset of Surveiller et punir, declares
his ambition to write, as Nietzsche did, a "genealogy" - a "genealogy of the
modern 'soul."' Interpreting the eagle and sun as Nietzschean symbols

suggests, more narrowly, that we read Surveiller et punir as a genealogy of
a specific type of modem soul, namely "the last man" -docile, oblivious, a
stranger to creative energy, unable to take flight, unwilling to be different,
serenely unaware of those "hair-raising and hazardous things" that have

driven other men "into a madhouse." In effect, Surveiller etpunir would then
become a sequel not only to Foucault's own exploration of the madhouse in
Folie et deraison but to Nietzsche's original Genealogy of Morals - a sequel

in which the French genealogist shows how the modern human sciences have
taken over the role of Christianity in disciplining the body and constituting
the soul, substituting for the Christian soul, "born in sin and subject to
punishment," a modern soul, born under surveillance and subject to an
indefinite discipline, "an interrogation without limits." "If I wanted to be
pretentious," Foucault remarked in an interview shortly after the publication
of Surveiller et punir, "I would use 'the genealogy of morals' as the general
title of what I am doing."11
Now, Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals expresses the same disquieting

transvaluation that I have already noted in Surveiller etpunir. Nietzsche, too,
expresses skepticism about the value of eliminating pain; he also expresses

an unwonted, disturbing sympathy for institutions that promote public displays of cruelty.
Nietzsche, furthermore, explicitly places the phenomenon of cruelty at
the heart of his genealogy. By cruelty, I mean (to modify slightly the
definition in the Oxford English Dictionary) "a disposition to inflict suffering"; indifference to or delight in pain or misery; mercilessness, hardheartedness, especially as exhibited in action. "Man is the cruelest animal,"
writes Nietzsche in Thus Spoke Zarathustra: "Whatever is most evil is his
best power and the hardest stone for the highest creator."12
This conviction takes shape gradually in Nietzsche's work. It grows, on

one hand, from his observation that the purity and beauty of ancient Greek
culture emerged only after a "long comfortless period" of "dark crudity and
cruelty" -an observation that leads Nietzsche to comment that "one can
speak of spring as long as one has a winter to precede it."'13

More fateful, because more fundamental, though, is Nietzsche's proposi-
tion - at first advanced hesitantly - that the infliction of pain, to the extent it
excites pleasure, ought not to be regarded as evil. When suffering is "accom-
panied by pleasure (feeling of one's own power, of one's own strong excitation)," writes Nietzsche in Human, All Too Human, "it occurs for the
wellbeing of the individual.... Without pleasure no life; the struggle for
pleasure is the struggle for life. Whether an individual pursues this struggle
in such a way that people call him good, or in such a way that they call him
evil, is determined by the degree and quality of his intellect." 14
This formulation, which yokes pleasure and pain together in a kind of

Dionysianfolie a deux, grows increasingly central to Nietzsche's thought. To
exercise actively the will to power, he regards as the essence of life. To
exercise this power with abandon is not only to court being cruel but, when
cruelty occurs, to enjoy the pain, the suffering, the agony that cruelty causes.
"To practice cruelty is to enjoy the highest" - note the adjective: the highest
-"gratification of the feeling of power." To enjoy the exercise of power is,
in effect, to be cruel: This is Nietzsche's hard teaching."5

At first, contends Nietzsche, such pleasure was public. Cruelty is "one of
the oldest festive joys of mankind." "It is not long since princely weddings
and public festivals of the more magnificent kind were unthinkable without
executions, torturings, or perhaps an auto-da-fe, and no noble household was
without creatures upon whom one could heedlessly vent one's malice and
cruel jokes." For thousands of years, societies have been organized hierarchically, enabling the man with prestige to enjoy the cruel pleasure of exciting
envy and permitting the man of power "the pleasure of being allowed to vent
his power freely upon one who is powerless, the voluptuous pleasure 'de faire
le malpour le plaisir de le faire,' the enjoyment of violation."'16

It was by public displays of cruelty, Nietzsche speculates, that memory
and, with it, the spheres of legal obligation and morality were first brought
into existence. "Blood, torture and sacrifices" were the way in which man
created "a memory for himself" - "only that which never ceases to hurt stays
in the memory." Joining a group, a man pledged himself to obey shared

rules - on pain of cruel punishment if he did not. Such punishment produces
"an increase of fear, a heightening of prudence, mastery of the desires: thus
punishment tames men, but it does not make them 'better.""'7
Taming, for Nietzsche, entails what he calls "internalization" -an
that, in our own post-Freudian age, seems deceptively self-evident.

instincts that do not discharge themselves outwardly turn inward,
Nietzsche: "[T]hus it was that man first developed what was later ca
'soul'." The invention of the soul divides the human animal. "Its inst
freedom pushed back and repressed, incarcerated within, and finally

discharge and vent itself only on itself," the organism declares war on
Suing for peace, the human being, in time, comes to swear allegi
a kind of psychological "oligarchy," with "regulation, foresight, a
meditiation" keeping at bay "our underworld of utility organs work
and against one another." With the "aid of the morality of mores and t
straitjacket," as Nietzsche puts it, the organism's oligarchy is kept in

man learns "to be ashamed of all his instincts." Stifling his cruel and
murderous impulses, he becomes "calculable, regular, necessary" - a subject

of civilized reason and morality."9
But the organism's cruel impulses do not disappear altogether. What
otherwise might be inexplicable -namely, the pleasure many men have

clearly learned to feel in taking pains to rule themselves - Nietzsche explains
through the survival of internalized cruelty and the paradoxical convergence

of pleasure and pain that characterizes it. The idea of "self-chosen torture" -
prima facie, a monstrous oxymoron -becomes the key in the Genealogy of

Morals to interpreting a host of intertwined phenomena: guilt; the bad
conscience; and, above all, the triumph of asceticism in Christianity.20
The internalization of cruel impulses represented by the triumph of
asceticism ramifies in unpredictable ways. Guilt hobbles man's animal
energies; shared taboos make exercising the will difficult and sometimes
unpleasant. Yet in some rare souls, the masochistic pleasures of self-rule
paradoxically strengthen the will to power in all of its cruel splendor; the old
animal impulses, cultivated with foresight and transmogrified through the

use of memory, imagination, and reason erupt in new forms of mastery. "This
secret self-ravishment, this artist's cruelty, this delight in imposing a form

upon oneself as a hard, recalcitrant, suffering material and in burning a will,
a critique, a contradiction, a contempt, a No into it, this uncanny, dreadfully
joyous labor of a soul voluntarily at odds with itself that makes itself suffer
out of joy in making suffer - eventually this entire active bad conscience you will have guessed it - as the womb of all ideal and imaginative phenomena, also brought to life an abundance of strange new beauty and affirmation,
and perhaps beauty itself."2'

In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche summarizes the history we have just
surveyed by using the metaphor of a ladder. The "great ladder of religious
cruelty," as he calls it, has three rungs. The first step leads to the sacri
human beings for the sake of one's god. Next, "one sacrificed to one
one's own strongest instincts, one's 'nature': this festive joy lights u
cruel eyes of the ascetic." Finally comes the "paradoxical mystery of th
cruelty," the sacrifice of God himself. This is the specific form of c
proper to the philosopher. Governed by the will to truth - a will nurtu
preserved by the practice of asceticism -the philosopher finally appe
who, recognizing that the idea of truth is itself a kind of fiction, spares no
in telling us that everything we hold as solid and certain about the w
on closer examination, demonstrably accidental, contingent, or false
ideas, philosophies, religions, moralities, everything. Such honesty r
ending in nihilism - the catastrophic conviction that nothing is tr

anything is permitted. Destroying, as it does, assumptions and essen
convictions that enable societies to function and most people to feel a
in the world, the philosopher's will to truth is "a kind of sublime wicke
But this final cruelty, unlike its Christian antecedent, does not incarcer
will to power; rather, it promises to liberate this will from the shac
groundless guilt, thereby restoring "its goal to the earth" by translatin
back into nature" - an animal 'nature' characterized, among other thin

cruelty: the primordial pleasure to be found in causing pain.22
In trying to imagine what kind of institutions might, in the future, rei
rather than weaken the will to power, it is useful to recall that diff
historical cultures have differed widely in the degree of internalizati
they have required and also in the externalized displays of power tha
have permitted. For long centuries, as we have seen, the state, accord
Nietzsche, employed the most "fearful means" for molding its human
rial. "Consider the old German punishments: for example, stoning
breaking on the wheel . . . , piercing with stakes, tearing apart or tra

by horses. . . , boiling of the criminal in oil or wine. . . , the popular
alive . . . , cutting flesh from the chest, and also the practice of smeari
wrongdoer with honey and leaving him in the blazing sun for the fli
Nietzsche remarks that the popular belief that punishment awaken
science is quite mistaken: One reason, he speculates, that "belief in p
ment" is "tottering" among nineteenth-century Europeans. "Generally
ing," he observes, "punishment makes men hard and cold; it concentr
sharpens the feeling of alienation; it strengthens the power of resis
Harsh penal practices paradoxically honor and preserve man's murd

impulses: for the criminal and spectators sense that "the type" of
criminal's actions "as such" cannot be reprehensible since one sees "ex
the same kind of actions practiced in the service of justice and appro
and practiced with a good conscience: . . . violence, defamation, imprison-
ment, torture, murder, practiced as a matter of principle and without even

emotion to excuse them."23
The modern state, by contrast, tends, as a matter of humanitarian and

egalitarian principle, to outlaw harsh forms of punishment and cruel practices
generally, abolishing slavery, for example, eliminating titles and status
symbols, softening hierarchical distinctions. In the wake of the French
Revolution, there had appeared a new kind of "legal order, thought of as

sovereign and universal." The democratic state is organized "not as a means
in the struggle between power-complexes, but as a means of preventing all
struggle in general." Heralded both by Kant's philosophy and by the liberal

and socialist movements of the nineteenth century, this legal order Nietzsche
despised; it introduced "a principle hostile to life, an agent of the dissolution and destruction of man, an attempt to assassinate the future of man."
Mankind was becoming enmeshed in a "tremendous clockwork, composed

of ever smaller, ever more subtly 'adapted' gears," in which there is "an
ever-growing superfluity of all dominating and commanding elements," in

which individuals represent "minimalforces, minimal values." Such individ-
uals, deprived of the spectacle of punishment and tired of the war within,
crave peace, tranquillity, an end to suffering. With "nothing any more to be
afraid of," man is "no longer able to despise himself," no longer able even
to enjoy the pleasure of inflicting pain on himself. At the end of this path lies
the "last man" - docile denizen of a world that, to return to our starting point
in Foucault's text, has rendered useless "both the eagle and the sun."24
It is scarcely news to remark that Foucault felt a profound affinity for
Nietzsche. In Folie et deraison, Foucault's first major work, Nietzsche is

repeatedly invoked as one figure in a pantheon of "tragic heroes" that also
includes de Sade, Nerval and Artaud - figures united by their being classified
as "mad"; but also authors, in the case of de Sade and Artaud, notorious for
their own transvaluations of cruelty. In the conclusion to Foucault's unpublished these complementaire on Kant's anthropology, completed at roughly
the same time, Nietzsche looms even larger: "The path of the question: What
is Man? in the field of philosophy, ends with the challenging and disarming
response: the Overman." "To awaken us from the confused sleep of dialectics
and of anthropology," writes Foucault in 1962, "we required the Nietzschean
figures of tragedy, of Dionysius, of the death of God, of the philosopher's

hammer, of the Overman approaching with steps of a dove, of the Return."
"Nietzsche," Foucault declares in another passage, from Les mots et les

choses in 1966, "marks the threshold beyond which contemporary philoso-
phy can begin again to think; and he will no doubt continue for a long while
to loom over its advance."25
Nietzsche marks a similar threshold for Foucault's conception of history.
In appearance, "or rather, according to the mask it bears," historiography in
the wake of Nietzsche may seem "neutral, devoid of passions, and committed
solely to truth." A closer look at such historiography, however, reveals at play
all the elements that Nietzsche associated with the will to truth: "instinct,
passion, the inquisitor's devotion, cruel subtlety, and malice." In the work of
such a historian, "knowledge," concludes Foucault-and this comment
climaxes perhaps his most important extended essay on Nietzsche -"is not
tied to the constitution and affirmation of a free subject; rather, it creates a
progressive enslavement to its instinctive violence."26

These are harsh words -harsher, in some ways, than anything we have
seen in Nietzsche. What can Foucault here mean by "progressive enslavement" to "instinctive violence"? How could "knowledge," through the pro-
duction of a certain kind of "history," bring about such an enslavement?

Is it at all plausible to see in Surveiller et punir a veiled expression of some
such aim?
Let us start by looking more closely at the discussion of supplice -death
by torture -in this book's second chapter, entitled "L'eclat des supplices."
The word eclat evokes a paradox underlined throughout the text: Torture, far
from being a disgusting act of blind savagery, was, as Foucault describes it,
a carefully regulated practice with its own splendors and glory. An art of
"maintaining life in pain," a "theatre of hell," "the poetry of Dante put into
laws," supplice was, emphatically, a festive pleasure: Crowds avidly flocked
to the scene of torture: "If the crowd gathered round the scaffold, it was not
simply to witness the sufferings of a condemned man or to excite the anger
of the executioner: it was also to hear someone who had nothing left to lose
curse the judges, laws, power, religion. Death-by-torture allowed the condemned man this momentary satumalia, where nothing was prohibited or
punishable." Climaxing in the ceremony of dismemberment, supplice also,
adds Foucault, allowed the "the crime to explode [eclater] into its truth."27
But in what does this "truth" consist? That crime has "beauty and greatness," Foucault insists: "The most intense point of lives, that which concen-
trates their energy, is precisely where they collide with power, struggle with
it, attempt to use its forces or escape its traps." Through "sacrificial and
glorious murders," the criminal becomes a "lightning-existence," harshly
illuminating the "ambiguity of the justifiable and the outlawed"; his fate, as
it is recorded in popular memory, reveals "the relation between power and

the people, stripped down to essentials: the order to kill, the prohibition
against killing; to make oneself kill, to be executed; voluntary sacrifice,

ordained punishment; memory, oblivion." Crime looms as a "privilege" - the
"exclusive privilege of those who are really great." Far from being a symptom
of pathology, murder in Foucault's eyes evinces an admirable sort of power:

"At bottom, the existence of crime happily manifests 'an irrepressibility of
human nature;' it is necessary to see in it, not a weakness or a disease, but

rather an energy that is straightening itself out, a 'striking protestation of
human individuality,' which no doubt gives it, in the eyes of all, its strange
power of fascination."28
Whereas in modern society the fascination with crime becomes a kind of
pleasure largely enjoyed vicariously, in private, for example, through the
reading of literature - one thinks of authors like Jean Genet and Norman
Mailer, on one hand, and the proliferation of popular nonfiction accounts of

hideous crimes and spectacular murder trials, on the other-the ancient
regime's practice of supplice allows the fascination with crime to exert "its
strange power" - its "truth," if you will - directly, in public. Facing both
executioner and outlaw, the crowd can appreciate "how men have been able
to rise against power, traverse the law, and expose themselves to death
through death."29
It is small wonder, then, that supplice in practice was an "uncertain festiva

in which violence was instantaneously reversible." Beholding the exquisitely
calibrated excesses of torture and " 'the cruel pleasure taken in punishing',"
the crowd at any moment might feel emboldened to vent its own subversively
"bestial virility" on the sovereign's official representatives. "In these executions, which ought to have shown only the terrifying power of the prince,
there was a whole aspect of carnival, in which the roles were inverted, the
powerful mocked and criminals transformed into heroes." Invigorated by the

shared pleasure of witnessing spectacular acts of cruelty, the crowd had its
own latent power as an "army of disorder" silently reinforced. It was this
cruel power that erupted on the great journees of the French Revolution, in
a "sort of constantly recommenced liturgy" of "combat and sacrifice."30

The effect of penal reform Foucault therefore considers highly ambiguous. Death by torture belonged to a specific "mechanism of power" - a social
mechanism where power, among other defining features, was visibly "exalted and strengthened by its physical manifestations"; a mechanism where
the power of the sovereign, along with the latent counterpower of the people,
"was recharged in the ritual display of its reality as 'surpouvoir"' -literally,
a "super-power," a power above power, a transcendent form of transc

power.3"
By contrast, contemporary societies, which seek to institute "less cruelty,
less suffering, more gentleness, more respect, more 'humanity,' " aim at a
"perfection of power" that would "render its actual exercise useless." With
the abolition of death by torture, "the people was robbed of its old pride in
its crimes." No longer was traversing the law permitted to be a source of
shared pleasure. The criminal was no longer cast as an outlaw, a hero, a fitting
adversary of sovereign power, but rather as a "deviant," an anomaly, an
aberration from the norms of a universal humanity, and therefore a "case,"

to be analyzed, rehabilitated, and, if possible, cured. Deprived of a shared
public forum for savoring displays of cruel omnipotence, subject to disciplin-
ary regimens that painlessly "dissociate power from the body," dissipating
savage impulses by acting in depth "on the heart, the thought, the will,
inclinations," mankind finds its potential for greatness - its ability to exercise
its "super-power" - squandered. The eagle - Nietzsche's proud symbol of

sovereign power - becomes useless, as does the "dancing star" born of chaos:
"Incipit tragoedia."32
But the last man is not the last word, either in Foucault or in Nietzsche.
The "tragic heroes" which Foucault invokes in Folie et de'raison bear witness
to another possibility, another perspective, another way of thinking, "outside," above and beyond the limits set by the "insidious leniencies" of mod-
em humanism. Driven inward, cut off from its old links to the punishing
Christian conscience that externalized itself in the great atrocities of the
Inquisition, cruelty, to borrow one of Foucault's phrases, turns from "jousts
to phantasms."33
The reference to phantasms is worth pursuing a little further, for phantasy,
the dream, and imagination together play a central role in Foucault's way of
thinking about cruelty. "Phantasms," he contends, "topologize the materiality
of the body" - they map out the otherwise mute animal instincts and drives.
The capacity to phantasize gives the human organism "disturbing and nocturnal powers." No matter what civilization may dictate, the dreamworld
remains beyond good and evil, outside of discipline, alien to reason, akin to
madness, a secret frenzy with all the "ambiguity" of "chaos and apocalypse."
Given any "healthy, normal and law-abiding adult," it is always possible to
bring out the chaos within -the "nakedness of desire as the lawless law of
the world" -by asking a man, as Foucault puts it in Surveiller etpunir, "how
much of the child he still has in him, what secret madness dwells within him,
what fundamental crime he has wished to commit." "Happiness and unhappiness" may be "inscribed in the register of the imagination," Foucault writes
in one of his first essays in 1954- but certainly "not duty and virtue." Perhaps
that is why Foucault, seventeen years later, in a rare flight of prescriptive
rhetoric, urged that phantasms "should" - note the word should - "be freed
from the restrictions we impose upon them, freed from the dilemmas of truth
and falsehood and of being and non-being. . . ; they must be allowed to
conduct their dance"-even though the dance of phantasy may produce

results that are, in Foucault's words, "simultaneously topological" -that is,
mapped back onto the materiality of the body as carnal desires-"and

cruel."34
There is more. Insofar as the dreamworld becomes the last, secret,
irrepressible redoubt of the primordial pleasure to be felt in inflicting pain

the imagination itself, as Foucault suggests in Folie et deraison, undergoes
an epochal transformation: "Sadism is not a name finally given to a practice
as old as Eros; it is a massive cultural fact which appeared precisely at the

end of the eighteenth century, and which constitutes one of the greatest
conversions of Western imagination: unreason transformed into delirium of
the heart, madness of desire, the insane dialogue of love and death in the
limitless presumption of appetite." After de Sade, continues Foucault in his

next major book, Les mots et les choses, "violence, life and death, desire, and
sexuality will extend, below the level of representation, an immense expanse
of shade, which we are now attempting to recover, as far as we can, in our
discourse, in our freedom, in our thought."35

Outwardly, in modern society, bodies may seem to be docile. But inwardly, as Foucault explains in the first volume of his History of Sexuality,
bodies and souls boil and seethe, their secret dreams of a mastery without
mercy "isolated, intensified, incorporated," and finally reconstituted in an
explosive proliferation of perversions. Cruelty, abolished as public spectacle,
reappears as a shadowy sexual obsession fueled by phantasies of butchery,
death, and violent domination, finding expression in a kind of delirious,

murmuring, increasingly garrulous language that discovers in the most
murderous impulses both an unlimited source of erotic fascination and an
"infinite void that opens beneath the feet of the person it attracts."36
There thus appears what Foucault regards as a distinctly modem tradition
of thought that exalts cruelty and death. Through monotonous inventories of

every conceivable atrocity, dramatically physical evocations of violence and
frenzied flights of philosophical phantasy, artists and writers like de Sade,
Artaud, Nietzsche, and Bataille not only rescue from a silent oblivion our
"primitive savagery" but labor to transform it into a "total contestation" of
Western culture: "Everything that morality and religion, everything that a

botched society has stifled in man, springs back to life in the castle of
murders."37
Surveiller etpunir is the hidden masterpiece of this tradition. Masquerading as a work of normal, law-abiding history, "neutral, devoid of passions
and committed solely to truth," it lures the unwitting reader into a castle of
murders. Orienting ourselves in the shadowy bowels of this dungeon of ideas,
we "feel an infinite void opening beneath our feet" -we experience what
Foucault calls "the thought from outside." Thinking through this thought which leads us, literally, "outside" of the text -we are brought face-to-face
with the specter of an "untamed ontology," as Foucault once put it. The dark
secret of this ontology is that the human organism in its savage, wild state
takes pleasure in inflicting pain - a "lawless law of the world," if ever there
was one. In Surveiller etpunir, has not the historian working in the wake of
Nietzsche cunningly deployed his "knowledge" in order to authorize -just
as Foucault promised-"a progressive enslavement" to "instinctive violence?"38
During the French student uprising in May 1968, graffiti appeared on the
walls of the Sorbonne. One slogan admonished: SOYONS CRUELS! [BE
CRUEL!]39
Perhaps the student who composed this graffiti had read Nietzsche and
Foucault, more likely not: Sentiments like this, popularized by born-again
enrages and the Situationists, were in the air. In its enigmatic economy, this
slogan, in any case, sharply poses the question that I would now like briefly
to explore. BE CRUEL! What can such an injunction possible mean?
There is a temptation, worth resisting, to shrug the question off as insane.
Still, there is something to be said for a healthy dose of naive common sense
and skepticism when approaching the question of cruelty.
Reading Foucault at his most histrionic, raving on about the castle of
murders, I am reminded of a splendidly superheated, youthful essay by
Georges Bataille; "The Use Value of D. A. F. de Sade." After slashing away
at Andre Breton and the surrealists for expressing their admiration for the
Marquis de Sade without showing the slightest inclination to put sadism into
practice, Bataille declares that "it is time to choose between the conduct of
cowards afraid of their own joyful excesses," and brave, truly serious sadists
like Bataille himself, who calls for the creation, after a "fiery and
Revolution," of "organizations that have ecstasy and frenzy as their
spectacular deaths of animals, partial tortures, orgiastic dances, etc.
This is absurd. And twenty-five years later, in the great magnum
his maturity, Erotism: Death and Sensuality, Bataille admitted as m
"Such a strange doctrine" as de Sade's, Bataille writes in 1955, "could

obviously not be generally accepted, nor even generally propounded, unless
it were glossed over, deprived of significance, and reduced to a trivial piece
of pyrotechnics. Obviously, if it were taken seriously, no society could accept
it for a single instant.'41
So what could a society accept? What can the injunction to BE CRUEL!

mean?
Here are some possibilities suggested by my reading of Nietzsche and

Foucault:
* BE CRUEL in your quest for the truth, ruthless in your honesty, savage
in your irreverance. This we may call the cruelty proper to Nietzsche's
philosopher, a cruelty certainly practiced by Foucault, one of whose great

and not-so-secret crimes was to butcher gleefully the concept of "man," as
this had been understood by modem humanists from Kant to Sartre.
* BE CRUEL in your resoluteness, welcome the harsh renunciations and
sometimes brutal costs of relentlessly pursuing any vaulting ideal, be it
wisdom, Godliness, or revolutionary purity. This we may call the cruelty

proper to the ascetic, an eagerness to suffer the pains entailed by unswerving
commitment to any burning faith or transcendent ambition, a cruelty accepted by both Foucault and Nietzsche and recently illuminated in fascinat-
ing detail by Foucault's friend Peter Brown in The Body and Society, his
study of sexual renunciation in early Christianity.
* BE CRUEL in the works of imagination that you create: spare us

nothing in painting the demons in the desert who tempt St. Anthony: a
horseman with a head made of thistle-flower, a mermaid riding on a rat, a
tonsured devil with a pig's snout; etch two beatifically radiant whores,
holding captive a dignified libertine with the body of a chicken and jabbing
the quill of a plucked feather up his ass; give us the death of Damiens in
unbearable detail, make us queasy, tell us exactly how red-hot pincers singed
his flesh, how his thighs were carved up and pulled apart. This we may call
the cruelty proper to the artist, a cruelty to be found in both Nietzsche and
Foucault, and also in the canvases of Bosch, the Caprichos and Disparates
of Goya, the theatre of Artaud, and pornography of Bataille.42
* BE CRUEL in your erotic play: snap on handcuffs, neck-collars and

chains, lock pins and clips on nipples, administer meticulous floggings; or,
be a slave for a night and, with your master's help, mimic the ancient "art of
maintaining life in pain," tremble with "the most exquisite agonies," savor
the disintegration and humiliation of the self in the jouissance of exploded
limits. This we may call the cruelty proper to de Sade and Sacher-Masoch, a
cruelty never directly mentioned in Nietzsche but explicitly endorsed by
Foucault, who praised sado-masochistic sexual practices for "inventing new

possibilities of pleasure" through the "eroticization of power."43
BE CRUEL in the license you give to institutions and political practices

that foster brutality and public displays of suffering: praise regimes and
popular insurrections that do not flinch from execution, torture, terror,
unleashing the lust for revenge. This is akin to the cruelty of Machiavelli's
prince; a kind of cruelty certainly not ruled out by Nietzsche, and often
commended by him, though his own political goals remain elusive; a kind of
cruelty also entertained sympathetically by Foucault, whose conception of
what he called "popular justice" he explained in one astonishing interview
by commending at length the September Massacres that occurred during the

French Revolution. In the spirit of Foucault, let us not mince words about
what, exactly, he was endorsing: Inflamed by rumors of a counterrevolution-
ary plot, crowds of Parisian militants in 1792 stormed the prisons, where they
established impromptu popular courts; those found guilty were forced to run
a gauntlet of clubs, pikes, axes, knives, sabers, even, in one instance, a

carpenter's saw; after the victims had been bludgeoned to death and hacked
to pieces, the lucky ones were thrown onto a bloody heap; the others had their
body parts - decapitated heads, mutilated genitalia - mounted on pikes and
triumphantly paraded through the streets of Paris; before the orgy of killing
was over, more than one thousand men and women had died."
Let me propose a crude summary of what Nietzsche and Foucault together

seem to be saying: Better externalized than internalized cruelty: It is healthier,
more "active," rather than weak and "reactive."45 Better internalized cruelty
than no cruelty at all: Both the ruthless resoluteness of the ascetic and the
brutal phantasies of the artist and solitary onanist at least bear witness to the
continuing chaos of instinctive violence -the kind of chaos needed to give
birth to "a dancing star."

Foucault's political views in this regard are, of course, far more complex,
even contradictory, than I can indicate here. In the last years of his life, he
became increasingly interested in discriminating between power, which he

regarded as ineliminable and a source of potential pleasure, and domination,
which he criticized for reifying power in an asymmetrical relationship

also defended such classically liberal devices as the assertion of human
against autocratic and totalitarian regimes. Apart from a few exceptional
cases-including revolutionary Iran, which Foucault admired-the resistance to domination, he conceded, could no longer come from crowds
weaned on public rituals of "combat and sacrifice."46
In countries like France and the United States, at the same time Foucault
looked elsewhere: implicitly, to madmen and delinquents; to the readers of
de Sade and Nietzsche and Artaud, one supposes; and, perhaps above all, to
the countless silent daydreamers who, in the aftermath of 1968, have felt free
to act out their wildest phantasies, giving rise, among other things, to "a
visible explosion of heretical sexualities," where the painless coercions of

modern society can be overturned voluptuously - for example, in an exuberant carnival of make-believe atrocities. Writing about such heretical sexualities, Foucault almost sounds optimistic: "Never have there existed more
centers of power; never more manifest and prolix thoughtfulness; never more
circular contacts and linkages; never more hotbeds for kindling, in order to
disseminate still further, the strength of pleasures and the stubborn wayward-
ness of powers."47
There is more to be said about these themes in both Nietzsche and

Foucault. The issue of cruelty in Foucault could be further illuminated by
systematically tracking his references to de Sade, to Artaud, and to Freud's
concept of thanatos.
There is more to be said as well about the enigmatic admonition to BE
CRUEL! It is worth noting, for example, how little we really know about
the differences and the similarities between philosophical, ascetic, artistic,
erotic, and political forms of cruelty: The interminibility of the current debate
over pornography and violence is only one symptom of our ignorance in this
area. Is externalizing cruelty, if only in art and erotic play, better than
internalizing it? Does it offer, as some research suggests, a useful outlet for
aggressive impulses, exhausting energies that might otherwise break society
apart? Or, on the contrary, does making public cruel phantasies stimulate an
appetite for them, increasing the likelihood that some people will act out such
phantasies? So far as I can see, no one really knows.48

One thing at least does seem clear after reading Nietzsche and Foucault
on this subject. Whether cogent or not, the transvaluation of cruelty proposed
by both Nietzsche and Foucault is radically incompatible with the avowed
principles of most modem (and, for that matter, many historical) societi
though, of course, the fascist and Nazi cases are striking, and not partic
reassuring, exceptions. Judith Shklar, I think plausibly, suggests that liberalism has to rest on "putting cruelty first," and regarding cruelty as the
worst of vices. Furthermore, it is probably no accident that most contem-
porary advocates of outlawing the continuing practice of torture ultimately

refer back to something very much like the humanistic anthropology that
Nietzsche and Foucault both have so savagely criticized. "It may be possible
to make torture disappear by making it effectively illegal," remarks Edward
Peters at the close of his sober little history of Torture, "but it seems necessary
also to preserve the reason for making it illegal and dangerous -to preserve
a notion of human dignity that, although not always meticulously observed,
is generally assumed in the public language, if not the unpublic actions, of
most modern societies, and assumed, moreover, in a generally universal and
democratic sense."49
This, of course, is not to say that Nietzsche and Foucault are mistaken: It
is simply to point out that their views on power and cruelty raise a number
of very complex theoretical and practical questions.
It would be inappropriate to conclude without noting two final, and

profoundly paradoxical, features of Foucault's lifework, taken as a whole.
The first is that Foucault, insofar as he upholds a radically historicist view
of the body and soul, a view perhaps even more radically historicist than that
found in Nietzsche, must, if he is to be consistent, concede that "the lawless
law" of cruelty is, in fact, no law at all. This Foucault himself explicitly
stressed in the works he published after Surveiller etpunir. In La volonte de

savoir, he calls the human organism "un dispositif historique" -a deployment of forces that shifts over time. In a culture constructed differently, the
pleasures of pain, ceasing to haunt our phantasies, might well disappear

altogether.S?
What would it be like to be free of cruel impulses? That, I imagine, is one

of the questions Foucault had in mind as he worked on the second and third
volumes of his History of Sexuality. In these two final works - on the classical
arts of self-control - he was, as he wrote near the end of his life, struggling
"to learn to what extent the effort to think one's own history can free thought
from what it silently thinks, and so enable it to think differently." In these
searing words, which come as close as any to revealing the genuinely tragic
character of Foucault's own life, we must, if we take seriously Nietzsche's
views on internalization and Foucault's final sentence in Surveiller etpunir,

"hear the distant roar of battle."5'
But that is a topic for another time.
NOTES
1. Michel Foucault, Surveiller etpunir [hereafter SP] (Paris, 1975), 9 (English transl
Discipline and Punish [hereafter DP], trans. Alan Sheridan [New York, 1977], 3). In several
passages here and elsewhere, my own translation differs, in a few cases substantially, from the
published English versions of Foucault's works. My essay's epigraph is from Michel Foucault,
Mental Illness and Pyschology, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York, 1976), 73.
2. SP, 11 (DP, 5).
3. Michel Foucault, Death and the Labyrinth: The World of Raymond Roussel, trans.
Charles Ruas (Berkeley, 1986), 84, evoking the "cruelty without claws" of Roussel's phantastic
world-and "a darkness within the thing itself which is quietly contained there." Cf. Michel
Foucault, "Language to Infinity," in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice [hereafter LCP],

trans. Donald F. Bouchard, 60-61, on the language of de Sade.
4. Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago, 1982), 143. This book, explicitly endorsed by Foucault himself as a sound
guide, is arguably the best single work in English on Foucault's thought. It is only fair to warn
the reader that the basic sense of the interpretation offered by Dreyfus and Rabinow is in sharp
contradiction to my own understanding. This naturally raises a question about the plausibility
of my own, quite different reading of Foucault. Accounting for these radical discrepancies,
however, requires a much longer discussion of Foucault's polymorphous texts and persona,
which would help make intelligible the various interpretations of his thought-and the uses to
which it has been put -by different audiences, not all of them academic.
5. Edward Peters, in his exemplary short history of Torture (Oxford, 1985), 89, is the only
commentator I know of to point this out. "L'eclat des supplices" is the title of chapter 2 of SP;
Alan Sheridan translates it as "The Spectacle of the Scaffold" -which drains the French of its
paradoxical sting.
6. SP, 34, 140, 143, (DP, 29-30, 138, 141).
7. Judith Shklar, Ordinary Vices (Cambridge, 1984), 8. See also Richard L. Gregory,
ed., The Oxford Companion to the Mind (Oxford, 1987), 693. In Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge, 1989), Richard Rorty discusses Foucault, Nietzsche, and also cruelty, citing
Shklar as one inspiration. The book, alas, is a profound disappointment, largely because of
Rorty's naive (and, in the context of his own philosophy, arbitrary) conviction that, as he puts
it, "J. S. Mill's suggestion that governments devote themselves to optimizing the balance
between leaving people's private lives alone and preventing suffering seems to me pretty much
the last word" (p. 63).
8. SP, 219 (DP, 217).
9. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra [hereafter Z], prologue, nos. 1, 10. He
and throughout, I am using the translations of Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale.
10. Martin Heidegger,Nietzsche, trans. David Farrell Krell (New York, 1984), vol.2,4
cf. Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche (Paris, 1965), 43. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science [her
GS], no. 343; Beyond Good and Evil [hereafter BGE], no. 25; and Z, no. 5.
11. SP, 34, 228 (DP, 29, 227). Michel Foucault, "Prison Talk," in Power/Knowledge
[hereafter PK], ed. Colin Gordon (New York, 1980), 53. Foucault's reference to "being pretentious" is, in fact, disingenuous: Elsewhere (and on more than one occasion), he refers to SP
as "reactivating the project of a 'genealogy of morals,' "without mentioning Nietzsche by name.
See, for example, Michel Foucault, "Questions of Method," in Kenneth Baynes, James Bohman
and Thomas McCarthy, eds.,After Philosophy: End or Transformation (Cambridge, MA., 1987),
102. Cf. Foucault's own back-cover blurb to the original French edition of SP: "Can one produce
a genealogy of modem morals through a political history of bodies?"
12. Z, III, 2. Cf. Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, on the crux of the second essay in the
Genealogy of Morals: "Cruelty is here exposed for the first time as one of the most ancient and
basic substrata of culture that simply cannot be imagined away."
13. Friedrich Nietzsche to Erwin Rohde, 16 July 1872, in Selected Letters of Friedrich
Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Christopher Middleton (Chicago, 1969), 97.

14. Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, no. 104.
15. Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak [hereafter D], no. 18. See also Friedrich Nietzsche, The
Birth of Tragedy, no. 2, on the intertwining of agony and ecstasy among Dionysian revellers;
and the Genealogy of Morals [hereafter GM], II, 12, on the will to power as the "aggressive,
expansive, form-giving," etc., "essence of life."
16. D, no. 18; GM, II, 6; D, no. 30; GM, 11, 5.
17. GM,II,3, 15.
18. GM,II, 16, 17.

19. GM, II, 1; D, no. 18; GM, II, 2.
20. D, no. 18; see also GM, III, 11.
21. GM, II, no. 18.
22. BGE, no. 55, no. 230; GM, II, 24; cf. GM, III, 28.
23. GM, II, 3, 14.
24. GM, II, 11; Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, no. 866; BGE, no. 201.
25. Michel Foucault, Introduction a l'anthropologie de Kant, ler tome (these complementaire; typescript available in the Bibliotheque de la Sorbonne), 128. Foucault, "Preface to
Transgression," inLCP, 38. Michel Foucault,Lesmotsetleschoses [hereafterMC] (Paris, 1966),

353 (English translation: The Order of Things [hereafter 071 [New York, 1970], 342).
26. Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," in LCP, 163, 162. For a provocative discussion of Foucault's literary techniques as an historian, see Michel de Certeau,Heterologies, trans.
Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, 1986), 185-192.
27. SP, 38, 49, 228 (DP, 33-34, 46, 227).
28. SP, 72, 295-296 (DP, 68-69, 289). Michel Foucault, "Les vies des hommes infames,"
Les Cahiers du Chemin 29 (15 January 1977), 17, 14; Michel Foucault, ed., Moi Pierre Rivi?re,
ayant egorge ma mere, ma soeur et mon frere .. . " (hereafter MPR) (Paris, 1973), 271-272
(English translation: !, Pierre Riviere, Having Slaughtered My Mother, My Sister andMy Brother
... [hereafter IPR], trans. Frank Jellinek [New York, 1975], 206-207).
29. MPR, 271 (IPR, 206). See also SP, 72 (DP, 69).
30. SP, 66-67, 75, 64, 267 (DP, 63, 73, 61, 262). Michel Foucault, "Un si cruel savior,"
Critique 182 (July 1962), 606; "Iran: The Spirit of a World Without Spirit," in Politics,
Philosophy, Culture, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman (New York, 1988), 214 (Foucault's reference
to the French Revolution comes in the context of explaining his fascination with the Iranian
revolution).
31. SP, 60-61 (DP, 57).
32. SP, 21-22, 202, 72, 140, 307, (DP, 16, 201, 69, 138, 299); GS, 342.
33. SP, 195 (DP, 193).
34. Foucault, "Theatrum Philosophicum," in LCP, 170. MC, 290 (OT, 278). Michel
Foucault, Histoire de la folie a l'age classique [originally published in 1961 as Folie et

deraison- hereafter FD] (Paris, 1972), 551 (partial English translation: Madness and Civiliza-
tion [hereafter MA], trans. Richard Howard [New York, 1965], 281). SP, 195 (DP, 193). Michel
Foucault, "The Thought from Outside" [hereafter "TO"], in Foucault/Blanchot, trans. Jeffrey
Mehlman and Brian Massumi (Cambridge, MA., 1987), 17. Michel Foucault, "Dream, Imagi-
nation, and Existence," trans. Forrest Williams, in Review of Existential Psychology and
Psychiatry 19 no. 1 (1984-85), 69.
35. FD, 381 (MA, 210); MC, 224 (OT, 211).
36. Michel Foucault, La volonte de savoir [hereafter VS] (Paris, 1976), 65 (English trans-
lation: The History of Sexuality [hereafterHS], trans. Robert Hurley [New York, 19781,48; "TO,"
28.
37. FD, 551 (MA, 281).
38. MC, 291 (OT, 278): The French phrase, une ontologie sauvage, nicely evokes Heidegger, Levi-Strauss, and de Sade, all at once.
39. See Rene Vienet, Enrages et Situationnistes a la mouvement des occupations (Paris,
1968), 99. I owe this reference to Greil Marcus.
40. Georges Bataille, "The Use Value of D. A. F. de Sade," in Visions of Excess, trans. Allan
Stoekl (Minneapolis, MN, 1985), 102.
41. Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality, trans. Mary Dalwood (New York,
1962), 180.
42. The description of the works by Bosch ("The Temptation of St. Anthony") and Goya
("Todos Caeran [All Will Fall]," Caprichos, plate 19) was inspired by Foucault's reference to
both artists in FD, 550 (MA, 280-281). Cf. the definition of cruelty in Antonin Artaud, The
Theatre and Its Double, trans. Mary Caroline Richards (New York, 1958), 101. Foucault's friend
Leo Bersani has interesting things to say about sado-masochistic impulses in art in The Freudian
Body: Psychoanalysis and Art (New York, 1986).
43. SP, 38 (DP, 34). Michel Foucault, "An Interview: Sex, Power and the Politics of
Identity," Advocate, 7 August 1984, 27, 29. My description of s/m play is, in part, a paraphrase
of that in Leo Bersani, "Is the Rectum a Grave?" in Douglas Crimp, ed.,AIDS: CulturalAnalysis,
Cultural Criticism (Cambridge, MA, 1988), 217.
44. See PK 1-2. The description of the September Massacres is drawn from Simon Schama,
Citizens (New York, 1989), 630-639. Brian C. J. Singer of York University in Toronto has written
an interesting (and so far unpublished) essay on the sociology of violence as it relates to the
Massacres, "Violence in the French Revolution: Forms of Ingestion/Forms of Expulsion." For
a sensible, if rather cautiouE, brief appraisal of Nietzsche's elusive views on cruelty and politics,
see the superb study by Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Cambridge, MA,
1985), 215-217.
45. These categories are elaborately worked out in Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche as Philoso-
pher, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York, 1983), esp. 129-130.

46. For Foucault's growing interest in liberalism, see the surprising course of 1978-79 in
the College de France, "Naissance de la biopolitique," summarized in Michel Foucault, Re6sume

des cours, 1970-1982 (Paris, 1989), 109-119. Cf. Michel Foucault, "Face aux gouvemments, les
droits de l'homme," a statement issued in 1981, first published in Liberation, 1 July 1984, 22.
Perhaps the clearest statement of the difference between power and domination appears in
Michel Foucault, "The Ethic of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom," in James Bemauer
and David Rasmussen, eds., The Final Foucault (Cambridge, 1988), 18-19.
47. VS, 67 (HS, 49). See also SP, 195 (DP, 193): "In a system of discipline, the child is
individualized than the adult, the patient more than the healthy man, the madman a
delinquent more than the normal and the non-delinquent."
48. A particularly impressive effort to grapple with these issues is Robert J. St
Perversion: The Erotic Form of Hatred (New York, 1975). Apart from Stoller's current
s/m and Bersani's essay, cited in nt. 43, perhaps the most interesting essay in English that
of on the theoretical issues raised by sado-masochistic sexual practices is by Foucault'

Gayle Rubin, "The Leather Menace: Comments on Politics and S/M," in SAMOIS, eds.,
to Power (Boston, 1981), 194-229.
49. Peters, Torture, 186.
50. VS, 139 (HS, 105). Cf Michel Foucault, "Power and Sex" (a 1977 interview), in
Foucault, Politics, Philosophy, Culture, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman (New York, 1988), 119-120.
51. Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley (New York, 1985), 9; SP,
315 (DP, 308).
James Miller is Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science at Brown University.

Author of History and Human Existence: From Marx to Merleau-Ponty (1979), Rous-
seau: Dreamer of Democracy (1984), and "Democracy Is in the Streets:" From Port
Huron to the Siege of Chicago (1987), he is currently working on a biographical study

of Michel Foucault.
CALL FOR PAPERS
WORLD WAR II -A 50-YEAR PERSPECTIVE

May 30-31, 1991
Siena College is sponsoring its sixth annual multidisciplinary conference
on the 50th anniversary of World War II. The focus for 1991 will be 1941,
although papers dealing with broad issues of earlier years will be welcomed.
Topics welcome include Fascism and Nazism; the war in Asia; literature; art;
film; diplomatic, political, and military history; popular culture and Women's
and Jewish studies dealing with the era. Asian, African, Latin American and
Near Eastern topics of relevance are solicited. Obviously, collaboration and

collaborationist regimes, the events in Greece, Yugoslavia, and the Balkans in
general, as well as North Africa, the invasion of Russia, Pearl Harbor, and so
on will be of particular relevance.
Replies and inquiries to: Professor Thomas 0. Kelly II

Department of History
Siena College
Loudonville, NY 12211
Deadline for submissions: December 15, 1990

Carnivals of Atrocity: Foucault, Nietzsche, Cruelty

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Carnivals of Atrocity: Foucault, Nietzsche, Cruelty

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Carnivals of Atrocity: Foucault, Nietzsche, Cruelty

Author(s): James Miller

M ICHEL FOUCAULT'S GREATEST WORK, Surveiller et punir

door of the Church of Paris,' where he was to be 'brought on a cart, naked

of great economy and precision. Slow, meticulous, ceremonial, it is a kind of

? 1990 Sage Publications, Inc.

Miller / CARNIVALS OF ATROCITY 471

pomography -a pomography of murderous pleasures, and, on the printed

network of surprising anecdotes, unexpected hypotheses, and patches of

reader to contemplate with unwonted sympathy what Foucault calls l'eclat

et punir is like walking into a fiendishly clever kind of philosophical fun

472 POLITICAL THEORY / AUGUST 1990

Fireworks, of course, there certainly are: Among other things, S

et punir offers readers a provocative new approach to the history

institutions; a seductive new jargon that promises to define, as nev

"genealogy of the modem 'soul'," showing how an institution like the

At the same time, Surveiller et punir is a singularly difficult text. While

patiently exploring detours in pursuit of answers to the many riddles it

What, for example, are we to make of Foucault's apparent fascination with

form that is fundamentally foreign to Foucault's way of thinking: What, if

large amount of merciless violence connected with the exercise of political

issued by Amnesty Intemational. It is symptomatic of how matters stand in

of on cruelty. Why this silence surrounding the phenomenon? Perhaps, as

Miller / CARNIVALS OF ATROCITY 473

might produce a straightforward argument. In the book's central chapter, on

extinguished one by one in the daily exercise of surveillance, in a panopticism

tertwined, the two animals, as Heidegger comments in his lectures on

otherworldliness of God. Elsewhere in his work, Nietzsche subverts the

"eclipse of the sun," "a starry sky," a constellation of "different moralities"

474 POLITICAL THEORY / AUGUST 1990

As we have seen, Foucault, at the outset of Surveiller et punir, declares

his ambition to write, as Nietzsche did, a "genealogy" - a "genealogy of the

modern 'soul."' Interpreting the eagle and sun as Nietzschean symbols

serenely unaware of those "hair-raising and hazardous things" that have

Folie et deraison but to Nietzsche's original Genealogy of Morals - a sequel

Now, Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals expresses the same disquieting

expresses skepticism about the value of eliminating pain; he also expresses

Nietzsche, furthermore, explicitly places the phenomenon of cruelty at

Miller / CARNIVALS OF ATROCITY 475

This conviction takes shape gradually in Nietzsche's work. It grows, on

speak of spring as long as one has a winter to precede it."'13

evil, is determined by the degree and quality of his intellect." 14

This formulation, which yokes pleasure and pain together in a kind of

exercise actively the will to power, he regards as the essence of life. To

in effect, to be cruel: This is Nietzsche's hard teaching."5

le malpour le plaisir de le faire,' the enjoyment of violation."'16

in the memory." Joining a group, a man pledged himself to obey shared

"an increase of fear, a heightening of prudence, mastery of the desires: thus

punishment tames men, but it does not make them 'better.""'7

476 POLITICAL THEORY / AUGUST 1990

Taming, for Nietzsche, entails what he calls "internalization" -an

that, in our own post-Freudian age, seems deceptively self-evident.

freedom pushed back and repressed, incarcerated within, and finally

straitjacket," as Nietzsche puts it, the organism's oligarchy is kept in

murderous impulses, he becomes "calculable, regular, necessary" - a subject

otherwise might be inexplicable -namely, the pleasure many men have

through the survival of internalized cruelty and the paradoxical convergence

prima facie, a monstrous oxymoron -becomes the key in the Genealogy of

animal impulses, cultivated with foresight and transmogrified through the

secret self-ravishment, this artist's cruelty, this delight in imposing a form

and perhaps beauty itself."2'

surveyed by using the metaphor of a ladder. The "great ladder of religious

Miller / CARNIVALS OF ATROCITY 477

cruel eyes of the ascetic." Finally comes the "paradoxical mystery of th