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The Transcendental Logic of Enlightenment as Negation of the Negation of Life

Cengiz Erdem

The relationship between the subject and power is a theme that has played a significant role
in determining the direction of European thought since Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud weighed
in on the philosophical scene. Both the Frankfurt School thinkers such as Marcuse,
Horkheimer and Adorno, and the Parisian philosophers such as Foucault, Deleuze and
Badiou, took on this subject as one of the objects of their studies in different ways. Although
I was deeply influenced by Adorno’s Negative Dialectics and Marcuse’s Reason and
Revolution at the beginning, I later on turned towards Foucault, Deleuze and Badiou to find
tools for repairing the restrictive implications of the early Frankfurt School thought. I think
philosophy and critical theory have a lot more to offer one another that can be used in the
transformation of the predominant order of being in particular and overcoming nihilism in
general, than many, such as Habermas, suggest.

The point of departure of this essay is the modern discourse on power that emerged with
the Enlightenment in the Eighteenth Century. A response to metaphysics and Christian
dogmatism, Enlightenment is a system of thought which proclaims itself to be governed by
universal reason alone. In the Dialectic of Enlightenment Horkheimer and Adorno situate
Marx and Freud, together with themselves, in this tradition. I situate Foucault, Deleuze and
Badiou as well in this same tradition of Enlightenment.

What manifests as the mutation of light from the "natural light" to the "Enlightened"
is the substitution of belief for knowledge, that is, a new infinite movement implying
another image of thought: it is no longer a matter of turning toward but rather one
of following tracks, of inferring rather than grasping or being grasped. Under what
conditions is inference legitimate? Under what conditions can belief be legitimate
when it has become secular? This question will be answered only with the creation of
the great empiricist concepts (association, relation, habit, probability, convention).
But conversely, these concepts, including the concept of belief itself, presuppose
diagrammatic features that make belief an infinite movement independent of
religion and traversing the new plane of immanence (religious belief, on the other
hand, will become a conceptualizable case, the legitimacy or illegitimacy of which can
be measured in accordance with the order of the infinite).1

Enlightenment signifies the secularization of the authority of the Big Other, and erection of
instrumental reason in the place of the absolute authority of the Bible. In this light
Enlightenment appears to be merely a change of roles between the masters and the slaves;
the problem inherent in the metaphysical world of representation remains the same. Walter
Benjamin, for instance, warns against this trap set by the panoptic mechanism which creates
a Leviathan within the subject. In his essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction, Benjamin argues that cinema can turn out to be a fascist propaganda machine
if it falls in the wrong hands. Benjamin is not only against the aestheticization of politics but
also the politicization of aesthetics. What remains unthought in Benjamin’s essay, though, is

1
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy? (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 53

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the ideology of representational and metaphysical conceptions of non-reason, which is itself
the problem inherent in the predominant power structure.

Foucault’s interpretation of Bentham’s Panoptic mechanism, as well as his thoughts on


health and death in relation to the predominant power structure become relevant here. In
Discipline and Punish Foucault presents the Panopticon as a metaphor of how power
operates within modern western society. A revolutionary apparatus for its time (19th
century), the Panopticon was more than just a model of prison for Foucault, it was a
mechanism to keep an absent eye on the prisoner, to keep them under control at all times.

The Panopticon functions as a kind of laboratory of power. Thanks to its


mechanisms of observation, it gains in efficiency and in the ability to
penetrate into men’s behaviour; knowledge follows the advances of power,
discovering new objects of knowledge over all the surfaces on which power
is exercised.2

The formulation of the concept of the Panopticon involves not only seeing without being
seen, but also a mechanism that imposes both their differences and their resemblances
upon the subjects. So the subject’s difference from other subjects is itself externally
constituted, but is also internal to the subject. The subject is the product of the mechanism
in which the subject finds/loses itself, and participates in the setting of the trap. Some
subjects are produced in such a way as to act on an illusory sense of consciousness, that they
are in control of their lives and events surrounding them, that they are freely choosing their
destiny, when in fact all the rules and possibilities of action are always already set. In a
panoptic mechanism taking on passive and submissive roles brings wealth, love, health, and
even happiness. In a panoptic mechanism everyone is a slave, but some are less so than the
others. In a panoptic mechanism submissiveness brings power. The system is such that the
subject, to feel secure, takes on a passive role. In return the subject is recognized as worthy
of a higher step on the social ladder, which brings an illusionary sense of security. The
efficiency of the panoptic mechanism depends on its ability to produce
submissive/adaptive/rational subjects.

The Panopticon may even provide an apparatus for supervising its


own mechanisms. In this central tower, the director may spy on all
the employees that he has under his orders: nurses, doctors,
foremen, teachers, warders […] and it will even be possible to
observe the director himself. An inspector arriving unexpectedly at
the center of the Panopticon will be able to judge at a glance,
without anything concealed from him, how the entire establishment
is functioning. And, in any case, enclosed as he is in the middle of
this architectural mechanism, is not the director’s own fate entirely
bound up with it?3

Panopticon, then, is a mechanism that disperses power as it produces submissive subjects.


The transparency of the building makes it a model for the exercise of power by society as a
whole. The subject becomes one with the mechanism surrounding it and so becomes the

2
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977), p. 204
3
Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 204

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effect and the functionary at the same time. In short, the subject starts operating like and
feeling itself as a machine. The body is not replaced by a machine but starts to work like the
machine it is connected to. This is the contamination of the subject by the object.

Foucault’s interpretation of the Panopticon and Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan are still relevant
precisely because they present us with metaphors representing an idealized model of
modern power structure. This power structure is not only still dominant, but also increasing
its dominance as it decreases its visibility. It does this by making the subjects believe that
they are governed by the reality principle when in fact they are governed by the pleasure
principle. This situation causes a shift in the subject’s conception of health. I’ll come back to
this in the future, but now I have to mention something else which is very closely linked to
this shift in the subject’s conceptions of health and death.

The most important thing that Hobbes says in Leviathan, which I think is still relevant to a
considerable extent, is that death is the absolute master, and the fear of death forces the
subjects to adapt to the existing social order. Leviathan feeds on this fear of death, and it is
Leviathan itself that instills the fear of death in people. If we keep in mind that in Western
societies death is associated with nothing/ness, it becomes clearer why and how Foucault’s
use of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon in Discipline and Punish as a metaphor of the modern
power structure which has nothing/ness at its centre gains new significance.

At the periphery, an annular building; at the center, a tower; this tower is pierced
with white windows that open onto the inner side of the ring; the peripheric building
is divided into cells, each of which extends the whole width of the building; they have
two windows, one on the inside, corresponding to the windows of the tower; the
other, on the outside, allows the light to cross the cell from one end to the other. All
that is needed, then, is to place a supervisor in a central tower and to shut up in each
cell a madman, a patient, a condemned man, a worker or a schoolboy. By the effect
of backlighting, one can observe from the tower, standing out precisely against the
light, the small captive shadows in the cells of the periphery. They are like so many
cages, so many small theatres, in which each actor is alone, perfectly individualized
and constantly visible. The panoptic mechanism arranges spatial unities that make it
possible to see constantly and to recognize immediately. In short, it reverses the
principle of the dungeon; or rather of its three functions – to enclose, to deprive of
light and to hide – it preserves only the first and eliminates the other two. Full
lightning and the eye of a supervisor capture better than darkness, which ultimately
protected. Visibility is a trap.4

Foucault, without directly referring to him, shows that Hobbes’s monster has become a
machine. I argue that this machine is itself in a process of transformation today, and is in the
way of taking the form of something that is neither organic nor inorganic, neither visible nor
invisible, but felt. This is power as affective force. Power can no more be represented by
metaphors. For metaphor is a concept that belongs to the world of metaphysics which exists
only as a fantasy world, whereas today power has a more material existence than it has ever
had and its materiality splits as it unites the psychosomatic and the sociopolitical realms of
experience.

4
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977), 200.
3
The automatization of power, that is, transformation of power from an organic state, as
demonstrated by Hobbes, towards an inorganic state, as demonstrated by Foucault, has
been studied in a different way and in a different context by Mark Poster in his Foucault,
Marxism, and History. Influenced by Poster’s interpretation of Foucault in relation to
Marxism, and in the context of the relationship between discourse and power, I reassert, in a
different way and for different reasons, that Foucault’s conceptualization of the Panopticon
is useful and yet insufficient in understanding the workings of power today in the face of the
recent developments in technology.

In this new situation the subjects know that they are still locked in the Panopticon, but
pretend that they are free floating across the Superpanopticon. This is because they are
being locked deeper into the Panopticon; and there finding themselves dismembered, losing
themselves in the terrible condition of being pushed further into the hitherto undiscovered
corners of one’s own room, towards the intra-worlds within their cells without any windows
opening to the extro-worlds surrounding them.

A new formulation of Foucault’s concept of bio-power, the Superpanoptic power structure


reverses the roles of Eros and Thanatos; abuses our understandings and misunderstandings
of the life drive and the death drive, as well as manipulating our inner conflicts and turning
us into antagonists. It does this by erasing the necessary boundary between life and death,
the organic and the inorganic, so as to create the conditions of possibility for manufacturing
an illusory sense of oneness with the world, hence uniting the subject of statement (the
enunciated) and the subject of enunciation which should remain separate from and/but
contiguous to one another for the perpetual transformation and multiplication of life forms
to take place at the same time.

There is always another breath in my breath, another thought in my thought, another


possession in what I possess, a thousand things and a thousand beings implicated in
my complications: every true thought is an aggression. It is not a question of our
undergoing influences, but of being ‘insufflations’ and fluctuations, or merging with
them. That everything is so ‘complicated,’ that I may be an other, that something else
thinks in us in an aggression which is the aggression of thought, in a multiplication
which is the multiplication of the body, or in a violence which is the violence of
language—this is the joyful message. For we are so sure of living again (without
resurrection) only because so many beings and things think in us.5

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