Note: Summary of the presentation delivered at the Argentine Congress of Psychoanalysis,
held in 2024. Panel in dialogue “Foucault, Biopower and Psychoanalysis: Agent of Power or
Space of Resistance?” with Alberto Cabral and Jorge Canteros.
I would like to pose a question that seems central to our practice: in what way does
psychoanalysis promote itself as an agent of the new forms of power, or in what way does it
offer itself, on the contrary, as a space in tension with them—that is, as a space of resistance?
The question is not new, but it is worth specifying, and to do so we must return to Foucault.
In The History of Sexuality, Volume 1 (1976), Foucault describes a new form of power that
he calls biopower, which succeeds sovereign power. The latter responded to a juridical
conception: it was a power that prohibited, a power to “make die or let live,” whose symbol
was the sword. Biopower, by contrast, is a power that concerns itself with life and is
exercised in the very act of administering it: a positive power, one that produces things,
induces pleasure, forms knowledge and generates discourses. It develops from two poles: one
around the body, oriented toward disciplining it and rendering it docile (the anatomo-politics
of the human body), and another around the population, oriented toward regulating the
phenomena of life—births, mortality, health, longevity (the biopolitics of the population).
From this general presentation, I am interested in highlighting one characteristic that is
central to what I wish to develop: the place of sex. Within biopower, sex occupies a
privileged position because it is situated precisely between the individual body and the
population, constituting a point of entry both for the subjection of bodies and for the
regulation of the population. Hence sexuality was pursued, throughout the nineteenth century,
down to the most minute detail of existence.
Foucault is, in this work, highly critical of psychoanalysis, and there are two central issues in
that rejection. The first is the refutation of the repressive hypothesis: far from a repressive
society that would have made the invention of psychoanalysis possible, what Foucault
describes is a society that incites people to speak about sex. The second is that psychoanalysis
would be one of the disciplines taking part in what he calls the deployment of sexuality.
Within that apparatus, “sex” operates as an imaginary, fictitious point through which each of
us must pass in order to gain access to our own intelligibility and identity. The apparatus thus
allows the techniques of power to invade life, exerting upon all of us the fascination of
discovering sex, liberating it, formulating it as truth.
But here it seems valuable to me to draw a counterpoint with a statement by Lacan elaborated
by Miller. For Miller, the invention of Freud’s genius is not the invention of the unconscious,
but the invention of the analytic apparatus: a certain way of putting the reality of the
unconscious into act in the phenomenon of transference. Its components are well known: free
association, interpretation, transference, and the analyst’s peculiar response to that
phenomenon—his or her neutrality.
We thus have, on the one hand, psychoanalysis as one more discipline within the deployment
of sexuality, and on the other, the analytic apparatus as the great Freudian invention. And
here we return to the initial question, but in more precise terms: we would have to identify at
what moment the analytic apparatus, which promotes an experience that puts the
manifestation of the unconscious into act, undergoes its displacements toward the side of the
disciplinary apparatuses.
Perhaps we may find the beginning of an answer in what is common to both formulations: the
apparatus, or dispositif. Among the disciplinary apparatuses—prisons, asylums, the
panopticon, schools—we find Christian confession, which is characterized by being
structured within a matrix of interlocution, and which was and remains the general matrix
governing the production of discourse on sex. If we understand that the analytic apparatus
offers an experience that also unfolds by means of a matrix of interlocution, one key would
lie in analyzing how the elements of that matrix are constituted. That is, principally, on the
basis of what operations upon oneself, by means of what technologies of the self, a subject
constitutes himself or herself as a psychoanalyst: as one capable of responding within that
matrix in such a way that the apparatus produces the effects that allow us to speak of the
unconscious. Operations upon oneself that also neutralize any demand for normality stirred
up by the disciplinary institutions that traverse us.