We are derisory, and in fact non-existent, compared to the sexual happiness of a fern prothallium.

Notebook no. 8, Foucault collection, BNF

On 2I September 1969 Michel Foucault wrote eight pages in his notebook under the title 'Sexuality, Reproduction, Individuality'.¹ Plant generation occupied a central place. Faced with the diversity of plant modes of reproduction, human sexuality appeared 'involuted', or 'stunted'.² By stirring up the sexual happiness of this fern prothallium, Foucault was attacking the moralism and narcissism that 'Man' had shown towards his sexuality. He was questioning the way in which an appreciation of the biology of plant sexuality might reconfigure our understanding of the relationship between human sexuality, reproduction and individuality.

That same year, 1969, Foucault gave a lecture at Vincennes entitled Le discours de la sexualité (The Discourse of Sexuality). Lesson 6 was devoted to the biology of plant sexuality. Foucault was then preparing to leave the University of Vincennes to join the Collège de France; the research project he was going to present as part of his application was that of a 'History of knowledge of heredity.³ Once again, the question of plant generation was at the heart of his research.

Finally, the handwritten reading notes preserved at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in boxes 39 and 45 bear witness to the quantity of work by botanists and plant biologists that Foucault consulted, read and annotated at the time.⁴ These notes correspond to the preparation of the courses at Vincennes and his application to the Collège de France, and immediately precede the writing of The Archeology of Knowledge.

This chapter explores this little-known aspect of Michel Foucault's work. Based on his unpublished handwritten notes, lectures and publications from 1969 and 1970, I try to show that it is within a history of knowledge of vegetality that Foucault's archaeological programme unfolds. By taking an interest in the moment when sexuality burst onto the scene in the botanical sciences, Foucault was setting in motion a critical project of anthropological thought and justifying the necessity of the archaeological method.

The heuristic value of plants for the biology of sexuality

If plants are an important subject for a history of sexuality, it is first and foremost because plants have been the source of fundamental discoveries in the biology of sexuality. In Lesson 6, Foucault discusses Camerarius, a German botanist of the seventeenth century, who (according to some) developed the first theory on the sexuality of plants.⁵ He discovered the presence of reproductive organs in plants. Camerarius noted that mulberry trees with pistil flowers only produced complete fruits (with seeds) when they grew close to plants with stamen flowers. He thus highlighted the so-called dioecious plants, in which the female sex (pistil) or the male sex (stamens) exists on separate individuals. He went on to discover monoecious plants, in which both male and female reproductive organs are present on the same individual, and hermaphroditic plants, in which both male and female reproductive organs are present on the same flower. He believed that hermaphroditism was the norm in the plant world. These theories were published in 1694 in a work entitled De sexu plantarum⁶ and were to have a considerable influence on our understanding of sexuality. On the one hand, the notion of the sexual organ became operative to describe the phenomenon of sexual generation throughout the living kingdoms: the generalization of sexuality. The sexual organ becomes the means of reproducing living things, in animals and plants alike. Furthermore, the terms 'male' and 'female' can no longer be used to characterize only a single individual plant: the individual scale is not a relevant scale for understanding sexuality, since two different sexes can be found in the same individual. Finally, the division of the two sexes is no longer self-evident, and hermaphroditism is now considered normal in many living beings.

Almost a century later, Kölreuter applied Camerarius' discoveries about the sexual organs of plants. In particular, he conducted experiments on cucumber flowers and gladioli. He noted that if not visited by insects these plants remained sterile. In a handwritten note, Foucault cites Kölreuter's work. He reported the results of his experiments: in gladiolus, the pollen is large, heavy and sticky; it remains in the pollen cavity. So

Nature is obliged to intervene by means other than the wind. The means are insects, especially bumblebees, which penetrate the flower and, when they leave, carry the pollen on their hairs. Then when they visit another flower, they leave the pollen on the stigma they find along the way.⁷

By highlighting the role of insects in plant reproduction, Kölreuter paved the way for new hybridization practices, including artificial pollination. From this point of view, Kölreuter's work was of central importance to the biology of sexuality and augured well for our understanding of heredity. It also redefined the concept of sexuality: there can be sex without there being a conjunction of two sexual organs. Sexuality involves more than the intimacy of two individuals; it is a matter of environmental conditions and requires the intervention of third parties.

This point was confirmed by the work of Sprengel, the originator of the theory of pollination. He documented the different adaptive strategies used by flowers (colour, smell, nectar quality) to attract the insects they needed to reproduce. In particular, he worked on the cross-fertilization of flowers: some flowers are unable to fertilize themselves, and the pollen contained in the stamens does not settle in the pistil of the same flower to fertilize it; fertilization only takes place if the pollen is deposited in the pistil of another flower of the same species. Plants that use cross-fertilization have an interest in ensuring that the insects that come to collect their nectar then deliver the pollen to the right plant. They use signals to achieve this. In a handwritten note, Foucault describes, according to Sprengel, a flower with a large yellow spot at its heart. He quotes: 'the bumblebee knows very well what this yellow spot means.⁸ For the bumblebee, the spot is a signal, indicating the presence of nectar. For the flower, it indicates the presence of pollen, or the desired location of its destination. Foucault was quick to point out the importance of Sprengel's work for Darwin. These variations in the appearance of flowers correspond to evolutionary adaptations in the species that encourage its continuation. Here, sexuality is seen less as an individual accomplishment than as a general phenomenon aimed at the reproduction of the species. The individual is only one stage in the process; it is sexuality that achieves fulfilment through the individual.

But perhaps the most decisive botanical contribution to the history of biology is that of Matthias Jakob Schleiden, who developed the cell theory in the 1830s. In his work 'Essay on Phytogenesis', he defined plants as 'aggregates of individualized and independent beings which are the cells'.⁹ Schleiden pooled his microscopic observations of plant tissues with those of the zoologist Theodor Schwann on animal tissues, and both were able to assert that the cell is the structural and functional unit of plants and animals. All living things in all kingdoms are composed of the same matter. The cell is the smallest unit of life and also the most fundamental. However, if Foucault refers to Schleiden in his work at the turn of the 1970s, it is not to attribute to him the discovery of the cell or the development of this whole area of biological knowledge known as cell biology. Foucault was interested in Schleiden for his research on plant generation. The German botanist was one of the first to systematize the use of the Weiss microscope in his studies of plants. He claimed to have been able to observe the formation of the embryo in the plant. He maintained that the embryo forms in the plant at the end of the pollen tube, and that it consists of a development of the ovule. The embryo is therefore only a stage in the development of the ovule and is a function of its growth. Consequently, there is no sexual generation; in other words, no conjunction between two distinct cells. Foucault, who devotes a multitude of notes to Schleiden's theories on phytogenesis, reports: 'People see in Schleiden's theory a reason to abandon plant sexuality and any parallelism with animals.¹⁰ Foucault made Schleiden the centrepiece of his research into the biology of sexuality. In fact, at the beginning of the nineteenth century Schleiden found himself at the confluence of a number of controversies concerning the biological understanding of sexuality. These questions preoccupied not only botanists but a whole generation of biologists and contributed to a reconfiguration of the understanding of the relationship between life and sex, decisive for the advent of modern biology. When Foucault examined the notion of scientific truth at the end of the ig6os, and rethought the function of error for scientific knowledge, he did so in the light of these debates. Schleiden's theory of embryo formation was based on a set of facts accepted as true in the botanical sciences of the time; in other words, it conformed to the rules of biological discourse. In this sense, Schleiden was 'in the true'. And although he made a scientific error in considering that the embryo was only a stage in the development of the ovule already contained in the plant, and in rejecting the idea of plant sexuality, it has to be said that this was a 'disciplined error': an error that respected the discursive rules of early modern biology. In his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, Foucault declared:

Schleiden, ... denying plant sexuality in the middle of the nineteenth century, but according to the rules of biological discourse, was only formulating a disciplined error.

It is always possible that we are speaking the truth in the space of a savage exteriority; but we are only speaking the truth by obeying the rules of a discursive 'police' that we must reactivate in each of our discourses.¹¹

For Foucault, it was Mendel who spoke 'the truth in the space of savage exteriority'. Gregor Mendel, a nineteenth-century Prussian monk and botanist, conducted experiments on pea plants. By studying the transmission of a series of seven characteristics to subsequent generations of peas (shape and colour of the seed, colour of the flower, shape and colour of the pod, location and size of the stem), he isolated three laws of heredity and laid the foundations of genetic knowledge. However, Mendel's work was not widely acclaimed when he published it in the second half of the nineteenth century. Foucault had these words for Mendel in his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France:

Mendel was telling the truth, but he was not 'in the truth' of the biological discourse of his time: it was not according to such rules that biological objects and concepts were formed; it took a whole change of scale, the deployment of a whole new plane of objects in biology for Mendel to enter the truth and for his propositions then to appear (for the most part) correct. Mendel was a monster of truth, which meant that science could not talk about him.

Foucault's interest in the knowledge of vegetality thus takes different forms. First of all, and this is what we are concerned with here, knowledge of plant sexuality is decisive for biological knowledge of sexuality in general, both animal and plant. Understanding the phenomena specific to plant generation involves fundamental discoveries for the modern life sciences and makes it possible to redefine the very concept of sexuality. Second, we are going to look at it now, by taking an interest in the knowledge of vegetality Foucault found material to formulate his own epistemology of the living, or a way of emancipating himself from the Bachelardo-Canguilhemian heritage and its Althusserian revival.¹²

The archaeology of plant knowledge

At the turn of the i970s Foucault was first and foremost known to his readers and followers as the author of Les mots et les choses (The Order of Things). Foucault was someone who criticized humanism with the tools of epistemology; who was known for having written the history of 'Man' as an object of knowledge, of science. But the very end of the i960s saw the transition from an archaeology of the [human] sciences to an archaeology of savoirs (knowledge), biological knowledge especially, or knowledge of vegetation.

This shift from science to knowledge reflects a rejection of scientism, which was one of the tendencies of French epistemology, from Bachelard to Althusser via Canguilhem. For Foucault it was no longer a question of analysing the theories, concepts and internal rationalities of scientific discourse. Nor was it a matter of highlighting a context or historical contingencies that were external to scientific discourse and shaped it. It was a question of resituating this scientific discourse in the form of a 'positive unconscious of knowledge': a set of rules and postulates that order its practice, define the mode of formation of its objects, the place of its subjects and the conditions of demarcation of science itself in the field of knowledge.

While scientific discourse must distinguish itself from the wider field of knowledge to assert its own positivity, it nevertheless remains linked to it. In the preamble to Lesson 6, Foucault announced that his analysis would focus on the relationship between the scientific discourse on sexuality, the social or cultural formation that regulates these questions of sexuality, and a set of as-yet-untheorized practices concerning sexuality. In other words, we need to understand sexuality as 'a phenomenon that emerges simultaneously in different discursive stratifications.¹³ Scientific discourse occupies one of these strata, in the midst of other strata such as everyday, literary, moral, religious or legal discourse.

The theoretical gesture of subordinating science to knowledge enabled Foucault to embark on a critique of Althusser based on the notion of ideology. In his 1969 lecture, he issued a call to 'demolish with the greatest care the idea that ideology is a kind of great collective representation that constitutes, in relation to scientific practice, its exteriority and its obstacle'.¹⁴ If we need to understand the biology of plant sexuality in the light of the practices that preceded and extended it (hybridization, for example), if we need to understand human sexuality in its biological and social dimension, by also taking an interest in its institutions (marriage, for example), it is because there is porosity between the different strata of discourse. Science is not impervious to what goes on beyond the boundaries of its positiveness. It must therefore be admitted that it can also function in an ideological mode. Ideology is not the domain from which knowledge, in order to become science, would have freed itself once and for all; it is not the negative of science; ideology can be functional in the space of scientific knowledge.

To attack the ideological functioning of a science in order to bring it to light and modify it is not to reveal the philosophical presuppositions that may inhabit it; it is not to return to the foundations that made it possible, and which legitimize it: it is to call it into question as a discursive formation; it is to attack not the formal contradictions of its propositions, but the system of formation of its objects, its types of enunciation, its concepts, its theoretical choices. It means taking it up again as a practice among other practices.¹⁵

The history of the science of plant sexuality cannot ignore the problem of ideology and its effects on the positive study of the phenomena of plant generation. The many controversies that have surrounded these questions, and the lively, even passionate, nature of the debates on plant sexuality, are a symptom of this. From the end of the seventeenth century, supporters of plant sexuality were strongly opposed to those who defended the 'intangible virginity of nature.¹⁶ On the one hand, there were those for whom plant reproduction involved phenomena similar to those of animal reproduction. In both animals and plants '[s]exual generation occurs when a living organism encounters a cell that cannot develop on its own; it must encounter another cell.¹⁷ On the other hand, there are those for whom generation is a stage in the growth of plants, and not a specific function. For the latter, sexuality is specific to beings of the flesh, to 'sinful animality.¹⁸ However, as Foucault states in The Archaeology of Knowledge, his intention is not so much to uncover the philosophical presuppositions of this science of plants, or the old moral themes that continue to haunt it, but rather to 'call it into question as a discursive formation.¹⁹

In Lesson No. 6, Foucault seeks to 'show that it was the very disposition of naturalist discourse that stood in the way [of the recognition of a sexuality for plants].²⁰ He insists that 'it is from there - from this discursive practice in its specific regularity - that imaginary investments and the organization of ideological themes were possible.²¹ The specific layout of a discourse makes certain facts enunciable, able to be conceptualized and problematized; and at the same time, through the interplay of a whole 'discursive police force', this layout does not allow other facts to be said - it relegates a set of elements to the realm of the unspoken. This is exactly what happened, for a long time, with the sexuality of plants. Sexuality was the unspoken part of the discourse on plant life. Hybridization could be practised, or a plant could be described metaphorically as male or female, without admitting that plants were capable of sexuality. Yet Foucault insists that for scientific discourse this unspoken fact is 'a functional principle'. Like ideology, '[t]he unspoken in a scientific discourse is not the effect of an imaginary masking, or of a conceptual defect; it is the effect of the rules specific to a discursive practice and brought into play in that practice.²²

Finally, the last point that makes Foucault's archaeological project operational stems from a reflection on the categories of truth and error in scientific discourse. By attaching a positive value to error, Foucault obliges himself to study the very structure of scientific discourse, in the temporality of its enunciation. We must not adopt the retrospective gaze of the historian, charged with a posterior truth; rather, we must place ourselves within the discourses in order to understand what made them functional in the moment that was theirs.

It is in this sense that Foucault admits that Schleiden - by making the development of the embryo at the end of the pollen tube a stage in the plant's own growth, and thereby disqualifying the possibility of a specific sexual function in plants - was committing 'a disciplined error': he remained in line with the naturalist discourse of the time. It was in this sense, too, that Mendel seemed to Foucault to be a 'monster of truth'; despite the fundamental nature of his discoveries on heredity, in his day he was not in the true.

In his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, Foucault used the example of the botanical sciences to show that

[All disciplines] are made up of errors as well as truths, errors which are not residues or foreign bodies, but which have positive functions, a historical efficacy often inseparable from that of truths.²³

Thus, Foucault's exploration of the knowledge of vegetality, and the more specific field of the early biology of plant sexuality, led him to formulate a series of principles (concerning knowledge, ideology, the unspoken, error) for the study of scientific discourse. It is an attempt to forge a new epistemology, emancipated from the Bachelardo-Canguilhemian heritage, and contrasting with Althusser's project for a theoretical refoundation of science. It is also a gesture of critique, of questioning what 'we are, do, say and think'.²⁴ The mission of archaeology is to outline the contours of anthropological thought.

Plant sexuality versus anthropological thought

The whole point of Lesson 6 for Foucault is to find, in the very disposition of naturalist discourse, the reasons why it was not possible, until at least the eighteenth century, to conceive of plants as having sexuality. In so doing, he brings to light the series of transformations required to generalize the phenomena of sexuality to the plant world. These transformations, characteristic of the transition from a natural history to a biological science,²⁵ had considerable effects on the way in which 'Man' himself could envisage his nature and his place in the world. It is because this modern biological knowledge has shaken up a certain number of certainties and reassuring humanist beliefs that Foucault is committed to conveying it.

The first characteristic element of naturalist discourse that needs to be overcome to give plants a sexuality is the confusion of phenomena relating to growth with those relating to reproduction, or the continuity of growth and reproduction. From this point of view, the multiplication of a plant by cuttings, by suckers or by seed makes no difference in nature as far as naturalist discourse is concerned. Phenomena involving the multiplication of a plant by itself, its individual growth, or those involving sexual reproduction are treated as equivalent.

For example, Aristotle, then Caesalpinus and Gletdisch, thought that the plant produces its seed from the pith, its richest nutritive principle. The development of the seed is the result of nutrition, followed by growth, and ultimately reproduction. There is a nutrition-growth-reproduction continuum, with no specific reproductive function. In plants, seed production appears to be a stage in the individual's own development.

So, in order to assert the existence of sexuality in plants, we need to dissociate reproduction from other vital phenomena and analyse each according to its own specificity. Foucault writes that this will require us to

reverse the relationship between the individual and sexuality: sexuality is not placed at the end of development but at the beginning. Sexuality precedes the individual. And it is not the individual who, having reached a certain point of maturation, gains access to sexuality and blossoms in it.²⁶

This point gives rise to a critique of sexuality as an anthropological theme. 'Man', through his sexuality, is merely taking part in a much wider programme over which he has no control. We are not fulfilled by our sexuality; it is our sexuality that is fulfilled by us. Our children do not prolong us; they merely introduce variations into the species. According to Foucault 'The function of anthropological thought is to preserve man from these discontinuities and to bring his death, others and history within his reach.' From this point of view, sexuality is understood by 'Man' as the possibility of a 'relationship with others through the family and death'; this is precisely what the modern biology of sexuality will compromise.²⁷ If we are to accept the existence of sexual generation in plants, we will have to dissociate growth and reproduction, and think of a specific sexual function, a function that cannot be summed up as a stage in an individual's own development: in this way we will also have to rethink the relationship between reproduction and the individual.

The second characteristic element of naturalist discourse that needs to be overcome to give plants a sexuality concerns precisely the status of the individual. In natural history, the individual is described as the sum of a series of characteristics; these characteristics belong to them alone. Foucault writes: '[the] general functioning of natural history implies that there are only similarities between individuals. No meta-individual biological reality ... no identical functions but similar results through analogous organs.²⁸ An individual relates to another only in terms of his representation. The fact that two individuals look alike does not imply that there is any real affinity between them. Natural history only proceeds by juxtaposing a series of beings; it has no explanatory value. It is purely representative.

Since the individual is a self-sufficient whole, there can be no 'meta-individual' reproductive phenomena: for natural history, there are only individuals that reproduce. There is no reason to think that these individuals cannot reproduce autonomously, cannot be self-sufficient. And even in cases where naturalists observe a conjunction between two sexual organs, what they are concerned with is always the determination of which is the active individual, which is the individual that is thereby completing a stage in its own development. For example, one of the most important debates among naturalists interested in generation was that between spermatists and ovists. The former assume that the active principle of reproduction is contained in the sperm, or male semen, and that the egg or ovum is nothing more than a passive host, a habitacle. The latter consider that the male semen provides nothing more than a mechanical impulsion, which triggers the development of the active principle of reproduction already contained in the egg. In either case, only one individual can be active. The second is at most an adjuvant, working towards the development of the first individual.

Furthermore, the attribution of the quality male or female to an individual is not indexed on the assumption by one or the other of a specific function. There is no necessary correlation between the sex of an individual and its sexuality. A plant can be described as 'male' or 'female' without there ever being any question of sexuality. Sex is not a function; it is a character. One plant may be called male because it is strong, and another female because it has beautiful colours; naturalist discourse makes metaphorical use of the notions 'male' and 'female'. And since sex relates to the essence of an individual, it is impossible, from the point of view of naturalist discourse, to envisage an individual being of both sexes. Each being occupies a clearly defined place in the cosmos. Naturalist discourse has set itself the task of documenting the place of things in the world.

Thus, to grant plants as well as animals a sexuality, it will be necessary to replace the idea that the individual was a unit of representation with the idea that the individual was an organism, an assembly of functional organs, the quality of which varied from one individual to another, and which could nevertheless be compared in so far as they fulfilled similar functions. It was necessary to 'dissociate the sexual organs from the individual characteristics'; it was necessary to 'discover that the individual is not male or female as it is big or small, but there is a male-female sexual organization that can be distributed over one or more individuals.²⁹

Here again, human sexuality takes a hit. From a general biological point of view, there is no need for two individuals of opposite and distinct sexes for sexuality to exist. From the moment that there is a conjunction of two cells from sexual organs, there is sexuality. It does not matter that these organs are carried by two distinct individuals. Nor does it matter that an individual retains the same sex throughout its life. In some hermaphroditic plants, it is alternately the male or female organ that is active.

By restoring the concept of sexuality to its general biological meaning, Foucault relativizes the importance that 'Man' gives to his own sexuality and underlines the fact that a certain number of the norms that surround the theme of sexuality have in reality nothing to do with life itself. From the point of view of life, sexuality is not the same as love, conjugality, the reproduction of the same, the complementarity of the sexes, the continuation of the self. On the contrary, sexuality is an act of discontinuity. He writes: 'Sexuality separates the individual from his successors ... The individual communicates with his descendants only through the identity of the stock (which is at a meta-individual level).³⁰ Both sexuality and death constitute a limit-experience for 'Man'. Foucault describes as reactionary

any philosophy that reacts to the epistemological structure of biology by trying to compensate for it, by mixing it with the epistemological structure of the classical age (continuity and representation) and by refusing ... to see in death an absolute and insurmountable limit of the individual, to see in love something other than love and reproduction.³¹

Thus, in the third and final structuring point of the naturalist discourse outlined by Foucault - a point that will have to be overcome in order to conceive of a plant sexuality - it is still a question of the individual and 'its absolute and impassable limits'. This is the idea that the individual has no functional relationship with their environment. The individual is in the world like an apple is in a tree, like a flower in a garden, like a bouquet in a vase. They are resting upon their environment. The environment is a backdrop, and the individual is functionally detached from it.

From this it follows that, when naturalists studied a phenomenon such as flower fertilization, they always had to pinpoint the place where the stimulation occurred. The environment could not intervene; the field of individual action had to be circumscribed. Any significant vital phenomenon had to occur at the level of the individual, which was the only significant unit from the point of view of life. Fertilization was therefore understood as stimulation. A stimulus activated a pre-existing sexuality in the individual, a mechanical dimension of sexuality through fertilization: the male organ had to touch the female organ or vice versa. Consequently, the existence of sexuality could only be accepted in living beings with locomotion, the ability to move. In other living beings, sexuality was neither possible nor necessary. For there to be sexuality, according to the naturalists, there had to be a well-defined male and female sexual organ in distinct individuals, and each individual had to be able to move in order to find in the other sex that enabled it to fulfil its own sexuality.

If a female plant was found to bear fertile fruit when it was close to a male plant, it could be deduced that they had a certain liking for each other. The environment could not serve as a support for reproduction, and fertilization was understood as stimulation. And in so far as it was impossible for these cellulose beings to move, the question of sexuality did not arise. Sexual organs have no reason to exist if there is no possibility of them meeting. In a handwritten reading note, Foucault mentions the botanist de l'Écluse, who in the sixteenth century was studying the case of papaya trees, Carica papaya. Noting that female trees only bore papayas if they had grown close to male trees, de L'Écluse declared that they were united by 'mysterious affinities.³² For these affinities to be understood as sexuality, it would be necessary to admit that fertilization was not a simple stimulation, and that it does not boil down to the mechanical and localized meeting of two individuals with different sexual organs. Fertilization must be seen not as the result of stimulation, but as the transport of elements, and it must be admitted that the environment (wind, rain, insects) plays a decisive role in this. In a handwritten note Foucault wrote that in order to make plants sexual beings naturalists would have to 'dissociate fertilization from the spatial bringing together of the male and the female, that is to say: establish the indispensable existence of a material element, establish the methods or instruments of transport in an environment.³³

Through an analysis of naturalist discourse on the question of plant sexuality, using the tools of his Archaeology, Foucault brings to light the epistemological structure of the classical age (continuity and representation). He characterizes it in three points: continuity between growth and reproduction, sexuality subordinated to individuality, and fertilization understood as direct stimulation. The epistemological transformations required to overcome this inherent disposition of naturalist discourse, which stood in the way of the conception of a plant sexuality, would result in a complete reconfiguration of the relationship between the individual, its sexuality and its reproduction. This brings us back to the few pages of Notebook no. 8 mentioned in the introduction - Sexuality, Reproduction, Individuality. The concept of sex is reworked from its more general biological meaning and distanced from its anthropological meanings. Sexuality is no more and no less than the phenomenon that allows certain cells to develop, generating a new individual, itself limited by its sexuality. This is the third reason for Foucault's interest in the knowledge of vegetality: to provide a hook for his critique of humanism, of sexuality as an anthropological theme. It's all about wounding 'Man', or a certain idea of 'Man', through life, through knowledge.

To conclude, the theme of plants, and Foucault's extensive reading of naturalists, botanists and plant biologists in the late ig6os, played a decisive role in the development of his archaeological programme. It was on the basis of the controversies surrounding plant sexuality at the end of the classical age that Foucault highlighted the epistemological transformations of the modern age and emphasized the subversive potential of the new biological knowledge for anthropological thought. It is in the singular element of naturalist discourse that he finds material to rethink the relationship between science and ideology, error and truth; and to reposition himself in relation to the history of science, or historical epistemology.

For the philosopher and the historian of science - or archaeologist - the plant object is of inestimable value: situated on the other side of the living kingdom, farthest from humanity, it constitutes the counterpoint to anthropological thought, its Other, its limit. It can offer refuge, but above all it allows us to contrast: to reveal in filigree what characterizes our own thinking. Foucault assumes this gesture: by showing what we have been, what we have done or thought, he wants to give criticism 'the form of a possible crossing.³⁴ Critical work, he writes, 'always requires work on our limits'. Sexuality is at the limit of the individual; for humans, it is a limit-experience. Plants are at the limits of the living world; for the anthropological subject, thinking about plants means experiencing their limits. For Foucault, then, plant sexuality appears as a formidable critical support. The very possibility of plant sexuality undermines the postulate according to which the sexual organ delivers the essence, or, let us say, the identity of the person who carries it; plant sexuality questions the dioecious norm, by making visible the vast majority of hermaphroditic individuals among plants; it disturbs ideas relating to the complementarity of individuals of opposite sexes; it puts into question the inescapability of sexual assignment or the invariability of sex in the same individual; it forces us to see in sexuality something other than love or reproduction.

In fact, in his reply to the Cercle d'Épistémologie at the end of the year 1970, Foucault declared, bringing to a close the period we have set out to illuminate: 'Knowledge is not there to console: it disappoints, it worries, it cuts, it hurts.³⁵

*

Endnotes

Footnotes

1. 1. These few notes are published at the end of the French edition of the Collège de France lectures La sexualité and Le discours de la sexualité of 1964 in Clermont-Ferrand, and of 1969 in Vincennes. See Michel Foucault, La sexualité et Le discours de la sexualité, Hautes Études, EHESS, Seuil, Gallimard, Paris, 2018, pp. 211-16. ↩

2. 2. 'We are beings with an involuted sexuality' and 'It is characteristic of man to claim for his species the final fulfilment of a sexuality which, before him, would have been sketchy or partial, whereas in fact he bears only a stunted sexuality; or rather he is the result of a reproductive process in which the gametophytic phase is absolutely reduced.' Ibid., p. 214 . ↩

3. 3. On this point, see the 'presentation of M. Foucault by himself during his application for the Collège de France': Michel Foucault, Titres et travaux, Dits et Écrits, vol. I, Gallimard, Paris, 2001, text no. 71. ↩

4. 4. Many of the documents used here come from these unpublished handwritten reading notes, some of which were consulted in the Fonds Foucault at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, and some of which were produced by the FFL (Foucault Fiches de Lecture) project; https://eman-archives.org/Foucault-fiches/objectifs-projet. ↩

5. 5. Foucault, Le discours de la sexualité, p. 165. ↩

6. 6. Rudolf Jacob Camerarius, De sexu plantarum, Martin Rommey, Tübingen, 1694. ↩

7. 7. FFL, SourceBoite_036-30-chem | Kölreuter. Sprengel. Rating bo36_f0557. ↩

8. 8. Ibid. ↩

9. 9. Matthias Jakob Schleiden, 'Beiträge zur Phytogenesis', in Archiv für Anatomie, Physiologie und wissenschaftliche Medicin, 5(2), 1838, pp. 137-76. ↩

10. 10. FFL, Box_039-6-chem | Around Schleiden, Reference bo39_f0180. ↩

11. 11. Michel Foucault, L'ordre du discours, Gallimard, Paris, 1971, p. 16. ↩

12. 12. On this point, see the excellent 'Situation du cours', written by Claude-Olivier Doron for the edition of the Vincennes and Clermont courses on sexuality. ↩

13. 13. Foucault, Le discours de la sexualité, p. 154. ↩

14. 14. Ibid., p. 132. ↩

15. 15. Michel Foucault, L'archéologie du savoir, Gallimard, Paris, 1970, p. 243. ↩

16. 16. Foucault, Le discours de la sexualité, p. 169. On this point, see also François Delaporte, Le second règne de la nature. Essai sur les questions de végétalité au XVIIème siècle, Paris, Editions Contemporaines, 2011. ↩

17. 17. Foucault, Le discours de la sexualité, p. 25. ↩

18. 18. Ibid., p. 167. 'In particular, the theme of vegetable innocence and sinful animality. The plant reflects that part of man that is violent, carnivorous and sexual.' ↩

19. 19. Foucault, L'archéologie du savoir, p. 243. ↩

20. 20. Foucault, Le discours de la sexualité, pp. 166-7. 'Disposition ie the mode according to which he forms his objects, his utterances, his concepts.' ↩

21. 21. Ibid. ↩

22. 22. Ibid. ↩

23. 23. Foucault, L'ordre du discours, p. 35. ↩

24. 24. Michel Foucault, 'Qu'est-ce-que les Lumières?', Dits et Écrits, vol. IV, Gallimard, Paris, 1994, text no. 339. ↩

25. 25. See also the section on the transition from natural history to biology in Michel Foucault, Les mots et les choses, Gallimard, Paris, 1966. ↩

26. 26. Foucault, Le discours de la sexualité, p. 171. ↩

27. 27. Ibid., p. 175 . ↩

28. 28. Ibid., p. 168 . ↩

29. 29. Ibid., p. 171. ↩

30. 30. Ibid., p. 174 . ↩

31. 31. Ibid., p. 175 . ↩

32. 32. FFL Box_045-2-chem | Before 1680. Rating bo45_foo82. ↩

33. 33. Foucault, Le discours de la sexualité, p. 171. ↩

34. 34. Foucault, 'Qu'est-ce que les Lumières?', text no. 339. 'The critical ontology of ourselves must be considered not as a theory, a doctrine, or even a permanent body of knowledge that accumulates; it must be conceived as an attitude, an éthos, a philosophical life in which the critique of what we are is both a historical analysis of the limits that are set for us and a test of their possible crossing.' ↩

35. 35. Michel Foucault, 'Sur l'archéologie des sciences, Réponse au Cercle d'épistémologie' in Dits et Écrits, vol. I, Gallimard, Paris, 2001, text no. 59. ↩