Magazine: Society, March/April, 1994
BOOKS IN REVIEW
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The Passion of Michel Foucault
By James Miller. New York: Simon & Schuster. 491 pages, $27.50
For upwards of two decades in the United States, the academic study of
literature and, increasingly, that of the humanities in general, has
been under the sway of a band of formidably esoteric philosophers from
Paris. The biggest names are Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Michel
Foucault, and Jacques Lacan, a diverse enough quartet in some respects
but with a number of things in common, such as their vaguely Gallic
insistence on there being a strong "erotic" dimension in activities not
ordinarily considered sexual, like reading a book. And the purveyors of
literary criticism and theory in the United States have borne out this
proposition in a sense by allowing themselves to be compromised and
betrayed by these brilliant Frenchmen and the promise of liberation they
seemed to proffer.
Foucault, who died of AIDS in 1984, was perhaps the most ambitious and
the most disturbing of the lot. Only Derrida can rival him in the depth
and extent of his influence in the American academic world and a
comparison between them is instructive. Both men were influenced by
German philosophers; in Derrida's case, Martin Heidegger; in Foucault's,
Nietzsche. Both men are nihilistic, Derrida in a spirit of punmanship
and play, Foucault in a darker, more visceral mode. What Derrida offered
the world was deconstruction, an all-purpose neologism in whose name a
great deal of double-talk has been unleashed. Foucault, by contrast,
offered an obsessive concern with power--as if all activities, whether
in the bedroom or in jail, are allegories of power.
Knowledge is a function of power, Foucault argued, sparking a mini-
industry of dissertations and term papers in which a system of hidden
power relations is said to underlie a seemingly benevolent institution
or convention. According to Foucault, knowledge is not something that
has an independent, objective existence; knowledge is a construction,
produced rather than discovered. What is more, it is the product not of
consensus but of conflict. The "truth" depends on who has the power to
enforce it.
In The Passion of Michel Foucault, James Miller makes clear just how
significant a line of thought this was and what appeal it exercised for
a generation of American academics who came of age in the 1960s--
Foucault translated Nietzsche's concept of the "will to power" into a
philosophical imperative. This placed him unequivocally in opposition to
humanism, which he defined as "everything in Western civilization that
restricted the desire for power." Foucault worshipped at the shrine of
death and Dionysus, glorified cruelty, and idealized the practices of
sadomasochistic eroticism, as if one might effect a healthy
transformation of the self by playing various parts in what Miller calls
"an erotic theater of cruelty." For Foucault, crime was positive energy
and the conscience was an agent not of moral rectitude but of perversion,
alienating human beings from their true, cruel, animal natures.
Discipline and Punish, Foucault's most important book, is an historical
examination of criminal punishment and, as Miller says, "a seminal work
of radical social criticism." It is also highly idiosyncratic. Comparing
medieval torture and execution to the methods of modem prisons, Foucault
comes out in favor of the former because modem prison systems, with
their emphasis on incarceration and surveillance, have in his view
removed the terror, and thus the heroism, from the criminal life.
Foucault had an unrelenting fascination with the outcasts of society--
the sick in hospitals, inmates of asylums, prisoners in penitentiaries--
and a penchant for using his personal life as an experimental laboratory
for developing and testing his ideas. Knowledge was to be acquired not
as a set of concepts to be mastered but as the result of ordeals to be
experienced.
Searching for "limit-experiences," the philosopher dropped acid in Death
Valley and consumed great quantifies of hashish. While a visiting
professor at the University of California at Berkeley, he frequented the
gay bathhouses of San Francisco, particularly those specializing in
"S/M." He regarded sex as a Faustian pact, judging it to be "worth dying
for," and he refused to alter his behavior after the AIDS epidemic had
broken out. There have been strong rumors that Foucault knowingly
infected others with the disease. Miller's verdict: probably not. More
likely, Foucault's unabated promiscuity was suicidal rather than
murderous.
Like Miller's previous book, Democracy in the Streets, a lucid account
of "the New Left" fashioned by college students of the 1960s, The
Passion of Michel Foucault is a valuable guide to treacherous
intellectual terrain. It is clearly written and aims to be scrupulous
and fair. If it is tougher going than Democracy in the Streets, it is
because Foucault's thought--in theory and in practice--is more demanding,
more difficult, and more dangerous than the thoughts of yesteryear's
campus radicals.
Foucault's books, like those of the Marquis de Sade, are always
stimulating. He contributed significantly to the assumption, now
widespread, that marginal lives--like those of the prisoners and asylum
residents he studied--may disclose central troths. He once pointed out
that the fall of the Bastille in 1789, the event that is usually thought
to have ignited the French Revolution, is undoubtedly a less important
historical occurrence than, say, a change in the amount of protein in
the average person's diet.
Miller tends to go a little too easy on Foucault. After explaining that
Foucault thought that rope should be punishable only to the extent that
it involved physical violence, Miller admits that "Foucault's specific
proposals are highly questionable" and then hedges his bets by adding
that "his courage" in maintaining that position is "beyond dispute."
Still, he finds it hard to put a good face on Foucault's enthusiasm for
the Ayatollah Khomeini's revolution in Iran, an enthusiasm that only
grew, says Miller, after the massacres in Teheran in September 1978.
Foucault dreamed of a "future society" at the end of a road paved by
"drugs, sex, communes, [and] other forms of consciousness," and in
retrospect, he looks as foolish (and as dated) as the campus utopians of
the militant 1960s and early 1970s. It does not bother me to know that
he was willing to jettison a project, or alter a point of view, as the
result of an acid trip in the desert, but I can imagine that some of his
more earnest followers may be put out by this example of his methods.
Other aspects of Foucault's philosophy--such as his intellectual
commitment to sadomasochism for its putative value in changing the self
and redeeming the world--are even harder to countenance in the era of
AIDS than they were during the innocence of the age of Aquarius.
Skeptical investigation of the sources of knowledge is Foucault's
greatest intellectual legacy. Would that he had directed an equal amount
of skepticism at the narcissistic, thrill-seeking self that demanded
gratification even at the cost of its own annihilation.
~~~~~~~~
Reviewed by David Lehman
David Lehman is author of Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the
Fall of Paul de Man. He is general editor of The Best American Poetry
Anthology.
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Source: Society, Mar/Apr94, Vol. 31 Issue 3, p84, 2p.
Item Number: 9404222497
