Magazine: Wilson Quarterly, Summer, 1993
Section: RELIGION & PHILOSOPHY
THE SECRET CABINET OF DR. FOUCAULT
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A Survey of Recent Articles
Little known outside the academy, Michel Foucault (1926-84) is an
exemplary figure to many tenured radicals within it and an influential
one to many other scholars. "Whatever else Foucault was, he was a great
Nietzschean hero," Princeton's Alexander Nehamas writes in the New
Republic (Feb. 15,1993). That is just what the French historian and
philosopher, who died of AIDS at the age of 57, ardently tried to be,
contends James Miller, author of The Passion of Michel Foucault (1993).
Foucault struggled all his life "to honor Nietzsche's gnomic injunction,
'to become what one is,' " Miller says in a Salmagundi (Winter 1993)
symposium occasioned by his controversial book, which details, among
other things, Foucault's homosexuality, sadomasochism, drug-taking, and
attempts at suicide.
"The inner logic of [Foucault's] philosophical odyssey, and also of his
public political statements and actions," Miller contends, "is
unintelligible apart from his lifelong, and highly problematic,
preoccupation with limiting the limits of reason, and finding ways--in
dreaming, at moments of madness, through drug use, in erotic rapture, in
great transports of rage, and also through intense suffering--of
exploring the most shattering kinds of experience, breaching the
boundaries normally drawn between the unconscious and conscious, order
and disorder, pleasure and pain, life and death; and in this way,
starkly revealing how distinctions central to the play of true and false
are pliable, uncertain, contingent."
Foucault, who occupied the chair of History of Thought at the
prestigious College de France in Paris and lectured widely on both sides
of the Atlantic, contended that what is deemed "knowledge" at any one
time is little more than the dominant interests' convenient fiction.
Those in power manipulate social attitudes so as to define such
categories as insanity, illness, sexuality, and criminality, in ways
that allow them to oppress "deviants." "More often than most people
dream," Miller adds, "we can change the rules of the game . . . even if
few of us ever will, inhibited as we are by the conventions of ordinary
language, common sense and conscientiousness, reinforced by the threat
of punishment and a more diffuse, hence insidious set of fears: of being
branded as queer, crazy, abnormal."
Foucault's thought had two basic components, Alexander Nehamas explains.
"The first, derived from Nietzsche and never abandoned, was that every
human situation is a product of history, though we may be convinced that
it is a natural fact." Insanity, for example, has no fixed character but
has been "constructed" in different ways throughout history. The second
component, which Foucault modified in later years, "was a relentless
suspicion of 'progress.' He had an uncanny ability to see the dark side
of every step toward the light, to grasp the price at which every
advance had to be bought. And he believed that the price was never a
bargain."
Power was Foucault's obsession, observes Roger Kimball, managing editor
of the New Criterion (March 1993): "He came bearing the bad news in bad
prose that every institution, no matter how benign it seems, is 'really'
a scene of unspeakable domination and subjugation; that efforts at
enlightened reform--of asylums, of prisons, of society at large--have
been little more than alibis for extending state power; that human
relationships are, underneath it all, deadly struggles for mastery; that
truth itself is merely a coefficient of coercion." Asked Foucault in
Discipline and Punish (1977): "Is it surprising that prisons resemble
factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?"
Of all Foucault's books, Discipline and Punish was the most influential
in America, "where its allusions to hidden 'power' fit so well with the
paranoid style of American politics," New York University's Mark Lilla
observes in the Times Literary Supplement (March 26,1993). In France,
however, where it was published in 1975, Foucault's book was received
with less enthusiasm. The preceding year, "a far more influential work
on the modern prison was published, [Alexander] Solzbenitsyn's Gulag
Archipelago.... In the face of this compelling account of physical and
mental torture directed by a regime many in France still considered the
vanguard of social progress, it was difficult to maintain that Western
classrooms were prisons and still remain within the bounds of good
taste."
"Discontinuities" are also evident in Foucault's political career, as
Princeton's Alan Ryan notes in the New York Review of Books (April 8,
1993): "He was a member of the French Communist Party for three years in
the early 1950s, and an ardent anti-Communist thereafter; he was persona
sufficiently "rata with governments of the Fourth and Fifth Republics to
be appointed to posts in Sweden and Poland that were both cultural and
diplomatic in nature." He "missed" the French students' rebellion of May
1968, when he was teaching in Tunis, but "made up for lost time by
siding with the 'Maoist' ultra-left in the early 1970s." He shocked even
some of the Maoists with his notion that the working class and its
allies should punish their class enemies without even bothering to
create "people's tribunals" to find them guilty of anything in
particular. He supported the Iranian Revolution, even after the
draconian nature of the Ayatollah Khomeini's regime had become evident.
"In his last years he spoke out on behalf of gay rights, and against the
abuse of human rights in Eastern Europe and elsewhere. The skepticism of
his philosophical account of personal identity and individuality made no
difference to his political rhetoric.... What positive conception he
possessed of a less oppressive society remains mysterious."
Some of Foucault's admirers fear that Miller's book will have an
unwholesome effect. It vividly demonstrates "why it is that whenever
those of us who feel ourselves to be in Foucault's embattled position,
or who share his political vision, hear those who don't do either invoke
the notion of `truth,' we reach for our revolvers," complains David M.
Halperin, an English professor at MIT, in Salmagundi. The idea of "truth,
" in his view, as in Foucault's, is only a tool of the oppressor.
Should Miller have refrained from reporting the seamier details of
Foucault's life? "At issue here," notes Dissent's (Spring 1993) Richard
Wolin, "is something much larger than how to understand Foucault's life
and work--it involves a clash of world views. Poststructuralists,
following Metzsche, do not believe in something like `the truth.'
Instead, there exist only `points of view' that are backed by
determinate interests.... The poststructualist standpoint invites an
ominous practice: where `truth'--however one chooses to define it--fails
to coincide with the agenda of political radicalism, it should be
suppressed. Yet, when truth becomes solely a matter of pragmatics or
interest, as it was for Foucault . . . we risk losing the capacity to
distinguish right from wrong, the just from the unjust, good from evil."
Change in the Churches (Percent change in membership, 1960-90)
Lutherans (8,379) +3.7
Methodists (13,266) +6.8
Jews (5,981) +11.4
Churches (254) +34.7
Roman Catholics (58,568) +39.1
Baptists (32,788) +55.0
Eastern Churches (4,576) +62.1
Mennonites (284) +77.3
Presbyterians (4,281) -1.2
Frinds (121) -4.1
Churches of Christ (3,794) -4.3
Moravian/Brethren (306) -11.4
United Church of Christ (1,599) -28.6
Episcopallians (2,446) -29.0
Adventist (751) +111.4
Mormons (4,462) +170.8
Jehovah's Witnesses (858) +243.3
Pentecostals (9,891) +422.7
U.S. population grew by 39 percent between 1960 and 1990, and overall
church membership rose by 37 percent, report the Roper Center's Public
Perspective (March-April 1993). But while membership in the evangelical
denominations mushroomed, the "mainline" Protestant churches lost
ground.
Note: 1990 membership numbers shown in parentheses, are expressed in
thousands.
Source: 1962 and 1992 Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches.
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Source: Wilson Quarterly, Summer93, Vol. 17 Issue 3, p137, 3p, 1 graph.
Item Number: 9402081825
