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    Full content for this article includes illustration and photograph.
                                                                              
   Source:  The New Republic, Feb 15, 1993 v208 n7 p27(10).
                                                                              
    Title:  Subject and abject: the examined life of Michel Foucault. (Cover
            Story)
   Author:  Alexander Nehamas
                                                                              
 Abstract:  Foucault's considerable philosophical career is analyzed. His
unique perspectives on historical determinism, the Enlightenment, and
industrial history continue to provoke academic comment nearly ten years after
his death in 1984 at the age of 58.
                                                                              
 Subjects:  Determinism (Philosophy) - Analysis
   People:  Foucault, Michel - Criticism, interpretation, etc.
                                                                              
  Magazine Collection:  67J0224
Electronic Collection:  A13417647
                   RN:  A13417647
                                                                              

Full Text COPYRIGHT The New Republic Inc. 1993

Subject and Abject

Michel Foucault is the most important and controversial figure of what is
loosely known as poststructuralism. The author of more than twenty books, as
well as a huge number of uncollected writings, he will doubtless be read long
after the other writers associated with that movement have been forgotten.
Foucault's controversial views and his unconventional life have provoked
admiration and disdain, adulation and disgust. His supporters and his
detractors see him in radically divergent ways. On one point, however, they
must agree: Foucault was a very famous man. And now, less than ten years after
his death Of AIDS in 1984 at the age of 58, we have two very different
biographies to prove it.

Foucault was that extremely rare creature, a genuine intellectual who was an
international celebrity. Though a good deal of his thought remains opaque,
many of his views have become part of current discourse; the prevalence of the
word "discourse" itself is a fine example of his influence. His impact on
philosophy, history, criticism, political theory and the study of sexuality is
already pervasive. He supplanted Sartre, while they were both alive, as the
leading intellectual of Paris. "When I was young," he once said, "he was the
one--along with everything he represented, the terrorism of Les Temps
modernes--from whom I wanted to free myself."

For Foucault, however, freedom was incompatible with reproducing someone
else's role. He was convinced, more generally, that the effort to replace
institutions is doomed to perpetuate them. In Madness and Civilization, for
example, he argued that Samuel Tuke, who in the early nineteenth century
replaced the prisonlike confinement of the insane with a more humanitarian
treatment, simply produced a new prison, a new kind of punishment, by holding
the insane responsible for their actions. In Foucault's rather startling
analysis, leg irons and the bonds of conscience were one:

Liberation of the insane, abolition of punishment, constitution of a human
milieu-- these are only justifications. The real operations were different. In
fact, Tuke created an asylum where he substituted for the free terror of
madness the stifling anguish of responsibility; fear no longer reigned on the
other side of the prison gates, it now raged under the seals of conscience.
"The soul," he wrote, "is the prison of the body."

There were two premises to Foucault's thought. 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. That conviction
prevents us from seeing that our particular views, habits and institutions are
contingent; that there was a time when they did not exist, and so there can be
a time when they will exist no longer. Many of Foucault's specific historical
claims have been disputed, but no philosopher has ever matched his ability to
find history where others find nature, to see contingency where others see
necessity. He was a master at revealing the emergence of radically new
objects--insanity, illness, even the human individual--where others had
detected only a difference in the treatment of unchanging realities. His
historical vision alone makes him a thinker who cannot be ignored.

Foucault's second premise, which he 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. Whether it was
Tuke's and Pinel's treatment of the insane, or the penal reforms of the early
nineteenth century, which exchanged physical torture for constant
surveillance, Foucault always discovered one horror replaced by another.

He believed that individuals and groups were elements of a vast network of
meaning and control over which they were powerless. Much of his work was a
description of that network, showing its historical basis and grimly hinting
that it was self-perpetuating. Reversing Clausewitz's brutal formula, he
claimed even more brutally that power, the nature of which obsessed him
throughout his life, "is war, a war continued by other means." And since all
relations were for him relations of power, warfare is constant:

None of the political struggles, the conflicts waged over power, with power,
for power, the alterations in the relations of forces, the favoring of certain
tendencies, the reinforcements etc., etc., that come about within ... "civil
peace" ... none of these phenomena in a political system should be interpreted
except as a continuation of war.

Sartre had believed that human beings are ultimately the subjects of their
actions, that they are free and sovereign agents, even if freedom itself is
not the product of choice. "Man," he famously wrote, "is condemned to be
free." Foucault detested this humanistic existentialism. He argued that the
"subject," far from being free, is itself the product of historical forces
that cannot be mastered; and that different conditions produce different sorts
of subjects. In his early works Foucault claimed that what we are today is a
creation of the last 200 years, brought about by specific and oppressive
arrangements, which he discussed in books like Madness and Civilization, The
Birth of the Clinic and Discipline and Punish. His own equally famous
formulation was this:

Man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.

If those arrangements were to disappear as they appeared, if some event of
which we can at the moment do no more than sense the possibility--without
knowing either what its forms will be or what it promises-- were to cause them
to crumble, as the ground of Classical thought [beginning in the sixteenth
century] did, at the end of the eighteenth century, then one can certainly
wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the
sea.

II

It is a great irony, then, that Foucault's attempt to free himself from Sartre
landed him in a similar role. He once claimed that he wrote precisely in order
"to remain anonymous," but his name is now known well enough to have justified
two biographical studies and a third has already been announced. And the irony
is still greater. What sort of biography can be written of a man who seems to
have thought that the "author," like the "subject," is a fiction, a recent and
oppressive invention? Far from being the origin of the meaning and the value
of a literary or philosophical work, the author, in Foucault's account, is a
construct aimed at preventing literature from being read, as he thought it
ought to be read, in radically novel ways, unconstrained by considerations of
genre, intention or historical plausibility: 'the author is the principle of
thrift in the proliferation of meaning."

This is an idea that is easily misunderstood. Foucault did not make the silly
claim that writers do not exist or that books get written by themselves, any
more than his notion of "the death of Man" implies that people are not real.
He was arguing, rather, that certain apparently natural ways of treating both
books and human beings are specific to given historical periods. Literary
works in particular, which are open to radically divergent readings, have been
treated as the products of a special kind of writer, "the author," who
(unlike, say, the writer of a scientific treatise) is accorded ultimate power
over their meaning. We generally read literary works to find out what their
author meant in composing them. But this, says Foucault, is a comparatively
recent practice, and the real aim of this conception of authorship is not so
much to glorify an individual (though it does that) as to create a mechanism
"by which one impedes the free circulation, the free manipulation, the free
composition, decomposition and recomposition of fiction."

The view that the author is not really a person whose word about the work is
final, but represents instead a particular and repressive way in which texts
are treated, is a crucial part of poststructuralism's attack on the humanist
conception of the author as a genius. It creates rather a thorny problem for
all those who wish to write sympathetically about Foucault. How should we
understand someone who seems to think that "understanding" is itself less a
goal of cognition than a means of control, one element of the indissoluble
pair to which he referred as "power/knowledge"?

Both Didier Eribon and James Miller are acutely aware of this problem, and the
manner in which each of them deals with it nicely epitomizes the sort of
biography that each of them has written. Eribon turns to further facts about
Foucault's life. He points out that Foucault actually did what authors do:
signed his books, connected them by means of prefaces, articles and
interviews, disputed readings, answered criticisms, participated in
conferences devoted to his work. Eribon's biographical method appeals
primarily to Foucault's public, institutional activity. His book is mainly an
account of Foucault's career, to which the personal life is subordinated.

Eribon writes well and often absorbingly. He is reticent about Foucault's
homosexuality; but with the exception of sex, which is a rather significant
exception in the case of Foucault, he has written the sort of biography that
has become for many people a substitute for the traditional novel--a book with
a hero or heroine, with a beginning, a middle and an end, with startling
reversals and revelations. What others do for the rich and famous, Eribon does
for the smart and famous. Or at least for the smart and famous of Paris.
(Eribon describes almost everything that happened to Foucault as the result of
the intervention of some Parisian luminary or other.)

Michel Foucault was born in Poitiers in 1926. He was educated at  the Ecole
Normale Superieure and the Sorbonne. His adolescence and early adulthood were
unhappy, and he attempted suicide more than once. He drifted in and out of the
Communist Party. He worked as an assistant in a psychology laboratory, and
taught, in 1952, at the University of Lille. Restless and enervated, in the
middle of a love affair with the composer Jean Barraque, he left for the
French Institute at the University of Uppsala in 1955. "I have suffered and
still suffer from a lot of things in French social and cultural life. That was
why I left France in 1955," he later said. But his wanderings around Europe
.(he held posts in Warsaw and Hamburg) never took his thoughts away from
Paris, which he seems to have both loved and loathed, a point of which Eribon
is aware without realizing its significance. Unsure of the direction of his
life and his thought, Foucault's state during those early years brings to mind
Flaubert's description of Emma Bovary: "She wanted to travel and she wanted to
go back to the convent; she wanted to die and she wanted to live in Paris."

In the end, unlike Emma, Foucault reached Paris. In 1960 he received his
doctorate with his massive Folie et deraison, known in English in a badly
abridged version as Madness and Civilization. He taught at Clermont-Ferrand
and became a celebrity in 1966 with the publication of The Order q Things,
which was a runaway best seller. Unhappy with his book, which detailed the
abrupt but systematically connected manner in which natural history, general
grammar and the theory of wealth were transformed into biology, philology and
political economy in the nineteenth century, Foucault left Paris again. May
1968 found him teaching at the University of Tunis. He kept abreast of the
events in Paris by means of a radio which Daniel Defert, the man with whom he
shared (though by no means. exclusively) the last twenty-five years of his
life, held next to the telephone for hours on end.

He returned to Paris later that year and organized the philosophy department
at Vincennes. In 1970 he finally attained the goal for which he had campaigned
for years: election to the College de France, the most prestigious institution
of French higher education. Soon thereafter, having abandoned his earlier
involvement in the Gaullist effort to reform the university system and his
generally apolitical attitude, he joined the radical French opposition.
Startling his academic colleagues, Foucault took to the streets. He worked
with various Maoist groups; but sometimes his radicalism left even the Maoists
speechless.

On one occasion, for example, he argued that popular justice should be
dispensed spontaneously, without the mediation of the "popular courts" which
the Maoists wanted but which, Foucault retorted, only replicated the bourgeois
system that they were intended to dismantle. In a manner naive and
frightening, he described the aim of the state apparatus as the education of
the masses, so that "it is the masses themselves who come to say, 'In fact we
cannot kill this man,' or, 'In fact we must kill him.'" He also organized the
Group on Prison Information (GIP), which focused attention on the horrible
conditions inside French prisons. It was at this time that Foucault developed
his notion of the "specific intellectual," who addresses particular social
problems without relying on a general theory of human nature or history, and
usually with the hope only of exposing, not of correcting, a specific wrong.

Through most of the '70s Foucault was the prototype of the engaged
intellectual, even coming to blows with the police. Discipline and Punish, his
history of the modern prison, and one of his bleakest and most influential
books, appeared in 1975. He gave a huge number of interviews on his opinions,
and he began to speak about his homosexuality and his involvement with
sadomasochism. He also began, in 1972, a series of increasingly frequent trips
to the United States. For Eribon, America provided Foucault merely with the
time and the leisure to prepare his Paris lectures. And though he acknowledges
that Foucault "was happy in his work" in America, he insinuates that it was
mainly because "he was happy in the pleasures of the flesh." And so "he
dreamed aloud of living in the Californian paradise. Sunny, magnificent .... "
Yet it was precisely during this time, and not coincidentally, that Foucault
altered the direction of his thinking, and revised the project that resulted
in his incomplete History of Sexuality, a work that marks a real but
insufficiently remarked-upon change.

Eribon is not exactly a student of ideas. Though he offers summaries of
Foucault's books, he consistently reduces ideas to personalities. He presents
Foucault's life as a supremely well-managed quest for academic and popular
success. Why Foucault bothered to write at all remains a mystery. Eribon's
book provides a marvelously vivid picture of the Parisian intellectual scene,
but no one will learn anything about Foucault's work from it.

III.

Is that a shortcoming in a biograph.y? Why should we expect to understand what
Foucault thought better after reading an account of his life? What is the
relationship between a philosopher's life and his thought? James Miller's
book, which represents an explicit effort to establish deep connections
between Foucault's ideas and his personal views on homosexuality,
sadomasochism, drugs and death, raises these questions in a spirit of urgency.
It is impossible to make a judgment of Miller's controversial book, therefore,
without examining, however roughly, Foucault's ideas.

Like Nietzsche and Bataille, Foucault was fascinated by what an individual or
a social group must exclude and suppress so that it can form a positive
conception of itself. He argued that our conception of what we are like as
individuals or "subjects" depends essentially on expelling and controlling
whole classes of people who do not fit the categories that the Enlightenment
developed in order to establish what it would count as "normal." Foucault
believed that the mechanisms used to understand and to control marginalized
and ostracized groups were also essential to the understanding and the
control--indeed, to the constitution--of "normal" individuals. Thus, the
constant surveillance of prisoners that replaced physical torture as a result
of penal reform came to be applied also to schoolchildren, to factory workers,
to whole populations (and, we might add, to average citizens, whose police
records, medical reports and credit ratings are even today becoming more
available and more detailed).

Who we are, in Foucault's account, is a function of such practices. What
counts as a "subject," as what is defined by such information and knowledge,
is the result of the exercise of power. In this sense power is "productive,"
and is the flip side of knowledge:

Power produces knowledge ... power and knowledge directly imply one another
... there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field
of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the
same time power relations. his is a vision in which everything is paid for.
"Ah, reason, seriousness, mastery over the affects, the whole somber thing
called reflection, all these prerogatives and showpieces of man," Nietzsche
had written; "how dearly they have been bought! how much blood and cruelty lie
at the bottom of all 'good things'!" Nietzsche did not believe that nothing
can ever change for the better. Eventually Foucault came to agree; but from
the '50s through the '70s, partly owing to the influence of Heidegger's
disdain for modernity and partly owing to his political commitments, the
antihumanist Foucault found it impossible to believe that any alteration in
what he regarded as an essentially corrupt social and political system could
produce any improvement. Power might be exercised in different forms, but its
amount and, more importantly, its quality, remained constant. Indeed, as the
expression of power came to be cloaked in the vocabulary of humanism and
humanitarianism, the condition of oppression actually became worse. For the
benevolent appearances of modern power made it that much more difficult to
resist.

In his earliest period Foucault examined the "archaeology" of the human
sciences-psychiatry, medicine, linguistics, economics and biology (as these
two were until recently studied). He investigated the rules underlying and
determining their practice, and he showed that these rules often underwent
radical shifts ("ruptures") that could be explained neither by the usual
appeals to universal scientific progress nor by the innovations of great
individuals. Foucault's aim was to subvert the objective status of the human
sciences, their claim to arrive at an independent truth, and to expose them
instead as a means for the creation and control of the modern "subject."

His method was exhaustively descriptive. But his point of view created a
serious problem for itself. Since history is itself a human science, how could
he claim that his own position regarding the human sciences was correct? If
his own analysis was true, then the human sciences might be able to reach the
truth after all; and if it was false, there seemed no reason to bother with it
or to believe it.' But this problem, commonly seen as a symptom of Foucault's
"nihilism," is not without its solution. For Foucault placed himself within
the domain that he was investigating. The issue is not whether there is a
general criterion for separating, in all cases, the true from the false, but
whether there is a particular theory or interpretation that is better than its
alternatives.

This may seem to beg the question. For, one may ask, what are the criteria by
which we can determine whether one interpretation is better than another? The
answer, again, is that there are no such general criteria. The criteria of
evaluation are not immune to dispute, even though it is less likely that
people will disagree about general principles than about particular claims of
truth or falsehood. Foucault offered his own views for evaluation and
criticism. His style, it is true, sometimes expressed a hauteur that seemed to
forbid discussion. But nothing in the substance of his writing precluded it,
and few writers have been as willing to revisit and to rethink their own
positions.

More disturbing was the work that Foucault undertook from the late '60s to the
late '70s, which coincided with his political activism. These were the years
when he shifted his attention from the human sciences themselves to the
disciplinary practices of the nineteenth century, and to the direct analysis
of the power relations that, he held, traverse everything we do and provide no
possibility for escape. The "genealogical" researches of this second period of
his writing were his most pessimistic. They were intended to show that
everything we take as orderly and rational (the prison, the court system, the
school) is the product of domination and subjugation, in short, of power; and
that there is no possibility of creating a system from which such domination
and subjugation can ever be even partially absent.

His writing and his research again were brilliant; but this was a much more
profound form of nihilism. It was crucial to Foucault that power be understood
not only as something exercised by a central authority and thus primarily as
an agent of prohibition. This, he said, was the 'juridical" exercise of power,
which is at best a part of what power is and does. More importantly, power is
a productive force. It is not exercised by subjects, it creates them. Power is
exercised through individuals, but it is not often under those individuals'
control. On the contrary, established relationships of power, despite the
intentions of those who try to modify them, reassert themselves in constantly
changing forms. Efforts to humanize power, to rationalize it, even to renounce
it result only in another exercise of power--in the creation of new ways of
knowing what individuals or "subjects" are, indeed, of new individuals or
"subjects." People who are subject to the sovereign's absolute and total
vengeance are essentially different from people whose every movement is
observed and catalogued by minor functionaries, who are themselves observed by
someone else.

Here is how Foucault put the point in Discipline and Punish:

[The] need for punishment without torture was first formulated as a cry from
the heart or from an outraged nature. In the worst of murderers, there is one
thing, at least, to be respected when one punishes: his "humanity." The day
was to come, in the nineteenth century, when this "man," discovered in the
criminal, would become the target of penal intervention, the object that it
claimed to correct and transform, the domain of a whole series of
"criminological" sciences and strange "penitentiary" practices. Thus a new
form of knowledge and a new form of control went together-- which, I believe,
is why Foucault refused throughout this period to offer alternatives to the
"intolerable" situations that he exposed in his writings and in his political
activities. Before such practical hopelessness, even Schopenhauer's
metaphysical pessimism seems trifling.

For more than twenty years Foucault seemed dedicated to exposing the seamy
underside of the Enlightenment, conceding to it no positive accomplishment and
refusing any and all visions of a better future. He explicitly denied that
reason can transcend time and accident, and lead us out of the impasse, since
reason itself was an instrument, a part of the program, of the Enlightenment.
Therefore he rejected the Frankfurt School's less grandiose idea of
rationality, according to which the contradictory principles of the
Enlightenment could be taken to their logical conclusion and its structure be
dismantled from within. Distant and ironic, an anatomist but not a physician,
Foucault seemed to withdraw more and more into a solitary philosophical
despair.

IV.

And yet matters were not quite so simple. As early as 1960 Michel Serres
noticed something important in Folie et deraison, when he concluded that "this
book is, therefore, also a cry." Foucault's scientific detachment, his
forbidding language and his abstract formulations could not hide his own deep
feelings for those who have been treated as insane. "At the heart of the
meticulous erudition of historical inquiry," Ser~ res wrote,

a deep love circulates ... for this obscure population in which the infinitely
close, the other oneself, is recognized .... Consequently, this transparent
geometry is the pathetic language of men who undergo the greatest of tortures,
that of being cornered, of disgrace, of exile, of quarantine, ostracism and
excommunication.

Serres's description is true of everything that Foucault wrote about the
disfranchised-about the poor, the delinquent, the prison population, the
sexually deviant, factory workers, even children attending the rigorous
schools of the nineteenth century. But Foucault's "deep love" seemed to
exhaust itself in letting the voices of these groups be heard. He seemed
himself to have nothing to say on their behalf. This was painfully clear in
the manifesto that he composed for the Group on Prison Information:

The GIP does not propose to speak in the name of the prisoners in various
prisons; it proposes, on the contrary, to provide them with the possibility of
speaking themselves and telling what goes on in prisons. The GIP does not have
reformist goals; we do not dream of an ideal prison .... [Our] investigations
are not intended to ameliorate, alleviate or make an oppressive system more
bearable. They are intended to attack it in places where it is called
something else--justice, technique, knowledge, objectivity.

Foucault's criticisms of many institutions were devastating. But his
unrelieved pessimism provoked vehement objections. How could someone so
convinced that so much was so wrong just stand by and proudly refuse-to offer
any suggestions for improvement? Was this philosophy, or was it the crudest
and most cynical form of nihilism? Was Foucault a real and responsible
intellectual, or a kind of terrorist cloaked in scholarship?

Then, in the early 1970s, Foucault began a work on the history of sexuality.
The first volume in the series, La volonte de savoir (translated as History of
Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction) appeared in 1976. Its central argument
was that, contrary to common views, the period between the sixteenth and the
nineteenth centuries did not so much repress sexuality as produce, literally,
an explosion of writing about it. He posed the question "not, Why are we
repressed? but rather, Why do we say, with so much passion and so much
resentment against our most recent past, against our present, and against
ourselves, that we are repressed?" Foucault's thesis was that the
proliferation of talk about sexuality, especially about the sexuality of
children and sexual perversion, brought new aspects of sexuality into
existence. Instead of being repressed, sexuality was to a great extent created
in the nineteenth century, and with it new capacities for understanding and
controlling human beings-in effect, new human beings--came into existence.
Once again, he proved himself a master of reversing received pictures.

After writing the introductory volume, Foucault put the project aside. Or
rather, he began to think about it in drastically new terms. The next two
volumes of his history of sexuality were different from what had been earlier
announced, in subject, style and approach. They appeared eight years later,
only a few days before his death. What, then, happened during this period to
change the direction of Foucault's project as well as his overall approach to
philosophy?

The change was indeed radical. Foucault's unqualified vilification of the
Enlightenment was replaced by a serious, if qualified, respect. In a late
essay titled, like Kant's, "What is Enlightenment?," he argued that the
project of the Enlightenment is still not over. Like Kant, we must engage in
constant criticism of ourselves and the world; but unlike Kant, the nature of
our criticism must be thoroughly historicist. Our question must be, "In what
is given to us as universal, necessary, obligatory, what place is occupied by
whatever is singular, contingent and the product of arbitrary constraints?"
This, of course, is an old idea of his, but Foucault's discussion ends on a
startlingly new note. Our critique, he wrote,

will be genealogical in the sense that it will not deduce from the form of
what we are what it is impossible for us to do and to know; but it will
separate out, from the contingency that has made us what we are, the
possibility of no longer being, doing or thinking, what we are, do or think
.... It is seeking to give new impetus, as far and wide as possible, to the
undefined work of freedom.

"The undefined work of freedom": these are the words of humanism. They
represent a stunning reversal for the philosopher who earlier believed that
the Enlightenment's reforms were in reality aimed not at the liberation of the
spirit, but at a new form of the subjugation of the body, "directed not only
at the growth of its skills, nor at the intensification of its subjection, but
at the formation of a relation that in the mechanism itself makes it more
obedient as it becomes more useful and conversely."

Why the change? My own view is that Foucault's earlier pessimism arose partly
from his inability to see for himself to whom the search for alternatives
should be addressed. At times he wrote as if there were no such "whom," taking
his own "dissolution" of the subject too literally: if individuals are simply
the playthings of power, then no effort on their part can produce a change in
the continual war of forces beyond conscious control. But he began to see that
the situation was more complicated, I believe, partly as a result of his trips
to America. This is Miller's argument, too. In the United States the full
complexity of Nietzsche's "beyond good and evil" became clear to him. He
grasped its double implication: not only that everything good has its bad
side, but also that everything bad has its good side. Every virtue, as
Nietzsche put it, was once a vice. And from his experience of the sometimes
silly, often indulgent self-absorption of California, Foucault rather
poignantly arrived at his final, deepest and most important idea, the idea of
the care of the self.

The self?. Hadn't he himself already eliminated this bourgeois concept? Was he
now rejecting all that he stood for? Not quite. Maurice Blanchot had read him
rightly:

Were not his principles more complex than his official discourse with its
striking formulations led one to think? For example, it is accepted as a
certainty that Foucault got rid of, purely and simply, the notion of the
subject: no more oeuvre, no more author, no more creative writing. But things
are not that simple. The subject does not disappear; rather its excessively
determined unity is put in question.

Even though Foucault sometimes wrote as if the self is a fiction, in fact he
had never denied that the subject exists. He could not imagine it, however,
existing happily; and so he tried to show how different periods constituted
subjects differently, and how the subject is not the final ground of thought
and history, but their complex product. If the self is not the final reality
underlying history, however, it is not exactly a fiction, either; and though
it is not ultimately free, it is not exactly a puppet. Moreover, every form of
power, in Foucault's new view, contains the possibility of its own undoing,
since every prohibition creates "the space of a possible transgression." Since
power is productive, the subjects that it produces, being themselves a form of
power, can be productive in turn.

That the subject is a construct of history implies that there is no such thing
as a "true self," an abiding unity beneath its many appearances. (Christianity
had perpetuated the notion of the true self it required that Christians engage
in a "hermeneutics of the self" to see which of their thoughts and desires
were really their own, that is, God's, and which were satanic, and foreign to
their real nature.) Foucault never abandoned his belief that the true self is
a chimera. Instead this belief became the unexpected foundation for his most
important idea. He returned yet again to Nietzsche, who had written that 'We
want to be the poets of our lives." That is to say, Foucault's thinking took a
seriously aestheticist turn: "From the idea that the self is not given to us,
I think that there is only one practical consequence: we have to create
ourselves as a work of art .... Couldn't everyone's life become a work of art?
Why should the lamp or the house be an art object, but not our life?"

This "rediscovery" of the self and the art of living was accompanied by two
other important developments. The first was his increasingly public
acknowledgment of his homosexuality. He came to believe, as Miller documents,
that if movements like gay liberation were to be successful, as he hoped, then
he would have to find a way out of his earlier pessimism about the finality of
power. The second was his interest in Greek attitudes toward pederasty in
particular and pleasure in general, and in the place of these attitudes in the
ethical enterprise of the classical and later pagan world, in the ancient
understanding of the good person. All these concerns intersect in The Use of
Pleasure and The Care of the Self, the great second and third volumes of The
History of Sexuality.

In ancient ethical practice, Foucault found a wide range of different
techniques, ranging from practical exercises to introspective self-examination
to the extensive writing of daily diaries, all aiming to make oneself into a
kind of person of which one could be satisfied, even proud. These techniques
constituted what he called, following his ancient authorities, "the care of
the self." He connected these instruments of morality explicitly to medical
thought and practice, and used something approaching the language of therapy
regarding them. He became supremely interested in the correct management of
pleasure. Was he, then, a belated Freudian? He was not. Unlike Freud, he did
not believe in repression; he denied the existence of natural or historically
constant needs and pleasures that have been denied by social constraints or
individual pathologies. More importantly, he believed that the care of the
self, unlike psychoanalysis, was not a process of discovering who one "truly"
is, but of inventing, improvising, creating who one can be. Finally,
Foucault's model for the care of the self was art.

Thinking under the sign of art seems like quite a departure for Foucault.
After all, talk of artistic creation always provokes thoughts of genius,
unlimited freedom, absolute spontaneity--the very ideas of which Foucault
remained resolutely suspicious throughout his life, before California and
after. But finally there is no contradiction. For creativity, too, is always
historically situated. Not everything is possible at every time. Like everyone
else, artists have to work within the limitations handed down to them by the
tradition to which they belong. Creation involves a rearrangement of the
given; innovation always implies a manipulation of the old. And lives, seen
aesthetically, are no different: the artistic creation of the self also makes
use of the materials with which one is always and already faced.

V.

In Foucault's case, the most important donnees during the last ten years of
his life were his erudition and his homosexuality. In particular, he became
progressively more fascinated with the sadomasochistic subcultures of New York
and San Francisco. Was this an adventitious event, best omitted from an
examination of his work, or was it integrally connected with his philosophical
development, as Miller insists? And did Foucault succeed in integrating it
into the life that he constructed for himself?.

The answer is that he did, and we are in Miller's debt for helping us see it.
Reversing yet another received view, Foucault argued that the traditional
picture, according to which the tolerant Greek attitude toward pederasty was
replaced by centuries of Christian repression, was crude, if not totally
inaccurate. Austerity was a constant concern and self-control a regular goal
from the fourth century B.C. to the third century A.D. But the forms of
discipline, the reasons for which it was undertaken and the objects in
relation to which it was practiced changed significantly over time, and could
therefore be adapted to other situations.

His late research seemed to suggest to Foucault that he might combine ancient
ethics (which "was not a question of giving a pattern of behavior for
everybody [but] a personal choice for a small elite") with the stuff of his
life, and thereby fashion a self of his own. The broad outlines of such a
project were limned in his view that Plato's connection between erotic desire
and the pursuit of truth opens onto what Foucault called "an aesthetics of
existence,"

a way of life whose moral value did not depend either on one's being in
conformity with a code of behavior, or on an effort of purification, but on
certain formal principles in the use of pleasures, in the way one distributed
them, in the limits one observed, in the hierarchy one respected.

Foucault found this aesthetic attitude also in the writings of the Stoics,
though his readings of them are problematic.

His last two books were remarkable for his realization that the ancient world
was keenly interested in the control of pleasure by means of serious and
concerted efforts, by what he tightly called askesis or "asceticism." The
purpose of these complex exercises was not to deny the pleasures--of sex, of
food, of worldly ambition-but to avoid excess, to become their master and
therefore the master of oneself as well. Asceticism is not the repression of
pleasure, it is the regulation of pleasure. Its objective is not denial, it is
satisfaction. The conventional ascetic ideal of the extirpation of pleasure is
not a fact of nature, but the product of centuries of Christian theorizing.

These complicated issues form the core of Miller's troubling biography.
Whereas Eribon appeals to the facts of Foucault's institutional behavior,
Miller responds, in a philosophical vein, to the paradox of writing the
biography of an author who denied the reality of the author by arguing that
Foucault was engaged in a lifelong project of fashioning himself as a subject,
of creating himself as the author he in fact became. This is not as banal as
it sounds. Not all who write are writers, and not all that writers write
resonates with their lives. To become an author in Foucault's sense is to be
unified and original; to produce nothing less than a new model of how a life
can be lived. Foucault applied his own historicism to himself, unifying his
life with his thought, and enlarging our understanding of what a "subject" can
be, much in the way that great artists enlarge our sense of what art can
accomplish.

Miller's controversial book is the product of prodigious research. Unlike
Eribon, Miller discusses madness, death and homosexuality, and particularly
sadomasochism in great, graphic, almost sensational detail. Though it is
philosophically motivated, Miller's book straddies the line between journalism
and scholarship, and alternates between scholarly readings and titillating
bits of gossip. He does not always succeed in putting all the elements of his
subject together. His discussion of Foucault's long-lasting obsession with
death left me rather confused because I could not see how it accounts for a
very large part of his writing. He tends to quote Foucault too often in
explicating his views, and since Foucault himself admitted that "one of my
flaws is not being naturally clear," his discussions are sometimes obscure.

Miller's central thesis is that Foucault's life was a continuous effort to put
together his literary and philosophical gifts and ideas, his homosexuality and
sense of exclusion, his strong political commitments (which distinguished his
approach from the hermetic and purely literary aestheticism of Roland
Barthes's later works), his dangerously close relationship with madness, his
interest in drugs and his fascination with death into one coherent and
aesthetically beautiful whole. This is not just to say that he was lucky
enough to die a relatively happy man. I doubt that we can know that, or that
it makes any difference. The point is philosophical, not biographical. It is
to say that Foucault extended the limits of what could count as an admirable
human life, even if it is a life of which many would not approve. But
admiration and approval, as Nietzsche might have said, are very different
things.

From Miller's account we may conclude that sadomasochism was a kind of
blessing in Foucault's life. It provided the occasion to experience relations
of power as a source of delight. It was the theater of power in which
discipline could bring happiness and domination itself be dominated, partly by
submitting to pain voluntarily, partly by controlling its intensity, partly by
changing roles. This freedom was unprecedented in Foucault's earlier
experience and unwarranted by his earlier thought. Having written about the
ways the self has been created in history, mostly through the power exercised
on us by others, Foucault undertook to exert power upon himself and, in
Nietzsche's words, to "become what he was" on his own. His writing about
control and his exercising control on himself became a single project.

Many will be unable to see in Foucault's life anything like the beauty that he
hoped they might find. His life and his work may seem to them disgusting and
perverse; and Miller's detailed accounts of abject practices will lend support
to the caricature of Foucault as a pervert with a highfalutin vocabulary. The
book will also upset some of Foucault's supporters, for whom it may seem like
an exercise in sexual reductionism, according to which Foucault is thereby
himself normalized and neutralized--a gay activist with a highfalutin
vocabulary.

But these conclusions about Miller's book are wrong. What is finally so
important and so disturbing about Miller's biography is its portrait of a man
who was willing to take serious risks with his thought as well as with his
life. About the former he asked: "What is philosophy today... in what does it
consist if not in the endeavor to know how and to what extent it might be
possible to think differently, instead of legitimating what is already known?"
And he defined "homosexual askesis" as "a way to work on ourselves ... to
invent--I don't mean discover--a way of being that is still improbable."

Foucault's sexual activities were fraught with danger, for himself and others.
I refer, of course, to AIDS. It is worth remembering that in the early '80s
AmS was little understood, so it is sanctimonious and hypocritical to attack
him today for continuing (as so many others did) to go to the San Francisco
bathhouses once the disease had been identified. "Sex is worth dying for,"
Miller quotes him as saying. This may seem shocking. But it is not the same as
saying that sex is worth killing for; nor is it exactly a clear admission of
suicidal intention. These are very vexed matters. As Miller concludes,
Foucault's behavior "would have involved engaging in potentially suicidal acts
of passion with consenting partners, most of them likely to be infected
already; deliberately throwing caution to the wind, Foucault and these men
were wagering their lives together; that, at least, is how I came to
understand what may have happened."

Foucault was not a particularly nice man, though his charm was legendary. What
Miller shows is the magnitude of the challenge that Foucault presents to our
judgment. He took all that he was faced with, accidents of birth and
upbringing, choices made consciously or unconsciously, paths followed by
chance or design, features pleasant and unpleasant, appetite and anger, desire
and despair, good and evil, and out of them created an oeuvre, a self, an
existence that, though it cannot (and probably should not) be followed by
others, became, in the strongest terms, a life of his own. There are not many
men or women of whom that can be said.

Whatever else Foucault was, he was a great Nietzschean hero. Finally he
belonged to a tradition whose loss we are in the habit of lamenting: the
tradition of philosophy as a vocation, as an art of living. And no philosopher
who has ever belonged to that tradition, including Socrates, who originated
it, has been free of the most virulent detractors. In this sense, the appeal
to the philosopher's life as well as to the philosopher's work is not only
justified, it is necessary. There is no understanding them otherwise, since no
clear distinction can be made between the two. Neither the life nor the work
is primary; neither can provide a basis on which the other can be understood;
and neither can even be understood in itself, since neither is an object in
its own fight apart from its contribution to the life-work or the worklife, to
the whole, of which it is a part.

I can imagine that many of Foucault's followers may be disappointed by his
personal, aestheticist turn. They may consider it an abdication of
responsibility, an indulgence for the sake of one man's happiness, an
abandonment of politics. But that would be a mistake. In cases such as
Socrates, Nietzsche and Foucault, the personal and the public, the aesthetic
and the political, are as entangled with one another as the "life" and the
'work." It is by effecting transformations in themselves that such thinkers
effect the greatest changes in the lives of others, for good or for ill. By
turning to the self in his later works, and by living in a manner that was
consonant with his ideas, Foucault's "deep love" for the excluded and the
marginalized began most powerfully to express itself. He made himself into a
model of autonomy, of a voice of one's own. Politics, as he might have put it,
begins with the care of the self, which was precisely what Socrates, to whom
Foucault devoted his last two lectures at the College de France, had been
telling his own uncomprehending contemporaries.

Not that this master of suspicion ever surrendered his extraordinary reserve.
"My point," he wrote,

is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous, which is not
exactly the same as bad. If everything is dangerous, then we always have
something to do. So my position leads not to apathy but to a hyper- and
pessimistic activism.

These are wise words, the words of a philosopher who showed that he was wise
long after he showed that he was intelligent. As much a voluptuary as an
ascetic, as much an ascetic as a celebrity, Foucault is proving to be one of
the representative figures of our age. His progress from the detached
quasistructuralist of the'60s to the committed and nihilistic intellectual of
the '70s to the paradoxical neohumanist of the '80s is a parable of our time.
It sets an example even for those who are unwilling to follow him, but who
wish, by their own lights, and ultimately like him, to chart a course truly of
their own.
                                                                              
                                -- End --