Magazine: New Republic, February 15, 1993
The examined life of Michel Foucault.
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SUBJECT AND ABJECT
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Michel Foucault
by Didier Eribon
translated by Betsy Wing
(Harvard Unversity Press, 374 pp., $14.95 paper)
The Passion of Michel Foucault
by James Miller
(Simon and Schuster, 491 pp., $27.50)
I.
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 of 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 biography? 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.
This 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 anti-humanist 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," Serres 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 I: 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 rightly 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 straddles 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 AIDS 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
right apart from its contribution to the life-work or the work-life, 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.
PHOTO: Drawing of Michel Foucault (VINT LAWRENCE)
~~~~~~~~
By Alexander Nehamas
Alexander Nehamas is Edmund N. Carpenter II Professor in the Humanities
at Princeton University.
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Source: New Republic, 2/15/93, Vol. 208 Issue 7, p27, 10p, 1 cartoon.
Item Number: 9302020106
