Magazine: Sewanee Review, Summer, 1994
Section: ARTS AND LETTERS
THE MASKS OF M. FOUCAULT
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Three lives of Michel Foucault have recently appeared. An irony that has
escaped no one (all three biographers are self-conscious about it, and
one of them actually claims that his biography "is not a biography") is
that Foucault was one of the prominent proponents, with Roland Barthes,
Paul de Man, and Jacques Derrida, of the doctrine of the death of the
author.
This doctrine discourages an interest in authors, as well as
biographical orientations or appeals to authorial intention in the
reading of texts. It sometimes affirms that texts are written by the
language rather than by persons, and that they are unstable and
polysemous, with a life of their own which is independent of meanings
inscribed in them by their authors. Or by critics, in some cases: but
critics are "privileged," as authors are not, especially critics
announcing the death of the author. As Leo Sfax reflects in Gilbert
Adair's whodunit, The Death of the Author, the doctrine can only apply
if it is an exception to itself, accepted as both authoritative and
"stable," because propounded by him.
Professor Sfax himself dies (or does he? there's some indeterminacy on
the point, and he appears able to write about the matter after the event)
, as did his real-life original Paul de Man, and Barthes and Foucault
too, leaving Derrida, who is probably immortal and not a true believer
anyway. For practical purposes the death of the author functions only as
long as it retains its metaphoricity, like other facons de parler ("they
ought to be shot," for example, or "I could eat you up") which we like
to think we don't mean but don't not mean either.
Foucault's commitment to the notion was perhaps special, in an old-style
romantic way. It involved a lifelong pursuit of epiphanies or "limit
experiences," a species of self-obliteration whose exact literal status
is itself ambiguous, and in which depersonalization quizzically coexists
with a species of ego-trip. He once described the process of breaking
"with one's self, with one's past, with the world, and with all previous
life" to "a kind of turning round on the spot," which evokes two
anglophone images of epiphany, Yeats's "mind . . . [like] a spinning
top" and Eliot's "still point of the turning world," both of them
modernist derivatives of a romantic mode of thought.
He was (both as a practitioner of sadomasochism and in more discursive
ways) interested in the idea that the most intense pleasures may come
from experiences of extreme and perhaps lethal pain. In a startling
prefiguration of the death of his friend and onetime lover Barthes, he
was once hit by a car, thought he was dying, and described the sensation
as one of intense pleasure. Symbolically he seems to have carried no
papers that might show his identity, and the police had to contact
Simone Signoret, a close friend, whose address was found on him. She
recognized him from the hospital's description and was indignant that
the police didn't know who he was. He may have attempted suicide in his
younger days, but some uncertainty exists on the point, and Miller cites
him as saying that suicide was "a moment of potential 'authenticity'."
One or two theatrical episodes of self-inflicted injury were possibly
the product of adolescent unhappiness, related to his homosexuality.
When Foucault was close to death, there seems to have been an element of
denial, and he and his friends and family tended to deny that he had
AIDS. But disbelief in the supposed "gay cancer" was still common in the
early 1980s. His death was unusually quick, and he seems to have
functioned quite normally until the end, which may have facilitated the
feeling that he was not really ill. The canard that he knowingly
infected others is not entertained seriously by the biographers, though
Miller suggests that he may deliberately have thrown himself into high-
risk activity. His remark, cited by both Miller and Macey, "How can I be
scared of AIDS when I could die in a car? If sex with a boy gives me
pleasure . . ." catches this mood, which is consistent with Foucault's
contempt for the warnings of "public health officials." The proposition
that to die from "diseases of love" was to experience the Passion dates
from 1963, and one would like to think that he stopped saying such
things after the advent of AIDS.
Foucault seems not to have wanted posthumous attention and instructed a
friend to burn his papers. Macey plausibly suggests that he would
probably have preferred Herve Guibert's novel, A l'ami qui ne m'a pas
sauve la vie, to any biography, though the book angered his friends.
Foucault appears there as Muzil, interestingly a homonym of Musil,
author of The Man without Qualities. (Guibert later committed suicide
from an overdose of an anti-AIDs drug). Of all the major ideologues of
the disappearing author, Foucault was the least interested in la chose
litteraire and seems to have felt for literary critics some of the
contempt his work may have helped them to deserve. It's instructive to
recall, in the present rash of "Foucauldian theory" in university
departments of literature, that Foucault's professional and pedagogic
involvement with literature was marginal and mainly confined to America.
He thought the "relentless theorisation of writing" was "a swan song,"
demonstrating "that the writer's activity was no longer at the centre of
things": another death of the author perhaps, which may in turn have
helped to fuel a widespread dislike of literature among academic
students of it. The dislike was not shared by Foucault himself, who was
a passionate and acute reader-and who perhaps was dismayed by the
professionals who weren't. At all events he worked in France not as a
professor of literature but as a historian, psychologist, sociologist,
and philosopher: perhaps the term philosophe, evoking the
eighteenthcentury Encyclopedistes, best describes his many-sided
contribution to knowledge and ideas and his generous and principled
activism in social and political causes. The tradition that philosophers
do such things survives in France: Sartre was Foucault's predecessor.
Foucault's writings are characterized by a series of arrestingly
schematic propositions: that the modern "humane" treatment of the insane
and of criminals is not an obvious improvement on the old forms of
confinement and torture; that sexuality is an invention of recent times;
that sexual repression didn't exist in the bad old days and might be a
good idea anyway; that the primacy we accord to sexual and genital
experience has displaced a wide range of polymorphous pleasures; that
the criminality of rape is overrated because sexuality is, and that it
should be juridically restricted to the element of bodily harm, any
genital transactions being neither here nor there and any denial of this
being itself phallocentric. Not a thing to endear him, you might think,
to his admirers in anglophone universities; but it's surprising what you
can get away with these days, in the decent obscurity of a foreign
language (translated, of course, otherwise how would anyone know? but it
was thought up in French, and it's the thought that counts).
Foucault was a radical with a billowing contempt for liberal causes,
especially for what he saw as the oppressively hygienic and interfering
humanism of the modern welfare mentality. "I am for the decentralization,
the regionalization, the privatization of all pleasures," he said in an
interview in 1977, after the publication of the first volume of his
History of Sexuality. It's not the only occasion when the Foucauldian
will-not-to-be-governed acquired a Thatcherite ring. Two years later he
was telling his students at the College de France to read the Austrian
economist Hayek for his defense of the free market against the power of
the state.
Foucault has appeared vulnerable to historians for his leaps of
historical synthesis, his seemingly arbitrary and schematic conception
of historical change, and the selective nature of the detailed evidence
on which these are based. Perhaps these are the qualities for which he
is admired in literature departments. His periodizing encapsulations and
summary sweep are less attractive to historians and are frequently
challenged at the level of empirical detail, but they have established
themselves as powerful discursive counters, capable of setting the terms
of the debate. When Foucault was projecting a collection of documents on
the "lettre de cachet confinement system," he described a method in
which texts were chosen, from journals like the Annales d'hygiene
publique and other archival sources, on "purely subjective grounds,"
"for the pleasure, surprise or even fear" they produced on a first
impression: "these `short stories' that suddenly emerge from two and a
half centuries of silence struck more chords than what we call
literature." This "anthology of existences" didn't materialize; but, as
Macey says, this is how the chance discovery of the Pierre Riviere
documents, about a nineteenth-century matricide, produced Moi, Pierre
Riviere, a haunting monograph about the medical, legal, and social
aspects of nineteenth-century penology, written collaboratively by
Foucault and his students.
Foucault's own books also sometimes begin with a powerfully evocative
exemplum or anecdote: the Ship of Fools in Histoire de la folie (Madness
and Civilization) and the torture and execution of the regicidal Damiens
in Surveiller et punir (the English title, Discipline and Punish, drops
the big brotherish overtones of surveiller). The habit has influenced
the practice of the New Historicists, a mainly American group of
literary scholars, sometimes with impressive results and in any event
preferable to glib chatter about paradigm shifts. In some ways these
strong beginnings remind one of an observation by C. S. Lewis about the
force and vitality of the openings of Dryden's poems, in which a loss of
energy is often felt in what follows, especially (in both writers) in
the more discursive parts.
The simplifications of historical process and of critical judgment were
in any event propelled in his own writings by an intensely acute insight
into detail and an enormous if erratic appetite for archival discovery,
far removed from the inert and reductive adoption of his insights, or
his more schematic paradigms, by followers with none of his learning,
his feeling for literary texts and demographic documents, or his highly
focused impulse for effective and creative provocation.
Foucault's interest in sadomasochistic activities seems to have driven
his lover, the composer Jean Barraqwe, to end their relationship in
1956; but evidently it played a more important (or perhaps a more openly
admitted) part of his life and writings in the 1970s, when he discovered
the gay scene in California on his trips to Berkeley as a visiting
professor. It is noted in all three biographies and in Guibert's novel,
but Miller is the only one to give it extended attention. He has
researched the San Francisco bathhouses and the techniques and
technologies of S/M, and he offers straightfaced explications of such
things as tit torture (aka tit work) and an innovation called fist-
fucking, said to be unknown to Sade or Sacher-Masoch, which provides
nonorgasmic ecstasies. Foucault joked about the young man who announced
rapturously that "Erections are out!" Miller has been scoffed at, but
this Californian experience was liberating for Foucault in obvious and
acknowledged ways. Edward Said issued an obituary rebuke to Foucault for
"exploring, if not indulging [fine touch, that "if not"], his appetite
for travel, for different kinds of pleasure (symbolized by his frequent
sojourns in California), for less and less frequent political positions,
" to which Macey (though not in general as interested as Miller is on
this subject) retorts appositely that "trips to California were, for
many gay European men, as politically important as visits to Israel were
for European and American Jews," an argument not likely to cut much ice
with the particular sage to whom it is addressed. Foucault would
probably say that the Californian experience transformed the character
of his political thought, as it undoubtedly helped him to formulate his
thinking on the degenitalization of pleasure and changed the direction
of his work on the History of Sexuality. Some years earlier, in 1971, he
told Chomsky on Dutch television that he had always (?!) wanted his
books to be fragments of an autobiography.
Miller is indispensable to the extent that he provides the only full
account of Foucault's American experience. Eribon and even Macey fall
short of what is needed on that front, though both otherwise provide a
more readable narrative. Macey probably gives the best account of
Foucault's time in Sweden, Poland, Germany, and Tunisia--and is
outstandingly the best on his life in France. There are sensitive
accounts of his family and friendships (his publicly known friends
included Althusser at the Ecole Normale Superieure, Claude Mauriac, son
of the novelist, Simone Signoret and Yves Montand, and Robert Badinter,
Mitterand's minister of justice), and a very full treatment of his
progress through the French educational system from a provincial lycee
to a professorship at the College de France. His political activism (for
prisoners' rights, immigrants, Vietnamese boat people, and other social
and third-world issues) was developed independently of fashionable
sentiment and powerful cliques and was remarkably courageous: he
frequently took on thuggish policemen and once had his ribs broken by
one. As a prominent figure of the French left, he was witheringly
contemptuous of gauchiste posturing and sloganizing. There are vivid
accounts of his help in preparing pamphlets, offering the use of his
flat for political work, demonstrating with Mauriac, Signoret, Montand,
Costa-Gavras, sometimes in the company of his arch-enemies Sartre and
Simone de Beauvoir. Foucault thought Sartre an "intellectual terrorist"
and wanted to take over his leadership of the French intellectual
establishment. Sartre resisted fiercely, and the conflict was
fascinating and oddly moving: Macey gives a poignantly comic account of
their occasional meetings, including one in which Foucault finds himself
driving an aged and tottering Sartre home from a political gathering.
Foucault emerges from each of these lives as a vulnerable, principled,
and highly sympathetic man, very different from the implacable ideologue
he is sometimes taken to be. Macey's fine coverage of responses to his
death in both France and elsewhere testifies to an unusually intelligent
public respect and affection, the dismal Said being a discordant voice,
while the French press seems to have been especially impressive.
Michel Foucault has been lucky in his biographers. The translator of
Eribon has rather poor French. The other two seem better but are hardly
faultless. Macey has retranslated his quotations from Foucault,
evidently aware of the low quality of the published versions, another
reminder that the influence of French penseurs in anglophone countries
is effected through texts that don't represent what they really said,
with few people on either side having the slightest awareness of the
fact.
Didier Eribon, Michel Foucault, translated by Betsy Wing. Harvard
University Press, 1991, 1992. xiv + 374 pages. Illustrated. $30,
$14.9S pb; David Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault. Pantheon,
1994, xxiv + 600 pages. $30; James E. Miller, The Passion of
Michel Foucault. Simon & Schuster, 1993. 492 pages. $27.50.
~~~~~~~~
By CLAUDE RAWSON
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Source: Sewanee Review, Summer94, Vol. 102 Issue 3, p471, 6p.
Item Number: 9408222823
