Will you still need me when I'm 64?
Christopher Bray
THE LIVES OF MICHEL FOUCAULT by David Macey Hutchinson, f20, pp. 599 THE PASSION OF MICHEL FOUCAULT by James Miller HarperCollins, £18, pp. 493 Three biographies of Michel Foucault in less than a year! Does a man whose life consisted of little but home, school, univer- sity, more university, a few much men- tioned though not very widely read books on the philosophy of history, the hurling of a few bricks at a few cops back in the Six- ties, the cruising of a few gay bars and an early death from AIDS merit the kind of treatment normally reserved for the glam- orous? And no one could have thought Foucault — with that boil of a head, that cicatricular mouth — glamorous. It is doubtful that any of his many lovers referred to him as Michel, ma belle.
Foucault was in his early forties when he came to fame in the aftermath of May '68. Despite the grand political claims of his books, this was his first real experience of radicalism, although he had joined the Stal- inist Parti Communiste Francais 20 years previously at the behest of his friend Louis Althusser. Like Althusser (like most revo- lutionary intellectuals, in fact), Foucault had little time for the people he purported to champion. Lenin used to say that nobody should be allowed to listen to Beethoven's ninth more than once a year lest the experience sap their insurrec- tionary fervour. Foucault thought that since cosmetics took women's minds off their troubles they should be barred from buying them. Yet to his credit, he didn't sign up with the communists for long. Early in 1953 the Russians imprisoned nine doc- tors — supposedly for trying to murder Zhdanov, in reality because they were Jews. Foucault, unlike many another young hot-headed idealist, was disgusted.
On top of this, the PCF was decidedly homophobic. And Foucault was decidedly homosexual. But did he have a fling with Roland Barthes? Who knows? According to David Macey's dull but detailed-as-a- butterfly-wing biography, Barthes was an occasional lover. According to James Miller's not quite so painstaking but decid- edly better written book (it has the further merit of not being afraid of criticising Fou- cault), Barthes was someone Foucault hardly knew. 'What's the beef?', Foucault would have said. The core of his thought was that truth was an impossibility. He thought us all too self-interested to get a close look at reality. And going back to the history books gets you no closer to the facts, since historians are interested beings too.
This would be bad news if it were cor- rect. Fortunately it is not correct — good historians are the proof. Good historians, like good biographers, use imagination to get at the truth. The imagination must be forever reined in by a critical intelligence, but the truth about truth is that it is avail- able only through imaginative leaps. Impar- tiality is hard work, but it is attainable. Historians who harp on about relativism are invariably partial historians. Objectivity only looks like an impossible objective to the impossibly subjective.
Foucault got his relativist outlook from Nietzsche. James Miller's thesis is that Foucault followed Nietzsche in more than just his theorising: Miller thinks that Nietzsche would have approved of Foucault's life. Like Nietzsche's Superman, Foucault was no slave to convention. He was an unconventional slave. Half vapourised by amyl nitrate, he would drift through the gay bars of San Francisco to beat and be beaten. He was cruising for a bruising. Both Miller and Macey spend sev- eral pages on these episodes, although neither can bring himself to the logical conclusion: that when Foucault finally joined in the revolution he did so less out of ideological conviction than out of a desire for violence. During a battle over what were seen as low student grants, Foucault, Macey reports, had 'a whale of a time ... flinging assorted missiles' at the police.
Despite Foucault's Nietzschean existen- tialism, a strain of determinism can be seen in his work. Like Derrida, Foucault thought language one of the limits of expe- rience: 'Reality does not exist', he once said, 'language is all there is.' But Foucault was more interested than Derrida in social matters. Derrida argued for the arbitrary relation between a word and the object it labels. Foucault argued for the arbitrary nature of social facts like crime or mad- ness. He thought them mere political con- structions. Hence madness
exists only within a society, it does not exist outside the forms of sensibility which isolate it and the forms of repulsion which exclude it or capture it.
As with lunacy, so with crime. Crime gave Foucault hope for mankind: it meant that society did not repress our primitive energies. If these childish inversions seem surreal then this is apt since Foucault loved de Sade, Dali and Roussel. Artaud's remark that 'if there had been no doctors there would never have been any sick peo- ple' was one of Foucault's favourites, and the thesis of most of his books can be boiled down to a similar piece of effron- tery. Discipline and Punish, his history of penal systems, sets out from the belief that society has become less liberal since aban- doning capital punishment. Everywhere we go, Foucault argued, we are trapped in an enormous prison.
Even academe. Judith Miller, Jacques Lacan's daughter, and one of Foucault's colleagues in the Gauche Proletarienne, vowed to destroy the university because it was a part of the state apparatus, a fragMent of capitalist soci- ety, and what appears to be a haven of liber- alism is not one at all.
In the hope of ridding France of academic elitism, she handed out university credits to anyone she met on the bus. This may be pondered in our classless society, where any building with a blackboard in it is eligi- ble for university status, anyone who can count up to three eligible to go there, and anything deemed worthy of study. Peace studies, black studies, women's studies, television studies — if you want to account for the crazier university options available today then you need look no further than Foucault's interest in so-called unwritten histories.
And now his own history has been writ' ten. What does one learn from these books? Chiefly that Foucault's relativistic outlook can be applied to Foucault himself. He used to say that the 19th century was to Marxism what water is to a fish. Increasing- ly his own work makes sense only when seen as a product of the Sixties. Not that Foucault would have denied this. He never suggested that he wasn't an interested being too. But one should ask of a body of philosophical work that it has a longer shelf life than a couple of decades. Nine years after his death his achievements, such as they are, are so much historical jetsam, their final worth little more than swee Foucault.
Previous page
