François Caillat (ed.) - Foucault Against Himself

Foucault Against Himself

FOUCAULT AGAINST HIMSELF

Translation 2015 by David Homel

Foreword 2015 by Paul Rabinow

First published in French as Foucault contre lui-mme under the direction of Franois Caillat Presses Universitaires de France, 2014

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This book has been supported by the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs as part of the translation grant program. Cet ouvrage est soutenu au titre des programmes daide la publication du Ministre des Affaires trangres.

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the Government of Canada (through the Canada Book Fund) and the Government of British Columbia (through the Book Publishing Tax Credit) for its publishing activities.

Cover and frontispiece photos: Michel Foucault at Home. Paris, 1978 by Martine Franck

(Cover: Magnum Photos PAR81742; frontispiece: Magnum Photos PAR1741)

Editing of translation by Brian Lam and Robert Ballantyne

Design by Gerilee McBride

Printed and bound in Canada

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication:

Foucault contre lui-mme. English

Foucault against himself / Franois Caillat; foreword by Paul

Rabinow; featuring Leo Bersani, Georges Didi-Huberman, Arlette

Farge, Geoffroy de Lagasnerie; translated by David Homel.

Translation of: Foucault contre lui-mme.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Issued in print and electronic formats.

ISBN 978-1-55152-603-4 (epub)

1. Foucault, Michel, 1926-1984. I. Bersani, Leo, interviewer II. Farge, Arlette, interviewer III. Homel, David, translator IV. Rabinow, Paul, writer of foreword V. Didi-Huberman, Georges, interviewer VI. Caillat, Franois, editor, interviewer VII. Lagasnerie, Geoffroy de, interviewer VIII. Title.

CONTENTS

Foucault Contra: No Laughing Matter?

During one of the interviews that Burt Dreyfus and I did with Michel Foucaultwhere were asking him to be more precise, to align his terms better, to clarify his argumenthe laughed (not his much-remarked-upon, haunted laugh from the underworld) with a certain joyous, unexpected grin and said, I love America because when they claim to be asking me about the Enlightenment, they are actually asking me about the Enlightenment, something that would never happen in France. In Paris, it would be all traps and allusions and political references. How could one respond to that remark except with a timid smile? Was this statement in line with the common condescension of elite French visitors toward the happy natives of California, or a grin of release?

One of the recurring themes in Foucaults discussions was how uncomfortable he felt, and had always felt, in France. He left his home country on many occasions (for Sweden, Germany, Poland, Brazil, Japan and, of course, often the US). This movement might be called flight from the strictures of bourgeois and petty bourgeois France. It might also be called deterritorialization from the normative, the settled, the already known, the given. Naturally, Foucaults trips registered a deep, and inescapable, ambivalence.

During 1980-81, I was an American in Paris. My flight and my deterritorialization were from the US and its academic fishbowls, to borrow a quip from Jean Genet, another peripatetic sort. If not thoroughly enamored with Paris, I liked being there. When I asked Foucault something about France, he would say, I dont know as I never go out; you know France better than I. Of course, this confused and disoriented me. Although it was clearly sarcastic on one level, it expressed a kind of pathos, a mood and affect that Foucault would neither give into entirely nor abandon.

On the night of Francois Mitterands election as the president of France in May of 1981, I arrived at Foucaults apartment at 7:50. The official election results were announced on state-run television at 8:00. Foucault already knew the results and was in one of the darkest moods I had ever encountered; he seemed close to despair. Later that night, a group of us went to the Bastille, where a joyous celebration for the victory of the socialists was taking place in the pouring rain. Suddenly a lightning flash illuminated the crowd, and just like that, Regis Debraythe dashing revolutionary and author made famous by his association with Che Guevara, who returned to France after his Latin adventures to pursue a career as a man of letters and leftist politicsappeared, and then shook Foucaults hand just as the skies lit up once again. Somehow with that flash of celestial enlightenment, our evening was over.

But Foucaults premonition that much more was growing dark proved all too prescient. His nasty and demeaning relations with the newly elected socialist government in France are well known. At the time, he was committed to the success of the Solidarity movement in Poland; the French socialist in power publically repudiated him and others. The minister of culture, Jack Lang, called Foucault a clown. For a time, Foucault teamed up with Pierre Bourdieu to attempt a critical and committed responsebut in vain.

From then on, Foucaults personal life in Paris drained him. He was living alone, traveling or dreaming about travel, and ultimately simply searching for a way forward. The novels of Herv Guibert give us a tone of the scene without being journalistic reportage. It was decidedly bittersweet.

When he died in 1984, Michel Foucault left no will. In France, this meant that his estate passed to his mother and then to his family. Those who had accompanied him over the years were left nothing. Foucaults act has occasioned much discussion, although not in print; it caused deep hurt, although not in public. Foucaults motivation remains opaque. It is a scandal that has been covered over in almost Balzac-like terms. Like family scandals everywhere, but with a distinctive French cast, it has been buried but not necessarily put to rest.

With the familys approval (which took some time), the vast project of editing his published works as well as his lectures at the Collge de France was given shape. One must be eternally grateful for the care, scrupulous attention, vast labor and political acumen required to complete this project, even if the thirty years it took were not entirely exempt from a strategy to keep his name and fame alive as well as to establish who the legitimate inheritors were after all.

The recent, rather extravagant provincialism of Foucault commentary in France certainly qualifies as an example of Foucault (the author) contra Foucault (the man). We foreigners might well be accused of sour grapes over this not entirely accidental exclusion, but such an assignation would be false; after all, some voices, well established in their own right, and posing no interpretive risks to the Parisian orthodoxy, are solicited and welcomed by those who for the moment ordain what counts. It is comforting to recall Foucaults own discomfort and contempt for Parisian cliquishness and its inward-looking stance of superiority. The days when that stance was intimidating are long gone.