During this same period, Foucault became a serious alcoholic, to the
point of needing to go through a detoxification treatment. (People recount that during his time in Sweden there were still moments when he would pass
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i n s u lt a n d t h e m a k i n g o f t h e g ay s e l f out, stone drunk.) In any case, Foucault su√ered deeply with psychological problems. He would never forget them; indeed he may never have entirely freed himself from them. They were in large measure tied to his inability to accept his homosexuality, although his feeling of being extremely ugly may also have contributed to them.∞≠ Yet that latter consideration too leads us back to his sexuality, to the modalities of gay sexuality (often made up of multiple encounters, of continual cruising, in which one’s physical features are of paramount importance). Clearly, Foucault’s way of inventing an appearance, a silhouette, his way of creating a personality, and perhaps the idea he would later develop—of taking action on oneself to make changes and to escape from normative violence—are all tied to the problems of his youth and the deep impression they made on him.∞∞
It was during this psychologically troubled period, when he was face-to-face with psychiatric medicine embodied in one of its most eminent practitioners, that Foucault chose to direct his education toward psychology and psychiatry. In 1949 he received a diploma from the Institut de psychologie de Paris. In 1952 he received a diploma in psychopathology for which he attended Delay’s presentations of patients in the large amphitheater of Sainte-Anne hospital. He had a passionate interest in Rorschach tests. He gave them to all his friends at the École normale, and they became the topic of a course he gave in the 1960s when he was in Clermont. He and his friend Jacqueline Verdeaux worked together as interns in Sainte-Anne’s electroen-cephalography laboratory, part of Professor Delay’s department.
It would be a mistake to reduce his interest in psychology to a simple reaction to his own psychological troubles. This interest also needs to be understood in the intellectual and political context of the time. There was a movement in which a certain number of young philosophers of the 1940s and 1950s turned in the direction of the human sciences (Didier Anzieu and Jean Laplanche moving into psychoanalysis, Pierre Bourdieu into ethnology and sociology, and so on). We should also note that in the years after the war France saw an extraordinary spread of psychoanalysis, which contributed to the renewal of intellectual life. The predominant influence of the Communist Party on leftist thinkers in the university (and especially at the École normale) also needs to be taken into account, along with the announced project of Marxist thinkers to develop a materialist psychology in opposition to psychoanalysis. They considered psychoanalysis suspect and denounced it as a ‘‘bourgeois’’ science. Foucault’s early writings, especially his first book, Mental Illness and Personality (1954), bear the marks of all of these debates.
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Consequently, we might say that Foucault’s interest in the scientific aspects of psychology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis is situated at the cross-roads where his personal troubles, his personal questioning, met the kinds of questioning that were agitating the intellectual life of the time.
In any case, psychology would be Foucault’s professional specialization for many years. He was hired to teach psychology in Lille in 1952, and he was hired as a psychology professor in Clermont-Ferrand in 1960.∞≤ All his early works from the 1950s are involved in this area of inquiry: he writes a long preface to Ludwig Binswanger’s Dream and Existence (which he and Jacqueline Verdeaux translate); he publishes Mental Illness and Personality (a good portion of which is devoted to Binswanger) and also two contributions to collections of essays, one on ‘‘Psychology from 1850 to 1950’’ and the other on ‘‘Scientific Research and Psychology.’’ In these two texts, he reproaches psychology for having forgotten ‘‘the negativity of man’’ and ‘‘the contradictions that man encounters in his practices.’’∞≥ Psychology will have no future, he writes, if it does not ‘‘take these contradictions seriously.’’∞∂ Given that psychology has forgotten its ‘‘infernal vocation,’’ he concludes, the only way it can save itself is ‘‘by a return to Hell.’’∞∑
One rediscovers this idea of an essential human ‘‘contradiction’’ at the heart of Madness and Civilization. There he refers to a ‘‘tragic structure,’’ and in another text from the same period to a ‘‘tragic split.’’ The very fact that psychology exists means for him that the presence of this tragic dimension has been forgotten.∞∏
Foucault’s friends, his fellow students at the École normale supérieure in the late 1940s and early 1950s, were aware of his psychological vulnerability and fragility. That fragility made him seem odd, enigmatic, and sometimes unbearable. His closeness to Louis Althusser, in fact, has as much to do with their shared su√erings as with their intellectual a≈nities. Althusser, in his posthumous autobiography, described the rapport that grew up between
them as they each struggled to maintain their mental equilibrium. Foucault, Althusser says, would be able to heal himself, to rediscover the sun, whereas Althusser would sink deeper into the night of unreason, slowly becoming a
‘‘missing person.’’∞π
The friendship between the two men was never broken o√, despite their divergent political evolutions. For example, Althusser would write about Foucault in a 1966 letter to his friend Franca Madonia: ‘‘We are a pair of
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i n s u lt a n d t h e m a k i n g o f t h e g ay s e l f taciturn brothers who communicate by way of our di√erent silences, including the silences of our a√lictions.’’ He goes on to add, ‘‘While I was in the hospital, he wrote me a letter that moved me to tears.’’∞∫
If Foucault was able to recover from his psychological problems, it is because he chose flight. In the first part of this book we saw that the impulse to find an ‘‘elsewhere’’ is, for gay people, linked to a kind of malaise, to an uncomfortableness in their very being. The impulse to flee is a way of escaping that feeling. Geographic distance, the search for di√erent locations, the e√ort to inscribe oneself in a new space, are all conditions for reconstructing oneself. Foucault had felt for a long time a desire to leave France, to go into exile. (He uses that word in many of his letters.) He therefore accepted an o√er that came from Georges Dumézil in 1954 to take up the functions of lecturer in French and director of the Maison de France in Upsala.∞Ω
The idea of ‘‘exile’’ returns over and over again in Foucault’s letters to Jean Barraqué. In a letter written a month after his arrival in Sweden, for example, Foucault describes all the di≈culties associated with his exile, but also the feeling of being able to recognize himself in this in-between sort of existence:
Frightful pleasures of which I had no inkling rise up in me: those of exile, of a foreign land, of incomprehensible languages, the pleasure of being unnecessary, in excess, something that it is easy to ignore; of being there, among them, a massive presence, but having no attachment to them, feeling their glances pass over the surface, like looking through a window at night; and finally, only being held down by the
weight of two suitcases. . . . All of this gives me the impression of recognition one sometimes has on rediscovering in the daylight some
impression had during the night, in a forgotten dream. In fact that is what my existence and its truth were. They finally rise to the surface of my life with a perfection of which I had despaired.≤≠
In another letter: ‘‘If you only knew the well-being of mornings in exile, when one is ready to set out into one’s day taking the steps of a foreigner up to the solitary peaks. You can see necessity being revealed, like a face on the wet surface of a wall.’’≤∞ In yet another: ‘‘I’m not blue; it’s a di√erent kind of feeling: a very sweet bitterness of which I have always dreamed: not to be there, to be one too many and also absent, running towards a definitiv
ely uncertain resting place, being for the people here only the useless transparency of a foreigner, and for the people there nothing more than an empty
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space slowly being filled in; it’s marvelous. One feels the cutting edge of life being honed, but for the sacrifice of which existence?’’≤≤ In a letter from August 1955, he tells Barraqué of lunching with the four Frenchmen at the university there, and remarks, ‘‘In all of them one finds a parcel of night in which they seal up the secret of their exile. No one asks any questions. No one speaks of Paris, from where we all come. We were immediately complicit in our reservedness, like a bunch of stunned fellows, disheveled, recovering themselves after having all managed to escape over the same wall.’’
Nonetheless, Foucault mentions in the same letter that one of the four men knows ‘‘everyone in the Arcadie group.’’≤≥ All these descriptions of exile were written in the early days or weeks of his stay in Sweden. The tone of his later letters, especially those to Georges Dumézil, will show him in better spirits.
Foucault only returned to France in 1960, when he took up a teaching post in Clermont-Ferrand, having spent three years in Sweden, a year in Warsaw, and another in Hamburg.
3
The Impulse to Escape
There was another way to fight the repressive violence of normalcy, to e√ect the necessary work on oneself to escape from it. One could interrogate—
through historical inquiry and theoretical reflection—the processes that led to certain divisions, to ‘‘social segregation,’’ to the ‘‘exclusion’’ of people with ‘‘anomalies,’’ ‘‘deviancies,’’ or ‘‘su√erings.’’∞ One could write the history of the dividing lines between the normal and the pathological, thereby calling into question those sciences (most notably psychiatry) that were only able to come into existence after those lines were instituted, those sciences that ratified the lines, making them seem natural. Madness and Civilization sets the pattern for this kind of exploration of the past, an exploration undertaken in order to understand and to refuse the present. It is a theoretical act grounded in a personal experience.
Everyone who was present as this enormous book was conceived and
then took shape seemed aware of the fact that an entire existence was at stake. Louis Althusser, for example, never separated Foucault’s own ‘‘madness’’ from the work that he undertook. In 1962, when Althusser began reading Madness and Civilization, he expressed great enthusiasm for a book he called ‘‘stupefying, astonishing, the work of a genius, a bit of a mess, but still a beacon with new insights and illuminations, with elements of night and flashes of dawn, a twilight book, like Nietzsche, yet as luminous as an equation.’’≤
Throughout Althusser’s correspondence with Madonia, one can sense
his fascination, even his obsession, with Foucault’s book. Clearly these ‘‘elements of night’’ and the accompanying flashes of light resonated with that deepest part of himself that was threatened with madness. Foucault, he says, brings ‘‘intimate matters’’ up to the surface of theoretical reflection, matters in which Althusser doubtless rediscovered his own experience.≥
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Certain of the reflections to which Althusser was inspired by Foucault’s book are deeply moving, for instance the page in which he recalls all the unlucky people he has known who have disappeared into silence:
I am thinking about that entire part of life that makes large numbers of men fall silent. I have frequented, known, or seen many of them. They can be seen when you are in an institution. . . . I had often thought of this, and Foucault’s book on madness brought it back to mind. There
are those who speak, who move about, use language, enjoy life. These
are the ones who are heard and seen, who are taken into account,
whose actions matter. . . . This is healthy humanity. But then there are those one never hears speak because they cannot speak. Yet they are
alive, or at least they are surviving. Their life is exactly that: waiting for death. Often these people knew that they were approaching the edge, that they were about to fall over it. They saw themselves fall. Now they are on the other side, where they cannot even kill themselves.∂
Althusser, in both his autobiography and his correspondence, continually invites us to read Madness and Civilization as part of a therapeutic cure by which someone who might have fallen over the edge, maybe even someone who saw himself falling over the edge, who managed to escape from this condition.
Foucault’s book is a reflexive work, a turning back on the self, at the same time as it is a turning toward the light. It is a ‘‘journey to the end of the night’’
at the end of which the author is able to rediscover the ‘‘sun.’’ It is an
‘‘archeology of silence,’’ performed in order to recuperate the possibility of
‘‘speech.’’∑ In the process the book also o√ers an analysis of those institutions that organize the social topography of daylight and of shadow, a gene-alogy of the knowledges that have been granted the power to regulate the relations of individuals to the norm, to acts of exclusion, and to a history of relegations.
We see then why Foucault’s books are often filled with a tension rarely found in works of history or philosophy: his books are not only about theoretical questions, but also about questions of life and death, of freedom and su√ering.
Gilles Deleuze says something similar (using words that sound like Gide speaking of Dostoevsky) when he speaks of the ‘‘vital stammering’’ of the writer, of the ‘‘delicacy of health’’ and the ‘‘frailty of constitution’’ of the
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i n s u lt a n d t h e m a k i n g o f t h e g ay s e l f thinker: ‘‘It is strange how great thinkers have a fragile personal life, an uncertain health, at the same time as they carry life to the state of absolute power or of ‘Great Health.’ ’’∏ The writer and the philosopher come face-to-face with the forces with which they intersect and of which they are made up.
Further, in order for thought to take place, a ‘‘crisis’’ is necessary. In another interview, Deleuze states while speaking about Foucault: ‘‘Once you start thinking, you’re bound to enter a line of thought where life and death, reason and madness, are at stake, and the line draws you on. You can think only on this witches’ line, assuming you’re not bound to lose, not bound to end up mad or dead. That’s something that always fascinated Foucault, the switch-ing, the constant juggling of what’s close and distant in death and madness.’’
A little later he adds, ‘‘The question of madness runs right through Foucault’s work. Though of course he criticized Madness and Civilization for still giving too much weight to an ‘experience of madness.’ Rather than phenomenology, he preferred epistemology, in which madness is taken up by varying kinds of ‘knowledge’ from one historical formation to another. Foucault always used history like this. He saw it as a way of avoiding madness.’’π
Foucault often insisted on the ways in which his work was anchored in his biography, and he never hid the important value for him of everything he had to say about the ‘‘modes of implication of the subject in discourses.’’∫ How could things have been otherwise? In a 1981 interview, he states clearly that
‘‘every time I have tried to do a piece of theoretical work it has been on the basis of elements of my own experience: always in connection with processes I saw unfolding around me. It was always because I thought I identified cracks, silent tremors, and dysfunctions in things I saw, institutions I was dealing with, or my relations with others, that I set out to do a piece of work—a kind of autobiographical fragment.’’Ω
A year later, he says almost the same thing: ‘‘Each of my works is part of my own biography. For one or another reason, I had the occasion to feel and live those things.’’ He gives the example of Madness and
Civilization and tells how he had worked in a psychiatric hospital (Sainte-Anne) in the 1950s. ‘‘I was free to move from the patients to the attendants, for I had no precise role. It was the time of the blooming of neurosurgery, the beginning of psychopharmacology, the reign of the traditional institution. At first I accepted things as necessary, but then after three months (I am slow-minded!), I asked, ‘What is the necessity of these things?’ After three years I left the job and went to Sweden in great personal discomfort and started to write a history of these practices.’’∞≠
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Foucault is here describing a professional relation to the institution. The personal discomfort he mentions is still situated in an exterior register. But in other interviews he brings out a more intimate link. In 1981, for instance, he comments, ‘‘It has already been important to me that each of my books be in some way an autobiographical fragment. My books and my personal
problems with madness, prisons, sexuality are one.’’∞∞
The objection could always be raised that not all of Foucault’s books fit this description. Neither The Order of Things nor The Archeology of Knowledge, for example, seem to fall into this category. It is true, in fact, that Foucault published two kinds of books: those concerned with the history of forms of knowledge and those concerned with the history of institutions. This division is, of course, not absolute, for the books that deal with institutions also investigate the systems of thought that are invested in the institutions. All of Foucault’s work can ultimately be thought of as a critique of the human sciences, where we understand the word ‘‘critique’’ in two di√erent ways.
The first is the Kantian meaning—an analysis of the historical conditions behind the emergence of certain discursive domains. (Think of the discussion in The Order of Things of general grammar or political economy.) The second involves the political sense of a calling into question of the scientific and normative pretensions of these discursive domains. (Psychiatry is dealt with in this way in Madness and Civilization, and psychoanalysis in The History of Sexuality. ) It nonetheless remains di≈cult to find a personal, biographical reference point for The Order of Things. The book is certainly historically situated, as is any philosophical work. The questions Foucault asks in it concern the transformations in the human sciences in the period after the war, when those sciences were abandoning the notion of ‘‘man’’ and becoming interested in ‘‘systems’’ instead (with Jakobson, Lacan, and Lévi-Strauss each representing one ‘‘counter-science’’).∞≤ Clearly it is ‘‘structuralism’’ that is being examined, or the evolutions that are being experienced in philosophical and scientific thought. But where are the ‘‘personal problems’’ that we saw referred to in the interviews just cited?
Insult and the Making of the Gay Self Page 36