But here is another question we might ask: did Foucault like The Order of Things? Did he like The Archeology of Knowledge? What place do these two books have in his body of work? He would say in 1978 that they were very ‘‘technical’’ works, even ‘‘formal exercises.’’ It seems, in fact, that he rapidly ceased to be interested in them, especially after May 1968 had reawakened in him the emotional cord that had vibrated in Madness and Civilization—one that, in addition, made him resonate with the political and cultural movements
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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 present in his society. So it is hardly surprising to find that he would go so far as to assert that neither The Order of Things nor The Archeology of Knowledge were
‘‘truly mine.’’ The problems he took up in them, he would say, are not the ones that interested him the most. This is why he was able to oppose these texts, ones he considered ‘‘marginal’’ within his whole work, to the texts that his real ‘‘passion . . . runs through,’’ texts that dealt with problems that
‘‘really fascinated’’ him.∞≥
One can, of course, take an alternate point of view and consider that all books have their necessary place within the economy of a body of research, within the trajectory of a given body of work. They have at least a small role to play. Even the works that Foucault rejects or thinks of as marginal to his output surely represent moments he had to pass through in order to organize his ways of thinking, in order to deepen this or that aspect of a committed body of work. (So one could say that The Archeology of Knowledge grows out of The Order of Things in the same way that The Order of Things grows out of Madness and Civilization and The Birth of the Clinic. ) They may have responded to problems posed by the theoretical or philosophical context in which Foucault found himself (the context, for example, of the new kinds of questioning opened up by structuralist sciences in the 1960s). In short, we are not required to agree with him in his choice as to which are his ‘‘real’’ books.
Gilles Deleuze put it very well when he said, ‘‘You have to take the work as a whole. . . . Otherwise you just won’t understand it at all.’’∞∂
Still, Foucault did himself sift through his works and separate out those that corresponded to his ‘‘real’’ centers of interest, those that, as he said, dealt with ‘‘limit experiences’’—‘‘madness, death, sexuality, crime are more intense subjects.’’∞∑ There can be no doubt that Foucault always felt a particular sentimental and intellectual attachment to Madness and Civilization, which he thought of as in some ways his book—a truly innovative book, the one into which he had poured the most of himself, and the one from which all his future research would grow.∞∏
When, in the mid-1970s, he took up again his work on the lettres de cachet from the Bastille, he wrote a preface for the collection of documents he was intending to publish.∞π It is a magnificent text, entitled ‘‘Lives of Infamous Men.’’ In it, he speaks of the emotion (‘‘one of these impressions that are called ‘physical’ ’’) that he felt upon reading these ‘‘ ‘bits of news,’ suddenly emerging from two and a half centuries of silence.’’ He says that they
‘‘stirred more fibers within me than what is ordinarily called ‘literature.’ ’’
Then he adds: ‘‘A long time ago I made use of documents like these for a
t h e i m p u l s e t o e s c a p e
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book. If I did so back then, it was doubtless because of the resonance I still experience today when I happen to encounter these lowly lives reduced to ashes in the few sentences that struck them down.’’∞∫
This is perhaps the text in which Foucault shows us most clearly, most decisively, the impulse, the theoretical passion, that animates the books that he considers to be truly his. His whole philosophy of history, his whole way of thinking about the individual, and his whole political will surely find themselves encapsulated in these several sentences. In them, he inscribes at the very heart of life, at the very heart of the person, the conflictual arena in which that person’s destiny, that person’s freedom, is at stake. He is speaking about the struggle that takes place as an individual faces the forces of power: ‘‘Is it not one of the fundamental traits of our society, after all, that destiny takes the form of a relation with power, of a struggle with or against it? Indeed, the most intense point of a life, the point where its energy is concentrated, is where it comes up against power, struggles with it, attempts to use its forces and to evade its traps’’ (161–62).
If Foucault ‘‘put his life into his thought,’’ as Gilles Deleuze so aptly said, he never did so as truly, as manifestly, and with such intensity as in the book written between ‘‘night’’ and ‘‘daylight.’’ In 1960, when he had just finished writing it, he called it Madness and Unreason ( Folie et déraison). We now know it as Madness and Civilization ( Histoire de la folie).∞Ω
I do not mean to say that Foucault simply recounts his life in this book, or in any other. There is no ‘‘autobiographical confession’’ to be found here.
Foucault always insisted that even if a theoretical work is born out of personal experience, still, the result cannot be a ‘‘transposition into knowledge’’
of that experience. ‘‘One’s relation to experience must, in the book, allow for a transformation that is not simply my own as a writing subject. That transformation must truly have a value for others as well.’’≤≠
All of this suggests that theoretical work has its point of departure in the personal malaise one experiences vis-à-vis this or that ‘‘institution.’’ The malaise is then transformed into a historical problem. Foucault says as much quite clearly in a lecture given to the Société française de philosophie in 1978, in which he defines critical thought as a gesture of ‘‘voluntary inservitude’’ or
‘‘reflective indocility.’’≤∞ These remarks follow upon an analysis of the development and multiplication of ‘‘arts of governing’’ in the sixteenth century (the art of pedagogy, the art of politics, of economics, and so on), and ‘‘of all
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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 the institutions of government, in the broad sense that the word government had at this time’’ (384). He insists on the fact that this process was always accompanied by another that rose up simultaneously in order to oppose it.
Its opposition was not some directly contrary a≈rmation, a simple face-to-face declaration that ‘‘we do not want to be governed.’’ Rather it was a kind of perpetual restlessness, an unending calling into question: ‘‘How not to be governed like that, by that, in the name of these principles, in view of such objectives and by the means of such methods, not like that, not for that, not by them?’’ (384).
The ‘‘art of not being governed’’ or, as Foucault puts it, the ‘‘art of not being governed like that,’’ thus finds itself in opposition to the ‘‘arts of governing.’’ This is what Foucault calls a ‘‘critical attitude’’:
And if governmentalization is really this movement concerned with
subjugating [ assujetir] individuals in the very reality of a social practice by mechanisms of power that appeal to a truth, I will say that critique is the movement through which the subject gives itself the right to question truth concerning its power e√ects and to question power about its discourses of truth. Critique will be the art of voluntary inservitude, of reflective indocility. The essential function of critique would be that of desubjectification [ désassujettissement] in the game of what one could call, in a word, the politics of truth.≤≤
This explains why Foucault insists on the fact that critique is not to be found primarily in the content of this or that doctrine. It is not a theory. Critique, for Foucault, is above all an ‘‘attitude,’’ or, as he will put it a few years later, an ethos. ≤≥
Foucault’s entire theoretical project was surely inspired by this critical will, by this ‘‘intransig
ence’’ that was so firmly rooted in his life and in his body.≤∂
This same inspiration must also be what allows so many readers to find themselves, in Gilles Deleuze’s words, reading ‘‘intensely’’ and entering into
‘‘resonance’’ with Foucault’s books.≤∑ Just as reading Nietzsche often had an overwhelming e√ect upon his readers, among whom Gide and Foucault hold a prominent place, so coming into contact with Foucault’s thought has often been felt as a deeply personal and self-transformative experience.≤∏
The tension present throughout Foucault’s work is thus fundamentally
tied to the will, or better, to the necessity to free oneself. It is tied to the
t h e i m p u l s e t o e s c a p e
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‘‘impulse to escape [ force de fuir]’’ that Foucault describes in his 1973 article on the painter Rebeyrolle.≤π Traveling through history is the means by which one comes to understand the systems of thought that regulate institutions, by which one undoes the sense of self-evident normalcy that inhabits them, by which one breaks the bars that are installed in people’s minds by disciplinary technologies.
At the beginning of the text on Rebeyrolle (who paints prisons and the animals that escape from them), Foucault writes: ‘‘Prison—as Jackson has testified—is today a political space. That is to say, it is a space in which impulses [ forces] are born and reveal themselves, a place in which history takes shape and out of which time can arise’’ ( Dits, 2:401). In this context perhaps prison should be understood as a metaphor that designates the entire set of principles of subjugation/subjectification. We know, in fact, that two years later, in Discipline and Punish, Foucault would demonstrate how the
‘‘prison’’ as an institution appears within the historical context of a huge transformation in the modalities by which power is exercised, in the passage from the public display of sovereignty to the inscription of discipline onto individual bodies, in the passage from the commotion around displays of torture to the subjugated soul—a soul that is both the e√ect and instrument of this process of incorporation.≤∫
We are, then, certainly justified in imagining that it is, in general terms, this interior prison of the soul as it is produced by disciplinary technologies that is being described as the place in which ‘‘impulses’’ toward escape come to manifest themselves. The animals painted by Rebeyrolle are examples of this. Their movements to escape create history, and cause time to happen. A politics is born from these passages, these displacements, these divergences.
Somewhat later Foucault will speak of the ‘‘impatience for liberty’’ as a way of naming the feeling, the transformational energy thanks to which someone undertakes to break out of the web of subjugating constraints and impediments. Slow work in the archives, meticulous work on documents, the genealogical work that seeks out those historic ‘‘events’’ that have constructed us and from which we must disengage ourselves—these are only the means, the method by which we give shape and reality to that ‘‘impatience,’’
by which we transform it from a simple feeling of refusal or rejection into a productive and creative act.≤Ω
4
Homosexuality and Unreason
Would it be possible to read Foucault’s Madness and Civilization as a history of homosexuality that dared not speak its name? Might we imagine that this book took the place of a work on homosexuality at a moment when it was impossible to choose that subject for a dissertation in the French university system? Is ‘‘madness’’ a metaphor or a ‘‘code’’ meant to express an underground meaning, one hidden by the text of the book yet containing its secret and authentic truth?
Such questions are hard to avoid and perhaps even harder to respond to.
For to respond to them would be to interpret Foucault’s texts in terms of a problematics of ‘‘truth,’’ whereas those texts set out to thwart any such project. It would be to read Foucault’s texts in a confessional mode, a practice they intended to challenge. It would be to read them in terms of a
‘‘psychological interpretation,’’ something Foucault detested.∞
It would be, above all, to limit the scope of our interpretation. For when, in Madness and Civilization, Foucault seeks to reconstruct the kinds of experience that shaped the appearance of madness in this or that historical moment, or when, in La Volonté de savoir, he sets out his ‘‘analytics of power,’’ he is making an e√ort to allow his specific analyses to have as wide a field of applications as possible, to allow them to be useful in the widest range of disciplines. At the very least they should be able to serve as a heuristic grid for other investigations. To tie them down to a single meaning, even a hidden one, would be to impoverish their theoretical power, perhaps even to negate their project.
We also know that Foucault was quite literally obsessed by the theoretical and historical question of madness and of ‘‘mental illness.’’ Whatever links there might have been for Foucault between his fascination for madness and his painful experience of homosexuality, it simply is the case that he did set
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out to study the ways in which the social exclusion of the ‘‘insane’’ came into being, the ways in which the ‘‘mentally incompetent’’ were reduced to ‘‘silence.’’ It was in the ‘‘lightning flashes’’ of Artaud, Nerval, Nietzsche, or Hölderlin, in the ‘‘transfigurations’’ of Goya, in all those works that gave voice to the ‘‘cries’’ of madness, that Foucault sought, throughout his work in the 1950s, to ground the possibility of ‘‘total contestation’’ and of a counterattack against psychiatric discourse.≤ He celebrated the idea of the
‘‘mad philosopher,’’≥ just as he never ceased, throughout the 1960s, to wonder about the links between madness and literature.∂ And when he speaks of the ‘‘fundamental experience’’ of humanity that must be recovered from the oblivion ushered in by the reign of psychology, he invites us to return to the fundamental dialogue between Reason and Madness (notably by way of
literary and artistic experiences).∑
Yet it is necessary to insist that when he speaks of ‘‘madness,’’ Foucault speaks simultaneously of other exclusions, notably those related to sexuality.
Further, his analysis of ‘‘madness’’ is presented as the first part—a central, but not a unique part—of a group of analyses yet to be written. In the preface to the 1961 edition of Madness and Civilization, Foucault announces that ‘‘it will also be necessary to tell the stories of other divisions,’’ in particular, to ‘‘write the history—and not only in the terms of ethnology—of sexual interdictions: to speak of the constantly shifting, continually obstinate forms of repression within our own culture’’ ( Dits, 1:161; my emphasis). He thus clearly indicates the necessity of writing a history of sexuality as an obligatory sequel to Madness and Civilization ( Histoire de la folie), a continuation without which the earlier work could not be considered complete. The study of madness and the analysis of sexuality form, in Foucault’s vision, two fragments of the same inquiry.∏
For the project of Madness and Civilization, as it is given in the 1961 preface (which Foucault removed from the 1972 republication) was to inaugurate the vast future work of a ‘‘history of limits,’’ of gestures that establish borders, ‘‘gestures that are obscure and necessarily forgotten once performed, whereby a culture refuses something that will come to function as its Outside.’’π
Doubtless it would be foolish, and not particularly useful, to try to determine which was the primary, founding interest of Foucault’s research: sexuality or madness, madness or sexuality. In fact, it seems that Foucault’s
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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 intellectual interests always revolved around the same objects—that basically, from the very outset, a set of theoretical problems had presented themselves to him, and he would return to them in al
l of his future work: madness, sexuality, the penal system, and therefore psychiatry, psychoanalysis, psychology, criminology, and so on.
The question of sexuality had already begun to surface in the introduction Foucault wrote to Ludwig Binswanger’s Le Rêve et l’existence ( Dream and Existence), published in 1954, at a time when Foucault was interested in lived experiences of madness viewed through the framework of ‘‘existential analysis,’’ as it had been elaborated by Biswanger, a Swiss-German psychiatrist.∫
And during both semesters of the academic year 1956–57, while he was
teaching at Uppsala University (that is to say, when he began working on Madness and Civilization), he gave a course called ‘‘The Conception of Love in French Literature from the Marquis de Sade to Jean Genet.’’Ω For a long time Foucault was fascinated by Sade’s work and greatly admired Genet’s writings.∞≠
There is another example of Foucault’s longstanding interest in the
themes that he would turn to in his later books. In 1961, just after the publication of Madness and Civilization, the question came up of the republication of his 1954 book, Mental Illness and Personality. Foucault expressed some reluctance to Jean Lacroix, the series editor, about republishing what was, in his view, an outdated work. He suggested instead a new study that would have to do with ‘‘crime,’’ ‘‘penal justice,’’ and ‘‘criminology.’’∞∞ In the end, he agreed to the republication of the book, but he replaced the second part—too grounded in his Marxism of the early 1950s—with a summary of the theses developed in Madness and Civilization. The book would also henceforth be titled Mental Illness and Psychology. ∞≤
Insult and the Making of the Gay Self Page 37