Denunciation, deviation and repetition

Foucault's fascination with sex and death had seditious motives, but does Power deserve its
billing as part of his 'essential works'?

Power: The Essential Works Volume 3

Michel Foucault
Penguin 25, pp480

Foucault, garbled and parrotted by academic hacks, has become something of an evil
genius for our times. I thought of him the other day when someone in Oxford accused me
of being a 'liberal humanist', which in today's academic police state is the most
unforgivable of intellectual sins. My crime, to which I pleaded proudly guilty, was to
actually mean something. Didn't I realise the individual, so gloriously exemplified by
Shakespeare's characters, had been declared obsolete by Foucault, and that the liberal play
of possibility in interpretation was a mere mask for the imposition of repressive prejudice?
Knowledge, Foucault declared, can never know the world. No wonder academics are such
zealous disciples: his paradox absolves them from having to teach anything.

In 1973, he brought the bad news to the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro,
where he lectured on 'Truth and Juridical Forms'. God, he told the pontificating Catholics,
had been killed off by Nietzsche; it remained for us to de-deify nature by recognising its
instinctual chaos, its unknowable wilfulness. The world was a battle between insurgent
desire and the blind brutality of power. Nothing is right; truth and justice - the follies of the
liberal humanist, defended in the comic strip by a Superman who is definitely no
Nietzschean - are the alibis of might.

Our only means of self-defence lay, for Foucault, in the defiance of unreasoning taboos.
Intellectually or erotically, we should rejoice to find ourselves outlawed or classified as
criminals, because we have offended the norms of a society whose business is to discipline
and punish us. Among the occasional texts collected in this anthology is an essay on the
'Lives of Infamous Men', unearthed from the archives of the Bastille: a commentary on
careers of terror and scandal, libertinage and profligacy, which subvert the official
consecration of virtue and heroism. (This, I should add, is one of the few valuable pieces on
offer: these Essential Works, mostly consisting of repetitious lectures and ephemeral
journalism, are far from essential and sometimes, in several long interviews explicating
Foucault's shorter, more epigrammatic books, they're not works at all.)

Foucault's campaign of sedition began with an abstract, theoretical study of 'procedures of

classification in the order of empirical knowledge'. This led him to assail the institutions
which apparently uphold reason and profess to cure physical or moral ailments. He
denounced the madhouse, the medical clinic and the prison as agents of a false, censorious
piety. He admitted his motives were seditious: 'For me, madness, sexuality and crime are
more intense subjects.' Succumbing to this attraction, he saw himself as a colleague of the
deviant heroes of Genet's novels.

One of the best pieces here is a short, impassioned assault on Georges Pompidou's
guillotining of two prisoners in 1971. Their abrupt end demonstrates that the whole penal
system is impelled by 'the desire for death, the fascination with death'; and that lust -
symbolised by the rearing, phallic, blood-stained shape of the guillotine - was grounded, for
Foucault, in a fatal sexual curiosity. This complicity between sex and death revealed to him
'the fascism in us all', just as it provoked Genet's sexual rhapsodies about the Nazis. The
revelation was meant to be shocking: Foucault would not have enjoyed the spectacle of
academics convening fascist rallies to enforce the credo of political correctness. And, in the
years before his death from an Aids-related illness in 1984, he made a kind of self-
destructive atonement for what he had discovered about his unholy, illiberal, inhumane
nature.

Foucault's social science, properly understood, functioned as a coded autobiography. He

berated the justice system as a greedy 'consumer of confessions', but specialised in a
discreet, illicit confessional mode of his own. Thus in 1982 he extolled the Arab institution
of the public bath house, which survives as 'a cathedral of pleasure at the heart of the city'.
By then he was frequenting homosexual bath houses in the US cities where he lectured:
gymnasia of liberated instinct, free from the 'society of supervision'.

His reflections on the perversity that prompts us 'to love power, to desire the very thing that
dominates and exploits us' also read rather differently now we know about his adventures in
the S/M dens of San Francisco. There he bowed down before power, derived a fierce thrill
from its domination and exploitation of him, and stoically endured the medical
consequences of what he called his 'limit-experience'. 'In the depths of his dream,' he
believed, 'what man encounters is his own death.' It was a tragic perception, far from the
amoral gaeity of Zarathustra. Could Foucault have been a liberal humanist after all?