(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
François Caillat (ed.): Foucault Against Himself. Arsenal Pulp Press, 2015.
We know him – Michel Foucault – as the bald man with glasses who has written books on power, surveillance and biopolitics. Today he is an icon worldwide. But most of today's people have heard the laughter of the philosopher – and perhaps therefore not understood his thoughts. In the early main work The words and things Foucault writes at last: "... all those who still want to talk about man, about his dominion or about his liberation, all those who still ask questions about what man is in his being, ... ... you can only meet with a philosophical laugh, which in a sense means – that is, to a certain extent silent ».
Foucault was famous for his laughter, but there were actually several, as Caillat writes in his preface. There was the laughter haunted by something foreign, something unfamiliar (Freud uncanny) who threatens the one who laughs; then the laughter as a declaration of sympathy to see his interlocutor lost – and finally the gift-like laugh, gai savoir, especially when his countrymen tried to take his work seriously.
An unfit man. All his life, Foucault tried to free himself from categories, identities and roles. Foucault Against Himself tells the story of the invisible paths between the author Foucault and the human Foucault. Caillat has interviewed colleague Leo Bersani of Berkeley University, art historian Georges Didi-Huberman and philosopher Geoffroy de Lagasnerie of Paris, and historian Arlette Farge. Common to them is that they have met Foucault or worked with him at key times in his life. They have important things to say about Foucault's person who tells the story of "an unsuitable man, a man who could not reconcile with the academic institutional jersey" and, not least, the environment in France, a man who was away or dreaming all his life To be so, first to Sweden, Tunisia and Poland and then to California, a man for whom evasion as a maneuver both in his homeland and in the role of academic, intellectual and gay became crucial to not only his opportunity to live and function, but also for his way of thinking.
To think is to learn to see. For Didi-Huberman, Foucault is a writer who taught him that knowledge is a matter of learning to look anew. Foucault's idea of the archive is about organizing a material and figuring out when to cut. The opening sentence in The birth of the clinic, describing glances, gives us a new picture of the power of the physician: “This book is about space, about language, about death; it is about the act of sight, the gaze. " Next, Foucault dives directly into an 18th-century scene showing the treatment and gaze of the hysteric. The reader cannot put the book down. "Reading history has nothing to do with returning to what it once was […], but tracing the most pressing issues for the world today." "When you dive in, you disturb the present." You see the river moving towards its own stream. "The past (the origin) is the eddy current of the present as it moves." Huberman says Foucault creates "the atlas of thought […] knowledge is a way of orienting us." The idea of knowledge as editing "is becoming important today at a time when people think that knowledge is about knowing a lot of things, as if databases were YouTube videos." What is downplayed by many of today's academics is that «Foucault was political from his first book». "When you ask questions about the organization and the discourses and the institutions, you are political." In Foucault's archival study of the infamous, he digs out the nameless homeless from oblivion, those whom Walter Benjamin referred to as "the true subject of history." The important lesson from Foucault, according to Huberman, is that what he did for the discourses we must do today with and for the images.
Foucault and the political. Foucaults so-called genealogical method, describing relationships in new, unexpected ways that connect the past with the present, not only activates a new gaze and vision, but contains a political gesture. You make the invisible visible. Foucault abandoned the notion of the universal intellectual (Sartre) who can talk about anything, but admired the specific intellectual who must take a risk and get involved in concrete events that he throws himself into and analyzes. He refused to celebrate Mitterrand's victory with this one in 1981, as he did not want to see himself as a universal intellectual associated with state power. When Edward Said criticized him for being only involved in micropolitical areas, he replied that “all revolutionary actions must begin with the change that is taking place in the relationship between people. And it takes time ».
Foucault abandoned the notion of the universal intellectual (Sartre) who can talk about anything, but admired the specific intellectual who must take a risk and get involved in concrete events that he throws himself into and analyzes.
Foucault and ethics. Most people inspired by Foucault focus on his thoughts on power. But for the last ten years of his life, Foucault dealt with ethics. After writing his first volume on the history of sexuality, he experienced a long crisis of several years. The crisis was about him having to return to the man he had so far not liked to talk about. Not man as a rational self-dependent being, but man as a being who can expand and experiment with his experience by "inventing new relational modes that can pull us out of the lust of power." It was not ethics for rules and the practice of judgment that occupied him, but ethics as a care for the self that drew thoughts of friendship and intimacy. Through studies of ancient thinkers, he discovered a critical language about pleasure that was more well developed than what we have today. By extension, he formulated a general pleasure economy that focuses on sensibility, intimacy, pain and pleasure, and true masculinity linked to the body's sensory areas. He criticized the idea that it is a liberation when we decode all pleasures by speaking openly; «He should strive for de-sexualization» (Bersani). Although in San Francisco he lived as a homosexual, both in practice and in his philosophy he was preoccupied with moving away from desire and the genital towards pleasure and intimacy. It is intimacy that sets the whole register of pain and experience in motion and thus paves the way for ethical experience. Only through this care for the self does it become possible to be a role model for others, inspire and guide others in their lives.
Live on the edge, work in the center. Foucault's life was a life in several directions. "He lived a double life, […] marginal, far from the norms of society, at the same time close to the seat of power." Teaching at the Collège de France was associated with rituals and high prestige, but Foucault perceived the teaching profession as a “subversive” practice (Arlette). "His lectures were not populated by hat ladies, but the militants with a desire for political change." The joy of the teaching profession he found in the exchange with the students, but met it most on his many travels, not least at Berkeley in California. He fled the hierarchical system of France and was not interested in the role of professor, but instead "played with the status that the university gave him" and "the university was a departure hall to get away" (Bersani). Foucault was a discreet subversive nomad – a master of evasion.
