The Passion of Michel Foucault. - book reviews

National Review, Feb 15, 1993 by Jay Tolson

GORE Vidal might have said it best: the French do seem to have both feet firmly planted in the air. By the French, of course, Vidal meant French intellectuals, specifically the great celebrity penseurs of the postwar period, from existentialism's high priest, Jean- Paul Sartre, to the gnomic bricoleur Roland Barthes. They and their confederates have served not only as idols in their own country but as shapers of the assorted intellectual fads that have swept the modern world, often with unfortunate consequences. As well as fostering shabby, derivative scholarship and rampant fashion anxiety in the academy - how terrible to master structuralism only to find oneself deconstructed by one's more up-to-date peers - Francophone notions have been used to justify some of the worst political crimes of our century.

Yet it is unwise simply to dismiss or mock French intellectual life since 1945. Despite its excesses, the French critique of the modern world - of our varieties of bad faith, our idolatrous consumerism, and our Panglossian faith in progress and other Enlightenment values - has helped make it possible for men and women to live examined lives. The daring, contestatory spirit of French intellectual life has provided a valuable antidote to the timid empiricism and smugness of much Anglo-American thought. Then, too, a number of French intellectuals, from Simone Weil to Albert Camus, stand forth as exemplary moral figures, even as heroes.

James Miller, who has previously written books about the American New Left and French intellectual history, would add Michel Foucault to France's pantheon of heroic modem thinkers. It is a risky proposition, to which many may strongly object, but it makes his bracing "philosophical life" all the more engaging.

The problem with Foucault, simply put, was his profound perversity, a quality that characterized both his life and his work. In fact, it would be all too easy to explain away Foucault's work as the predictable consequence of a tortured psychological make-up: in this case, homosexuality and sadomasochism with a strong suicidal component. Miller, to his credit, never sucumbs to the temptation. Without judging or sensationalizing, he sets forth the dark side of Foucault's life, from incidents of self-mutilation in his university days to his pursuit of the S&M leather-bar life in San Francisco. Miller is in many ways more direct about Foucault's private torments than was the French journalist Didier Eribon in his recently published biography, Michel Foucault. Miller suggests that Foucault's indifference to self-preservation was never more dramatically apparent than in his refusal to practice "safe" sex even after he learned about AIDS, the disease from which he died, at age 54, in 1984. (The less pardonable sin, if the rumors that Miller reports are true, was Foucault's refusal to curtail his promiscuity after he knew that he had the virus.)

Yet Miller's achievement is precisely his ability to present the often gruesome facts of Foucault's life without making them seem the absolutely determinative force behind his ideas. Some reviewers have mistakenly seen a reductive urge behind Miller's assertion that all of Foucault's work grew out of "a profoundly problematic preoccupation with death." But this claim is, if anything, a commonplace. What great philosopher, from Socrates to Wittgenstein, has not been thus preoccupied? Miller believes that Foucault's fondness for S&M and assorted "limit-experiences" found analogues in his writing, but he resists drawing a simple causal relation.

At least as important to Foucault's work as his psychological disposition, Miller shows, were more purely intellectual and historical experiences and engagements. The first was Foucault's response to the cultural climate of postwar France, an atmosphere dominated, though in a highly repressed way, by guilt over Vichy collaboration with the Nazi regime. Miller could even have made more of this largely unconfronted shame - unconfronted, that is, until more recent years, with the rise of the nouveaux philosophes. Foucault's determination to overthrow Sartre as the father figure of the postwar intellectuals must have been partly related to his sense that Sartre fared far too comfortably during Vichy days, indeed to the point of being published by Vichy-controlled publishing houses. Sartre was not alone in his almost gymnastical feats of intellectual denial, but his Being and Nothingness can be seen as the supreme effort to explain away radical evil-the very evil that lay behind Nazism-or at least to translate it into a complex species of psychological bad faith. (That the central ideas of Sartre's tome were derived from a highly compromised German thinker, Martin Heidegger, makes the work even more suspect.) Stranger yet was Sartre's determination to defend Soviet Communism and demonize Western liberal democracy. Foucault was right to rebel against such an equivocating paterfamilias, though one feels that Foucault's objection to Sartre - that he was the last of the great coercive humanists - doesn't get it right, either.