Review: Saint Paul-Michel Foucault Author(s): V. Y. Mudimbe

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Review: Saint Paul-Michel FoucaultAuthor(s): V. Y. MudimbeSource: Transition, No. 57 (1992), pp. 122-127Published by: Indiana University Press on behalf of the W.E.B. Du Bois InstituteStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2935160 .Accessed: 02/09/2011 02:15

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TRANSITION @( Under Review

S A I N T PAUL-MICHEL

FOUCAULT

V. Y. Mudimbe

Saint: a person of great benevolence.

Death, said Epictetus, akes he laborer s he

labors, the sailor as he navigates: "and you,what do you want to be your occupation hen

you are taken?" And Seneca imagined hemoment ofdeath as the one n which one mightsomehow become hejudge of oneself and mea-sure the moral progress hat one had accom-

plished up to one's last day.-M. Foucault, quoted n D. Eribon

Discussed in

this essay

Michel Foucault,Didier Eribon, trans.

Betsy Wing, Cam-

bridge, Mass.: Har-vard UniversityPress

OnJune 2, 1984, Michel Foucault was in

the hospital with what he thought to be

flu. He was moved to the Salpetriere onJune 9, the very context of his celebratedMadness and Civilization. On June 25, hedied. Offically, according to Le Monde

(June 27, 1984) he passed away at 1:15P.M. of neurological complications fol-

lowing acute septicemia. In fact, it wasAIDS that led to his death. At the end ofhis book on Foucault, Didier Eribon asksa crucial

questionthat

highlightsthe

complexity of the French philosopher'smasks:

[In early June, 1984] did he know . . . that

he was at death's door? That he had AIDS?

No, say most of his friends. He never knewthe nature of this suffocating llness. Even inthe hospital he was making enthusiastic lans

for a trip to Andalusia. . . . Did he reallybelieve it? Or did he want to reassure his

friends? There s no evidence hat the latter sthe case. During the winter before his death,he telephoned Dumezil [his mentor] and toldhim: "I think I have AIDS. ". . . This does

not say he was sure, but in this confidence,quietly murmured o his oldfriend who wasthen eighty-six, one of the people who hadbeen closest o him for thirty years, must wenot hear the voice of truth acknowledging

itself?

Didier Eribon's book more than ful-fills the promise of its title, meticulouslyunmasking Foucault the man and the

philosopher.Foucault's full name is Paul-Michel

Foucault. In fact, it should have been

simply, in the familial tradition, Paul

Foucault,the name bestowed on the first

son in the family: the name of the grand-father, the name of the father. Foucault'smother submitted to the tradition but

hyphenated the Paul with Michel. WhyMichel? A reference to the archangel?

122 TRANSITION ISSUE 57



Michel Foucault

0 Martine Franck

The family was Catholic. Paul-Michelwould become an acolyte and choirboy.The tradition would also require him toattend Catholic schools.

Later Paul-Michel suppressed the first

part of his hyphenated Christian nameand became Michel Foucault. Why? Ac-

cording to his mother, he disliked thefact that the initials of his name wereidentical to those of Pierre Mendes-France. Beautiful! But it is the father'sand grandfather's first name that he

dropped, and not his mother's nominal

imposition. So he became Michel, liber-ated from the nom du pere. Is it really a

rupture and, if so, what are its implica-tions? Paul Foucault, Michel's father,was a medical doctor, a surgeon and pro-fessor at the medical school in Poitiers,himself the son of another surgeon inFontainebleau. Years later, in Uppsala,after visiting a laboratory, MichelFoucault wondered why he chose to be-come a philosopher and not a scientist: hehad reacted against a tradition.

Although his family was somewhat

anticlerical, Foucault was educated byecclesiastics in Poitiers. He lived underthe shadow ofJesuits at the Lycee HenriIV and the Freres des Ecoles Chr6tiennes

(at the College Saint Stanislas) and evenhad Benedictine professors such as Fa-ther de Montsabert and Pierrot from

Liguge Abbey. Then came his initiationat the Ecole Normale on Rue d'Ulm.Eribon says: "He was a solitary, unso-ciable boy, whose relationships withothers were very complex and oftenconflict-ridden. He was never at easewith himself and was somewhat un-

healthy." He studied psychology underDaniel Lagache and Julian Ajuriaquerra;seventeenth-century philosophy withHenri Gouhier; Parmenides under JeanWahl; phenomenology with Jean Beau-

fret, Jean-Toussaint Desanti, and Mau-rice Merleau-Ponty; and he discoveredMarxism thanks to Louis Althusser. In1950 he joined the Communist party. Inthe same year, he flunked the agr6gation.Achieving high results in the examina-tioh the following year, Foucault found

SAINT PAUL-MICHEL FOUCAULT 123

d I



a niche for one year at the Fondation

Thiers. He behaved badly there and, by

the beginning of the academic year 1952,he was an assistant professor at the Uni-

versity of Lille.Interested in psychology since the be-

ginning of his studies at the Ecole Nor-

male, Foucault was coached by Jacque-line Verdeaux, a friend of his family andan anesthetist to Foucault's father. Fromthe early 1950s, he was in contact with

two Swiss psychiatrists, Roland Kuhnand Ludwig Binswager, who were veryfamiliar with Freud, Jung, Jaspers, and

Heidegger. This led to the translation inFrench of Binswager's Traum und Exi-stenz (1954, Desclee de Brouwer).Foucault, thanks to Althusser, then

taught at the Ecole Normale, where hisaudience included, among others, Jean-

Claude Passeron and Jacques Derrida. InAugust 1955, Foucault moved to take upan appointment as a French instructor in

Uppsala at the Maison de France, 22 St.

Johannegatan. He taught ten hours aweek and enjoyed the company of a

group of close friends: Jean-FrancoisMiquel, a biologist; Jacques Papet-Lepine, a physicist; Constanza Pasquali,an Italianist; and Peter

Fyson,a

professorof English. Was he happy? He dislikedthe climate, says Eribon: "'I am the

twentieth-century Descartes' he told his

freeze-mates, 'I'm going to die here.

Luckily, there's no Queen Christina to

top it all off.' " The reference is to thefact that the queen, who in the seven-teenth century invited Descartes to Swe-

den, also demanded to have philosoph-ical conversations at five o'clock in the

morning. The unfortunate Descartes

caught a cold and passed away at the ageof fifty-four.

In 1958, Foucault decided to leaveSweden and to move to Warsaw. His

teaching load had been increased totwelve hours and he needed time to workon his doctoral dissertation. Again aFrench instructor, this time he alsoserved unofficially as a cultural attache atthe French embassy. The Warsaw phasewas short-lived and Foucault had to leave

hurriedly within twenty-hours, says Eri-bon: "The story is rather muddled, but

apparently quite a commonplace in East-ern Europe. He met a boy, with whomhe began to spend some happy hours inthis gloomy, stifling country. But the

young man was working for the police,who were trying to infiltrate the Western

diplomatic services." In 1955, Foucaultwas sent by the Quai d'Orsay to Ham-

burg as a director of the French Cultural

Institute and as a professor associatedwith the Department of Romance Lan-

guages at the university. It is there that he

completed his monumental dissertationHistoire de lafolie a l'age classique nd be-

gan work on his secondary thesis, an an-notated translation of Kant's Anthropol-

ogy. In 1960, the two works werefinished. He consulted Jean Hyppolite,his thesis advisor, and decided to moveback to France to become charged'enseignement at the University ofClermont-Ferrand.

Foucault defended his two theses on

May 20, 1961. The jury was presidedover by Henri Gouhier and included

Georges Canguilhem and Daniel La-

gache: three "monuments" of the French

University. He received his doctoratewith a "very honorable mention." From1960 to 1966, although living in Paris,Foucault taught at Clermont, schedulingall of his teaching on one day. The Order




of Things was published in 1966 and

immediately became a best-seller: "Fou-

cault, comme despetits pains,"

an-

nounced Le Nouvel Observateur, a left-

oriented Parisian weekly; says Eribon:

"Success was Foucault's. Everyone whomet him during the spring of 1966 de-

scribed a happy man, visibly delightedwith his success and his nascent celebrity.But when the euphoria had evaporatedhe seemed to think it was the worst book

he had written." Clearly, this indicates

-the complex of a hyperscrupulousthinker who had responded in the same

way to his preceding books. The Order of

Things, three years after its publication,was to be subsumed conceptually by the

Archaeology of Knowledge.At the beginning of the academic year

1966-67, Foucault ended up at the Uni-

versity of Tunis teaching philosophy. He

had wanted to leave France and had been

seriously considering Congo-Kinshasa(later renamed Zaire) as a possible alter-

native. I was then an assistant professorat Lovanium University. A friend of

mine, the French philosopher JacquesGarelli who was then professor of French

literature at the Institut Pedagogique Na-

tional, gave me Foucault's resume. Lo-

vanium University was then consideringopening its first department of philoso-phy. I gave Foucault's resume to my Bel-

gian dean and lobbied to have him hired.In vain, however, since he was not suf-

ficiently qualified to satisfy the Belgianacademic authorities. Eribon notes it

well by exposing the issue as a questionof nationality and philosophical chapelles:

"Jean Sirenelli, in charge of foreignFrench instruction, ... [a former friend]whom Foucault had known . . . at the

Rue d'Ulm when both were giving

classes there in the early 1950s . .. couldnot see what audience Foucault could

find atCongo-Kinshasa,

whose univer-

sity was still in the clutches of professorsfrom Louvain, and he strongly advised

Foucault--who seemed to want to gothere-not to." Thus, in 1966-67, Fou-cault found himself teaching in Tunisia.As always, his courses were very popu-lar: he managed to have Jean Hyppoliteinvited, (and somehow) Paul Ricoeurcame to lecture at his university.Foucault was rude, says Eribon, and"had no trouble telling his students whathe thought: 'I am going to summarizewhat Ricoeur said' he told them. Aftereach point, he asked them whether or notit was a faithful summary. And when

they acquiesced, he told them: 'Well,now we're going to tear it apart.' "

At the end of 1968, Foucault was back

in France. He was considered "undesir-able" in Tunisia, Eribon says, because ofhis position regarding the 1967 "pro-Palestinian demonstrations (which) de-

generated into anti-Semitic riots." Buthe was able to join the department of

psychology at the University of Paris-Nanterre. I was personally excited by theidea since I was serving as charge' e cours

in the laboratory of ethnology and com-parative sociology at the same univer-

sity. But Foucault withdrew: he did not

want to compete with Pierre Kaufman,a Lacanian psychoanalyst and a highly re-

spected member of the French Resistancein the 1940s. Instead, he accepted a po-sition as a tenured professor at the newlycreated Centre Experimental at Vin-

cennes. Eribon defines Foucault's stayat Vincennes as an "interlude." If it wasan "interlude," then so were each of his

preceding steps. As chairman of the




philosophy department, he had to toler-ate almost every day what Michel Serres

could not stand after just one year of ex-perience: "the same atmosphere of intel-lectual terrorism as the one imposed bythe Stalinists." As Eribon explains, thelist of courses in the philosophy depart-ment was a problem-a political one:

Foucault was "director" f thephilosophy de-

partment, even though the idea of directing

was almost meaningless n such a context. Inany case, a course program was posted. Itsentries hed light on the prevailing ntellectualclimate and the worldview of the "Vincen-nois." Here are some of the course itles or1968-69: "revisionism-leftism" y JacquesRanciere; "sciences f social formations andMarxist philosophy" by Etienne Balibar;"cultural revolutions" by Judith Miller;

"ideological truggle" by Alain Badiou. Ofcourse, there were some who persisted withmore traditional academic ubjects: MichelSerres discussed positivist theories of scienceand the relationship etween Greek rational-

ity and mathematics; Francois Chatelet

taught "Greek political thought. Foucault

analyzed "the discourse of sexuality" and"the end of metaphysics." In 1969-70courses were

similarlymixed n tone and con-

tent: "theory of the second tage of Marxism-Leninism: Stalinism" by Jacques Ranciere;"third stage of Marxism-Leninism: Mao-ism" by Judith Miller; "introduction o

twentieth-century Marxism: Lenin, Trot-

sky, and the Bolshevik movement" by Henri

Weber; "Marxist dialectics" by Alain Ba-diou. Franfois Chatelet stoically continuedwith "critique f Greek speculative hought"and "epistemological roblems n the histor-ical sciences"; Foucault offered "the episte-

mology of the sciences f life" and Nietzsche.The latter would provide the material for

"Nietzsche, la genealogie, l'histoire" inthe 1971 volume paying tribute to Jean

Hyppolite. The first year there were so manyin Foucault's lass-more than ix hundred-that he tried to limit enrollment. "No morethan twenty-five," he told Assia Melamed,who was secretary f the section, and chose arather mall room. Even so, about a hundredshowed up for his classes.

Foucault invited to Vincennes Gilles

Deleuze, Jean-Francois Lyotard, andRene Scherer. For him, as Eribon puts it,"it was a chance to arrange things in a

way that would forever alter the Frenchintellectual landscape." He succeeded. In

1970, competing against powerful andwell-established "institutions "-YvonBelaval and Paul Ricoeur-MichelFoucault became professor at the College

de France. He taught there until the endof his life in 1984, publishing during histenure challenging books that emergedfrom his teaching: in 1971, L'Ordre duDiscours (his inaugural lecture); in 1975,Surveiller et Punir (translated as Disciplineand Punish); and the three volumes on the

history of sexuality: in 1976, La Volontedu Savoir (The History of Sexuality, Vol-ume I: An

Introduction),n

1984, L'Usagedes plaisirs (The Use of Pleasure), and, fi-

nally, the same year, Le Souci de Soi (TheCare of the Self).

Eribon does much more than simplyto trace Foucault's life. He travels withFoucault and unmasks his multiple and

contradictory visages. Images that weremasks are transformed into an exactingbiography. For example, the matureFoucault claimed to come from a familywhich was "somewhat anticlerical," yethe attended Catholic schools, went tomass on Sundays, and even served as




choirboy. Foucault's image today is gen-erally one of an anti-institutional mili-

tant. But this contradicts the whole of hiscareer: all his positions abroad were

made possible by powerful friends, and

his election to the College of France was

the result of politicking on the part of

people who did not share the ideological

opinions of Foucault the philosopher and

the activist. At the time of his death, bu-reaucratic Parisian projects were under-

wayto send him abroad

(to Japanor the

United States) as a cultural attache. He

would have preferred the United States,Eribon says, since it "represented (forhim) not only the pleasure of work but

also, quite simply, pleasure."

Who was Foucault? That is, in es-

sence, the problem tackled masterfully

by Didier Eribon. Beyond the play ofcontradictory images, one meets a phi-losopher, a "saint," simultaneouslymodest and ambitious, who was critical

enough not to become a Jesuit and sin-cere enough not to play systematically bythe game of the French bourgeoisie thatwas his own milieu.

Eribon's biography of Foucault is cer-

tainlythe best available

today.Its Amer-

ican version is elegant, the translation is

very good, and it contains no major er-rors that I noticed.


Documents

Review: Saint Paul-Michel Foucault Author(s): V. Y. Mudimbe