The sounds of silence

...And the book is interesting: a considerable feat...

...Taking a pair of apples, he aligns them and says, "Here was the Russian artillery...

...At the end of the bout, Rocky makes a ridiculous, contradictory speech in which he condescends to praise dttente -- all the while standing over Drago's bloody body...

...We felt privileged in witnessing an immense intelligence struggle for a form of thought which could be radically critical and authentically freeing...

...As the author suggests, scholars specializing in the history of ideas, even those not much interested in religion, will profit from studying this skillful record, reflecting as it does the interplay of personality, character, vested interests, accidents of timing and physical circumstance, all mixed in with the influence of learning, logic, force of language, and intellectual gamesmanship...

...I was surprised, for how could it be otherwise...

...The same thing happened more publicly in the Second Vatican Council, but on a scale too grand for this kind of close examination...

...Foucault's own quest for freedom should be of assistance to Christian thinkers in at least two areas...

...In 1980 he asked me to arrange a private meeting with several of 17 January 1986:19them so that he could discuss his research on Christian experience...

...Stallone delivers an elegant symbolic inversion of the actual technological relationship between the superpowers at the same time as he chides each nation's fantasy about itself and its rival...

...In place of human beings capable of love, our knowledge has produced a menagerie of separate species with sexual names: homosexuals and heterosexuals, normal and perverse...

...Instead, Foucault showed that the last century has seen an explosion of studies on sex and of interest in unorthodox sexualities, a multiplication of experts concerned with the sexual realm, and the emergence of a specifically modern enterprise to master the truth of sexuality...

...2, A History of Sexuality, provides the occasion for a brief review of this remarkable thinker's achievement...

...Moreover, he compounds his clues by casting his new bride and recent Playboy Playmate, Brigette Nielsen, as the Nordic superwoman girlfriend of Drago...

...Although Greek and Roman experience fashioned a culture of the self, only Christianity, with its practices of confession and examination of conscience, constituted the self as a hermeneutical reality whose truth must be uncovered by a permanent process of selfinterpretation and diagnosis of the truths and illusions operating within the self...

...Language was the arena for the two great forces which his written works explored: power knowledge -- the privileged information and expertise which exert power in our lives -- and the powers which disguise themselves only as human science...

...When I studied with him in 1979 and 1980, he was dev.eloping a unique approach to the history of sexuality and arriving at crucial intuitions into how human beings are diminished and governed by modern modes of thought...

...How did we come to desire this modern prison cell of our self...

...to be more conscious of the limits of our modem sciences and of their ability to tell us who we are...

...What compensates for it is the fascination of observing minds changing, and of seeing new issues emerge out of the process...

...He succeeded in conveying to his listeners and readers a feeling of entrapment within cages of ideas that would not be easy to escape...

...The learned tones of the sexual discussion which babbles throughout our culture would amuse if its tragic results were not so evident...

...For Foucault, Plato transformed into an issue of truth the dilemma posed to an earlier Greek ethic of how to use pleasure by its most significant sexual-relationship, namely, the love between men and boys...

...and, perhaps most importantly, the relevance of history and culture to ethical reasoning...

...Foucault's Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975) examined how the human sciences helped to give rise to technologies for human improvement whose actual destructiveness was cloaked by benevolent claims...

...Should we be surprised, he asked, by our feelings of alienation...

...This volume is less signficant than his examination of Christian sexuality which has yet to be released in France but which will carry the title Confessions of the Flesh...

...The prisoner's regimented fate is the extreme product of the "carceral archipelago" which modernity has fashioned through the powers which expert schemes exercise in defining our image of human being...

...Inasmuch as there was an isomorphism between social relations and sexual relations in that culture, the boy, as a future citizen, destined to active self-governance, could not permit himself to be reduced to the level of a passive object of pleasure...

...Christian pastoral techniques were taken over by the modern period and form the roots of its own exploration of the self, most especially of the self's sexual being as a truth to be enunciated...

...The norreal dilemma found itself transformed in Plato's Symposium: the question of proper sexual conduct is replaced by the question of the being of love itself...

...He pressed on them a series of invitations: to look beyond apparently liberal values to the many social and political strategies with which they merge and within which they might play roles not originally anticipated for them...

...some redefined their own identities as Catholics, and as human beings acting in history...

...The originality of this enterprise is to have exploited sexuality as the self's secret which is in constant need of speech about it and expert knowledge for its direction...

...His work sabotages both our culture's official portrait of the human being and the authority of the human scientists who are its guardians...

...The consequence of this will to know is to have enshrined sexuality as the central feature of human identity, the seismograph of who we really are...

...Ever so I III I II II S OME years ago, during a brief visit to my home, a then-famous politician scanned the bookshelves'in our living room, pulled out a paperback, checked the index, and pronounced it a bad book: only a couple of page references appeared after his own name...

...The modem period discarded, however, the critical ascetical spirit in Christianity which continually undermined any temptation to assert a mastery of the self in an objective science...

...He urged an escape from the immaturity which canonizes specific historical solutions as eternal responses to the dilemma of human existence...

...Clearly Stallone is satirizing the macho absurdity of his hero: peace is good when the enemy is beaten...

...Along with the leaders of French political and cultural life, the international body of his former students mourned the premature end of their Foucault years...

...Americans, MICHEL FOUCAULT'S GUEST FOR FREEDOM I II by contrast, have permanently stable family lives...

...I enjoyed the good fortune of having had Foucault as a teacher...

...And, of course, the story lacks all suspense...

...This binding has often succeeded in hiding our human incomprehensibility from ourselves, in having the chatter of the trivially knowable deafen the questions born of pain and wonder...

...Robes't aJ...

...To what form of privileged knowledge is the self subjected in dealing with sexuality...

...Nowhere is this incarceration more subtle than in our modern understanding of sexuality and the programs of"liberaII I FATHER JAMES BERNAUER, S . J . , teaches philosophy at Boston College, tion" propagated by it, In the first volume of A History of Sexuality: An Introduction (1976), Foucault argued against the widespread claim that the modern age was a period of sexual repression which we post-Victorians are now overthrowing, indeed, must overthrow...

...Because his account is meticulously chronological, Kaiser has to rehash arguments everyone interested in the topic has heard many times before, about the biological, medical, demographic, sociological, psychological, spiritual, and ethical aspects of birth control...

...But then, reading the Introduction, I thought for a while I would not be able to recommend the book...

...His counsel is timely when so many wish to flee either from the Middle Ages into an embrace of the modern or from the present into an imaginary gold -' en age of primitive Christianity...

...That meeting remains my most vivid memory of him...

...There is much new detail about the commission's members and procedures, but most of it corresponds to and merely fleshes out what is already known...

...What is the precise form of asceticism proposed to the moral agent and what purposes is it meant to serve...

...Without such an intellectual asceticism, the modern exploration of the self fabricated a human figure who could be defined by the so-called human sciences and whose moral conduct ought to be governed by this knowledge...

...The USSR is no paunch-bellied, aging empire but a hi-tech superstate of Nazi clones...

...First, it outlines a program for how the complex history of Western sexuality should be studied...

...One thinks particularly of the Chicago couple Pat and Patty Crowley: Deeply but conventionally loyal Catholics, they found themselves growing out of their automatic deference to theologians, bishops, and cardinals, able to join the struggle and make themselves heard, to no small effect...

...A difference between my guest and me is that I waited for privacy before flipping through my copy of the book under review -- a reporter's retelling of the Catholic birth control debate over the past two decades -in search of references to myself...

...Commonweal: 18the dissymmetry of the partners is overcome by a mutual love of the truth...

...Stallone allows Rocky to beat Drago, but only to expose the American boxer's narcissism, confusion, and pretension...

...Not unexpectedly, it is Plato who looms largest here...

...The extraordinarily powerful modern alliance of knowledge, power, and sexuality is thus experienced not as a force to be wary of and to be resisted but as the natural terrain in which to grasp our intelligibilty...

...Michel Foucault was a thinker of prodigious passion and his words frequently flash with intense feelings and shrill formulations...

...In the rest of the book, fortunately, I IIIII II slowly, with many false starts, and yet with a certain inevitability (given their brains and their integrity), they redefined their mission...

...On their appointment most commission members thought they had been assigned a public relations task: not to question the ban on contraception but to repackage it...

...In this light, one begins to see why Stallone so often displays his near-naked body throughout the film...

...His purpose is to belie his plot...

...and that American innocence in such matters is mere pretense...

...the limits, if any, of the magisterium's capacity to discern and legislate morality on the basis of natural law...

...It even led him to the talk of theologians...

...One learns all too soon who will figure as the heroes of the story, fighting for democracy, pluralism, openness, and freedom in the church, and who are the villains desperately trying to hang on to their power by manipulating old anathemas...

...A translation of his study of the Roman transformation of Greek experience will be issued in the fall of 1986 as The Care of the Self...

...Thus, a generation ago most Catholics would have thought Kaiser's subtitle at war with his Commonweal: 20...

...There could be no better way to induce bias, which is why I make this disclosure...

...yet the welcome it would have received was transformed into grief when its author died, at the age of fifty-seven, a few days after its appearance in French in the summer of 1984...

...The book at hand was long delayed and eagerly anticipated...

...These silences were most frequently created not by repressive forces but by the incessant proliferation of languages which claimed they were saying all that was worth hearing, all that could be known...

...And the Introduction closes with a one-liner that comes too soon and says too little: "This is really a story of how the people of God grew up, and in a very few years...

...Isn't the satirical message clear...

...the issue of how the honor of the boy is to be preserved in sexual love is changed into the question of one's love for the truth...

...Foucault's greatest legacy as a teacher was to make his students aware of silences which most of us ignored but he heard, and which gave an urgency to his words and his life: groups not listened to, hopes not articulated, historical I I I JAMES BERNAUER T HE PUBLICATION of an English translation of Michel Foucault's The Use of Pleasure.Vol...

...He was a man for whom no historical epoch, no intellectual language, no human passion could ever become a forbidden territory for his own restless questioning...

...The struggle for human freedom, for the discovery of ourselves as responsible actors in the world, gets diverted into such personally misleading and politically innocuous campaigns as sexual liberation, whatever that means this season...

...Positioning two pears, he says, "Here was the British cavalry...

...the obstacles placed in the way of ethical reappraisal by the centralization of teaching authority...

...The mystery of humanity has been imprisoned within cells which provide the illusory comfort of a clear, but impoverished, self-understanding...

...I~IoTt Kaiser's analysis emerges mostly out of the events he records...

...The Order of Things (1966) explored the system of knowledge from which our current conceptions of finitude derive...

...The Use of Pleasure, the second volume in his history of sexuality, possesses a double importance for this question...

...There are some...

...why, we're jes' folks close to the land and don't know nuthin' about computers...

...And here," he concludes, taking a giant pineapple and putting it squarely in the middle, "Here was I." TOM O'BRIEN The sounds of silence II profound gratitude for the privilege of having had those years, the distressing silence which accompanied the release of this study seems more comprehensible...

...There is, then, some tedium to be endured...

...They include some flattering remarks about the work of the National Catholic Reporter at a time when I was its editor...

...The language of psychology conquered those voices and exiled realms of experience, which frequently were signals of transcendence, from our sense of reasonableness, and so from serious discussion...

...Unlike the contraception debate, other issues that came to the surface are still very much on the current agenda for many Catholics...

...Soviets, he winks, have hot, cosmeticized, superstar sex...

...Mais oui, Monsieur Candide...

...Although the differences in approach to sexuality among Greek, Roman, and Christian cultures are touched upon in this volume, Foucault's analysis of them is presented in the next two volumes of the series...

...Among them: papal infallibililty and the uses of papal authority (or, more broadly, the distribution of power in the church and the modes by which it is wielded...

...Foucault understood that our pursuit of these questions, formulated in the unique accents modernity has given them, has had the effect of binding us to a defined, 17 January 1986:17objective self...

...Modernity's counsel is to identify with this figure rather than with one's transcendence of any particular culture's image of the human...

...We are proud in claiming insight into our temporality, while failing to recognize that modern thought has dispersed time within histories that make us subservient to alien calendars: passing moments of some economic or biological process...

...the central concern about boys and their virtue is replaced by the need to cherish the master of love...

...It argued that the human sciences, e.g., economics and biology, were crucial in determining the fundamental categories through which we interpret ourselves...

...Meanwhile Rocky takes to a Siberian log cabin where he chops wood, does farm chores, and even grows an Abe Lincoln beard...

...Watching, I could not help but recall the ironic classic that Stallone echoes, a scene from the 1930s British film, The Four Feathers...

...I appreciate now II IIIII IIII II why his ease with those theologians was so memorable for me...

...Also, a passage the author quotes from the NCR editorial responding to Pope Paul VI's encyclical Humanae Vitae is the very one I would have chosen...

...to be less trusting that current concepts of freedom and dignity are self-evident and do not bring with them different enslavements...

...The rhetorical excess which sometimes accompanied that subversion often irritated and distracted critics from his purpose, which always remained liberation...

...so do his characterizations of the principal players and of what was at stake for them...

...Our contemporary experience is precisely that, ours, and as such it invites new forms of reflections and new paths for the practice of freedom...

...In Madness and Civilization (1961), he traced how the positive identity of modern reason was forged only by silencing those voices of madness which had called into question for earlier cultures the adequacy of their rationality...

...It is a world of omnipresent judges, norms, and treatments which we have allowed to tame our strangeness...

...Two examples of the latter: the influence on traditional views about women, sex, and marriage of the intellectual and social context in which they were formed...

...The search for who we are and what we ot~ght to become is taken hostage by our culture's "true" sciences...

...It has the tone of bland, Time-style advocacy journalism, which achieves its effects through the use of flavorful but low-fiber adjectives instead of chewier nouns and verbs...

...Foucault shifts the investigation from the level of moral codes and conduct to a series of interrogations aimed at discovering how the self is articulated as a moral being in relation to sexuality...

...Foucault evoked a strong personal loyalty from his students...

...What is the nature of the domain specifically grasped and mapped as sexual...

...Rocky, naturally, sticks with the reliable but dowdy Adrian (and son...

...Now, however, that the shock of sudden death has given way to a I memories not expressed, significant dimensions of human experience rendered speechless...

...Secondly, Foucault warned of the" blackmail of the Enlightenment," by which he meant the danger of identifying enlightenment with the forms of knowing and the types of institutions developed in a particular historical period rather than with a permanent attitude of criticism...

...The U.S...

...Robert Blair Kaiser was a Rome correspondent for Time in the early sixties...

...The scene also demonstrates the unquestionable status of Stallone (who not only stars in Rocky IV but wrote, directed, and produced it) as a genuine cinematic auteur...

...Nowhere were these relations of knowledge to power more influential than in the articulation of the question which our culture demands that we pose to ourselves about ourselves, interrogations regarding the form of our reason, the nature of our finitude, the disciplines for human development, the meaning of our sexuality...

...Dipping a finger in claret, he draws a line on the table and declares," Here was the thin red line" of English infantry...

...On those parts of the story of which I have independent knowledge, I found his reporting essentially accurate...

...Neither a formal religious believer nor a trained theologian, this former student of the Jesuits appeared totally at ease discussing Augustine and Cassian, sin and conII IIII Ill fession...

...The question which dominated Foucault's last years was how our culture ever developed such an experience of human life that we would seek in sex what is most meaningful and true about our selves...

...First, he outlines a historical approach to Christian sexuality, but not just in the sense of following the changes in the church's teaching of it...

...The second achievement of this volume is to show how the Greek experience of sexuality silently distorts our fundamental approach to the whole sexual domain...

...Perhaps it only presaged for him a deeper comfort to come, a final homecoming, a surrender of his self not to the silence of death but to the Word of Life...

...Though I haven't read all the other accounts, I suspect that this one contains more information about the inner workings of the papal birth control commission, the book's principal focus, than any other...

...Behind his attacks on systematic knowledge often regarded as beyond question was a deliberate strategy of subversion...

...He knows that filmgoers will realize that you can only get such a pumping-iron physique in the gym, not the woods...

...He once expressed his astonishment to me about the violent denunciations his works sometimes provoked...

...I I I I IIII I I I Books: FROM BEHIND CLOSED DOORS II I IIIIII [ I I I In Till POLITICS OF S ew ~ RELIGIOii A CASE HISTORY IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF DOCTRINE, 1962-1984 Robert Blair Kaiser Leaven Press, $10.95, 263 pp...

...That struggle led his mind beyond the paralyzing din of so much current knowledge to voices which were not heard...

...More significantly, his analysis will press the question of the different meanings which sexuality cardes in various historical periods and the different functions it fulfills in an age's understanding of how the subject develops as a moral being...

...There, C. Aubrey Smith, mutton chops and all, recreates the battle of Balaklava on an English dinner table...