The Passion of Michel Foucault, by James Miller
Wolin, Richard
THE PASSION OF MICHEL FOUCAULT, by James Miller. Simon and Schuster, 1992. 491 pp. $27.50. I would like and I hope I'll die of an overdose of pleasure of any kind. . . . I think that the kind...
...now we talk to one another...
...It concerns To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life, a moving autobiographical testimonial by the writer Herve Guibert, in which Foucault is prominently featured as a character a clef named "Muzil...
...There are many ironies here, for throughout much of his life it was the philosopher's habit to efface his own traces as a thinker...
...In an infamous dialogue with Maoist leader Pierre Victor (who, in a later incarnation, became Sartre acolyte Benny Levy), Foucault tried to outflank the Maoists on the left...
...For Miller, far from hazarding a general argument concerning "homosexuality and death," claims that such a connection becomes meaningful only in Foucault's particular case...
...Thus, Miller's accounts of Foucault's systematic pursuit of sensual excess, of "limit-experiences," are essential to his story — so crucial were these activities to Foucault's own self-understanding as a "postmodern subject" (their omission, moreover, is the chief shortcoming of Didier Eribon's otherwise informative biography, Michel Foucault...
...And Miller's claims are convincingly documented: from an early suicide attempt to countless essays and interviews, a preoccupation with death seems to have played a prominent role in Foucault's development...
...On the basis of such hints, Miller has done a superlative job of reconstructing Foucault's theoretical/ personal quest for "experience...
...At issue here is something much larger than how to understand Foucault's life and work—it involves a clash of worldviews...
...Foucault waxed lyrical about the robust, uninhibited gay subculture he discovered in San Francisco that same year: "Such a way of life is extraordinary to me, unbelievable," he said to a friend...
...The "veracity" of Guibert's fictionalized account of Foucault has been certified by virtually all of Foucault's intimates...
...In his thought, the very concept of identity was associated purely and simply with "normalization" —that is, with the reign of disciplinary power...
...Or, as he had remarked to a French interviewer two years earlier, "Each time I have attempted to do theoretical work it has been on the basis of elements from my experience...
...This is cheap and easy and obvious," claims Rabinow...
...This is especially true since, as Miller himself demonstrates, awareness about the disease among Bay Area gays was widespread by March 1983...
...For close to two decades, in the wake of the New Left's demise, left-wing scholarly energies that were once preoccupied with the problems of capitalism, imperialism, class, race, human rights, and emancipation have been sublimated along poststructuralist lines...
...Yet, it is plausible to believe that Foucault chose death willingly, out of lust for "an overdose of pleasure...
...Foucault's California-inspired embrace of nonnormative sexual practice consummated a personal/ theoretical search for an "erotics of truth" based on "non-identity...
...This transformation of one's self by one's own knowledge is, I think, something rather close to aesthetic experience...
...Miller's clarifications raise more questions than they answer...
...there is no right, even for the act of knowing, to truth or foundation for truth"), we risk losing the capacity to distinguish right from wrong, the just from the unjust, good from evil...
...And as the sad history of our century amply demonstrates, when radical political agendas ignore questions of justice by turning themselves into their own standard of right, intolerance—if not mass murder—is rarely far behind...
...The full truth about Foucault's final months may never be known...
...Finally, and in the same connection, one might cite his surprising 1982 avowal, "Each of my works is a fragment of my biography...
...There are no such places in France...
...As a result of these experiences, Foucault's understanding of his major theoretical project of the late 1970s, his multivolume The History of Sexuality, underwent a transformation: after years of research, Foucault diverted his gaze from the normalizing techniques by which society turns us into creatures with well-defined sexual identities (such concerns still occupied center stage in volume one) and instead pursued the possibilities involved in "desexualization...
...The desideratum expressed by Foucault in The Order of Things, "that man [read: the "subject" of traditional humanistic inquiry] be erased like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea," may be treated as the watchword for an entire generation of post-Sartrian French intellectuals...
...After all, as he confided to literary critic D. A. Miller several months behore his death: "To die for the love of boys: what could be more beautiful...
...Along with theorists such as Claude Levi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, and Jacques Derrida, Foucault was in the forefront of those structuralist and poststructuralist critics who, during the 1960s and 1970s, proclaimed the death of antiquated humanistic concepts such as "man," "the subject," "the author," and so on...
...The result has been a fascination for SPRING • 1993 • 259 Books Foucauldian neologisms such as "discursive regime," "carceralism," "technologies of the self," the "will to know," "power/knowledge," "governmentality," and so forth...
...His death was a postmodern crucifixion suffered at the hands of a merciless contemporary plague...
...However, such myopia must be balanced against his heroic work on behalf of French prisoners, as well as his courageous stand in favor of the independent Polish trade union Solidarity, at a time when the recently elected French Socialist government was busy appeasing Jaruzelski's Orwellian "Government of National Salvation...
...Berkeley anthropologist and Foucault intimate Paul Rabinow views Miller's study as little more than an exercise in pseudoscholarly, X-rated sensationalism...
...Miller, a former book and music critic for Newsweek and the author of an outstanding history of Students for a Democratic Society in its predogmatic phase ("Democracy is in the Streets": From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago), has applied his scholarly and journalistic talent to a subject of daunting scope: the relationship between life and work in the "philosophical life" of Michel Foucault...
...To be sure, Foucault's steadfast "anti-normativism" resulted in his embarrassing partisanship for not a few specious political causes—to wit, his not infrequent alliances with French Maoists in the early 1970s...
...Yet, "The Passion of Michel Foucault" —Foucault's "passionate" quest for intense, self-transformative modes of experience—led, sadly, to martyrdom...
...I think that it is politically important that sexuality is able to function as it functions in the bathhouses," observes Foucault in a 1978 interview entitled Le Gai Savoir...
...By investigating this dimension of Foucault's life with such sincerity and candor, Miller has advanced our understanding not only of Foucault the man but also of Foucault the thinker...
...Poststructuralists, following Nietzsche, do not believe in something like "the truth...
...You meet men there who are to you as you are to them: nothing but a body with which combinations and productions of pleasure are possible...
...He proceeded to invoke the bloody September massacres of 1792, in which the people dispensed with all legal subtleties by taking justice directly into their own hands, as his preferred model of "justice" —thereby scandalizing even the unregenerate gauchiste Victor...
...that is, in terms of his pursuit of limit-experiences or an ethos of "aesthetic transgression," whose model had been provided by Dionysian-inspired poets of scandal, or litterateurs maudits, such as the Marquis de Sade, Nietzsche, Antonin Artaud, and Georges Maine...
...Miller has unearthed biographical data about the philosopher that are likely to be misused by his detractors...
...He's trying to write a sexy book that will make a lot of money...
...For some time before Miller's book was published, rumors circulated concerning its damning and prurient revelations...
...For the most part, those aspects concern the philosopher's avowed fascination with the S/M leather/bathhouse scene in the Folsom Street area of San Francisco's Castro district...
...Between fits of coughing, however, he was eager to report on his latest escapades in the baths of San Francisco...
...In his vivid descriptions of Bay Area bathhouse life before the "plague," Miller proves a compassionate commentator...
...Though there are those close to Foucault who contend that, until the end, his doctors never came clean about his disease, it is impossible to believe that someone as sexually aware as Foucault could have completely mistaken his symptoms...
...Guibert, a close friend to whom Foucault made an elaborate deathbed confession, himself died of AIDS in 1990...
...Foucault was gay and died tragically of AIDS in June 1984...
...I have only one significant reservation concerning Miller's study...
...In 1983 Foucault informed a Canadian interviewer: "I am not interested in the academic status of what I am doing because my problem is my own selftransformation...
...Butler seems to overreact...
...The feminist scholar Judith Butler has characterized one of Miller's central theses—that Foucault's lifelong fascination with death constituted a type of "death wish" —as "insidious and enraging...
...Even the most puritanical and closedminded of readers may find themselves persuaded by Miller's sympathetic, tactful account...
...I think that the kind of pleasure I would consider as the real pleasure would be so deep, so intense, so overwhelming that I couldn't survive it...
...Foucault was also a relatively uncritical supporter of revolutionary Iran well after the draconian nature of the Ayatollah Khomeini's regime had been exposed...
...The reasons he gives for dismissing the allegations that Foucault, knowing he was infected with the virus, continued to have unprotected sex, seem to be at variance with the preponderance of documentation to the contrary that Miller himself has amassed in the main body of his study...
...There is nothing lurid or voyeuristic about Miller's presentation...
...Should Miller have refrained from telling the truth when such restraint would have greatly diminished our understanding of Foucault—not just Foucault the man but equally Foucault the philosopher...
...how it involved acting out sexual fantasies that always stopped short of cruelty...
...There is an important piece of evidence that Miller cites early on, but which he strangely lets drop in the postscript...
...Miller, conversely, relies on traditional conceptions of historical fact and evidence...
...a] pleasure so deep, so intense, so overwhelming that I couldn't survive it...
...Yet, when truth becomes solely a matter of pragmatics or interest, as it was for Foucault (in a 1971 essay on Nietzsche, he observes that "all truth rests on injustice...
...It has to do with the postscript, where the author discusses his reasons for dropping his original line of inquiry concerning Foucault, AIDS, and safe sex...
...Hence, Butler views the stakes involved as pertaining to a conflict of interests alone—the politically progressive interests of Foucauldians versus the Pat Buchanans of the world and their unwitting allies such as James Miller...
...You cease to be imprisoned in your own face, in your own past, in your own identity...
...Don't be silly," he replied, "it's just the opposite: the baths have never been 262 • DISSENT Books so popular, and now they're fantastic...
...We all know exactly why we're there...
...He shows how sadomasochistic practice was consensual...
...S/M, he would later remark, is "the real creation of new possibilities of pleasure...
...Whereas Victor and company, in the spirit of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, argued for the creation of "people's tribunals" that would summarily try and dispatch bourgeois malefactors, Foucault contended that even 260 • DISSENT Books such courts were too formal, that is, "bourgeois," for his tastes...
...Part of my purpose is old-fashioned: telling the truth is what writers of history are supposed to do...
...his embrace of "anarchy within the body, where its hierarchies, its localizations and designations, its organicity, if you will, is in the process of disintegrating," fed his own philosophical anarchism: a deep mistrust of logic and reason, of inherited ethical norms, of modern legality, and of methods of scientific classification...
...Although the book has gained many prominent supporters—among then, the gay writer and activist Edmund White and French historian Lynn Hunt—a chorus of powerful naysayers condemned the book in advance...
...As Miller explains in a succinct account of the cultural-historical circumstances that gave birth to Foucault's wild success among the academic left: "Students weaned on the Talking Heads and David Lynch flocked to his public appearances, cherishing the bald savant as a kind of postmodernist sphinx, a metaphysical Eraserhead whose demeanor was weird, whose utterances were cryptic—and whose philosophy .. . could nevertheless be summed in a simple mantra, consisting of two words: 'power' and 'knowledge.' " With the demise of New Left politics, all that seemed to remain was cultural radicalism, and it was Michel Foucault more than anyone else who seemed to occupy the furthest reaches of this experience...
...People "are inventing new possibilities of pleasure with strange parts of their body—through the eroticization of the body...
...Twenty pages into his book Guibert recounts the following anecdote: In the autumn of 1983, Muzil returned from his [Berkeley] seminar with a dry cough that was tearing his lungs out and slowly wearing him down...
...The poststructuralist standpoint invites an ominous practice: where "truth" —however one chooses to define it—fails to coincide with the agenda of political radicalism, it should be suppressed...
...The idea that bodily pleasure should always come from sexual pleasure, and the idea that sexual pleasure is the root of all our possible pleasure—I think that's something quite wrong...
...This danger lurking everywhere has created new complicities, new tenderness, new solidarities...
...Miller's biography of Foucault is a book that has been much heralded and, by some, much feared...
...These men live for casual sex and drugs...
...Incredible...
...As Miller explains Foucault's position at the time: he believed that "instead of instituting a process of 'normalization,' and rendering judgment according to laws, it would be better simply to relay fresh information to the masses . . . and then let the popular 'need for retaliation' run its course...
...In many ways these techniques of bodily experimentation constituted the fulfillment of a Nietzschean quest for "self-overcoming": a process of aesthetic self-transfiguration that alone allowed one to transcend the narrow constraints by virtue of which we moderns are constituted as "subjects...
...Instead, there exist only "points of view" that are backed by determinate interests...
...The spurious linkage between homosexuality and death, she continues, "dovetails nicely with the culturally reactionary position of people like Patrick Buchanan...
...His real achievement is to show us how for Foucault life and thought were inseparable in ways that few of us before would have been imagined...
...As he avows in the book's preface, "Above all, I have tried to tell the truth...
...From his first trip to California in 1975, where Foucault experienced an LSD-induced epiphany concerning the familial origins of his homosexuality (the riveting account of this incident is one of the high points of Miller's narrative), his life—and the relationship between his life and his work—had definitively changed...
...In interviews during the years preceding his death, he confessed that his intellectual oeuvre could only be understood autobiographically...
...Much of the animosity has been the result of an investigative premise that Miller subsequently abandoned: the suggestion that Foucault, knowing he was dying SPRING • 1993 • 261 Books with AIDS in the fall of 1983, continued to have unprotected sex...
...It was then that the Bay Area Reporter, San Francisco's gay newspaper, featured a prominent editorial concerning the suspected link between AIDS and unprotected sex...
...That day I remarked to him, "Those places must be completely deserted now because of AIDS...
...This accounts for the laconic allusion at the end of The History of Sexuality to "a different economy of bodies and pleasures" that would be freed from the constraints of the predominant "normalizing" sexual practices...
...Before, no one ever said a word...
...Yet, toward the end of his life, Foucault seems to have radically rethought the relation between "author" and "work" along surprisingly traditional lines...
...I think it's a kind of creation, a creative enterprise, which has as one of its main features what I call the desexualization of pleasure...
...Michel Foucault, "The Minimalist Self " (1983) James Miller has provided us with a luminously intelligent biography of Michel Foucault...
...On the contrary, one can only admire his unflinching, nonjudgmental, and, in many instances, outright sympathetic treatment of the potentially sensational aspects of Foucault's personal life...
...His celebration of "a multiplication of burgeoning bodies," "of a kind of autonomy of its smallest parts, of the smallest possibilities of a part of the body...
...His nocturnal encounters on Folsom and Castro Streets showed him a new realm of erotic possibility beyond the constraints of "modern," socially sanctioned sexual identity...
...Given the status Foucault has enjoyed in American academic circles, there are many with vested scholarly interests who are made nervous at the thought that the master's luster might be tarnished...
Vol. 40 • April 1993 • No. 2
