It is not surprising that Foucault became the bogeyman of strange people, but it is surprising that what he is accused of does not appear in his writings.
Photo: wikimedia.org/CC BY-SA 3.0
Every great political thinker since Niccolò Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau has been feuding. It is therefore not surprising that Michel Foucault, who died 40 years ago, has become the bogeyman of right-wing culture warriors and left-wing citizens. The only surprising thing is that what he is accused of does not appear in his writings at all.
Just take the accusations made against him by Susan Neiman or Nathalie Heinich that he was the spiritual father of identity politics. This is absurd because hardly any other theory questions “identity” as fundamentally as his own. Sure, he was an activist in the anti-prison movement and got a bloody nose in battles with the police. His name also stands for the goals of antipsychiatry. Fredric Jameson rightly states that Foucault was not the theorist of power but of imprisonment. But the fact that he spoke out against asylums, prisons and cold showers does not mean that he believed in the identity or even ideality of any persecuted minority. On the contrary, it is precisely the fact that the insane, the perverted, the “infamous” cannot, do not want or are not allowed to achieve an identity for this or that reason that makes him curious.
The rumor spread by cheering Persians that he would have become an Islamist at the end of his life is also unfounded. Anyone who reads the reports that Foucault sent from Iran to the “Corriere della Sera” in 1978 will find joy in the demise of the Shah’s despotism, a willingness to engage with the new rulers, but above all a lot of cautious distance discover. It says that as a Westerner you should hold off on making judgments for the time being, and it also says that he himself still understands very little about Iran. And it says that he doesn’t think what’s happening is a “revolution.” “This is perhaps the first major uprising against the planet’s systems, the most modern and the craziest form of revolt.”
nd.DieWoche – our weekly newsletter
With our weekly newsletter nd.DailyWords look at the most important topics of the week and read them Highlights our Saturday edition on Friday. Get your free subscription here.
We have now learned that it was perhaps a modern revolt, but not a modernist revolt. But the fact that, in his eyes, it was also “crazy” explains what fascinated Foucault about Iran. His radio broadcasts, a transcription of which has just appeared, illuminate this point particularly well. Interviews and discussions accompany the publication of his books from 1961 to around 1976. The few radio appearances he made afterwards are no longer significant. Since it is only peripherally about “The Order of Things” (1966) or “The Archeology of Knowledge” (1969), the focus is on the history and literature of madness, i.e. his first major work, “Madness and Society” (1961 ), and everything that accompanied it, such as his statements about the writer Raymond Roussel or the Marquis de Sade.
Even more interesting than what he says to journalists or in debates with Louis Althusser or Pierre Klossowski are his feature series on the “Languages of Madness”, on “Pain and Suffering” or on “Rousseau, Judge by Jean-Jacques” (1776), a late work by Rousseau that has been wrongly ignored. In his Funk essays, written in the early 1960s, Foucault strikes an unusually personal, even poetic tone.
The crazy people were first celebrated, then locked away, finally declared sick and “cured.” While he works out in his books how it came about that in the age of mercantilism, i.e. from the 17th century onwards, the unreasonable, and indeed all figures considered anti-social, the gays, the promiscuous women or the daydreamers, were put into workhouses , he focuses his attention on the late Middle Ages in the features. The fool, not just the court jester, had the task of throwing the truth in society’s face. This is evidenced by the Festival of Fools held in Northern Europe on January 1st and its “Deposuit potentes”, i.e. the imagined fall of the powerful from their throne.
Foucault experienced this rebellious spirit in 1954 at a party in the psychiatric hospital in Münsterlingen (Switzerland). But he also finds traces in poems and stories. He doesn’t just use the relevant crazy people like Antonin Artaud or August Strindberg. He even finds what he is looking for in such harmless novelists as Guy de Maupassant or Thomas Mann (“The Chosen One,” 1951). Insanity appears to be the reverse of meaningful speech. It is said about Friedrich Nietzsche that he took the risk of going crazy long before he became so. “Everyone who speaks has, at least secretly, the freedom to go crazy. Conversely, every person who has become crazy and thus alien to human language remains a prisoner of the closed universe of language.
The same applies here again: Foucault does not look for a counter-identity beyond civil identity, but rather determines the conditions for any identity formation. He wants to think about reason historically and dialectically and to contain everything that is excluded from it, including the strange, violent and instinctual. “Without night, the day would seem very pale to us.” What is striking is that, unlike Julia Kristeva, he sees the opponent of reason not in the gestural-physical – or, as she calls it, “semiotic” – but in the semantic- assumed at the content level of the language. For example, he examines Rousseau’s obsession that he is being persecuted as seriously as if the very concept of being persecuted were at stake. “It is not true that the language took possession of things in order to translate them; rather, they lie within it like a silent, sunken treasure in the midst of the roar of the sea.”
Michel Foucault: Radio interviews 1961–1983. Hg. v. Henri-Paul Fruchaud. Flammarion, Paris 2024, 933 S., br., ca. €58.
judi bola link sbobet sbobet88 slot demo