Foucault: Philosophy in an Hour. Paul Strathern

Paul, his father’s name). Michel Foucault’s first years at the ENS were to be a litany of incidents. On one occasion he slashed his chest with a razor; on another he had to be restrained while chasing a student with a dagger; and on another he nearly succeeded in committing suicide by taking an overdose of pills. He drank heavily and occasionally experimented with drugs (very much a minority pursuit in those far-off days). Sometimes he would disappear for nights on end, afterwards slumping back hollow-eyed and haggard into his dormitory with depression. Few guessed the truth. He was tortured with guilt over what had occurred on his lonely sexual expeditions.

      Foucault was unable to live with himself, and none of the students in his dormitory wished to live with him. They looked upon him as mad and dangerous, qualities that only seemed to be exacerbated by his evident brilliance. Fiercely aggressive in intellectual argument, he was not above resorting to violence. His fellow students shunned his company, and he began developing psychosomatic illnesses. Long bouts in a solitary bed in the sanatorium spared him from the communal existence of his dormitory, and here he read voluminously, even by ENS standards.

      Foucault’s somewhat haphazard enthusiasm for history now found cohesion. He began reading the nineteenth-century German philosopher Hegel, whose philosophy insisted on the coherence and meaning of history. The purpose of history was its long progress toward the ultimate reality of reason and self-consciousness. According to Hegel, ‘All that is rational is real, and all that is real is rational.’ Below the surface of events, history had its hidden structure. ‘In history we are concerned with what has been and what is; in philosophy, on the other hand, we are concerned not with what belongs exclusively to the past or even the future, but with what is, both now and eternally – that is, with reason.’ History and philosophy became one, a unity that had immediate relevance to the present.

      From Hegel, Foucault progressed to the twentieth-century German philosopher Heidegger, who saw the human predicament as determined by deeper elements than mere reason. ‘My entire philosophical development was determined by my reading of Heidegger,’ Foucault would later write. The excitement of first encountering Heidegger’s thought is best conveyed by his student Hannah Arendt: ‘Thinking has come to life again; the cultural treasures of the past, believed to be dead, are being made to speak, in the course of which it turns out that they propose things altogether different from the familiar worn-out trivialities they had been presumed to say.’ The past was alive in the present, and how we understood the past showed how we could understand the present. History was not recording the truth of the past but revealing the truth of the present. Such was the drift of Foucault’s thought.

      At the time, Heidegger’s philosophy was a matter of deep debate in the cafés of Left Bank Paris. Postwar disillusionment and a despair with traditional values had led to a widespread enthusiasm for the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre, who had himself been heavily influenced by Heidegger. Sartre’s existentialism was highly subjective and believed in ‘existence before essence’. There was no such thing as an essential humanity or subjectivity. This essence we ourselves created by the manner in which we existed, made our choices, and acted in the world. Our subjectivity was likewise no constant element, open to static and limiting definition. It was continually being created, constantly evolving as a result of the life we led.

      Foucault was to absorb many ideas from Hegel, Heidegger, and Sartre. Yet equally significant were the ideas he rejected. In an important way he formed himself in reaction to these philosophers, especially Sartre. As a personality and a thinker, Sartre dominated the Parisian intellectual scene and would remain a constant presence almost throughout Foucault’s life: an example and a goad to his aspirations. Sartre’s ideas would perform a similar role. Foucault was temperamentally averse to remaining in anyone’s shadow for long. He not only had ambition but also sufficient contrariness to strike out on his own – even though his reactive impulse often outran his ideas. There would be no father figures for Foucault; one had been enough.

      The young man was maturing at an exceptional rate, both academically and personally. His increasing intellectual assurance was matched by his emotional self-understanding. He was learning to accept his homosexuality, and the violence in his character was subsumed by occasional sado-masochistic role-playing.

      By now Foucault’s intellectual abilities were beginning to attract the attention of leading figures attached to the ENS, who would discuss their ideas with him. Foucault’s former examiner Georges Canguilhem was developing an entirely new structural history of science. In his view, science did not progress by some gradual and inevitable evolution. The history of science involved a number of distinct discontinuities, where knowledge would take an unprecedented step forward into some new realm. (Einstein’s relativity is perhaps the best-known example in this century). Canguilhem was unusual in having qualifications in both philosophy and medicine. This enabled him to ask, with some acumen, ‘What is psychology?’ Ironically he attacked psychology on the very ground that it saw as its function and strength: knowledge of self. What was the basis of psychological knowledge? What precisely was it doing, or trying to do? Such questions were of particular interest to Foucault, whose earlier erratic behaviour had brought him into firsthand contact with institutional psychiatry. He had been temperamentally averse to the role of patient, and disillusioned with the psychology behind the treatment offered him. This had prompted him to ‘forget the whole thing the moment my shrink went on holiday’. Now here was Canguilhem articulating what he had instinctively felt was wrong with psychology – its lack of self-knowledge about what it was and what it was doing.

      Foucault also attracted the attention of Louis Althusser, who was then a young instructor at the ENS. During the war Althusser had survived five years in concentration camps, and as a result had become a convinced Marxist. He was now developing Marxist theory in what would later be seen as a structuralist direction. In reading Marx, he argued, one had to look beyond the surface text. It was necessary to be aware of the ‘horizon of thought’ that limited Marx’s language and concepts to his particular historical period. One had to try to understand the fundamental problems that Marx was actually dealing with (even though he may not always have been aware of them himself). Althusser persuaded Foucault to become a member of the French Communist Party (PCF). Despite its Stalinism, the PCF remained a major political force in France, largely as a result of the heroic role it had played in the Resistance during the Nazi occupation. But Foucault felt ill at ease with the party and attended few meetings. Having come to terms with his sexuality and accepted its centrality in his life, he was not enamoured to hear homosexuality dismissed by the party as mere ‘bourgeois decadence’. (Althusser was to remain a leading Marxist influence on students at the ENS for well over thirty years, until he strangled his wife in 1981. As a result, he spent his last decade confined in an asylum, where he wrote a brilliant autobiography in which he confessed how little Marx he had actually read).

      In 1951 Foucault took his final exams, achieving a brilliant result – as usual, on the second try. He was now faced with the prospect of military service. His record of ‘depression’, however, together with what appears to have been some family string-pulling, ensured that he was excused this waste of two years. He now continued working as an instructor at the ENS, specialising in philosophy and psychology. His interest in the latter led him to become a frequent visitor to the psychiatric unit at the Hôpital Sainte-Anne. Here he soon came to be regarded as virtually an unpaid member of staff, and was even allowed to deal with patients in a clinical capacity. Back at the ENS he became renowned for giving students Rorschach association tests ‘so I can know what’s on their mind’.

      But all this was more than just inkblot tests on good-looking students, and a former patient helping run the asylum. Foucault was now beginning to ask serious questions about psychology, questions that went beyond the promptings of Althusser. How could one study ‘experience’ scientifically? Human existence was not amenable to objective study: it must be approached by way of its humanity. This could be done by studying the very concept of humanity and how it had evolved.

      Foucault now discovered the philosopher who was to transform his entire understanding. Chronologically Nietzsche had preceded and heavily influenced Heidegger; it was as if Foucault was discovering the very roots of his own thinking. Through the long hot August of 1953 Foucault lay on the beach at Civitavecchia (the ancient port of Rome), avidly absorbing the message of the