August 31, 2006
Foucault night
This evening a friend recommended that I purchase three recently published volumes of Foucault's "Essential Works, 1954–1984"—focused on ethics; aesthetics, method, and epistemology; and power (The New Press)—and gave me a photocopy of John Rajchman's foreword to the soon-to-be-published The Chomsky-Foucault Debate (parts of the 1971 broadcast of which are on YouTube). I read the foreward on the train, and then almost immediately came across an essay (via 3QD) by Richard Wolin in the Chronicle of Higher Education that attempts to counter the explicitly antihumanist understanding of Foucault's work. After brief summaries of Discipline & Punish and The History of Sexuality, Wolin begins:
In American academe, that's the gist of the Foucault story. He has been venerated and canonized as the messiah of French antihumanism: a harsh critic of the Enlightenment, a dedicated foe of liberalism's covert normalizing tendencies, an intrepid prophet of the "death of man."But increasingly that perception seems wrong, or, at best, only partially true. Considerable evidence suggests that, later in life, Foucault himself became frustrated with the antihumanist credo. He underwent what one might describe as a learning process. He came to realize that much of what French structuralism had during the 1960s rejected as humanist pap retained considerable ethical and political value.
That re-evaluation of humanism redounds to his credit as a thinker. It stems from a profound and undeniable moral insight: If one wishes to become an effective critic of totalitarianism, as Foucault certainly did, the paradigm of "man" remains an indispensable ally. After all, it is the totalitarians themselves who seek to quash or eliminate man. As antitotalitarian political analysts and actors, our responsibility is to spare him that fate.
It would not be a misnomer to suggest that in fact the later Foucault became a human-rights activist, a political posture that stands in stark contrast with his North American canonization as the progenitor of "identity politics."
Wolin develops this argument and then discusses Foucault 2.0: Beyond Power and Knowledge, a new book by Eric Paras based on Foucault's later, as-yet-unpublished Collège de France lectures. I admit to knowing very little about Foucault—I can count on one hand the number of his short essays I have read, and have only skimmed the two major books mentioned above—but Paras's argument, as summarized by Wolin, is seductive and seems to be of significant interest to those invested in Foucault's thinking.