Joseph S. O’Leary: Why we need Michel Foucault
Caravaggio, once viewed askance, has emerged as the central painter of his period. Perhaps Michel Foucault, similarly, is now emerging as the central French thinker of his time, thanks to his mastery of a vast range of historical data and his clearsighted analyses, which shed novel light on how humans have lived and thought, while pursuing a steady quest for enlightenment, liberation, and justice. What he writes in Les anormaux (the 1975-76 lectures at the Collège de France) about ‘Ubuesque terror, grotesque sovereignty’ offers an insightful comment on events taking place now, fifty years later. He speaks of ‘the maximalization of the effects of power on the basis of the disqualification of the one producing them.’ Political power can be seated in ‘a corner that is manifestly, explicitly, deliberately disqualified by the odious, the infamous, or the ridiculous.’ Roman history illustrates a mode of domination rooted in this ‘almost theatrical disqualification of the point of origin of all the effects of power in the person of the emperor; this disqualification whereby he who possesses majestas, supreme power, is at the same time in his personage, his physical reality, his dress and gestures, his body, his sexuality, his way of being, an abject, grotesque, and ridiculous figure.’ If a supreme leader is stupid, mad, and a clown, this does not disqualify him but cements his hold on power.
The same lecture examines the history of hermaphroditism. Once intersex children were seen as the spawn of the devil and done away with. Then they were obliged to decide on one gender and if they strayed from it were liable to be executed for ‘sodomy.’ One recalls that the offence for which Joan of Arc was burnt at the stake consisted specifically in her dressing as a man. What would Foucault make of the current hysteria about gender in Britain, in which lofty declarations of concern about how the trans movement is allegedly threatening the hard-won rights of women instantly tumble over into mockery and slander directed at vulnerable trans people? We hear of an LGB alliance, excluding T — a mean-spirited stance that contrasts with the broad and generous acceptance that has historically characterized the LGBT community. (This is not to say that Foucault can be acclaimed as an apostle of ‘woke.’ He would be quick to critique its hollow sloganeering and its bullying.)
Foucault was relentlessly smeared in the puritanical Anglophone world. I heard one of his sensationalistic American biographers, thirty years ago, regale an audience in Japan with tales of how the French thinker hung out in leather bars in San Francisco. I bumped into Foucault’s companion Daniel Defert the next day, who said, ‘I couldn’t sleep last night. Michel was not like that at all.’ Foucault’s correct prediction that ‘pedophiles’ would be the scapegoat of choice in the 21st century is ritually invoked against him, and all the French thinkers who joined him in asking telling questions have been successfully shut up. I suggest that there is more truth, and certainly more clarity, in Foucault’s many books than in the Byzantine elucubrations of Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida, whose dazzling brilliance too often petered out in murky dead-ends.