Foucault’s influence

Foucault has been widely read and discussed in his own right. He has galvanized an army of detractors, the less attentive of whom have misread his critique of “man” as radically antihumanist, his critique of power-knowledge as radically relativist, and his ethics as radically aestheticist. They have not, however, prevented him from inspiring increasingly important alternatives to established practices of cultural and intellectual history. In France and the Americas, Foucault’s unraveling of Marxist universalism has continued both to vex and to inspire activists of the left. The antipsychiatry movement of the 1970s and ’80s owed much to Foucault, though he did not consider himself one of its members. His critique of the human sciences provoked much soul-searching within anthropology and its allied fields, even as it helped a new generation of scholars to embark upon a cross-cultural dialogue on the themes and variations of domination and subjectivation. Foucault’s elucidation of the dense and minute dimensions of discipline and biopolitics likewise has had a noticeable impact on recent studies of colonialism, law, technology, gender, and race. The first volume of The History of Sexuality has become canonical for both gay and lesbian studies and “queer” theory, a multidisciplinary study aimed at critical examinations of traditional conceptions of sexual and gender identity. The terms discourse, genealogy, and power-knowledge have become deeply entrenched in the lexicon of virtually all contemporary social and cultural research.

Foucault has attracted several biographers, some of whom have been happy to flout his opposition to the practice of seeking the key to an oeuvre in the psychology or personality of its author. Yet, in their favour, it must be admitted that Foucault’s personal life is a worthy subject of attention. He regularly made the issues that most troubled him personally—emotional suffering, exclusion, sexuality—the topics of his research. His critiques were often both theoretical and practical; he did not merely write about prisons, for example, but also organized protests against them. In 1975, while in Spain to protest the impending executions of two members of ETA, the Basque separatist movement, by the government of Francisco Franco, Foucault confronted police officers who had come to seize the protest leaflets he had prepared. He also publicly attacked Jean-Paul Sartre at a time when Sartre was still the demigod of Parisian intellectuals.

Although he despised the label “homosexual,” he was openly gay and occasionally praised the pleasures of sadomasochism and the bathhouse. He was something of a dandy, preferring to shave his head and dress in black and white. He declared that he had experimented with drugs. Even more scandalously (at least to the French), he declared that his favourite meal was “a good club sandwich with a Coke.” Foucault cultivated his celebrity as “an all-purpose subversive,” but neither his thought nor his life contain the substantive principles of an activist program. Foucault was skeptical of conventional wisdom and conventional moralism—but not without exception. He was an ironist—but not without restraint. He could be subversive and could admire subversion—but he was not a revolutionary. He dismissed even the possibility of providing an answer to Vladimir Ilich Lenin’s great, abstract question “What is to be done?” Rather, he insisted upon asking, more concretely and more locally, “What, in a given situation, might be done to increase human capacities without simultaneously increasing oppression?” He was not confident that an answer would always be forthcoming. But whether the situation at hand was common or simply his own, he sought in all his endeavours to remove himself to a vista distant enough that the question might at least be intelligently posed.