Elusive and exasperating, Michel Foucault has a growing cult
Watching French Marxists grapple with the radical theories of Michel Foucault, says the philosopher's Translator Alan Sheridan, is like watching "a policeman attempting to arrest a particularly outrageous drag queen." The solemn specialists who patrol the American university have their own difficulties with Foucault. Leo Bersani of the French department at Berkeley eulogizes him as "our most brilliant philosopher of power," but Yale Historian Peter Gay dismisses him: "He doesn't do any research, he just goes on instinct." Anthropologist Clifford Geertz of the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study attempts a new classification: "He has become a kind of impossible object: a nonhistorical historian, an anti-humanistic human scientist. He is what any French savant seems to need to be these days: elusive."
The object of all this controversy is a taut, trim man of 55, whose shaven skull and steel-rimmed spectacles give him a remarkable resemblance to Telly Savalas playing Kojak. On one of his periodic forays to the U.S., a week ago, Foucault appeared in the brick-and-glass Davidson Conference Center of the University of Southern California to participate in a three-day symposium on himself. As usual the hall overflowed with students and professors trying to unravel the mysteries of "panoptic discourse," "bio-power" and other matters raised in Foucault's intricately argued and opaquely written works. "Do not ask me who I am and do not ask me to remain the same," says he. "Leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order."
Officially, Foucault's papers declare that since 1970 he has been a professor at the celebrated College de France, which permitted Foucault to create for himself a new field that he called "the history of systems of thought." Most of his work, though, is done in an expensively austere Paris apartment that could pass for an ivory tower. The book-lined walls are painted off-white, and the eighth-floor view overlooking the rooftops of Paris is spectacular. The only sign of frivolity: a marijuana plant burgeoning among the petunias on the terrace.
In this setting, Foucault has produced a piercing and extremely influential series of books on the subtlest problems of individual liberty and social coercion. In analyzing the relationship between power and truth, he is in the process of redefining both. The nine major books translated into English range from Madness and Civilization (1961) through studies of hospitals (The Birth of the Clinic, 1966), prisons (Discipline and Punish, 1975) to the first volume of a projected five-volume History of Sexuality (1976). Foucault is now finishing the second volume, for publication early in 1982, but anyone who expects lurid revelations will be disappointed.