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Like many intellectuals of his generation, Foucault joined the Communists after World War II; he quit within two years, sooner than most. Marxism "interested me but left me dissatisfied," he recalls; Marx himself was, after all, a product of the 19th century episteme. As for the "young people of my generation who were attracted to Marxism, they found in it a means of prolonging that adolescent dream of another world." Foucault remains politically unclassifiable but generally within the radical left. Says he: "I lived in Sweden, country of liberty, then Poland, a country quite to the contrary, and these experiences showed me that whatever the legal system, mechanisms of power constrain the individual and direct his conduct in an effort to normalize him."
Foucault's views are colored to some extent by his homosexuality.
That too he sees as an issue of power. Says he: "I was never really integrated into the Communist Party because I was homosexual, and it was an institution that reinforced all the values of the most traditional bourgeois life." In his historical research, Foucault was impressed by the fact that although a few homosexuals were burned at the stake as late as the 18th century, such drastic punishment was rarely actually used. Says he: "The practice of arrest served rather as a mechanism of control. So I tried to turn the problem around, saying to myself, 'Why was the state so interested in sexuality?' " Foucault's historical researches unearth extraordinary documents that he publishes separately as supporting evidence. Thus his inquiries into crime led to the discovery of a confession that he quoted as its own title: I, Pierre Riviere, having slaughtered my mother, my sister, and my brother . . . Foucault's studies of sexuality led similarly to Herculine Barbin—Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-Century French Hermaphrodite, which he prefaced with one of his most startling rhetorical questions:
"Do we truly need a true sex?" His newest discoveries, due out in book form shortly, are a series of 18th century cases in which men asked the Parisian authorities to imprison their wives or children. Says Foucault, with considerable understatement:
"There is in this series an aspect of family conflict that speaks to the families' rapport with power."
To those historians who rebuke him for being too personal and too impressionistic, Foucault offers a bristling response.
"If I wished to be a historian in the present sense of the word, that would not be difficult," he says. "But it would be better to ask why I have done what I have done.
This problem, say, of locking up the mentally ill—did historians bring it up? No, it was necessary for a 'twisted' person to have the bad idea of introducing questions at once personal and political. But historians always take their problems from the present. If it is not from the immediacy of their personal lives, or the political and social life of their country, it is simply from their university environment."
Foucault's constant turning around of problems, his new questions that often remain unanswered, can be exasperating. He frequently thrusts forward a dramatic idea only to back off and start redefining terms.