File spoon-archives/postanarchism.archive/postanarchism_2004/postanarchism.0407, message 14


Date: Fri, 16 Jul 2004 01:34:16 -0700 (PDT)
From: "J.M. Adams" <ringfingers-AT-yahoo.com>
Subject: [postanarchism] West: 'The Phılosopher as Dangerous Lıar'


The Philosopher as Dangerous Liar

http://www.newstatesman.com/site.php3?newTemplate=NSArticle_Ideas&newDisplayURN=200406280015

by Patrick West

Monday 28th June 2004 
 
 
 
Michel Foucault taught that might is right, truth is
relative, and history just an interesting narrative.
Why do we still lionise the French philosopher? By
Patrick West

Upon Michel Foucault's death, 20 years ago this month,
the historian Paul Veyne wrote in Le Monde that the
philosopher's work was "the most important event of
thought in our century". The rest of the world was all
too ready to agree, and Foucault has become one of the
most celebrated philosophers of our times, lauded as
the godfather of postmodernism and extending his
influence widely and deeply in academe.

Foucault lords over the fields of history, literary
theory, queer theory, medicine, philosophy and
sociology, and his ideas have permeated society in
general. His best-known theses, that the concept of
"truth" is relative, that "madness" is a cultural
creation and that "history" is mere storytelling, are
now familiar fare at enlightened dinner parties (and
those contemptuous inverted commas are mandatory).

Yet many lament his persistent appeal. The pervading
theme in Foucault's philosophy is that human relations
are defined by the struggle for power. Right and
wrong, truth and falsehood, are illusions. They are
the creation of language and the will to dominate.
Socialists, for instance, believe in redistribution of
wealth only because they want to get their hands on
other people's money. Conservatives maintain the
opposite merely because they want to keep hold of
their property. Psychiatrists believe there is a thing
called insanity only because they want to incarcerate
others and subject them to their control and
oppressive "gaze". A doctor just likes bossing people
around.

Thus, there is no such thing as benevolence: men have
created hospitals, schools and prisons not to cure,
educate and reform, but to control and dominate "the
Other". The rationalism of the Enlightenment was
merely a mask for this malevolent impulse.

That this bleak philosophy should have gained such
cultural currency is due at least in part to the cult
of personality that grew around Foucault. A sarcastic
and fiercely intelligent depressive, he took LSD,
repeatedly attempted to kill himself, drove a Jaguar
and attended sadomasochist parlours in California. He
was also one of the first famous casualties of Aids.

Foucault loved being outrageous. He publicly urged
inmates of French jails to escape from prison, and
supported the Ayatollah Khomeini's revolution as well
as Baader-Meinhof terrorists. He also declared that
the happiest day of his life was in July 1978, when he
was hit by a car while high on opium. "I had the
impression that I was dying, and it was really a very,
very intense pleasure," he later told a journalist.

However, one should not underestimate his
philosophical appeal. Foucault's nihilism has tapped
into a growing mood of pessimism in the west. He
represents a generation of leftists who, despairing at
the failure and the horrors of the socialist
experiments in the postwar era, have sought
intellectual solace in apathetic relativism. These
postmodern pessimists reject the notion of human
rights and progress. They mock the pursuit of reason
as a chimera and blame the Enlightenment for
everything from colonialism and environmental
degradation to Hiroshima and Auschwitz. They owe a
debt to Nietzschean anti-humanism, Freudian psychology
and Saussurean linguistics, but theirs is also a
political reaction.

Foucault was a Marxist who gave up the cause. He came
to deride such abstract notions of truth and justice
as representing class interests: socialists don't want
justice, he told Noam Chomsky in a 1971 television
interview - they just seek power. "Our task at the
moment is to free ourselves completely from humanism
and in that sense our work is political work," he once
uttered. "All regimes, east and west, smuggle shoddy
goods under the banner of humanism . . . We must
denounce these mystifications."



Because there are no values, there can be no
judgement. In 1978, looking back on the postwar era,
Foucault said: "What could politics mean when it was a
question of choosing between Stalin's USSR and
Truman's America?" While conservatives will baulk at
the proposition that the Soviet Union and the west
were of moral equivalence, Foucault offered no
alternatives for progressives, either: his repudiation
of humanism renders impotent the opportunity to
challenge any status quo.

Foucault derided the notion of rational justice as a
bourgeois fiction, and "truth" as a coefficient of
power. He espoused a return to barbarism. He praised
the September Massacres of 1792, in which thousands of
suspected royalists were butchered, as an admirable
example of "popular justice". In Power/Knowledge
(1980) he called for the abolition of all courts and
the adoption of a "proletarian justice", in which
there would be no third party present for the accused,
no one to examine the evidence, no one to judge the
impartiality of the facts. Only someone with
Foucault's twisted logic could advocate tyranny in the
name of freedom.

He epitomised what one of his critics called
"infantile leftism", an egotistical school of politics
which is concerned principally with making gestures;
attempting to shock (think Michael Moore) and
constantly criticising, but never proffering a
coherent alternative. J G Merquior labelled Foucault a
quintessential neo-anarchist. Whereas traditional
anarchists were inspired by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's
mutualism and Kropotkin's co-operatives, and took
pride in their embrace of science and humane
Enlightenment values, Foucault owes more to the
egotistical, destructive spirit of Mikhail Bakunin,
whose anarchism luxuriated in its negativity and
irrationality. Its beliefs consist entirely of what it
opposes. This legacy can be seen in today's "anti-
capitalist" demonstrators, who are clear about what
they seek to destroy, but rather vague as to what they
want to create.

Foucault captured the zeitgeist. His conceit that
insanity is an invention of the Renaissance, designed
to reify its opposite idea of reason, was gaining
currency in the 1960s, when his seminal Madness and
Civilisation was published. In Britain at this time, R
D Laing was popularising the notion that insanity was
an invention of modernity and schizophrenia the
symptom of bourgeois oppression. Yet the move away
from the idea that madness can be comprehended as a
medical condition has brought immense suffering to
those afflicted by chemical disorders of the brain.
Thanks to the Foucauldian suggestion that mental
hospitals are oppressive quasi-prisons, thousands of
people who are a danger to themselves and to others
have been left to fend for themselves in "care in the
community" programmes.



Foucault's derision of modern medicine is said to have
been prompted by an early personal experience. As a
boy, he was taken by his father to a psychiatrist to
be "treated" for his sexual interest in men. (Foucault
famously loathed his father, a doctor from the
bourgeois class.) This event aroused the suspicion in
his mind that doctors did not exist to help the
afflicted, but to reinforce contemporary mores.

His questioning of the reality of biological maladies
and mental illness was doubly ironic: his hero
Nietzsche died of syphilis, a physical condition that
drove him insane; and Foucault himself succumbed to a
disease that he did not believe to exist, having
laughed off talk of a "gay plague" as homophobic
hysteria.

Michel Foucault was not just wrong; he erased any
possibility for proving himself to be right. He
asserted that "the author" did not exist, that he or
she is condemned to produce a work defined by customs
of literature, and created through a language imposed
on the mind from without. How can we believe an author
who tells us the author does not exist, who writes in
an objective prose that objectivity does not exist,
this historian who tells us that we cannot write
history? His canon is self-invalidating.

In his 1977 pamphlet Forget Foucault, the eminent
French social historian Jean Baudrillard argued that
Foucault's writings are themselves discourses in power
that impose their own narrative, projecting their own
will to truth. Those who lionise this "author" today,
devoted as they are to this source of power-knowledge,
continue to contradict themselves. Perhaps it is time
to take heed of Baudrillard's exhortation. Perhaps it
is time to forget Foucault. 
 

This article first appeared in the New Statesman. For
the latest in current and cultural affairs subscribe
to the New Statesman print edition. 


===="What war is not a private affair, and, inversely, what wound is not a war that comes from society as whole?"

- Gilles Deleuze, Logique du Sens (1969)


		
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail Address AutoComplete - You start. We finish.
http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail 

   

Driftline Main Page

 

Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005