Foucault

Against Himself

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 FOUCAULT AGAINST HIMSELF
Translation © 2015 by David Homel
Foreword © 2015 by Paul Rabinow

First published in French as Foucault contre lui-même under the direction of François Caillat © Presses Universitaires
de France, 2014

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any part by any means—graphic, electronic, or
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Cover and frontispiece photos: “Michel Foucault at Home. Paris, 1978” by Martine Franck
(Cover: Magnum Photos PAR81742; frontispiece: Magnum Photos PAR1741)
Editing of translation by Brian Lam and Robert Ballantyne
Design by Gerilee McBride
Printed and bound in Canada

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication:

Foucault contre lui-même. English
Foucault against himself / François Caillat; foreword by Paul
Rabinow; featuring Leo Bersani, Georges Didi-Huberman, Arlette
Farge, Geoffroy de Lagasnerie; translated by David Homel.

Translation of: Foucault contre lui-même.

Includes bibliographical references and index.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-55152-603-4 (epub)

1. Foucault, Michel, 1926-1984. I. Bersani, Leo, interviewer II. Farge, Arlette, interviewer III. Homel, David,
translator IV. Rabinow, Paul, writer of foreword V. Didi-Huberman, Georges, interviewer VI. Caillat, François, editor,
interviewer VII. Lagasnerie, Geoffroy de, interviewer VIII. Title.

B2430.F724F69613 2015 194 C2015-903473-6

C2015-903474-4

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 CONTENTS

Foreword | Paul Rabinow

Introduction | François Caillat

On the Perception of the Intolerable | Arlette Farge

Learning to Escape (Meditations on Relational Modes) | Leo Bersani

Knowing When to Cut | Georges Didi-Huberman

What Does It Mean to Think? | Geoffroy de Lagasnerie

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FOREWORD
Paul Rabinow

Foucault Contra: No Laughing Matter?

During one of the interviews that Burt Dreyfus and I did with Michel Foucault—
where we’re asking him to be more precise, to align his terms better, to clarify his
argument—he laughed (not his much-remarked-upon, haunted laugh from the
underworld) with a certain joyous, unexpected grin and said, “I love America because
when they claim to be asking me about the Enlightenment, they are actually asking me
about the Enlightenment, something that would never happen in France. In Paris, it
would be all traps and allusions and political references.” How could one respond to
that remark except with a timid smile? Was this statement in line with the common
condescension of elite French visitors toward the happy natives of California, or a grin
of release?
One of the recurring themes in Foucault’s discussions was how uncomfortable he
felt, and had always felt, in France. He left his home country on many occasions (for
Sweden, Germany, Poland, Brazil, Japan and, of course, often the US). This movement
might be called flight from the strictures of bourgeois and petty bourgeois France. It
might also be called deterritorialization from the normative, the settled, the already
known, the given. Naturally, Foucault’s trips registered a deep, and inescapable,
ambivalence.
During 1980-81, I was an American in Paris. My flight and my deterritorialization
were from the US and its academic fishbowls, to borrow a quip from Jean Genet,
another peripatetic sort. If not thoroughly enamored with Paris, I liked being there.
When I asked Foucault something about France, he would say, “I don’t know as I
never go out; you know France better than I.” Of course, this confused and disoriented
me. Although it was clearly sarcastic on one level, it expressed a kind of pathos, a
mood and affect that Foucault would neither give into entirely nor abandon.
On the night of Francois Mitterand’s election as the president of France in May of
1981, I arrived at Foucault’s apartment at 7:50. The official election results were
announced on state-run television at 8:00. Foucault already knew the results and was
in one of the darkest moods I had ever encountered; he seemed close to despair. Later
that night, a group of us went to the Bastille, where a joyous celebration for the victory
of the socialists was taking place in the pouring rain. Suddenly a lightning flash
illuminated the crowd, and just like that, Regis Debray—the dashing revolutionary and
author made famous by his association with Che Guevara, who returned to France

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after his Latin adventures to pursue a career as a man of letters and leftist politics—
appeared, and then shook Foucault’s hand just as the skies lit up once again. Somehow
with that flash of celestial enlightenment, our evening was over.
But Foucault’s premonition that much more was growing dark proved all too
prescient. His nasty and demeaning relations with the newly elected socialist
government in France are well known. At the time, he was committed to the success of
the Solidarity movement in Poland; the French socialist in power publically repudiated
him and others. The minister of culture, Jack Lang, called Foucault a “clown.” For a
time, Foucault teamed up with Pierre Bourdieu to attempt a critical and committed
response—but in vain.
From then on, Foucault’s personal life in Paris drained him. He was living alone,
traveling or dreaming about travel, and ultimately simply searching for a way forward.
The novels of Hervé Guibert give us a tone of the scene without being journalistic
reportage. It was decidedly bittersweet.
When he died in 1984, Michel Foucault left no will. In France, this meant that his
estate passed to his mother and then to his family. Those who had accompanied him
over the years were left nothing. Foucault’s act has occasioned much discussion,
although not in print; it caused deep hurt, although not in public. Foucault’s motivation
remains opaque. It is a scandal that has been covered over in almost Balzac-like terms.
Like family scandals everywhere, but with a distinctive French cast, it has been buried
but not necessarily put to rest.
With the family’s approval (which took some time), the vast project of editing his
published works as well as his lectures at the Collège de France was given shape. One
must be eternally grateful for the care, scrupulous attention, vast labor and political
acumen required to complete this project, even if the thirty years it took were not
entirely exempt from a strategy to keep his name and fame alive as well as to establish
who the legitimate inheritors were after all.
The recent, rather extravagant provincialism of Foucault commentary in France
certainly qualifies as an example of Foucault (the author) contra Foucault (the man).
We foreigners might well be accused of sour grapes over this not entirely accidental
exclusion, but such an assignation would be false; after all, some voices, well
established in their own right, and posing no interpretive risks to the Parisian
orthodoxy, are solicited and welcomed by those who for the moment ordain what
counts. It is comforting to recall Foucault’s own discomfort and contempt for Parisian
cliquishness and its inward-looking stance of superiority. The days when that stance
was intimidating are long gone.
In 1966’s The Order of Things, Foucault ended the chapter entitled “Man and His
Doubles” as follows (English translation): “to all those who still wish to talk about
man, about his reign or liberation … to all those warped and twisted forms of
reflection, we can only answer with a philosophic laugh, which means, to a certain
extent, a silent one.”1 Actually, the original text in French is more cutting: “à toutes
ces formes de réflexion gauche et gauchies …”2 A better translation of this devilish
play on the word gauche, whose political meaning is “leftist,” is “awkward and
bumbling.” Regardless, the laugh is a silent one.
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of

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the Human Sciences. No translator listed. New York:
Random House, 1970, p. 343.
Michel Foucault, Les Mots et les choses: une archéologie
des sciences humaines. Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1966, p.
354.
Foucault was famous for his laugh. Actually, there were several laughs. Here,
Jacques Lacan’s theorem is telling: “Le rire accueille la subjectivité prise au
dépourvu.”3 (Laughter greets the subject caught off-guard.) The haunted laugh from
Hades might well have erupted when Foucault, having thought he had heard every
form of baseness and deceit possible, was confronted by a new twist. There was
another laugh, however, one seen more frequently abroad where the natives took his
work seriously, which meant engaging with it with unstinting admiration and
questioning. At first, such discussion caught him “off-guard”; hence the new impish
laughter of a surprising, animated gai savoir.
Jacques Lacan, “La jeunesse de Gide,” Écrits, p. 763, Le
Seuil, 1966, cited in Jean-Claude Milner, Le Juif de savoir,
Paris: Grasset, 2006, p. 145.

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INTRODUCTION
François Caillat

Michel Foucault died in June of 1984. He left behind a body of work that has been
published around the world, and is a source of inspiration for many thinkers, and the
subject of a multitude of interpretations.
The man lived up to his work: he was a complex person with a number of apparent
contradictions. He was a radical militant, yet a professor at the tradition-bound Collège
de France; politically involved, yet a studious philosopher, happy living on the edge,
though concerned with his central standing in well-known French institutions. He was
a brilliant, incisive, iconoclastic figure. Speaking both in the classroom and in the
street, he helped create the figure of the intellectual in tune with his times, using his
personal experience to reflect on reality. He went far beyond his era and his country to
become the authoritative thinker he is today.
Michel Foucault never sacrificed the gritty reality of his life for the world of ideas.
The pathways he took display overflowing vitality and an appetite for constant
renewal. We need to keep in mind the many facets of his life, from his arrival in Paris
at the end of the 1940s, when the young man from the provinces began attending the
highly-ranked École normale supérieure on the rue d’Ulm, to 1984, when the world-
renowned thinker died of AIDS. These three-plus decades take us to university
libraries in Sweden and Poland, revolt in Tunisia and student agitation at the
Université de Vincennes in Paris, his classes at the prestigious Collège de France, and
the fight alongside Jean-Paul Sartre and the French Maoists, not to mention American
campuses, and gay enclaves in California.
Throughout his tumultuous existence, he built a methodology of thought, subject
to variations and even refutation, moving from one discipline to the next, changing
perspective and centers of interest, but always working in a coherent direction. Over
thirty years, Michel Foucault’s work traveled in different directions and took on
different subjects, with an originality recognized by all and probably unequaled.
Foucault against Himself—or how a major twentieth-century thinker succeeded in
avoiding any single definition of himself and his work.

Four movements will help us understand who Foucault really was. They are like
waves, or musical phrases. They situate the contrasting faces of the man and his work

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inside fertile relationships, and contribute to a portrait of incompletion, constant
reevaluation, and adjustments orchestrated by Foucault himself. This perspective is not
the result of a sudden decision or judgment made from without. These are movements
that Foucault could easily be in tune with, and they confirm his taste for change and
his rejection of certainty.

Variations on Power
The first movement concerns the question of power. The issue is central, not because
Foucault makes it into a stated object of research, but because it keeps returning in
different formulations. The question of power seems to outstrip his intentions by
reappearing throughout his work and forcing itself on him. The issue persists.
“Variations on Power”: this first movement applies to nearly all Foucault’s works.
We see how the issue of power is transformed, how it moves and takes on new forms
through most of the research he did across disciplines, through philosophy, history,
psychiatry, and prisons. There is no need to look at everything, since two of his books
will serve the purpose: Madness and Civilization and The Will to Knowledge. In both
works, Foucault renews his analysis of power, which includes turning it inside out and
inverting it in its presuppositions and consequences.
In Madness and Civilization, which first appeared in French in 1961, the idea of
exclusion holds sway. Power pushes aside, rejects, and marginalizes the different
figures that denature social order: the mad, vagabonds, prostitutes, and homosexuals.
Inaugurating the classical age, the “big imprisonment” displays the power of the
negative, of darkness. A living part of society is suddenly silenced, excluded, forgotten
behind its walls. In its decision-making function, power cuts off and separates.
Fifteen years later, in 1976, inclusion seems to inform The Will to Knowledge.
Analyzing the role of sexuality in the West, Foucault describes, on the contrary, a kind
of power with a positive aspect, the power to incite. It was apparently wrong to believe
that sexuality was censored, repressed, and made taboo—instead, it was encouraged.
Power does not forbid sex; it encourages its formulation via confession and admission,
and it organizes constant speech and produces statements of truth. Power doesn’t
exclude; it constitutes.
From Madness and Civilization to The Will to Knowledge, Foucault changes his
point of view and assigns new ways of functioning to the apparatuses of control. From
one book to the other, the issue of power varies and returns in renewed fashion.

The Thinker and the Militant

A second movement, concerned with Foucault as a character, shows us that his
agitation not only motivated his thought processes, but also touched on his everyday
life as a philosopher, his concrete existence in society at a given time. We could
choose the period between 1970 and 1975 in France to show that Foucault’s
personality was involved in divergent, sometimes contradictory activities. “The
Thinker and the Militant” displays a Janus figure, a double-edged persona, a
combination of reflection and activism.

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 Foucault is a thinker in his writings and in his role as a teacher, most notably at the
Collège de France, where he started giving classes in 1971. In this temple dedicated to
culture, a place where lofty minds met, Foucault worked alongside people known for
their spirit of logical deliberation. But he did not project that smooth sort of self-
image. He rejected the comfort his position offered and wanted to take his ideas to the
street. Beginning in 1970 and 1971, Foucault supported Jean-Paul Sartre and far-left
militant groups in their defense of immigrants and undocumented workers in their
fight against deportation. Along with other intellectuals, he founded the Groupe
d’information sur les prisons (the GIP, or Prison Information Group) with the aim of
informing the public about conditions of detention and focusing media attention on
prisoner revolts during 1971 and 1972. Foucault also got involved in the “Vérité-
Justice” committees that were set up by the Maoists of the newspaper La Cause du
peuple to denounce the everyday injustice of capitalism. He was not a militant in the
organizational sense of the term, but he analyzed, wrote articles, and spoke up to
explain and denounce. He took sides in political conflicts, but also when it came to
events like the tragic fire at the 5-7 nightclub in Grenoble, or the Bruay-en-Artois
murder in 1972. Foucault wanted to think about the present in the present, and get
involved in current events, basing his thought in the political and social reality of the
times. In this critical perspective, he was joined by the politicized intellectuals of the
era, notably Jean-Paul Sartre (though they had strong disagreements about philosophy)
and Gilles Deleuze.
Both thinker and militant, Foucault brought together these two ways of
involvement in the world. He defended the concept of the “specific intellectual” acting
at a given time and place, involved in short-term, sometimes minor problems, and
calling for a localized response. These particular problems did not always require a
generalized mobilization of the mind, nor did they demand the involvement of the
“total intellectual”—the kind of intellectual Sartre referred to, who lifted the smallest
conflicts to the level of pure concept. Foucault’s position is based on circumstances.
There’s a taste for the present in his thought that completed or contradicted the
outmoded image some people have of the thinker. By setting himself in the midst of
events, with their unpredictable side and unexpected turns, Foucault ran the risk of
throwing himself off balance, taking wrong positions, contradicting himself, and
having to start all over or “unbind himself,” as he liked to put it—free himself anew.
But that seemed to suit him just fine. He insisted on living in the world’s disorderly
movement, and his own.

Where Does the Individual Fit In?

We can find Foucault’s interest in the unbinding of the self in a third approach oriented
toward man. The human issue—or, more rightly, the subject—arises in his thinking in
a way that at times seems contradictory. We see, for example, how things change
between The Order of Things, published in French in 1966, and The Use of Pleasure
and The Care of the Self, his last texts published in French in 1984.
Of the first work, when it was published, people said it displayed a structuralist
position and theorized about “the death of man” announced by Nietzsche in the

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previous century. His analyses of the different epistemological systems that have
followed each other since the Renaissance in the areas of language, the body, and the
economy are indeed compatible with the structuralist current that occupied the Paris
scene in the 1960s. When the book came out, Foucault was stingingly attacked by the
upholders of the philosophy of the subject and humanist thought; in this work, they
saw the equivalent of what Claude Lévi-Strauss was doing in anthropology, Roman
Jakobson in linguistics, and Jacques Lacan in psychiatry. Jean-Paul Sartre also
weighed in against the book that he judged inapt to reflect on history and human lives;
he described its author as “the last rampart of the bourgeoisie”—which didn’t prevent
the two intellectuals from working together ten years later in far-left groups.
Sartre’s critique interests us because it points to the disappearance of a knowing
subject in Foucault. After all, what place could it have once the structures of
knowledge, which are unconscious and collective, have dispensed man from any
thought or action, any voluntary creation, any mastery of the practice of thought? In
The Order of Things, man is a subject constructed by culture, educated and educator
both, measured by the yardstick of his times. Foucault broke with the classical theory
of the subject as creator of thought. On the contrary: he considered man as an
invention of history, born in the nineteenth century and already slated for
disappearance.
Then, less than twenty years later, Foucault seemed to make a radical departure
from this book that had launched so much debate. In The Use of Pleasure and The
Care of the Self, he described man during Greco-Roman times who resembles, if not a
creative subject, at least a being who creates himself via modes of subjectivity.
Certainly, the man of whom Foucault spoke is not the knowing subject of classical
philosophy, nor the subject, master of his destiny, the way humanist thought dreamed
of. But here is a being of flesh and blood, sensation and thought, and Foucault wanted
to describe the choices, preoccupations, and active care he applied to himself. In this
work on Antiquity, Foucault returned man to a central place in his reflection. He went
on to build a way of being and thinking about relations with other people, a form of
involvement in the social world, all things that could apply to any of us today. This
new issue would occupy him until his death in 1984.
Over those two decades, his thought seems to have totally turned on its head,
leaving readers of the time perplexed and at sea. In this change, if not a complete
contradiction, there is a readjustment that once again displays the thinker’s right to
mobility of the highest order.

A Life on the Edge, A Job at the Center

The fourth and final movement describes the opposing positions Foucault occupied
over a period of thirty years. He led a double life, pulled in two directions, a marginal
being, far from society’s norms, yet very close to the seat of power.
On one hand, “a life on the edge” reveals the progress of a timid young man from
the provinces, wearing the straitjacket of his family background, rejected by the
intellectual environment of the École normale supérieure, feeling excluded by the
great difficulty he experienced in accepting his homosexuality, attempting suicide and

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sojourning in psychiatric hospitals, and deciding late to live out the rest of his life with
great panache, far past the edges of social and moral order. All the ingredients for a
life of passion were there.
At the same time, Foucault was careful to maintain a choice location in the
mechanisms that produced and distributed knowledge. His pathway was exemplary,
paved with excellence, following the elite road in France: the Henri IV Lycée, the
École normale supérieure, the Collège de France. He didn’t turn up his nose on
prestige positions that placed him at the heart of institutions of knowledge and
language: cultural attaché overseas, chargé de missions for various ministries, and jury
member for the ENA public administration school in Strasburg. He exercised a vigilant
eye as his works were published by the most powerful houses, like Gallimard and le
Seuil. He succeeded in living a paradoxical and atypical life, both on the edge and at
the center of a very standardized world. He drove a Jaguar and dropped LSD on a
regular basis, and spent his days at the National Library and the National Archives. He
hit the gay S&M bars in Paris as well as in San Francisco a few hours after giving a
lecture in front of an audience of stiff-necked academics. He practiced excess to
perfection, both in his intelligence and knowledge as well as the organized disorder
and flaming out of his life.
In this very open game between private life and public office, Foucault danced a
subversive pas de deux. Where others may have been careful or remained in outright
rebellion, he decided not to choose. He proved that a person could be part of the
seraglio but not transmit its customs. He showed how to develop personal freedom
without becoming marginal. His freedom and refusal to maintain appearances caused
some astonishment at the time, just as his death from AIDS caused a scandal. It was a
sign of his moral and intellectual independence. Foucault never stopped reinventing
himself and throwing off disturbing and contrary images of who he was.

These four movements, among all the other possibilities, provide us with a
confrontation of contraries, a staging of variables. This skewed perspective is true to
Foucault’s wishes. The thinker demanded the right to move about and to change. He
refused to consider his works over and definitively finished; he preferred to speak of
use rather than a body of work. He did not want his life, private and public, to be
reduced to a single identity, and in the process risk turning it into something useful for
policing.
Foucault against Himself: the way he wanted to be, the way he thought, against
himself.

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ON THE PERCEPTION OF THE INTOLERABLE
Arlette Farge

—You met Foucault after the events of May 1968.

Arlette Farge: I first became acquainted with him through his work in 1975, when
Discipline and Punish came out. Back then I was a teacher for young educators who
wanted to work in the penitentiary system, so I knew a lot about what Michel Foucault
was discussing, and the way, for example, he would go into prisons to read Discipline
and Punish out loud to the prisoners.
I admired him. Back then, street demonstrations, anything concerning freedom,
utopia, the prison system, happiness, life that’s intolerable—those things were objects
of personal and intellectual interest for me.

—What did you think of his social involvement?

Arlette Farge: For me, everything began after 1968. I had returned to France after
spending two years in the United States, where I had been part of a number of feminist
movements, so important figures taking to the streets didn’t surprise me. On the
contrary—they encouraged me. At the time, it felt as if something was happening on a
worldwide scale, so I was completely ready not only to accept, but to be part of it. But
not in my professional life; I was still too young. I wasn’t with the CNRS social
research group yet. And I wasn’t living in Paris but I participated from the suburbs,
since I couldn’t get to Paris because of the strikes.

—Who was it that took to the streets? Foucault the intellectual, or Foucault the
militant?

Arlette Farge: He was a militant, that much was true, and he explained why; he spoke
of the role of the “specific intellectual” as he would call it later, a subject he wrote
about. I don’t separate his trade as an intellectual from his work and social
involvement. Everything followed a line of social action.

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—Are intellectuals prescient about what will occur in society?

Arlette Farge: No, I don’t think so. I think they support social change if such is their
desire and if opinion is ready to accept them. Intellectuals don’t gaze down on society
from above. They support what they feel they need to. We feel something in public
opinion and reflect on what action is necessary, then we take those actions. Foucault
never wanted his words to be handed down from on high. I think he was a particular
kind of intellectual who moved in solitary fashion toward the hot topics and conflicts
of his times (madness, the prison system, the body, knowledge and truth) while
reflecting on how the institutional game could be turned on its head and made to
produce new places for knowledge.

—How did his discourse take shape? It’s difficult to imagine.

Arlette Farge: I don’t think the exercise was so difficult, since the prison system was
so important to him. He traveled to Fleury-Mérogis and La Santé to speak with
prisoners because he felt concerned about the darker side of society that cried out to be
reimagined, and freed of academic ways of study and positivism. When you’re
completely convinced of something, it’s simple and easy to get it across. But if you’re
standing behind a barricade of books, it’s hard. But of course, he wasn’t like that.

—Was Foucault’s way of communicating different from Sartre’s, since they often stood
in opposition?

Arlette Farge: Of course, it was very different. Sartre’s political involvement was
much more generalized. He could talk about everything, any subject, in the press.
Foucault didn’t speak out in the press very often in the 1970s. Later, he would become
more vocal.

—Yet Foucault was an abstract thinker who pondered big philosophical questions.

Arlette Farge: That’s true, and that’s where his ability to communicate was so strong.
He knew how to place himself at the right level.
Getting back to the subject of prisons, Discipline and Punish is a masterwork that
supports people who live behind bars, and even if they don’t understand everything,
they do understand that someone is coming to talk about them, someone is seeking
them out to tell them that their situation is intolerable. For me, that’s what a militant is,
that’s what a specific intellectual is.

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—Discipline and Punish came out on 1975, and the Groupe d’information sur les
prisons dates back to 1971. In the book, do we find the ways of thinking he developed
from his work as a militant?

Arlette Farge: I’m not sure we can find anything that comes from his experience as a
militant in Discipline and Punish. Foucault began a process of reflection in this book
and that reflection spilled into other areas, which was emblematic of what his thinking
would be later on. It would go on to serve subjects other than prisons, and move into
the area of power and knowledge.
Of course, there are all the comparisons he made with colleges, the military and
factories, which were adopted immediately by militant graffiti artists (“School =
Prison”).

—Foucault never stopped moving from the local to the global and using specific cases
to produce more general analyses of how society functions.

Arlette Farge: I think that any small-scale case, any moment of discourse, any strategy,
any exchange of speech or even anonymous words had great significance for him.
Foucault worked in extremely narrow areas. And he had to battle to get people to
accept that these narrow areas have great influence over other fields of endeavor.
Reducing and narrowing an area of study was like a laboratory for him. And that
laboratory was where his reflection took place.
Already, in Discipline and Punish, there was a lot of The Will to Knowledge
present. Even if we think that he reversed his positions, when we read the two books,
we see there’s a very strong and very coherent continuity and logic, though he
remained a sly and crafty person who liked to hide, and he hid well.

—His book I, Pierre Rivière is history at its most—

Arlette Farge: At its most infinitely small.

—There’s a relation there too with the small and local, isn’t that true?

Arlette Farge: Of course, and that’s where Foucault was probably most misunderstood
and criticized. Because of works like Discipline and Punish and The Will to
Knowledge that are quite abstract and difficult for some readers, he was much
criticized for not having understood the individual, the singular person, the small
event. But books like Herculine Barbin and Pierre Rivière and Le Désordre des
familles—we wrote the last one together—prove that he was extraordinarily attached
to the lives of people who were not only excluded by society, but had never been

16
known or recognized.
I often saw him in the archives, though historians criticized him for not having
researched and interpreted archival material. His interest in archives was greater than
any other historian’s. He used to say that when he read certain texts like I, Pierre
Rivière or the ones we worked on together at the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, he felt a
physical vibration. A physical vibration is more than an emotion; it’s when your body
begins to move and be moved. Intellectuals are often described as cerebral beings, but
he was literally shaken at times. He said that he felt more tremors in the archives than
when he read a piece of literary writing—and he read an enormous amount of
literature. That’s a side of Foucault people don’t know. The emotional upset. He
suffered because that side was never recognized.

—That was his attraction for what Michon called miniscule lives and singular
existences.

Arlette Farge: Yes, because for him, a particular story was never just a particular story.
It revealed much about the power apparatus that put people in direct contact with
discipline and repression. Because these miniscule lives on which he worked at length
could only be discovered through police archives—therefore, through a bias. What
interested Foucault was this confrontation, and the resistance of isolated individuals
who are confronted by power. I can personally attest to that, and the emotion that those
people brought forth in him that no one ever understood. He was very hurt that no one
recognized him for those works.

—Because they seemed like a contradiction, or because no one wanted to see them?

Arlette Farge: Because his way of writing in Discipline and Punish did not correspond
to a historian’s work. The historian works with files and quotations and standard
footnotes. He creates bibliographies, and quotes the books he has worked on.
Discipline and Punish exploded like a bomb in the world of historians. The book
includes very few references, very few footnotes and, even worse, doesn’t put forward
a subject.
Very often, he would include expressions like “It was said that” or “It is not
difficult to understand.” That style was held against him and, during a debate that took
place three or four years after Discipline and Punish came out, an assembly of
historians, who had decided to finally look into what Foucault had written, accused
him of being a bad historian. He countered the charges brilliantly, with devilish
cunning and intelligence, because he could be devilish, and that possession that took
hold of him was what made him so pleasant to be around.

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—You mention the physical emotion because you spent time with him?

Arlette Farge: Because I wrote with him. How can I explain it? It was something that
people around him, be they philosophers, intellectuals, scientists, and especially
historians—since what Foucault wanted was to be recognized by historians—just
didn’t see. I’m not saying that they didn’t want to see, but they saw nothing and heard
nothing. Though it’s true that when a philosopher barges into the historians’ sandbox,
some people have a hard time accepting the intrusion.
That was a time when the disciplines were very compartmentalized, and you
weren’t supposed to grab what was on someone else’s plate. With Discipline and
Punish, Foucault totally blew apart everything that had been said about prisons and the
system of power.
Because that’s the heart of the issue: disciplining the body, training it. Since I
experienced it, I can tell you that he was not at all recognized for the work he did after
that. For I, Pierre Rivière, a little. For that book, he decided to work with a team,
including other historians. That was different. He published a very long text that
accompanied the story. Then the book became a film by René Allio, a different object.
This process was different from what we did with Le Désordre des familles: he went
and sought out someone unknown to work with, me, and that certainly didn’t help the
cause.

—He was criticized, but also very involved in universities.

Arlette Farge: It was a rather unusual relationship because the people who attended his
classes and filled the amphitheater of the Collège de France were not the usual
university audience. They were very different; they were militants, and the way they
dressed is worth noting. It would be interesting to look at photos because they really
were the militants of their time.
They were coming to listen to a Collège de France professor, that’s true, but for
them he was both part of the institution and completely atypical, and he taught them
something that went far beyond anything they had heard before. I don’t know of any
other equivalent. Even with Bourdieu. At the time, other professors at the Collège de
France never had an audience like that: an audience of militants. I attended Lacan’s
seminars, and they were nothing like that. With Foucault, the audience was rapt.
His classes at the Collège were quite different from his books; they were very
conversational. Foucault’s conversational style was very interesting because it let him
introduce all sorts of interstices, and he was able to slip all sorts of things through the
cracks. He wasn’t an institutional man in my opinion; he was bored silly by the
prospect of having to give classes. He dreaded the whole process. He was afraid of it.
Teaching was extremely hard on him.

—Was the Collège de France a good place to take a stand?

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Arlette Farge: I couldn’t say because I never spoke to him about what he expected
from the Collège.

—Sartre looked down on teaching in an institution. Does Foucault’s relation to the

Collège show his particular slant?

Arlette Farge: Sartre is completely different. The extraordinary fame his books had,
and his companion’s as well; his is the story of a couple. Foucault is the story of one
man.

—Could we say that Foucault brought the margins into the heart of the most
conservative institutions?

Arlette Farge: Yes, and it was extraordinary how he turned his job at the Collège de
France into something subversive. People always said that the audience there was
made up of little old ladies wearing hats. And there are still plenty of them today. But
in Foucault’s classes, there were no little old ladies. To go and listen to Foucault was
like proclaiming your desire for political change. But I couldn’t say that he actually
decided his classes would be like that, because I didn’t know him enough on that
particular point.
I never thought he was an institutional man. I never saw him that way, even in his
personal reactions. I think back to 1981, when François Mitterand was elected
president of France. Maybe I was actually there, since we were working together when
he got a call from Mitterand asking him to accompany him to a celebration of his
victory at a ceremony at the Panthéon. Foucault refused. In very clear and courteous
fashion, of course. I didn’t hear how Mitterand responded, but I did understand
Foucault, that he turned down the offer because of his idea of the “specific
intellectual.” Of course, he had voted for Mitterand and he knew him, but he didn’t
want to be that sort of personage who appeared to be “in” with those in power and
entering the Panthéon alongside the president.

—It seems he introduced contradictions wherever he went.

Arlette Farge: He always used to say, “I perceive the intolerable.” I think we need to
remember those words: “I perceive the intolerable.” The further he advanced and the
more he worked, the more he perceived the intolerable and the more he worked so it
would be visible and others would feel it too. He also used to say, “I’ll never be the
same again.”
There are two things about him. The first thing you have to know, and it’s very
simple, is that he really wanted to be recognized by historians. For him, history was

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something absolutely fundamental. And historians’ indifference to him was quite
painful. The second thing that was very, very special about him was his way of seeing
the world. He could immediately and simultaneously bring together the greatest degree
of abstraction with the universe of the private individual whom he met, or got close to;
whose words he listened to.

—He caused some outcry among historians, with his take on history.

Arlette Farge: That’s true. But remember that Madness and Civilization, which first
came out in French in 1961, had a very hard time getting into print; a historian,
Philippe Ariès, finally arranged for the book to be published with Plon. But remember
also that Philippe Ariès was actually an industrialist and not an intellectual. That story
is the beginning of something, and I think it’s worth noting. First Madness and
Civilization, then The Birth of the Clinic, and finally Discipline and Punish all had to
come out before historians got into gear. As for Madness and Civilization, it’s pure
poetry. They could all see that. There is nothing extraordinarily subversive if you’ve
studied a little history. But Foucault was a fox in the henhouse. Both amused and hurt.
And happy to get his claws in there … Foucault was very strong on irony, very funny,
very sarcastic, and always ready to kick at the wasps’ nest.
But when his application to be director of the École des hautes études was refused
because Fernand Braudel didn’t want him, he was hurt very deeply. He would have
been good there. He wouldn’t have asked for the Collège de France if he’d been
director at the École.

—At the Collège, a chair was designed for him, made to measure.

Arlette Farge: Sure, but there are a lot of chairs at the Collège that are made to
measure.

—Wouldn’t you say there was a sort of mixture, a kind of impurity at the Collège
compared to the usual traditions of French universities?

Arlette Farge: I might not use the word “impurity.” He shook up the ways people
worked in the field of history, and that’s never easy. I didn’t know Foucault when I
read Discipline and Punish. But I remember closing the book—I was working on the
same subjects—and saying to myself, “Well, that’s over, I’m finished working, there’s
nothing more to say.” I spent a year assimilating that book. So I understand the
historians’ reaction.
At the same time, if you’re a historian, you can’t just stop. I had to find the energy
to tell myself, “I’m still going to keep on with what I’m doing.” That was before I

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