40 years without Michel Foucault

Image: Helena Jankovičová Kováčová
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By VINÍCIUS DUTRA*

What still remains admirable in Foucault's way of reflecting is his acumen in contesting ideas intuitively accepted by the critical tradition of thought.

The Nietzschean tradition was one that had the courage to undo a conception of history which brought together a vulgar celebration of great names and monuments. Which would be to denounce that this type of celebration sometimes present in our relationship with the past was just another insidious way of making us forget our own power of life, the possibility of reinventing it.

However, what can we do even when the name of the person who left us is someone who subverted the vocabulary of the human sciences to the point of leaving an intellectual legacy that retains all its strength today, forty years after his death? This is the case of Michel Foucault, who unfortunately died in the Parisian Salpêtrière hospital on June 25, 1984, just as he was about to begin revising his manuscript. The confessions of the flesh.

Published posthumously in 2018 by the French publisher Gallimard, this work was destined to be the fourth and final volume in a long program of Foucault's work: the arduous task of writing a history of sexuality in the West. One of the initial impulses for such an endeavor may have arisen in a moment of existential crisis that the French philosopher went through in the mid-1970s.

It is difficult not to assume that the restlessness of those years did not leave marks on Michel Foucault's critical reflection. The philosophical thinking of this archaeologist of knowledge was not at all unscathed by the effects of certain historical events. Let us remember that the constellation of events in which Foucault was inserted is haunted by different situations. At the end of the 1960s, France saw the return of the ghost of the Paris Commune due to the blockades produced in May 1968.

Michel Foucault was at that time teaching in Tunisia, which even gave him the opportunity to closely follow the non-European March of 1968, with all its student effervescence against the arrest and torture of protesters carried out by the Tunisian regime. Upon returning to Paris for a few days at the end of May, imbued with this flame of insubordination, Michel Foucault would have said the following, according to his biographer Didier Eribon, about the student revolt in France: “They don't make the revolution, they are the revolution.” As much as he made this type of consideration, we also know how much the comparison that the French philosopher made between the events in Tunis and Paris was not so favorable to May 1968. Michel Foucault believed that things had been much more drastic on the ground Tunisian.

The mutation in his way of thinking intensified even more during his time in California, now in the 1970s. Just remember how the culture underground gay man in San Francisco, at least according to James Miller's thesis, served as a trigger for him to imagine another form of relationship between bodies. If there was already an entire field of knowledge which sought in its own way to provide an interpretation of why we feel such and such sexual pleasure, what Michel Foucault was now trying to highlight was the very intensity of pleasure.

This attitude led him to care less about hermeneutics and more about semiotic modulations. In view of this, we can advance one assumption: Foucault's position contributed to the creation of a significant distance in relation to something that had its relevance for critical thinking throughout the 20th century, psychoanalysis. This way of putting things created a questioning of the psychoanalytic vocabulary that predominated especially in France at that time. This hegemony also emerged with the help of the highlight of a major project undertaken by none other than Jacques Lacan, with his famous “return to Freud”.

Michel Foucault's provocation was contained in the first volume of History of sexuality, with his high suspicion about what he ironically called the “repressive hypothesis”. Published in 1976 with the subtitle The desire to know, this book was an implicit confrontation with the Freudo-Marxist tradition.

Roughly speaking, what such leftist thinking used to do was start from the assumption that we were all repressed, and that sexual liberation was necessary. It couldn't be very different from that, after all, wasn't Sigmund Freud one of those who theorized about how morality ended up producing an attempt to repress sexuality?

Freudian psychoanalysis had noted very well how this prudish “silence” that hovered over the sexual was the cause of all sorts of neurotic symptoms. This idea, which Foucault called the “repressive hypothesis”, continued to circulate among those involved in May 1968 (which may be a good indication to begin to understand a certain ambiguity of the French philosopher in relation to this extremely important event for the subversion of customs in the XNUMXth century).

Michel Foucault's radical gesture was to take the “repressive hypothesis” to its point of collapse. Of course, it was not a question of neglecting an entire unwritten guidebook on how to behave when it comes to sex, a guidebook that is always accompanied by every siren of the “moral police”.

On the contrary, what Michel Foucault sought to provide was a very different picture from the supposed absolute silence in the face of sexuality. What his report accomplishes is an archeology that tries to show us how there was, especially from the 17th century onwards, not a great repression which would have once and for all repressed the sexual, but a proliferation of discourses that contributed to an intense incitement to talk about sex. With this, Foucault could shuffle the consolidated opposition between power and pleasure to invite us to think from a place where sex is invested with power and power is invested with pleasure.

These multiple discourses regarding sexuality permeated different institutions of knowledge: they were not only present in psychiatry's concern with the attempt to categorize so-called sexual perversions (Krafft-Ebing's work is exemplary here) but also in the literary production which it addressed. shamelessly a whole range of erotic experiences (the writing of the libertine Marquis de Sade is significant in this regard). Highlighting these speeches disrupted the widely accepted conception of a repressive power that would block the desire to even talk about sex.

However, what perhaps initially went unnoticed by Michel Foucault was that, for psychoanalysis, the question had been transmuted: why does the sexual still cause a whole series of impasses for subjects even when culture, with its “superknowledge” about Does sexuality no longer require that it remain hidden?

It is true that this was later identified by Michel Foucault himself in the conference “Sexuality and Power”, given in 1978 in Japan. In any case, what still remains admirable in his way of reflecting is his acumen in contesting intuitively accepted ideas by the critical tradition of thought. And it is in this sense that, even though Foucault was someone who suspected the “ontology of lack” (which even predominates in psychoanalysis), he is missed by us, because whoever says this word not only evokes the vocabulary of sin, of guilt and desire. It also evokes that of longing.

*Vinícius Dutra, psychoanalyst, is a doctoral candidate in philosophy at the University of São Paulo (USP).


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