The Boss

Foucault. Our most important philosopher….

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Years ago I was talking to the owner of a secondhand bookshop; it is Tombland, here in Norwich. As I was paying out the pension for some decrepit philosopher she mentioned that Foucault was seldom in the shop, though he was the most popular figure on her course. She ascribed this to sentimentality: Discipline and Punish, The History of Sexuality, Archaeology of Power keepsakes from university days.

I have often thought about this since. Was she right? After all, students generally sell off their textbooks; for who wants John Hospers’ An Introduction Philosophical Analysis on the shelf when there are ourselves in younger more attractive days? Foucault is a special case.

According to José Merquior Foucault is not of the top rank. Gary Gutting in an important study of French thought argues his debt to Sartre, which was camouflaged by a somewhat snide rhetoric. In a TLS review Jonathan Ree shows that Foucault’s scholarship cannot be trusted. 

We mustn’t stay too long with the work; Foucault easily condemned for his inaccuracies, his propensity to grandstand rather than argue and delineate. Such details, we must remember, are for the few, the intellectual elite, the professional academics like Merquior and Ree who are interested in the details of historical research and the truth content of philosophical statements. An exotic species. Their undergraduates are like us, the common folk, who use ideas as topics for conversation, and as handy signifiers of political position and signs of moral worth. We do not subject a concept to careful research and close analysis… At best we get out the dictionary. Let's be honest with ourselves: we love our conceptual baubles! we do not manufacture them. Once taught the key concepts, and they are safely memorised, the undergraduate will not read Foucault again. What’s the need? The truths about power, knowledge and sexuality have been revealed, and we accept them until the day we die; his commandments to be our tombstones.

And this is important. It is the graduates - who do not test ideas - that influence the society; their professor hardly able to leave his study for the books blocking the door. Not the quality of a concept that wins the community’s applause but its ubiquity.

The grand dames of French high society used to attend Foucault’s public lectures; leaving their little dogs outside the room they would sit with their furs and pearls in the front row to enjoy the revolutionary spectacle… Foucault was a charismatic; a new Rasputin, encouraging the rich and the aristocratic to revel in their (metaphysical) degradation; his lectures and books transgressive performances delighting a dying culture, its natural dandyism.

It is Gary Gutting who offers the best insight into Foucault: he belonged to a new wave of academics that brought the fresh juice of belletrism into an academy arthritic with age. The output of these young radicals an unstable mix of scholarship and imagination, where the details of history and the concepts of philosophy were used to create theories often fantastic and fairy tale; for Derrida the entire the philosophic tradition was a fiction.

We are getting closer…

Foucault didn't discover the truths of modern society. No. He took his master - Nietzsche - at his word, and created new myths, which entire generations have come to think simple common sense. These ideas are the foundation stories of our time; Foucault the creator of the contemporary universe his influence is everywhere; we meet an old student, and we are talking, though soon we can hardly stand for the heady atmosphere, so lush, so reverential… “Knowledge is power” she intones, as if touching the relics of a saint. 

But he was an intellectual guerrilla… In a curious metamorphosis, common to ideas, the meaning of his key concept has changed; power no longer conceived as a necessary ally but as our worst enemy, to be attacked and ridiculed; a transformation that has made him highly attractive to those, and there are many, who identify with the oppressed. Foucault has become our Christ. His books our Gospels. Ever see a Christian throw away Holy Writ?