part 1
Last year, an Argentine play, helmed by a distinguished director, called something like “Searching for Foucault”, arrived on tour in Montevideo. It was about a teacher having a nervous breakdown. There was disappointingly little about Foucault himself. It was clear that the play was using his name to give itself a certain caché. Apart from the fact I had wanted to see more of this director’s work, it felt as though I had gone to see it under false pretences. Still, the title demonstrates the curious allure of the philosopher’s name. More than any other late twentieth century intellect, the myth of Foucault has grown from the days when I first studied him, a year after his death, at York university. If the last thirty years have been the age of any given figure, we might well look on back on them as the Foucault years.
Macey’s book traces Foucault’s life from birth to untimely death. As well as detailing the story of his life, it also tackles the story of his intellectual development, not an easy task for such an intellectual magpie. Suffice to say that Macey is rigorous and comprehensive in his detailing of Foucault’s work, which is the most important element of his life. However, as regards the secondary issue of describing the person, Foucault remains as enigmatic a figure upon the conclusion of the book as he was at the start. He’s a bundle of contradictions. Sage-like but quick-tempered. An espouser of political causes of all kinds who was criticised for not being political enough. An ascetic soul who was also a hedonist who frequented the bathhouses of San Francisco. A would-be outsider who was very much an insider in the highfalutin circles of French academia. Perhaps these contradictions are fundamental to the construction of a mind that taught the world to think in terms of matrices rather than absolutes.
Nevertheless, even Macey’s book seems to cling to the notion of an absolute truth that underpins thought. The final pages relate a coded secret account of Foucault’s past (written by a possible ex-lover) as though this might indeed be the key to understanding him. (One that made me think of Hanecke’s Caché.) One imagines Foucault himself would not have warmed to this theory/ conceit. Or perhaps this was a way for the biographer to acknowledge that whilst his book discloses a great deal of information about Foucault, the philosopher, it also leaves many a stone unturned.
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part 2
Additional note written whilst reading this book:
“On reading Foucault’s biography:
When I first read Foucault, in 1986/7, it felt as though one had discovered a writer who could map out the shape of the world. Not just the world as I knew it to be then, but also the world which was to come. In so many ways this proved to be correct. Foucault was the prophet of identity, of post-truth (for better and for worse). The iconoclast of the post war systems he and my parents grew up with. However, this is not the thought. The thought is thus: the world requires a successor. For the first time since those days, one is conscious of the fact that Foucault’s view (pendulum) is no longer sufficient. In the ensuing decades three things have occurred which have yet to find a mind capable of synthesising them. These elements are the digitalisation of the world (internet; personal computers; robotics etc); climate change; accelerated globalisation. The latter has always existed as a concept, but has been hyper-extenuated by the rise of aviation and the digital shrinking of the world. The other two factors were no more than flecks on the distant horizon back in 1987. There may be writers/philosophers who address any of these issues with imagination and insight. But I have yet to come across anyone who has in any way synthesised these elements of the present, permitting the reader to peer into a future and begin to comprehend the shape and needs of advancement/ survival within this future. The global warming of information. The rising simulacrum tide.”
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