jdact
Forgetting Foucault: Acts, Identities, and the History
of Sexuality
«When Jean Baudrillard published his infamous pamphlet
Forget Foucault in March 1977, Foucault's intellectual power, as Baudrillard recalled ten years
later, was enormous. After all, the
reviews of La volonté de savoir, the
first volume of Michel Foucault's History
of Sexuality, had only just started to appear. At that time, according
to Baudrillard’s belated attempt in Cool
Memories to redeem his gaffe and to justify himself, by portraying his
earlier attack on Foucault as having been inspired, improbably, by
sentiments of friendship and generosity, Foucault was being persecuted, allegedly, by thousands of disciples and… sycophants.
In such circumstances, Baudrillard virtuously insisted, to forget him was to do him a service; to adulate him was to do him a
disservice.
Just how far Baudrillard was willing to go in order to
render this sort of unsolicited service to Foucault emerges from another
remark of his in the same passage: Foucault's
death. Loss of confidence in his own genius… Leaving the sexual aspects aside,
the loss of the immune system is no more than the biological transcription of
the other process. Foucault was already washed up by the time he died, in
other words, and AIDS was merely the outward and visible sign of his inward,
moral and intellectual, decay. Leaving the sexual aspects aside, of course.
Baudrillard's injunction to forget Foucault, which was
premature at the time it was issued, has since become superfluous. Not that
Foucault is neglected; not that his work is ignored. (Quite the contrary in fact.)
Rather, Foucault's continuing prestige, and the almost ritualistic invocation
of his name by academic practitioners of cultural theory has had the effect of
reducing the operative range of his thought to a small set of received ideas, slogans,
and bits of jargon that have now become so commonplace and so familiar as to
make a more direct engagement with Foucault's texts entirely dispensable. As a
result, we are so far from remembering Foucault that there is little point in
entertaining the possibility of forgetting him.
Take, for example, the title of a conference, Bodies and Pleasures in Pre-and Early
Modernity held from 3 to 5 November 1995
at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Bodies and pleasures, aa that famous phrase occurs in the concluding
paragraphs of Foucault's History of Sexuality, volume 1, does
not in fact describe Foucault's zero-degree definition of the elements in question
in the history of sexuality as the poster for the conference confidently
announces. To be sure, the penultimate sentence of The History of Sexuality,
volume 1, finds Foucault looking forward to the day, some time in the future,
when a different economy [une autre
économie] of bodies and pleasures will have replaced the apparatus of
sexuality and when, accordingly, it will become difficult to understand how the
ruses of sexuality… were able to subject us to that austere monarchy of sex. An
incautious reader might take that phrase, a different economy of bodies and
pleasures, to denote a mere rearrangement of otherwise unchanged and unchanging
bodies and pleasures, a minor modification in the formal design of the sexual
economy alone, consisting in a revised organization of its perennial elements
(as the conference poster terms them). But such an interpretation of Foucault's
meaning, though superficially plausible, is mistaken, and in fact it runs
counter to the entire thrust of his larger argument. The change of which
Foucault speaks in the next-to-last sentence of The History of Sexuality,
volume 1, and which he seems fondly to anticipate, involves nothing less than
the displacement of the current sexual economy by a different economy altogether, an economy that will feature bodies and
pleasures instead of, or at least in addition to, such familiar and overworked
entities as sexuality and desire. Foucault makes it very clear that bodies and
pleasures, in his conception, are not the eternal building blocks of sexual
subjectivity or sexual experience; they are not basic, irreducible, or natural
elements that different human societies rearrange in different patterns over
time, and that our own society has elaborated into the cultural edifice now
known as sexuality». In Martha C. Nussbaum e Juha Sihvola, The
Sleep of Reason. Erotic experience and sexual ethics in ancient Greece and
Rome, David M. Halperin, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London,
USA, 2002, ISBN 0-226-60915-4.
Cortesia
de UChicago/JDACT