Foucault

BOOK REVIEWS this light, Conrad's work is fascinating precisely for the sheer impossibility of its task, a failure which is immanent in the project of recovery. Thus Erdinast-Vulcan views Conrad's unevenness as a symptom of a broader problem; the fight against ethical collapse "operates both as a theme and a structuring principle"—that is to say, a discourse—in Conrad's fiction throughout his career. She isolates three discursive strategies in Conrad's work, labelling them myth, metaphysics, and textuality. In Lord Jim, The Rescue, and Nostromo, she argues, Conrad regressively turns to the discourse of myth to insulate his protagonists from the modern world. Heart of Darkness, Under Western Eyes, and The Shadow-Line are marked by a turn to metaphysics, the quest for a transcendent authority. Finally, she argues, Conrad's later work shows his characters locked in a world of self-referential fictionality; this "self-defeating" discourse she labels "textuality." Such categorizations might seem intimidating or artificial were they not the occasion for some bold, well-argued readings of the problem points in most of Conrad's novels. Erdinast-Vulcan defines Jim's weakness not, "as has been argued by critics, his tendency to live in a fictional realm, but his inability to bring himself to a total surrender to the fiction." She notices fascinating patterns of doubling in the "metaphysical " novels; the sudden "dissolution" of the narrative voice in the final section of Under Western Eyes, she notes "is symptomatic of a world which has lost its view of auctor mundi and denies the relationship of the ethical to the Absolute." Her explanation of Conrad's late, weak writing as representative of the "opposite pole of romantic vision," one in which fiction is imposed on an essentially meaningless reality, is original and persuasive. While Erdinast-Vulcan's book is tightly argued, it can seem heavy with jargon at times. Some useful concepts have inelegant names, like "identifiction." Her ample bibliography omits Aaron Fogel's excellent Bahktinian study of Conrad, Coercion to Speak: Conrad's Poetics of Dialogue. Nevertheless this treatment of Conrad's ethics in the light of the philosophical problems of modernism is a powerful, intelligent book. Wendy Moffat Dickinson College Foucault Didier Eribon. Michel Foucault. Betsy Wing, trans. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991. xii + 374 pp. $17.95 529 ELT : VOLUME 35:4 1992 DIDIER ERIBON acknowledges in the first sentence of his biography of Michel Foucault that his project "may seem paradoxical," inasmuch as Foucault spent a lifetime repudiating the very notion of the individual as a "subject." Claiming indeed—in a phrase which has achieved ironic fame—that he himself wrote "in order to have no face," Foucault was nothing if not paradoxical: an inveterate individualist who denied the reality of the individual; a well-heeled bourgeois professional and selfdescribed "anarchist of the left;" a caustic critic of the same French establishment of which he was always a member, and which made him its fair-haired boy during the seventies and eighties; and finally, the ultimate success story within a world he would later compare scathingly to Bentham's Panopticon, that centralized, bureaucratized universe of modern France in which human beings are measured according to social scientific norms and a never ending battery of "objective" tests and "confidential" reports. Yet Eribon, a journalist on intimate terms with Paris's left-bank elite, does not confront and analyze his paradoxical subject—who must indeed be constructed as a "subject" if there is to be a biography of him—so much as keep a respectful distance from him. Warning us that Foucault was a complex man of many masks, Eribon denies that "there is any truth of personality that it would be possible to discover beneath these successive disguises"; and while arguing throughout that there is a unity to Foucault's oeuvre, he wishes to avoid effacing its "innovative power" and "fruitfulness" and hence offers no "single, mutilating version." In short, this is a biography which, out of a wish to remain faithful to the precepts of its "subject," refuses to interpret either Foucault's personality or his writings. Among the consequences of this refusal are some odd omissions. Writing of...