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  • Confessions of a Masked Philosopher: Anonymity and Identification in Foucault and Guibert
  • Nicholas de Villiers (bio)

Hence I cannot give you what I thought I was writing for you—that is what I must acknowledge: the amorous dedication is impossible (I shall not be satisfied with a worldly or mundane signature, pretending to dedicate to you a work which escapes us both). The operation in which the other is to be engaged is not a signature. It is, more profoundly, an inscription . . . [I]n [Pasolini’s] Teorema the “other” does not speak, but he inscribes something within each of those who desire him—he performs what the mathematicians call a catastrophe (the disturbance of one system by another): it is true that this mute figure is an angel.

—Roland Barthes (1978, 79)

This is a work of fiction. Any similarity of persons, places, or events depicted herein to actual persons, places, or events is entirely coincidental.

—Publishing info. from Hervé Guibert (1991)

In one of the many dialogues with a fictional interlocutor in the works of Michel Foucault, in this case The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault addresses critical suspicions regarding his “moveable thought”:

“Are you already preparing the way out that will enable you in your next book to spring up somewhere else and declare as you’re now doing: no, no, I’m not where you are lying in wait for me, but over here, laughing at you?”

“What, do you imagine that I would take so much trouble and so much pleasure in writing, do you think that I would keep so persistently to my task, if I were not preparing—with a rather shaky hand—a labyrinth into which I can venture . . . in which I can lose myself and appear at last to eyes that I will never have to meet again. I am no doubt not the only one who [End Page 75] writes in order to have no face. Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order. At least spare us their morality when we write.”

(1972, 17)

Many of Foucault’s biographers find here the irony of Foucault’s fame, yet desire for anonymity. (Here, Foucault no doubt references Maurice Blanchot, as perhaps the most famously “faceless” French writer). Against a writing style that seems self-effacing, they attempt to put a face to the name Foucault, to undertake the difficult task of locating Foucault’s “identification papers.” This morality of writing stands in opposition to Foucault’s reference to eyes he will never have to meet again: this is a text which cruises us. This morality is met with Foucault’s famous laughter. This laughter is a prominent feature in many Foucault biographies, such as James Miller’s The Passion of Michel Foucault, as well as in the works of Foucault’s friends Hervé Guibert and Gilles Deleuze (both of whom have expressed the difficulty of transcribing Foucault’s laugh). These accounts vary in terms of how they present and invoke the more “personal” Foucault. As Eleanor Kaufman has pointed out,

With respect to this “personal” Foucault, it is interesting to note the prodigious industry of Foucault biographies. In contrast to the overwhelming surplus of details that these biographies provide, the details that Deleuze proffers—and they are generally the same gestural tracings (the eyes, the voice, the laugh) repeated over and over again—seem paradoxically more revelatory . . . While the biographies would present a Foucault laid bare, Deleuze presents a Foucault who haunts.

(2001, 77)

This laughter also haunts Hervé Guibert in his roman-à-clef To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life, in which the narrator describes his relationship to a fictionalized version of Foucault named “Muzil,” and recounts Muzil’s death from AIDS. One passage recalls the night of his death when Hervé watches a rerun clip from an intellectual variety show Apostrophes of one huge, endless fit of Muzil’s laughter:

literally cracking up at a moment when everyone expected him to be as serious as the pope and pontificate about one of the tenets of...

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