Historicizing Theory

2. Michel Foucault and the Specter of War

I remember very well that I experienced one of my first great frights when Chancellor Dollfus was assassinated by the Nazis in, I think, 1934. . . . The menace of war was our background, our framework of existence. Then the war arrived. Much more than the activities of family life, it was these events concerning the world which are the substance of our memory. . . . Our private life was really threatened. Maybe that is the reason why I am fascinated by history and the relationship between personal experience and those events of which we are a part. I think that is the nucleus of my theoretical desires. —Michel Foucault, Politics, Philosophy, Culture The last two decades of critical reflection on the legacy of Michel Foucault have given us a substantive and dynamic portrait of the theorist as Parisian intellectual, sexual revolutionary, and political dissident—all roles Foucault consciously adopted and polished, while leaving the factual skeleton of his life deliberately unfleshed. Indeed, critical views of Foucault have often reproduced his own reluctance to connect his thought to a life: David Macey, Didier Eribon, even to a great extent James Miller and the many critics who offer brief biographies as part of their critical studies of Foucault’s works all seem to discover that the attempt to tell a relatively traditional form of biography is complicated enormously both by Foucault’s position on his own legacy, and by his reluctance to make information about his life part of the written record. Macey begins his book with an exhaustive list of the various 49 2 Michel Foucault and the Specter of War KAREN RABER philosophical traditions that have claimed Foucault, or that might have influenced his work, concluding that to tell the life story is to tell the intellectual history Foucault did willingly leave behind: “To say that the history of his books is to a large extent the biography of Michel Foucault is, at one level, almost a truism,” Macey observes, and clarifies, “His biography is, that is, the story of a thought, a work in progress.”1 David Cousins Hoy remarks that “there may not be a single ‘Foucault,’” and so attempts to find consistency in his works are unlikely to succeed.2 Miller, whose discussion of The Passion of Michel Foucault (1993) inspired heated and venomous arguments among Foucault scholars for deliberately foregrounding Foucault’s sexuality, may nonetheless be most tellingly criticized for telling a wholly conventional psychologized biography: Lynn Hunt observes that Miller’s treatment of the man who wished “to efface himself and decenter all of mankind,” represents the resurrection of all Foucault assaulted and should, if you believe his positions have merit, have successfully dismantled.3 At the moment the critic believes she has found the ultimate “life story” of “Foucault” it turns out the author is simply not where we expected him to be. We have inherited from Foucault, these examples suggest, a skeleton, a ghost, a mind, some thoughts, but perhaps not precisely a system of thought, and certainly not an individuated, coherent corpus—physical or intellectual, disciplined or otherwise. Yet, even in the absence of a system, consistency or a body, there is still history—discontinuous, problematic in its reconstruction, subject to Foucault’s own skeptical methods, but a kind of history. A history like that, derived exclusively from texts, history that is the story of thoughts or what the academy has classified as “intellectual history,” however, is also a tradition thoroughly assaulted in Foucault’s early works. But if we are looking to historicize Foucault, should we not be looking for a social history, a local history, which suggests the environment, the historical context that produced ‘Foucault’—the “nucleus of [his]theoretical desires?” Such a history, proceeding from a skeptical posture, is in fact precisely the project Foucault’s work invites from us. Some, mainly Foucault’s critics and intellectual heirs, have tried to do just that. Most critical accounts of the relationships between Foucault’s life and work break his development into periods—Hoy, for instance, is typical in dividing the work into three decades, each with a particular set of interests, implications, and outcomes. And most generally agree about locating the connections between his theoretical positions, his political work, and in turn his sudden and tremendous influence on European and American theory and politics, in the turbulent events, the maimed bodies, the political crises of the 1960s and 1970s: Vietnam, Algeria, the Tunisian and Parisian student uprisings of 1967 and 1968, and Attica...