We cannot know what the grass would be, power or sex not cloaked in discourse; it is impossible for us to release (da "we dig out of the sand") facts from the shell of their discourses. It is neither relativism nor historicism, it is perspectivism.
-Paul Wen
If you ask Martin Heidegger, Aristotle's life can be summed up in this sentence: "Aristotle was born, worked and died." That is the writer The battle and the times wanted to say that the philosopher's biography is not important, but his work; you don't have to be too much of a villain to say that, look, Heidegger is one of those who certainly have an interest in not studying their biography too closely (it is well known why). But there is something else: it is easy for us to have an indifferent distance towards Aristotle's biography, because he is not even in the broadest reasonable sense of the word our contemporary, but rather an actor of an epoch long enough that it cannot exist in our consciousness otherwise than through "a work ", be it a philosopher's, a historian's or a poet's. In other words, we are thrown into the world in which we found Aristotle as a long-ago canonized value, fully a "work", only in the traces of a "man". With contemporaries, unfortunately or fortunately, it is quite different.
Michel Foucault (Michel Foucault, 1926-1984), is one of the most influential thinkers of the second half of the XNUMXth century, but also a man who produced and caused controversies, and by God, he also endured them. Everyone liked to "have an opinion" about him, including those who had never read anything of his - which was always less of an omission and more of an attitude. Provided that ordinary petty-bourgeois odium or ignorant contempt-for-empty makes sense to honor with such a designation.
Didier Eribon and Paul Venn, Foucault's friends and collaborators from different stages, wrote significant studies about him, now available in Serbian, and in the center of their attention was Foucault as a man of his era, a volcanic intellectual phenomenon, but also an imperfect human being whose these qualities also knew how to influence his work (as if it were possible otherwise). Eribon wrote an already canonical intellectual biography of the author Histories of sexuality, with a simple title Michel Foucault Biography (translated by Jelena Stakić; Karpos, Loznica 2014), while Paul Wen created an exciting intellectual-polemical breviary or a cross-section through all the key points of Foucault's work, written with the intention of dispelling at least some of the mystifications and "fancied essences" that were floating around around Foucault, Foucault: as a thinker and as a man (translated by Olja Petronić; Mediterran, Novi Sad 2014).
Eribon's capital book first appeared back in 1989, and a year ago a new, updated edition was published. It could be said that with this biographer - unlike some others - Foucault was "lucky" because Eribon is more than a solid connoisseur of Foucault's work, who is able not only to succinctly and succinctly interpret the significance of each of his most important works ( but also to convincingly convey to the reader the author's triumphs, anxieties and doubts that followed their publication) and to contextualize his books and other works in the time in which they appeared, but also an author who invested enormous effort in researching Foucault's life, and that effort never takes on the "excess" that leads to "tabloidy" and the so-called scandals. In other words, Eribon is a careful chronicler of Foucault's upbringing in a cold provincial bourgeois family, his early "disorders" during his studies in Paris, the painful search for the secrets of his own sexuality, etc., and that everything that can bear the aegis of the "private" is present here and considered only insofar as it can be shown or at least reasonably assumed to be reflective of Foucault's later work.
One of Foucault's constants was - although he spent most of his official career in universities - his essential, deep, "stomach" anti-academicism; also resistance to political dogmas of any kind. Hence, his flirting with Marxism, (Lacanian) psychoanalysis, structuralism, etc., remained only flirting, while his essential interests, just like his writing style and philosophical method, always went aside from the dominant schools and "isms". We know Foucault as an almost "canonized" contemporary classic, but Eribon lavishly documents how much resistance, misunderstanding, intolerance and even ridicule his work encountered almost to the very end. Well, there is something collaterally comforting in that: sometimes even in the most famous academic institutions, publishing houses and newspaper editorial offices of Paris, when faced with an unusual thought that does not fit into the prescribed framework, they behave quite provincially...
Apart from the "philosophical" and (conditionally) "private" Foucault, the most important hero of this book is the "activist" Foucault, self-styled to the point of eclecticism and alienated from French and European intellectual fashions and herds; all his life obsessed with the border of "normality" and "madness" and "transgression" as among others and the most meaningful human activities, Foucault engages in the defense of the rights of prisoners and "lunatics", as well as in anti-colonialist struggles - but the latter will not make him blind, for example, to anti-Semitism in the former French colonies - and in the fight for a different, reformed university, which will bring him closer ( post)sixty-eighth wave, but it won't stay there for too long either. His essential preoccupation with (homo)sexual transgression will not make him the archetype of stereotypical, politically correct gay activists, just as his profoundly "left" position will not make him insensitive to the plight of Eastern European dissidents, let alone make him "Sartrean" brawl singing to the Kremlin tyrants... First of all, the only major "slip" Foucault made at first was somewhat supporting Khomeini's Islamic Revolution (until it showed itself in action as the only thing it was, on such premises, and could be, therefore: insane tyranny), which is why one reader (of Iranian origin) Le Nouvel Observateur received a severe (and deserved) verbal beating…
It would be a sin not to emphasize another virtue of Eribon's book that transcends the "biographical genre" itself: this book, by the very fact that it closely follows Foucault through the Scylles and Charybdis of post-war French and European intellectual life, is also an exciting chronicle of intellectual-political-worldview currents and fashion, conflict and vanity, turns on the curves of history... Hence its pages, attracting and repelling with Foucault, are also filled with Sartre, Aron, Simon de Beauvoir, Deleuze, Diamel and so many others.
The story of that "Iranian slippage" spontaneously leads us to Venn's book; devastatingly and elegantly ironic and witty, Wen will address this Foucaultian failure - which, moreover, is by no means devoid of insightful, even prophetic, insights into the future importance of political Islam! - to comment lapidically with words nobody's perfect...
But what exactly is this two-hundred-page devotional essay by Venn? It seems that Venn would not have been at all wrong to have subtitled this book as: "Critique of commonplaces and established opinions about Michel Foucault." Let's say, those that he was a nihilist and anti-humanist; nothing in Foucault's work - with its incredible consistency devoted to the oppressed, the humiliated, the forgotten, the despised in the world... - comes close to this interpretation, but that doesn't mean at all that it will be rejected just because of that... Wen dismantles that kind of prejudice with with the vehemence of a connoisseur who seems to enter a rambunctious room where a drunken party has been raging all night and, almost without looking around, unfailingly returns every single thing in place.
On the other hand, where Eribon relies primarily on the factography of life, Wen interprets from the works of Foucault the position of a man who - very, very deliberately - did not belong to any of the "world reformer" castes, but who essentially revolutionized writing and thinking not only on in the French language, I was a consistent advocate of cautious and determined reformism (after the rich experiences of the 20th century, it is less contradictory than it seems!) in Western societies. And by no means at the end: although not a devotee of the cult and fetish of writing and text, Michel Foucault was to the core writer; his opinion is inseparable from the concept of superior literature, one that changes the world by its very existence, which (i) Venn demonstrates admirably. And how would it be different with a writer Supervision and punishment, to the one who loved René Char's line so much: "Develop your legitimate weirdness." That unique human justifiable weirdness will be read and researched for a long time to come, and these two books are a great contribution to that, whether you read them as an introduction to Foucault, or as
appendix.
