Scribbling On Foucault’s Walls
By Quiet Riot Girl
For Roland – Both of You
I write in order to have no face
Acknowledgements
Thanks and apologies go to Mark Simpson, for allowing me to take his words and his generous correspondence, and his friends (!), and turn them into something else. Thanks to David Halperin for kindly sending me his chapter from Dead Lovers, and for making me go and work it out for myself. Thanks to Steven Zeeland, The Man Who Wasn’t There, for The Queen Is Dead and A Lover of Soldiers. Thanks to James Maker, for galvanising me towards the end into productive indignation, with his impertinent aphorism, Foucault Knows Fuck All.
Thanks to everyone at Year Zero Writers for reading and showcasing extracts, especially Marc Horne who read the first draft, and to everyone at QRG blog who read and commented on the work in progress.
A special thank-you to Clare Farrell, whose website, http://www.michel-foucault.com will forever be to me, the place where Foucault lives.
PART ONE: MADNESS IS CHILDHOOD
Scribbling on Foucault’s Walls
Imagine if Foucault had had a son (or a daughter)…
In this 1980 interview1 with Michael Bess, a very lucky and I expect rather nervous graduate student from San Francisco, the great cutter of knowledge himself gave us a little insight into what kind of parent he might have been…
Question: Let me give a different example. If a child wanted to scribble on the walls of a house, would it be repressive to prevent him or her from doing so? At what point does one say, “That’s enough!”?
Foucault: […] If I accepted the picture of power that is frequently adopted— namely, that it’s something horrible and repressive for the individual—it’s clear that preventing a child from scribbling on the walls would be an unbearable
tyranny. But that’s not it: I say that power is a relation. A relation in which one guides the behaviour of others. And there’s no reason why this manner of guiding the behaviour of others should not ultimately have results which are positive, valuable, interesting, and so on. If I had a kid, I assure you he would not write on the walls—or if he did, it would be against my will. The very idea!
Picture the scene: Foucault’s study in the family home in Paris. The only type of clutter that is allowed is of the literary kind. His daughter, let’s give him a daughter just to disrupt our preconceived ideas further, of about four years old, is sat on the floor, crayoning, while her father studies. Oh but she is bored. Studying is all her father ever does. Studying and talking. About things she doesn’t understand. Her world is full of foreign countries like ‘Hegemony’ and ‘Discourse’. She looks despondently out of the window onto the square below, where children are playing. She sighs.
So it is hardly surprising that this neglected child picks up one of her crayons, a thick red one, and proceeds to draw all over the white walls of her father’s study. She is drawing a picture of hegemony. She wants her father to see her. For a long while he doesn’t see her at all, his shiny bald head is lodged firmly in his books. But in the end he looks up, irritated by the scratching sound.
‘Mais Quest’ce que tu fais?’ he demands. ‘Arrete!’
And he grabs the red crayon from the girl’s hand, who proceeds to cry. Loudly. Michel’s plans for his afternoon of interrogating dominant ideologies are dashed. ‘Power is a relation’, between father and daughter. He drops his book and scoops his daughter up in his arms, gently stroking her hair to placate her. When her cries have subsided, he offers to take her down to the square to play. The girl’s face lights up for the first time that day. ‘A relation in which one guides the behaviour of others..’
‘Hegemony’ remains. In deep red scribbled marks, all over the great philosopher’s study walls.
The Reader is The Writer
"I don't write a book so that it will be the final word; I write a book so that other books are possible, not necessarily written by me." Michel Foucault2
Dear Mr Simpson3,
I am writing to ask for your endorsement for a project I have begun. I am a great admirer of your work, and I don’t feel comfortable embarking on this endeavour without your ‘blessing’.
I am undertaking to write a work of ‘fiction’ based on the idea that Michel Foucault had a daughter. I put ‘fiction’ in inverted commas, because Foucault himself claimed that much of what he wrote, though very much concerned with reality, consisted of ‘fictions’.
‘Foucault, of course, had a special relation to fiction. "Foucault liked to say that all his works were 'fictions'," Macey tells us, "which did not necessarily mean," he goes on to explain, "that they were untrue." Foucault admitted to Claude Mauriac that he had made fictional use of materials he assembled in his books and made fictional constructions from authentic elements’4
So ‘Foucault’s Daughter’ is obviously fictional, but I am also using her to interrogate Foucault and his writings/life.
I believe you are friends with Steve Zeeland and Professor David Halperin. Halperin is very much the ‘expert’ in Foucault as far as I am concerned, and as you know, Zeeland knows a lot about some of the hidden corners of Foucauldian homosexual theory and practice. If you were willing, it would be really great if you could pass on a few questions I have for them, regarding the project. I don’t want to approach them ‘cold’ so to speak (apologies, I use a lot of ‘’s – I love words, but I never trust them to say what they mean or mean what they say).
I am, in addition, interested in the link between Halperin’s ‘Saint Foucault5’, your ‘Saint Morrissey’ and of course, Sartre’s ‘Saint Genet’. I am getting the impression that you ‘Queer Theorists’ like your ‘Great Men of History’. That’s partly why I think Foucault’s Daughter might have something valuable to find out here. She is not quite so in awe of the phallic phantoms of Homosexual Fagiography as some of her brothers. It’s not that she doesn’t ‘respect the cock’. She just doesn’t think it should get to write the whole story.
I
really hope you don’t find this idea impudent. Or if you do, that
you still believe it to be worthwhile. I come to this subject, as you
must have done with St Morrissey, with a kind of obsessive
love/ambivalence for Foucault, and his work.
In short, I am a
Foucault fan.
Yours in anticipation,
Quiet Riot Girl
Colette
The faults of husbands are often caused by the excess virtues of their wives. S. G. Colette
1960 is a difficult year for Mr and Mrs Foucault. And also it is the year their daughter is born. They never admit it to themselves, but the arrival of a baby into their lives at this particular point in time is felt by both of them, especially Michel, to be more than a minor inconvenience.
Michel is in the process of finishing Madness and Civilisation. It has taken its toll. How can you address the subject of Madness, and Civilisation, without facing up to your own demons? His wife is worried about him. But she is pregnant and he doesn’t seem that worried about her. Such is their marriage. As Colette, Madame Foucault’s favourite writer, once said: ‘a woman who thinks she is intelligent seeks equality with men; an intelligent woman gives up’. She gave up a long time ago.
But something about being pregnant has rekindled an old fire in Anne Foucault’s belly. Maybe the fire is the baby itself. There develops an unspoken battle over which will be born first, the baby or the book. Neither has any choice in the matter of course, but the battle is on all the same. A psychic battle, the worst kind, between husband and wife. It seems like a long time since the pair had enough passion to fight. But now, they are fighting each other once more, not out of love or hate or desire, but simply over the things they are fighting for: Anne for her unborn child, Michel for his ‘great work’.
Mother and baby 'win' the battle, and their daughter is born in May 1960, a couple of months before Foucault finally finishes his masterpiece. He is not there at the birth, as he has work to do. He always does. His daughter will learn this soon enough.
But the philosopher is able to spare some energy for another battle: over their daughter's name. He wanted to call her Eleanor, after Marx's daughter. But his wife is tired of Marx. And she knows enough to know that Eleanor had not had a happy life. She wants to call their child Colette, after her favourite novelist. Colette had not had the easiest life either, but it had been long and full of self-expression, sensuality and such beautiful writing. Something clicks inside her and she will not give in. Foucault argues and cajoles her, but he only makes it worse. Lectures in Marxist history from your all but estranged husband are not much fun at the best of times. When you are exhausted from giving birth they are more than a woman can take. His last ditch attempt to spread the impact of power is to try and get her to compromise, by calling the baby Colette Eleanor. But that seems the worst option of all. It would be a constant reminder of the fact they couldn't agree on such a basic l thing as their daughter's name. The mother stands firm. She gets her way and Colette is born.
The first couple of months are hard. Foucault is preoccupied with finishing his book, and his wife is restless, tentative about looking after such a fragile thing as a new life. She feels alone. That is because she is.
The shadow that hangs over the couple is darker and bigger than either of them realise. This is the year that Paul Mirguet changes the law in France, and erodes the precious 'Code Penal'. New legislation means that homosexuals are to be included in a list of 'scourges' against French society, which also includes 'whores, alcoholism and transvestism', and punished accordingly, if they dare express their perversion openly.
This will come to matter greatly to Foucault as he is a passionate defender of the principles of the republic. Well, the ones he agrees with anyway. Nothing is fundamental. But it will matter to him more, because, despite the image to the contrary given by his wife and sudden, beautiful baby girl, he too is a homosexual. His wife is well aware of this fact. How could she not be? It is written all over his sorry French ass.
Mirguet's law doesn't affect Foucault immediately in the direct sense. He is too busy with his book, and trying to maintain the facade of a marriage to be much of a pederaste in the active sense at this time. But there is something about the repressive nature of it, the closing in of a regulatory discourse on sexuality, on people's freedoms, that has a subconscious perverse effect on the man. You could put it down to a panic at becoming a father, or the coming to an end of his great project, but Foucault, without even realising it, reacts to Mirguet’s Law in quite an unexpected way.
One cool night, when his wife and baby are asleep, Michel leaves his books open on his desk and goes out. He does not have a plan, he just wants to breathe the night air. In the end he finds himself on one of his local haunts, a dingy bar on a side street near the river. He orders a cognac and sits by the window. He notices out of the corner of his eye, a young man coming into the bar, tall, thick set, a bit rough looking, possibly a labourer. The man looks at Michel and Michel looks back through his glasses, suddenly feeling very intellectual and fey. But the man does not seem concerned. He nods at Foucault and then walks past him in a very suggestive manner, clenching his buttocks. He sits at a table a little way from Michel, downs a biere and then leaves, passing Michel’s table again, doing his butt clenching thing. So Foucault takes the hint this time and follows the man out of the bar and down the street, keeping a few paces behind. He sees him turn right into a street, find a square, climb over the fence and into the bushes. Foucault follows, trying not to lose his glasses, his footing, his cool. He makes out the man in the shadows and approaches. But he is not sure what to do. Who will take the lead? Is it supposed to be him? The man decides for the both of them. He undoes his trousers and pushes Michel unceremoniously down onto his knees, guiding his head towards his cock.. Michel Foucault, philosopher, husband, father, kneels and sucks on an anonymous cock.. And, despite everything that suggests its opposite, he feels like this is a ceremony. He might be drinking communion wine, not a stranger’s spunk. Foucault swallows the sticky wordless substance silently. The man moans a little then does up his trousers and disappears into the night.
There is no going back now.
When he returns home, he goes to his daughter's room, and stands by her crib, watching her sleep. There is no shortage of love in his heart for this tiny bundle of bits of him and bits of his wife. He stands there and prays to a God he knows does not exist, prays that she will not suffer, not too much, in the coming years that he suddenly realises are going to be full of upheaval. For him, his wife, their daughter, and also the world beyond their little domestic sphere, for France.
The novelist, Colette, once said : ‘a happy childhood is poor preparation for human contacts’. This child, her namesake, is going to be very well prepared indeed.
Subject to the Law
Q: Assuming that we aren’t doomed, chained to sex as our destiny: and from childhood as they say…
MF: Exactly; look at what’s happening in the case of children. They say the life of children is their sexual life. From the bottle to puberty, that’s all they talk about. Behind the desire to learn to read or a liking for comic strips there is still, always, sexuality. Are you sure that this type of discourse is in fact a liberating one? Are you sure it doesn’t enclose children in a sort of sexual insularity? And what if after all they didn’t give a damn? What if the freedom of not being adult consisted precisely in not being subject to the law, the principle, the commonplace which ends up by being so boring, of sexuality? If there could be polymorphous relationships with things, people, bodies, wouldn’t that be childhood? Adults call this polymorphousness perversity to reassure themselves, and in so doing colour it with the monotonous tint of their own sex6.
‘The child had a wooden reel with a piece of string tied around it. It never occurred to him to pull it along the floor behind him, for instance, and play at its being a carriage. What he did was to hold the reel by the string and very skilfully throw it over the edge of his curtained cot, so that it disappeared into it, at the same time uttering his expressive "o-o-o-o." He then pulled the reel again by the string and hailed its reappearance with a joyful "da" [there]. This, then, was the complete gameódisappearance and return. As a rule one only witnessed its first act, which was repeated untiringly as a game in itself, though there is no doubt that the greater pleasure was attached to the second act. The interpretation of the game then became obvious. It was related to the child's great cultural achievement -- the instinctual renunciation (that is, the renunciation of instinctual satisfaction) which he had made in allowing his mother to go away without protesting’ Sigmund Freud "Beyond the Pleasure Principle" (Standard Edition, Vol. 18, pp. 14-15)7
One of Collette’s favourite things is a ball, a red, rubber ball. She plays with it, throwing it against the wall at the back of the house, and catching it. When her parents are arguing she goes out to the yard and throws the ball against the wall and counts in her head: ‘un, deux, trois’… to see how far she can get before she drops it. This repetitive action calms her, and drowns out the sound of the shouting and banging indoors. ‘Un, deux, trois, quatre, cinq…’ She does not know what it is that has made her parents so angry at each other, as if they are enemies. Sometimes she worries it is her, that she has done something wrong that made everything go like this. That she is a bad girl and her parents are angry at her. She throws the ball and she counts in her head and she pretends that she is happy, that her maman and papa love each other and will call her in any moment, to tell her supper is ready, or that it is time to get ready to go out on a trip, to the park, or the zoo. They never call her. She just keeps throwing the ball and counting. ‘Un, deux, trois, quatre, cinq, six…’
Once she lost the ball at nursery- she threw it too high and it got stuck on the roof of a shed. She was distraught. She could not contemplate life without her red ball. It made her feel sick to think about the loss. She screamed so piercingly and persistently that the caretaker was called from his day off specially to retrieve the ball and placate the child, a tiny hint of a smile peeking through her tears when he handed it to her. If Doctor Freud had have been there to witness this trauma, he may have concluded she was continuing to play the ‘fort-da’ game, where a baby throws something – perhaps out of its cot - and then delights in the fact that someone, a parent usually, retrieves it, before throwing the object again and thus repeating the process. This, argued Freud, could be a sign of how children learn to repeat traumatic experiences, to relive them, as if to take control, or to turn them into something which they can derive pleasure from, albeit perversely. It could also, said Sigmund, relate to the triumph the child feels at allowing its mother to leave the room without protesting. But Colette was born into a traumatic situation and her childhood was littered with separations and losses. She has not learned to trust that if her mother or father leaves the room, they are ever going to re –appear. What evidence have they given her, that this is true? What reassurance of their consistency? In the absence of certainty she takes an unhealthy pleasure in those things she can count on, like a red ball obeying the laws of gravity. She throws the ball into the air, ‘Un, deux, trois, quatre, cinq, six, sept, huit’….
It seems so young for a girl to have found a single activity that enables her to relax and forget her problems, the way adults say they do when they go swimming, or walk in the countryside, or have sex. She is a child. Her whole existence should be about joy and wonder and play, with the occasional moment of anxiety or upset. Not the other way round. Not isolated moments of sunshine, free from anxiety, throwing a ball against a wall. She doesn’t articulate this incongruity in her experience, not until much later, when she looks back on her early years with incredulity, and not a little contempt for her parents. But she knows at the time, deep in her heart, that something about her childhood is very wrong. She throws the ball, she throws herself out of her cot, waiting to see if anyone will catch her. She counts in her head, and inside the house her parents keep her subject to the law of sex. ‘Un, deux, trois, quatre, cinq, six, sept, huit, neuf, dix’.
Liberty Costs
“If repression has indeed been the fundamental link between power, knowledge, and sexuality since the classical age, it stands to reason that we will not be able to free ourselves from it except at a considerable cost.” Michel Foucault8
A beautiful day is breaking in Paris. A sleepy-eyed girl comes downstairs as usual, to be greeted by her mother, and a petit dejeuner of croissants and chocolat chaud. Everything is in its place. But as she holds the bowl up to her lips and peeks over the rim at her maman, just to make sure, the child senses something is wrong. The smile on her mother’s face is drawn tighter than usual. There is a piece missing from the jigsaw of family life.
Before she even thinks the word it escapes from her mouth.
‘Papa?’
The absent presence of her father is nothing new. But today his ghost is haunting her mother’s eyes.
‘Ou est papa?’
Her mother starts to cry at the sound of her daughter’s question. She has only seen her mother cry twice before. Once when their dog died, and once when, the memory has blurred in her consciousness. There was a phone ringing, raised voices, a door slamming.
The child leaves her place at the table and goes over to her mother, clambering onto her lap like she used to when she was small. Today she senses she has to be a big girl, but she just wants to feel her mother’s arms around her and to breath in her comforting scent. That mixture of cologne, baking and cigarette-smoke she knows and loves so much.
‘Ou est papa?’ she repeats. His not being there grows and grows till it fills the room, her mind, her lungs, the world.
Her mother just shakes her head and holds her tight, almost squeezing the air from her body.
Suddenly it is as if they are the only two living people left on the planet, and this is how it is always going to be.
‘Mais ou est-il?’ she asks, louder this time, her own voice shaking with the beginnings of sobs, that come from somewhere deep inside.
‘Papa est parti’. Daddy has left.
There is one thing this child is not, and that is stupid. In those three words she hears all the possible contradictory meanings, all the discours. She senses with the precision only a child can, all the nuances of her mother’s grief, all the late nights he spent away at the university, or locked in his study, doing his writing. All those times she walked in on the couple, as they lowered their voices from shouting to hissing at each other. That foreign word her mother spat at her father, only a few nights ago, before covering her mouth in shame, when she saw their daughter in the doorway: Pederaste.
‘Papa est pederaste’ says the girl, echoing her mother, spitting it out, trying it for size.
She does not expect the slap that descends on her flushed tear-stained cheeks. But it isn’t a surprise either. She knew that word had a power, a puissance, even though she doesn’t know what it means. She enjoys the shock of the sting of pain, the hatred she feels emanating from her mother’s hand. At least it replaces for a second or two, the sorrow in her heart and the nausea in her belly. Isn’t it amazing how you can make violence out of a single word? You just have to choose the right one.
Years later, when the girl has somehow grown into a woman, she still isn’t stupid. She still knows how to turn language into something much more – tangible. She goes to the cinema one afternoon, to hide from the bright lights of the world – its relentless gaze. She sits in the dark and watches Bicycle Thieves for the first time. It hits her like a slap across the face.
The blow comes right near the end of the film. Bruno, the boy, stands helpless in the street, as he watches his father steal a bicycle (as his had been stolen earlier), that he needs in order to get a job to feed them both. Bruno sees his papa get attacked by an angry mob, who hit him and shout at him for taking something that wasn’t his. The girl, who has somehow grown into a woman, looks at the expression on the boy’s face, and she sees her own expression in his eyes, herself as a little girl, that day in the kitchen with her mother. The girl and the boy are united in a freeze frame of that precise moment in their lives, the point at which a child realises its parents are fallible creatures. Bruno will never again see his father as an authority figure to be respected and to aspire to, not after he’s seen him steal in broad daylight and then be humiliated by a bunch of angry thugs. And the girl could never look up to her father again, not after that day when she was slapped round the face by her mother, simply for finding him out. For speaking the truth.
Her father has since found himself surrounded by sons and daughters, far more than he is comfortable with (one child was hard enough for him to handle). Needy, admiring sons and daughters who aspire to be like him, who are desperate to hear his ‘truth’. But the qualities they cherish in him are the very qualities that have caused his first, original daughter – a girl who has somehow grown into a woman – to be sitting alone in a cinema in the middle of the afternoon, crying like a child. This lost child is mourning far too late, the premature disappearance of her innocence. The collapse of her faith in the man she once knew only as ‘papa’.
Outside the sunlight dazzles her eyes. The world is in perpetual motion; as chaotic and splintered as it was when she briefly abandoned it, for the dark stillness of the cinema. ‘Freedom’ has not been achieved, except at a considerable cost. Not for the first time in her life, she wonders whether her father ever asks himself if perhaps the cost was too high.
Do Not Ask Me
“Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same. More than one person, doubtless like me, writes in order to have no face.” -Michel Foucault9
I don’t know what to do about Foucault. The real one. The one who wrote ‘in order to have no face’ .
The one who said his personal life was ‘nobody’s business’. I have made it my business. I have invented a daughter for Foucault and I want to know him through her. I have read his books and I have got to know him through his own words.
But I love this writer, this man, this ghost. I do actually respect his wishes. Even though he is dead, even though he said ‘nothing is fundamental’…
I have clicked on web links once or twice, looking for quotes by Michel, only to stumble on descriptions of parts of his life. I know he suffered. He would have to have really wouldn’t he? To be who he was. How else could he have written ‘Madness and Civilisation’ except by experiencing some madness, some interruptions to his civilisation?
I know how he died.
But I have turned away from these biographical descriptions. Partly as it genuinely feels like intruding on the life of a man who made it very clear he did not want to be intruded upon ‘I value my privacy’. Partly because biography is always fiction anyway so what would I learn except for some juicy titbits to pepper my story with? And partly I am reticent because, well, because I am a traitor and all I have said above is a total lie. I am plundering this man’s biography, taking his life as it was lived, and re-imagining it in a totally different way. Foucault’s daughter can only come into life by putting Foucault himself into some kind of shade… questioning his morality and his consistency. That’s what she seems to be doing anyway. I don’t want the ‘facts’ to get in the way of my story
In my defence I will say, that this little girl appeared in my world, and I feel kind of protective of her. She is my responsibility and I don’t want to let her down. Let’s face it, her papa was bound to have let her down, big time. He always had his head in a book, his mind on the indefinable nature of power. He would not have been able to be ‘Michel Foucault’ and a great dad. Something had to give, and history suggests what he would have sacrificed. So I am sacrificing his ’biography’. He didn’t think it was relevant anyway.
All writers are killers. All writers are magpies, highwaymen, adulterers.
At least I confess my sins.
And when I say I love Foucault I mean it with all my heart. But we all know what lovers are like don’t we? Lovers are the worst of all.
I’m telling you stories. Trust me.
Cutting
‘Knowledge is not for knowing; knowledge is for cutting’ Michel Foucault10
It is a hot night in Paris. The city is never totally quiet. She lies in bed with just a sheet draped over her, listening to the sounds of cars in the distance, and the occasional group of late-night revellers. What do adults do at night? But she might come to regret such idle questions. She is not ready for the answers. The girl is only six.
This is her father’s apartment. She knows it well but it doesn’t feel like home. At her mother’s house she could sleepwalk her way to the kitchen or the bathroom and back to bed. Home is part of her. Here she has to stop and think. Remember where light switches are. Tiptoe over loose floorboards. Try not to wake her papa. Not that he ever does. Her maman’s nerve endings are attached somehow to her daughter, even six years after she gave birth. If her child wakes in the night her mother stirs and worries. Sometimes the woman will find herself alert, in the middle of the night, thinking she heard her cry or move, and then remembers her daughter is with her father. But she still worries. She worries even more when she is with him.
The girl is thirsty but she doesn’t want to get out of bed and disturb the equilibrium. She lies awake a little longer, thinking about nothing. In the end she turns and switches on the bedside light. She reaches out and tugs at the curtain to look at the street below. It is empty except for two men, walking along, talking animatedly, arguing maybe. She can’t make out the words, just the timbre of their voices. They don’t sound angry, just, she doesn’t know the word. It’s the middle of the night and her throat is dry.
So the girl gets out of bed and tiptoes out onto the corridor. She walks gingerly towards the kitchen. She feels like a burglar. As she passes her father’s room she hears sounds. She hopes she hasn’t woken him up. He is always grumpy when he doesn't sleep enough.
The sounds she can hear are strange, as if there is an animal in there with her papa. Grunting, and then a kind of yelp, as if the animal is in pain. She stands still as a stone in the darkness and listens with all her ears and mind.
But it can’t be an animal because then she hears voices, men’s voices. One of them is her father. They are speaking quietly, almost whispering, and as if they are out of breath, like they have been running or something. The door is closed firmly. She cannot see anything. Why would her father go running in the middle of the night with another man? Did he leave her here on her own? That thought makes her feel anxious, upset. She remembers why she got out of bed in the first place and goes to the kitchen for the drink of water. Gulping it down, standing by the sink in her night dress, she gets that familiar feeling in her stomach. That the world is turning too quickly, and she is being left behind again.
Suddenly a loud cry emanates from one of the men in her father’s room. It startles her so much she drops the glass, still half-filled with water, onto the stone kitchen floor. It dutifully smashes into pieces. And one of the pieces lodges itself in her bare foot, causing her too, to cry out, imitating the noise she has just heard. After some scrambling, whispering, fumbling, stomping, her father appears, red-faced, half-dressed, in the doorway of the kitchen.
He sees his daughter, the glass, the water, the blood trickling from her toe.
‘Merde’ says the great philosopher, profound as ever.
Then they hear the front door slam. The ‘animal’ has gone, leaving father and daughter alone to clear up the mess. To dress her wound. Knowledge is for cutting, and it makes us bleed. Is this what learning will always be like? Accompanied by pain?
‘C’etait qui, papa? L’homme dans ta chambre?’ Who was it Dad? The man in your room? She asks, her voice beginning to shake a little. She is not ready for the answer but she cannot help but ask the question. She does not know it yet, but she will never be able to keep herself from asking the question, from picking the scab. Her ‘curiosite’, just like her father’s, will lead her through her life, sometimes into terrible trouble, and there will be nothing she can do to stop it.
Michel Foucault sighs. He knows they are cut from the same cloth, his curious daughter and him. He knows where this can lead. He adjusts his spectacles which are falling down his nose. He wishes he was anywhere but here. He goes to the placard to find a plaster for his daughter’s cut.
This is going to be a long night.
The Penal Code
Calling sex by its name thereafter [the 17th c.] became more difficult and more costly. As if in order to gain mastery of it in reality, it had first been necessary to subjugate it at the level of language, control its free circulation in speech, expunge it from the things that were said, and extinguish the words that rendered it too visibly present. — Michel Foucault 11
The Penal Code12 was adopted after the French Revolution, in 1791, to establish the general human rights of people in the new French Republic. As part of this penal code, men in France were permitted to put their penises where they wanted to. This seems very forward thinking to me. Vive La Revolution!
The Age of Consent the age of consent has been up and down like a French man’s pantaloons in France over the years. at points in the 18th/19th century it was as low as 11. But the onward march of modernity has meant it has gone creeping up. The homosexual age of consent was 21, then 18, and then Miterrand’s government in keeping with Miterrand’s liberal attitudes to sex, reduced the age of consent to 15 in keeping with heterosexual sex in 1981.
The Murky Mind of Paul Mirguet In 1960, Paul Mirguet a member of the Gaullist government, added homosexuality to a list of ‘scourges’ that were to be outlawed in France. A kind of social cleansing if you like. Amongst these scourges were alcoholism and prostitution, transvestism and, thanks to Mirguet, public sex acts between men, and cruising. Not quite so vive la revolution as vive La France. Liberte, Egalite, Hipocrisy.
So if we are thinking of Michel Foucault, which, I always am these days, he would have been 34 in 1960 and sexually active. So he is sexually active in the 1960s, albeit married and fucking about. Sorry but this is how he is in my eyes. And public sex acts are illegal and homosexuality is a scourge, and De Gaulle is in power, and France’s precious penal code is under threat, and the people are getting mighty pissed off and there’s a lot of meetings going on, and communism is real, and something has to happen. Foucault was there. Right in the thick of it.
Language and Power Sometimes I think of a word as a unit of power. You can use a word to hit with. Foucault’s daughter learned early how to hit with the old-fashioned term for homosexual: ‘pederaste’. A more colloquial implement was and still is ‘tapette’, meaning carpet beater, fly swatter, faggot. Foucault was a tapette. He won’t have missed the fact that ‘tapette’ describes the passive homosexual in theory, the receiver, the faggot. But thanks to la liberte, egalite and fraternity, and probably Mr Mirguet to some extent, I expect in the 1960 s all gays were called tapettes. I am still trying to work out if Foucault was more of a tapeur than a tapette. I am sure this will reveal itself in due course.
As this book on Urban Gay Spaces says:
‘Frenchmen who have sex with other men have been designated by many words over the years: sodomites, buggers, vile creatures, (infames) and anti-physicals, in the 17th and 18th centuries, pederastes (still the most common term from about 1740), uranians, inverts and homosexuals since the late nineteenth century, and gays from the beginning of the 1970s. As these words indicate, society at large has usually considered these men to be sinful depraved, degenerate, sick or insane. Even today, although two thirds of the French tell pollsters that homosexuality is just another way to live one’s sexuality. The words pede (slang for pederaste and equivalent to the English poof or American fag) and encule (quite literally one who is sodomised) remain common taunts with a particularly harsh sting’13
Gay Paris Where did Michel go with his Penal Code and his revolutionary spunk, fit to burst in the 1960s? I had this vision of him wandering round the Bois de Boulogne. I have been there myself and had a bit of a fumble in the grass. That was a long time ago, when I thought I was ‘straight’ and thinking I could go on mini-breaks to Paris with my boyfriend and that would somehow validate me as a young woman, as a sexual being. It all went wrong I don’t have to tell you, or I wouldn’t be here, over twenty years later, wondering where Michel put his saucisson. (OK Halperin I have a list of 205 words in French for penis14. Can’t you help me out and tell me which one would have been common usage in 1960? Is that under copyright too?)
The Marais, a historical and traditionally poor district of Paris, has become the Soho of Paris in recent years. I am pretty sure this was after Michel’s time. I like the way there has been resistance to a gay quarter from gay people themselves, as it goes against the ‘national’ spirit of France15. Liberte, Egalite and, er Homogenity? Or Nationalism? Or just not having a big tacky gay district in the middle of your city?
I always thought Pigalle would be a cruising area, as that is a traditional haven for whores and hobos. But maybe it has got so touristy it’s not really somewhere gay men would choose to wander about so much these days.
So here I am. It is the early 1960s. Les Quatre cent Coups is on at the big screen. Everyone is smoking Galoises. The Republic is starting to look a bit saggy at the seams. Michel Foucault’s life is just about to hit a crisis, and so is that of France. Which one will blow first? And what would a little girl make of the spectacle?
Labrynth
‘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, into which I can move my discourse… in which I can lose myself and appear at last to eyes that I will never have to meet again.” — Michel Foucault16
‘What a distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of the child and the feeble mentality of the average adult.’ –Sigmund Freud
She
looks her father in the eye. He has seen her do this before. It is as
if her own eyes grow in size before him, and change in colour from
blue to black. Deeper and darker they get till he is drowning in
them, drowning in her need to know. She doesn’t have to
say anything, to repeat her familiar refrain, ‘mais pourquoi?’ He
understands the question. He just doesn’t know what to say.
It is the middle of the night. Both father and daughter are exhausted, but neither are ready for sleep. They are sitting at the kitchen table. She has her foot resting on a chair, with the plaster on her toe, reminding them both why they are there. What caused this.
He has to say something, anything, to break the silence and to stop her from asking another question. His mind is blank. All he can see when he closes his eyes for a second to think, is the image of his lover’s naked ass, taunting him in the gloom. And then the glass and his daughter’s toe and the blood. He opens his eyes and says:
‘Cherie’. ‘Je t’aime’ And then, under his breath, ’merde’. This is so difficult. It is harder than writing. And writing, writing is damned difficult.
She just looks up at him with those black pools of eyes, that ask him for the moon and the stars as well.
He gives her something much more prosaic.
‘L’homme’ he begins. ‘L’homme qui etait dans ma chambre’,… ‘c’est, c’est, mon amant’.
The child is silent. She knows her father is struggling and she is transfixed by the sight of her normally verbose and confident papa stumbling, searching for words, for a foothold on discourse. He usually has words cascading from his lips like water from a tap.
‘Je l’aime’. he says, not really knowing if this is true. They have only been lovers a few months, and so far it is more about the sex than ‘l’amour’. More about the curve of his lover’s arse and the way it rises up towards him offering itself to him, so openly, seeming to beg for his cock to… ‘merde’. This is ridiculous. His six year old daughter is sat in front of him, her eyes as black as coal, waiting for him to explain what this man was doing in their appartement in the middle of the night, and all he can think of is sex. That is what he was doing in their appartement in the middle of the night. But since when has sex ever been a good enough explanation for anything? Especially in response to a woman?
He goes back to the ‘discours de l’amour’, reluctantly. ‘l'amour’ is not his favourite subject at the best of times.
The child listens intently, intensely, as her father tells her in a shaky voice, how he loves this mystery man, the same way he used to love her maman. That his love, not for this man specifically, but for another man, men, for men, in general. That is why he left her mother in the first place.
‘Mais pourquoi…’ He dreads these two words more than any other coming from his daughter.
‘Pourquoi tu aimes les hommes?’ she asks. He manages a weak smile. He has been asking himself the same question for the majority of his life. She is her father’s daughter after all. They are doomed to ask the same questions. Over and over again.
‘Parce-que, parce-que…’ his voice trails off. What can he say? Because of the way their shoulders move and the line from the nape of their neck down their spine, to their coxic and the rounding of their buttocks below? Because of the way they sometimes smell of spunk and sometimes of rainwater and sometimes of the earth itself, as if he has dug them up right there from the ground?
‘J’aime les hommes….’ I love men….
And then he does something out of character. He scoops the child up in his arms and he stands and holds her tightly, tighter than he held her when she was first born, tighter than that hateful day when he had to say goodbye to her. He holds her and he feels tears forming behind his eyes. So he puts her down. He cannot start crying he might not be able to stop.
I love men, he manages to say eventually, because some people love men and some people love women. I loved your mother very much, but she is the only woman I have loved. Really, I love men.
The child is quiet. She is thinking about what her father has just said. Of all the things he loves about her this is one of the things he loves most. She is like him. She always considers everything she sees and hears. She never takes anything at face value. She has to work it out for herself. He is very proud of this so even when she comes to conclusions that are pretty terrifying for a seven year old girl, especially when they are conclusions about her own parents, for example, he is still proud of her commitment to reasoning and thought.
‘Je t’aime’. says the girl.
It is all he can do to stop himself from bursting into tears and kissing the life out of her.
‘Je t'aime ma chere’ he manages. Then he pretends to cough and goes to the refrigerator and gets himself a biere.
Outside it is nearly dawn.
Suddenly he doesn't want to be in these four walls anymore. They seem to represent all the oppressions he has ever felt. All the entrapment. He needs to escape.
‘viens’ he says to the girl. grabbing her by the hand, finding her some shoes and a coat before dragging her out of the apartment, onto the street, to breathe the air and watch the city wake up.
The philosopher has never been out in the city with his daughter before at such a witching hour. He feels a little vulnerable. His night=time self is different from his daytime self. Neither philosopher nor papa, at night he roams the streets of Paris, as himself. As Michel. As a man. He knows his daughter will have to know this man at some point, she is seeing glimpses of him already. He just worries that she will not like him. He is not sure if he likes him himself.
They walk South, through narrow streets that are virtually deserted, apart from some straddlers, some drinkers and some clochards. Sometimes, if you catch a bit of the city at a certain angle, cut it off from the modernity that surrounds it, it could be the 1930s, the 20s even. The old town. Michel would love to go back there and do some digging. The archeology of knowledge is a difficult task, without the benefit of time travel.
His daughter is quiet. She holds his hand in an iron grip walking by his side. She does not seem nervous, but maybe a little awestruck. He senses that she realises she is being allowed into the world of adults and that this matters to him. It is a ‘grande geste’ and she appreciates it.
They pass a square, one Michel knows well. He used to go there at night, climb over the railings into the bushes, into the labrynth. It was always the exploration he enjoyed the most. By the time he was stood, leaning against a tree, the bark digging into his back, a young pede sucking him off in the dark, the thought of sex had lost its sheen. But he still liked the feeling of being out in the night, unaccounted for, unknown. Unneeded. The garcon on his knees wasn’t sucking Michel Foucault’s cock, he was just sucking cock. No names are needed in this world, and that is how he prefers it. The few times he went out and met women, when he was still pretending to be normal, before he met his wife, it was always the first question they would ask. ‘what’s your name?’ followed closely by ‘what do you do?’ two questions he hated to answer. especially as he knew that ‘what do you do’? can really be translated as ‘how much are you worth?’ and ‘writer’ is not worth much at all.
But all that was a long time ago. Now he is walking through the streets of Paris with his seven year old daughter, just as dawn is breaking. Trying to somehow show her a tiny piece of who he is. A piece that relates to the noises she heard earlier, the man in his bedroom, the slamming door. It is not that he is ashamed, but he is. If anyone can accept that two contradictory meanings can exist simultaneously within the body of one man, it is Michel Foucault. But that doesn’t make the truth easy to handle. It just makes it true.
He tries to see things from his daughters point of view. He knows his wife’s perspective. He can still hear her, that horrendous night, calling him ‘pederaste’ and many other things besides. But his daughter is not his wife. He has read his Freud, and he knows that the two have a certain shared pull on his heart. But they are not the same. Whatever her maman says to her child about the pederaste that ruined their life, his daughter wills till think for herself. She is her father’s daughter too. What he doesn’t quite realise is just how much his daughter has been thinking for herself.
and she has already come to her own conclusions about a lot of things. one of them is that both her parents are idiots. They are both to blame for ruining their family life. Her mother sometimes seems pathetic the way she carries on railing against her papa. It was a long time ago and she is getting used to him being there in another place another part of the city. She is learning to split herself in two and be a different daughter at different times. This is called growing up and she wishes her mother would do the same.
They come across a bakery with its lights on. Someone has to bake those croissants for the morning commuters. Michel takes his daughter into the shop and buys her a pain au chocolat. It is still red hot from the oven. So he saves it for a while, leading her own, down to the main road and finally the embankment of the Seine. They sit on a bench and eat in silence, looking at the water.
‘C’est grand’ she says. It’s big. He thinks she means the river and he agrees, starting to ramble on about how ships used to come in from the English channel, but she stops him short.
‘Non. Le monde entier’ she corrects him. The whole world.
Michel Foucault puts his arm around his daughter and says ‘oui'. le monde est tres grand’
‘Et beau aussi’ says the girl. And beautiful too.
His heart breaks into a million pieces of glass.
‘Oui. ‘C’est tres beau’ .
Michel Foucault is usually so fascinated by, and preoccupied with the world, that he forgets how beautiful it is.
He hopes his daughter never forgets. He holds her tighter and chews on his croissant.
‘La vie est belle, ma belle’.
Mai ‘68
'May '68 was extremely important, without any doubt. It's certain that without May '68 I wouldn't have afterward done the work I did in regard to prison, delinquency, and sexuality.' Michel Foucault17
‘Her father was the dominating figure in this circle, owing to his intelligence and his character as much as to the circumstances of his life. It was those circumstances which provided the framework for the history of the patient's childhood and illness, At the time at which I began the girl's treatment her father was in his late forties, a man of rather unusual activity and talents, a large manufacturer in very comfortable circumstances. His daughter was most tenderly attached to him, and for that reason her critical powers, which developed early, took all the more offense at many of his actions and peculiarities’ Sigmund Freud: Dora 18
In spite of everything, she still loves him. Colette lives with her mother, and she sees her father regularly. She endures her loss with some sort of grace, except for at moments when she might fly off the handle for no apparent reason. There is always a reason. Children always have a reason. But at this point, aged eight, becoming herself, Colette Foucault loves her father.
It is a cool, slightly blustery day in May. Her mother prepares petit dejeuner as usual but she seems distracted, anxious. Colette does not ask her what was wrong. She doesn’t want to start her off. She drinks her hot chocolate and looks out of the window. It just seems like a normal day to her. But it is not.
Outside when they go shopping, mother and daughter, hand in hand, there is a strange atmosphere on the streets. There are few cars, and groups of people are congregating and talking loudly. The bars are busy and it is only eleven in the morning. Colette’s mother drags her along, trying to get on with her ‘courses’ but she can’t hide her tension. She barely speaks to the shop assistant in the Boulanger and then drops her baguettes. A young man, he is tall with short dark hair and a big smile, picks them up and winks at Colette. ‘It might not be the best day for a little one to be out’. ‘Maybe you should go chez toi, ma petite’. He hands Colette a sweet from his pocket and then walks out, purposefully. He has been waiting for a day like this.
Colette and her mother have to cross the suburb to get to their favourite patisserie. It is a tradition they have when they do their weekly shopping. They turn the corner onto the main rue, and then they are met by an astounding scene. The road is full of people. Shouting, singing, dancing even. Banners and placards sail above them, and the police stand at the roadside, seemingly unsure as to what to do. Colette holds her mother’s hand tight, and senses the tension in her body.
They are stood on the pavement. It would be impossible to cross the street to the patisserie, but the route back home also looks quite tricky, as more and more people seem to be piling out of buildings onto the streets. So they stay where they are. People are now pushing past Colette and her mother to join the demonstration. They are at the mercy of the crowd. Colette can’t see much beyond a sea of bodies/legs/faces. She feels a little bit faint.
Michel Foucault is part of the manifestation. He can’t help but get a thrill out of this spontaneous collective action. People everywhere he looks, chanting, singing, holding impromptu political debates. Paris is being taken over by the people. It is exciting! He walks with the homosexuals. They have been segregated from the main march but are still part of it. He knows this is ridiculous, this spatial symbolic ‘separation’ of one group of protestors from another. But hopefully events like this will change all that. He holds his head high. He finds himself smiling.
It is difficult to miss Michel Foucault if you know him, and his daughter knows him better than most. She sees him walking towards her, in a mass of other demonstrators, before he sees her. She pulls on her mother’s arm:
‘maman, c’est papa!’
But her mother is not listening. She is talking seriously to a gendarme, about how to get out of the mele. Colette has never liked the police. So she ignores them and focuses on her father, moving towards her in the crowd. She lets go of her mother’s hand. She calls him
‘Papa!’
Colette sees her father and her father can see her. He is staring straight ahead in her direction. She waves at him. Jumps up and down. He looks at her, but kind of through her. Seeing but not acknowledging his daughter. She is devastated. Her immediate, angry reaction is that he must have more important things to do, more important people to talk to, as he often seems to. More important than his own child. She starts to walk towards him, fighting her way through the crowds to find her papa. But she just gets lost in a sea of bodies. Time slows almost to a halt. Colette is suspended in one of the most important moments in the History of France, frightened, lost, alone. Michel continues marching and they do not see each other again that day. And the next time they do see each other, something has been lost. Their relationship is never quite the same again. Colette carries around that precise emotion, captured there amidst the heaving, chanting crowds, in Paris, May 1968, for years to come. It is a mixture of anger, fear, loss, and abandonment, the perfect ingredients to create an alienated individual. The making of the void.
Colette is carried along by the crowds, feeling increasingly angry rather than scared. She has given up trying to find her father, the salaud, and just wants her maman. Eventually the crowd chews her up and spits her out onto a pavement. There is nothing for it but to swallow her pride and talk to a gendarme. He is not as scary as he looks, in that smart blue uniform and peaked cap, with the gun sticking out of its holster. He asks her her name and where she lives, and realising how it is actually just around the corner, he decides to walk her home. People part in order to let them pass. The order of society has not quite broken down yet.
Miraculously
Mrs Foucault is at home when the policeman brings her daughter to her
door. Her eyes are wide with worry, and she starts admonishing the
child immediately on seeing her, and simultaneously explaining to the
gendarme why she came home, as she thought it was the safest thing to
do. But soon she softens and holds her daughter close. They thank the
gendarme and he returns to the shouting masses.
Colette does not tell her mother that she saw her father that day. She never tells her. And she doesn’t explain why, on subsequent weekends when she is due to go and stay with him, that she hides in her room and won’t come out without a fight. She doesn’t ask him why he didn’t acknowledge her. She doesn’t want to know the answer. She just learns how to cope on her own. May 1968 may be her father’s Revolution, the sparking of his political imagination. The making of Michel Foucault. It’s not hers.
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