Foucault's 1968

BERNARD GENDRON

Michel Foucault's career as a public intellectual, his stances in words and deeds, in theory and practice, were deeply informed by the events of May 1968 and the political struggles that followed upon it. It is difficult to single out any cultural theorist or political philosopher of importance for whom May 1968 had such a decidedly dramatic impact or who was more engaged with its meaning and import. Yet, there has been scant scholarly attention to this relationship, perhaps because it is thought to be of little interest beyond the biographical or because it is surmised that he was not particularly sympathetic to the uprisings of May 1968, given his often-expressed skepticism concerning the emancipatory promise of mass revolutionary movements. Absent from Paris in May 1968, he had no memories to share of the barricades nor any badge to wear.

Against these doubts, I argue that Foucault's relation to May 1968 was extensive and intimate as well as crucial for understanding his theory and practice in the 1970s. Most obviously, in the wake of 1968, Foucault became a militant political activist, whereas earlier his posture toward politics was one of ironic detachment. Less appreciated is the shock and disruption that the events of 1968 administered to his theoretical work and methodologies. It is well known that, roughly between 1969 and 1975, Foucault's thinking underwent a major transformation, usually described as the transition from "archaeology" to "genealogy," that eventuated in the publication of Discipline and Punish in 1975. According to most commentators, this resulted from Foucault's discovery of basic flaws in his archaeological method. A closer analysis, however, reveals that his intense engagement in political militancy within a post-1968 horizon was the chief catalyst for temporally halting and then redirecting his theoretical work.

Also not well appreciated is how much Foucault reflected on 1968 to determine its meaning. This is understandable, since these reflections appear not in his books or well-known articles but in the mass of interviews conducted in the 1970s, many of which were published originally in foreign languages during Foucault's travels abroad and not available in French until the publication of Dits et écrits (Things Said and Written) in 1994. In these texts, Foucault dismisses not the importance of May 1968, which he considers a major rupture in Occidental politics, but the dominant Marxist interpretations of it. In his rereadings of May 1968, he sought to wrest control of its meaning from Marxism as a strategic maneuver in his objective of providing a non-Marxist, left-wing critique of modern liberal societies.

By using May 1968 as a subtext for reading Foucault, I put into play three interpretative strategies at variance with those of standard commentaries. First, I treat his militant political activity as an integral part of his oeuvre as a public intellectual. Commentators on his theoretical work generally disregard his political activity, in some cases dismissing it outright as mere "biography" and thus wholly "un-Foucauldian" as a basis for interpretation. Why it should be "un-Foucauldian" is not clear, given that Foucault's political militancy was wholly public and on the record, not the sort of intimate biographical detail that Foucault would want to "efface" from his texts. Failure to attend interpretatively to these political practices diverts us from those rich textual sources in which Foucault, by grappling with the issues addressed by his militancy, takes the first theoretical steps in the trajectory toward Discipline and Punish.

Second, by focusing on Foucault's post-1968 interviews, I highlight his reflections about the present, the contemporaneous, in stark contrast with his canonical work, which barely ever proceeds beyond the nineteenth century and austerely excludes any reference to the present, leaving it to readers to draw the contemporary implications. Foucault's multifarious discourses on the present, in addition to reflecting the twists and turns of his thinking during this volatile period, performed the strategic function of legitimating the timeliness and relevance of his new theoretical work for post-1968 politics. Of equal importance, Foucault needed to provide a counter to the voluminous Marxist analyses of the present, particularly of May 1968, which dominated leftist discourses at the time.

This leads to my third interpretative strategy: to cast Foucault's theoretical perambulations between 1969 and 1975 in the light of his ongoing engagement and debate with Marxism. The extensive scholarship on Foucault's relation to Marxism has treated his work as a finished system to be compared and contrasted with Marxism as a system while giving little or no attention to the evolution of his thinking about Marxism. On the other hand, those who follow Foucault's theorizing through its mutations barely attend to his relation with Marxism. And yet, during that crucial 1969–75 period, Foucault was entangled thoroughly with Marxism, sometimes appropriating, sometimes critiquing its concepts, sometimes working in alliance with or in opposition to various Marxist groups. In sum, these three interpretative strategies afford us a richer, more complicated, and plausible account of Foucault's so-called transition from "archaeology" to "genealogy." No linear narrative, it moves by fits and starts through moments of confusion along multiple registers.

Detachment from Politics (1953–1967)

When Foucault returned to France in late 1968, after three years at the University of Tunis, he was received with suspicion by fellow Left intellectuals, still basking in the glow of the May—June events. He had the reputation of being condescendingly apolitical, a ferocious critic of the French Communist Party (the PCF, Parti communiste français), a Gaullist technocrat, and a denier of the power of human agency. A year before, these charges, though seriously distortive of his...