No More Learning

? Q: Your work has often been brought together with the research of Claude Le? vi-Strauss and Jacques Lacan under the label of "structuralism. " To what extent do you accept this grouping? Is there a real convergence in your different re- searches?
? MF: It's for those who use the label to designate very diverse works to say what makes us "structuralists. " You know the joke: what's the difference between Bernard Shaw
and Charlie Chaplin? There is no difference, since they both have a beard, with the exception of Chaplin of course.
? The Birth of a World 61
? Q: In The Order of Things you speak of the "death of man," which has provoked vivid emotional reactions and innu- merable controversies among our good humanists. What do you think of all this?
? MF: The death of man is nothing to get particularly excited about. It's one of the visible forms of a much more general decease, if you like. I don't mean by it the death of god but the death of the subject, of the Subject in capital letters, of the subject as origin and foundation of Knowledge (savoir), of Liberty, of Language and History.
One can say that all of Western civilization has been subjugated (assujettie), and philosophers have only certified the fact by referring all thought and all truth to consciousness, to the Self, to the Subject. In the rumbling that shakes us today, perhaps we have to recognize the birth of a world where the subject is not one but split, not sovereign but de- pendent, not an absolute origin but a function ceaselessly modified. ?
? Rituals of Exclusion
? Q: Mr. Foucault, it's been said that you've given us a new way of studying events. You've formulated an archeology of knowledge, the sciences of man, objectifying literary, or non-literary, documents of a period, and treating them as "ar- chives. " And you're also interested in current politics. How do you live out your science; how do you apply it to what's going on today? In other words, how do you uncover today's dis- course? How do you perceive changes taking place at this moment?
? MF; In the first place, I am not at all sure that I have invented a new method, as you were so kind to assert; what I am doing is not so different from many other contemporary endeavors, American, English, French, German. I claim no originality. It is true, though, that I have dealt especially with phenomena of the past; the system of exclusion and the con- finement of the insane in European civilization from the six- teenth to the nineteenth century, the establishment of medical science and practice at the beginning of the nineteenth cen- tury, the organization of sciences of man in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But I was interested in them--^in fact, profoundly interested--^because I saw in them ways of think- ing and behaving that are still with us.
? 64 Rituals of Exclusion
I try to show, based upon their historical establish- ment and formation, those systems which are still ours today and within which we are trapped. It is a question, basically, of presenting a critique of our own time, based upon retrospec- tive analyses.
Q: In terms of what's been happening in higher edu- cation around the world, do you see us, yourself, all of us, im- prisoned in some kind of system?
? MF: The form in which societies pass on knowledge is determined by a complex system: it hasn't yet been fully analyzed, but it seems to me that the system is being shattered; more under the influence of a revolutionary movement, in fact, than of mere theoretical or speculative criticism. There's a sig- nificant difference between the insane and the sick on the one hand, and students on the other, in this respect: in our society it is difficult for the insane who are confined or the sick who are hospitalized to make their own revolution; so we have to question these systems of exclusion of the sick and the insane from the outside, through a technique of critical demolition. The university sytstem, however, can be put into question by the students themselves. At that point criticism coming from the outside, from theoreticians, historians or archivists, is no longer enough. And the students become their own archivists.
? Q: Several years ago, a document appeared here called The Student as Nigger. Are there parallels aside from the m^ter-slave relationship between the student as an ex- cluded figure and the madman? And are there other "pariahs" defmed and set by society in order to maintain its own ration- ality and cohesion?
? Rituals of Exclusion 65
? MF: Your question is far-reaching and difficult to answer. At any rate, it concerns me greatly because it points essentially in the same direction as my work. Until now, it seems to me that historians of our own society, of our own civilization, have sought especially to get at the inner secret of our civilization, its spirit, the way it estabUshes its identity, the things it values. On the other hand, there has been much less study of what has been rejected from our civilization. It seemed to me intersting to try to understand our society and civilization in terms of its sytems of exclusion, of rejection, of refusal, in terms of what it does not want, its limits, the way it is obliged to suppress a certain number of things, people, proc- esses, what it must let fall into oblivion, its repression-sup- pression system. I know very well that many thinkers--though if only since Freud--have already tackled the problem. But I think there are exclusions other than the suppression of sexual- ity that have not been analyzed. There's the exclusion of the insane. There is, up to a certain point, the exclusion whereby we short-circuit those who are sick and reintegrate them in a sort of marginal circuit, the medical circuit. And there is the student: to a certain extent he is caught similarly inside a circuit which possesses a dual function. First, a function of exclusion. The student is put outside of society, on a campus.
Furthermore, he is excluded while being transmitted a knowl- edge traditional in nature, obsolete, "academic" and not di- rectly tied to the needs and problems of today. This exclusion is underscored by the organization, around the student, of so- cial mechanisms which are fictitious, artificial and quasi-theat- rical (hierarchic relationships, academic exercises, the "court" of examination, evaluation). Finally, the student is given a gamelike way of life; he is offered a kind of distraction, amusement, freedom which, again, has nothing to do with real life; it is this kind of artificial, theatrical society, a society of cardboard, that is being built around him; and thanks to this.
? 66 Rituals of Exclusion
? young people from 18 to 25 are thus, as it were, neutralized by and for society, rendered safe, ineffective, socially and politi- cally castrated. There is the first function of the university: to put students out of circulation. Its second function, however, is one of integration. Once a student has spent six or seven years of his life within this artificial society, he becomes "absorb- able": society can consume him. Insidiously, he will have re- ceived the values of this society. He will have been given socially desirable models of behavior, so that this ritual of exclusion will finally take on the value of inclusion and recu- peration or reabsorption. In this sense, the university is no doubt little different from those systems in so-called primitive societies in which the young men are kept outside the village during their adolescence, undergoing rituals of initiation which separate them and sever all contact between them and real, active society. At the end of the specified time, they can be entirely recuperated or reabsorbed.
Q: Could you then study the university the way you studied hospitals? Hasn't the system of the university changed somewhat? For example, are there not in recent history, and for various reasons, exclusions that were initiated by the ex- cluded themselves?
? MF: What I have just said is obviously only a very rough outline: it needs to be tightened up, for the mode of exclusion of students was certainly different in the nineteenth from that in the twentieth century. In the nineteenth century, higher education was only for the children of the bourgeoisie, or that fiinge of the petite-bourgeoisie which the higher eche- lon needed for its industry, its scientific development, its tech- nical skills, etc. Universities now have a greater number of students from poorer groups of the petite-bourgeoisie. Thus we have, inside the university, explosive conflicts between, on
? ? Rituals of Exclusion 67
? the one hand, a lower-middle class which finds itself politi- cally and socially more and more proletarianized by the very development of this higher bourgeoisie, for its development depends upon technology and science, that is, upon those con- tributions to it that are made by students and scientists sought from the ranks of the lower-middle class. This end result is that the upper-middle class, in its universities, recruits and enrolls, in order to make them scientists or technicians, people already undergoing a proletarian conversion and who conse- quently arrive at the university bearing a revolutionary poten- tial: the enemy is within the gates.
? So the status of the university becomes problemati- cal. The upper-middle class must see to it that universities remain environments of exclusion where students are cut off from their real milieu, that is, from one which is undergoing a proletarian change. Concomitantly, universities must increas- ingly provide rituals of inclusion inside a system of capitalistic norms. Thus we have the strengthening of the old traditional university, with its character of both theatricality and initia- tion. However, as soon as they enter the system, students un- derstand that they are being played with, that someone is trying to tum them against their true origins and surroundings; there follows a political awareness, and the revolutionary ex- plosion.
? Q: Aesthetics aside, do you see in what's happening in the university a parallel with Peter Weiss's play, MaratSade^--there also is a director-producer who sought to put on a play acted out by mental patients who try to tum the play against the spectators?
MF: That's a very interesting reference. I believe that play tells what is happening now better than many theo- retical essays. When Sade was an inmate at Charenton, he
? ? 68 Rituals of Exclusion
? wanted to have plays acted by the inmates. In Sade's mind, his plays were to question his own confinement; in fact, what happened was that the inmates acting out his plays questioned not only the system of confinement, but the system of oppres- sion, the values which Sade enforced upon them as he made them act out his plays. To a certain extent, Sade plays today's professor, the liberal professor who says to his students, "Well, why don't you just question all the bourgeois values they want to impose upon you," and the students, acting out this theater of academic liberalism, end up questioning the professor himself.
? Q: This is just what I wanted to ask you about the relation between faculty and students: are not professors in a way themselves excluded? After all, professors and adminis- trators live in the university community as well as students. Of course, one could say that administrators are only representa- tives of society, but in most cases, they are professors who have become administrators, and often temporarily. Are there differences between faculty and students?
? MF: I don't know the American university system well enough to give you even the beginning of an answer. In France, a professor is a public official and therefore is a part of the state apparatus. Whatever personal opinions he may hold, the professor, as a public official, maintains the system of transmission of knowledge required by the government, that is, by the bourgeois class whose interests are represented by the government. In the United States, it is probably different because of the open market for professors. I don't know whether the American academic is more threatened, more ex- ploited, or more ready to accept the values imposed upon him. The position of professor is almost untenable at the present, as is perhaps that of the lower-middle class: are not professors
? Rituals of Exclusion 69
? the most striking manifestation of this class which, in the nine- teenth century, at least in France, succeeded in having the upper-middle class delegate to it the right to exercise power? There existed what has been called a republic of professors, and the political framework of the Third Republic was bor- rowed directly from the teaching profession, or from profes- sions of the same type, physicians, lawyers, etc. Now that the Republic is functioning in a quite different framework, the lower-middle class in France is losing all control of the state apparatus. Therein lies its sense of misfortune, and its simulta- neous wavering between the temptation to join the students and their revolutionary struggle, and the temptation to regain power, to seduce once more that upper-middle class which no longer is willing to accept it except in a role as technician.
? Q: Before coming to Buffalo, you were teaching at Vincennes, an avant-garde university, talked about by some as being in complete chaos, seeking to adapt itself to the process you just described. You were saying that the position of pro- fessor is becominf untenable--from this perspective, on com- ing from Vincennes to Buffalo, did you find yourself in a strange, exotic land?
? MF: When I arrived in Buffalo, I thought that I still was in Vincennes: in spite of relatively superficial differences in behavior, dress, gestures and speech, it seemed to me that the same struggle was being waged in France and the United States. However, I believe that, as far as tactics and political strategy are concerned, American students are in a much dif- ferent position from their French counterparts. French stu- dents, in fact, have to deal with a large, organized working class which, through its unions and political organizations, clamors its allegiance to Marxism: French workers are perhaps ready to listen to students and understand their struggle, but at
? 70 Rituals of Exclusion
? the same time, French students have to fight the conservative influence of the Communist Party and the C. G. T. ^ The situ- ation of American students appears very different: it seems to me that the working class in America relates less easily to the students' cause. It must be more difficult for an American student to militate together with workers. On the other hand, the advantage in America is that there are no great conserva- tive forces like the Communist Party and the C. G. T. In prohib- iting and prosecuting the Communist Party for so many years,
? I think that the American government rendered, in a sense, a sort of service to the revolutionary cause; it kept open the possibility of ties between the students and the workers. Obvi- ously, there is also in America a specific stress point, the racial problem that we also have in France, but on a much smaller scale (one must not forget that there is in France a rather sizable group of African, Algerian or black workers constitut- ing a numerically important subproletariat).
? Q: Has there been an intensified chauvinism in France in the last few years, an increased refusal of anything that comes from the outside? It's true that America is a melt- ing pot; does it make a difference?
? MF: Well, it seems to me that, at least in intellectual circles, one does not encounter in America the unbearable chauvinism one finds in France. One must not forget that we are a small country caught between the two great models, the United States on the one hand and the Soviet Union on the other. We had to struggle for a long time against these two models. It was the Communist Party which suggested and im- posed the Russian one, and the struggle against the Party's conservative influence brought a somewhat systematic refusal of the Soviet model; on the other hand, a certain liberal bour- geoisie tied up with American interests never stopped putting
? Rituals of Exclusion 71
? forward the American model, against which it was also neces- sary to struggle. At that moment, I think, the mechanisms of chauvinism appeared inside the French Left. These are mecha- nisms that are not always conscious; they manifest themselves by a game of exclusion, of refusal and oversight. American literature, for instance, is very httle read in France. One does not read American philosophy, history and criticism at all; American books are translated after an enormous delay. One must not allow the struggle against American economic influ- ence and relations to affect relations with American intellectu- als. We must have a selective nationalism. I believe that a small country like France is necessarily bound to be somewhat nationalistic in its politics and economy if it wants to preserve some degree of independence; on the other hand, we must understand that a struggle which today is ideological but will become some day openly revolutionary is tuming up in every comer of the world. Cultural chauvinism must be abandoned.
? Q: This has been your first trip to America, your first teaching assignment in an American university. In relation to the cultural change which you just spoke about, how will these two months affect you?
? MF: My problem is essentially the definition of the implicit systems in which we find ourselves prisoners; what I would like to grasp is the system of limits and exclusion which we practice without knowing it; I would like to make the cultural unconscious apparent. Therefore, the more I travel, the more I remove myself from my natural and hibitual centers of gravity, the greater my chance of grasping the foundations I am obviously standing on. To that extent any trip--not of course in the sense of a sightseeing trip nor even a survey-- any movement away from my original frame of reference, is fiiiitful. It is always good for me to change language and
? 72 Rituals of Exclusion
? country. A simple example; in New York I was struck, as any foreigner would be, by the immediate contrast between the "good sections" and the poverty, even the misery, that sur- round them on the right and the left. North and South. I well know that one finds that same contrast in Europe, and that you too, when in Europe, are certainly shocked by the great misery in the poor sections of Paris, Hamburg or London, it doesn't matter where. Having lived in Europe for years, I had lost a sense of this contrast and had ended up believing that there had been a general rise in the standard of living of the whole population; I wasn't far from imagining that the proletariat was becoming middle class, that there were really no more poor people, that the social struggle, the struggle between classes, consequently, was coming to an end. Well, seeing New York, perceiving again suddenly this vivid contrast that exists everywhere but which was blotted out of my eyes by familiar forms of it, that was for me a kind of second revela- tion; the class struggle still exists, it exists more intensely. A
? Notes
? ' Peter Weiss, The Persecution and Assassination of Jean- Paul Marat, as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton, under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade, Translated by Geoffrey Skelton and Adrian Mitchell, (New York; Atheneum, 1966).
? 2 The C. G. T. (General Confederation of Workers) is a power- ful trade-union very close to the French Communist Party. Cf. A. Beiden Fields, Trotskyism and Maoism: Theory and Practice in France and the United States (New York; Au- tonomedia, 1988).
? 7
An Historian of Culture
? ? Q: Professor Foucault, you have said that philoso- phy, as a discourse, is above all a diagnostic enterprise. I would like to ask you a question about this. Doesn't perform- ing a diagnosis perhaps involve placing oneself outside, ele- vating oneself to a different level of reflection, a level superior to the level of the objective field to which the diagnosis is applied?
? MF; I would like to add that there exist various means of knowing diagnostically. By diagnostic knowledge I mean, in general, a form of knowledge that defines and deter- mines differences. For example, when a doctor makes a diag- nosis of tuberculosis, he does it by determining the differences that distinguish someone sick with tuberculosis from someone sick with pneumonia or anyother disease. In this sense diag- nostic knowledge operates within a certain objective field de- fined by the sickness, the symptoms, etc.
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Q: Yet it is outside the sickness: the doctor speaks of the sickness but doesn't live it; and his discourse is not in fact a symptom of this or that sickness.
? MF: Yes, within an objective field yet outside of the sickness. However, there are forms of diagnostic knowledge that are not located within an objective field but which, on the contrary, permit a new objective field to appear. For example, when Saussure defined what langue was with respect to parole or what synchronic was with respect to diachronic, he opened up a new sector of potential studies, a new objective field which did not exist before.
' And this too is knowledge through diagnosis, though much different from the first type.
? Q: At any rate, it is necessary to resort to a metalan- guage, a language to describe a language.
MF: Not always. It depends on the science with which one is dealing. I do not believe that one can call a medical diagnosis a metalanguage.
Q: If we consider the symptoms of a sickness as
signs, the doctor's discourse is metalinguistic with respect to these signs.
? MF: If you give to metalanguage the very general meaning of a discourse about a system of signs, it is true that one is dealing with a metalanguage. But only if one accepts this very general definition.
Q; Metalanguage is a discourse about a discourse.
MF: Yes, but now I am a little worried because today the term metalanguage is employed in a very wide and
? ? An Historian of Culture 75
? general sense which lacks rigor. One speaks of metalanguage in dealing with literary criticism, the history of science, the history of philosophy, etc. Naturally, one can talk about it in dealing with medicine as well. I wonder whether it might not be preferable to return to the more rigorous definition of meta- language, one which says that it is the discourse through which the elements and the rules of construction of a language are defined.
Q: In fact, in mathematics, metalanguage is the lan- guage through which mathematics is formalized. But beyond the definition, the most important aspect of the question is something else: that is, that the structure of the metalanguage can be different from that of the language.
MF: Possibly.
Q: But I am constructing my discourse within the
episteme of my civilization, or outside it?
MF: What meaning are you giving to the term epis-
teme?
Q: The same one you gave to it.
MF: Yes, and I'd like to know what that meaning is.
? Q: For my part, as a good neo-Kantian, I intend to refer to the categories.
MF: Now we're at the crux. What I called episteme in The Order of Things has nothing to do with historical cate- gories, that is with those categories created in a particular historical moment. When I speak of episteme, I mean all those
? ? 76 An Historian of Culture
? relationships which existed between the various sectors of sci- ence during a given epoch. For example, I am thinking of the fact that at a certain point mathematics was used for research in physics, while linguistics or, if you will, semiology, the science of signs, was used by biology (to deal with genetic messages). Likewise the theory of evolution was used by, or served as a model for historians, psychologists, and sociolo- gists of the 19th century. All these phenomena of relationship between the sciences or between the various scientific sectors constitute what I call the episteme of an epoch. Thus for me episteme has nothing to do with the Kantian categories.
? Q: Yet when you speak of the concept of "order" in the 17th century, aren't you dealing with a category?
? MF: I simply noted that the problem of order (the problem, not the category), or rather the need to introduce an order among series of numbers, human beings, or values, ap- pears simultaneously in many different disciplines in the 17th century. This involves a communication between the diverse disciplines, and so it was that someone who proposed, for example, the creation of a universal language in the 17th cen- tury was quite close in terms of procedure to somoeone who dealt with the problem of how one could catalog human beings. It's a question of relationships and communication among the various sciences. This is what I call episteme, and it has nothing to do with the Kantian categories.
? Q: I call these categories, because they are formal, universal, and empty.
MF: Do you consider historicity, for example, to be a category?
? An Historian of Culture 77
? Q: Yes, it's a category of 19th century culture.
MF: But this isn't Kant's meaning of "category. "
Q: It depends on how one reads Kant.
MF: Then I recognize that even my own are catego- ries in this sense.
Q: Let's go on now to another topic. I would like to ask you a question concerning your interest in Nietzsche. What is the Nietzsche that you like?
MF: Clearly, it is not that of Zarathustra. It is that of The Birth of Tragedy, of The Genealogy of Morals.
Q: The Nietzsche of origins, then?
? MF: I would say that in Nietzsche I find a question- ing of the historical type which does not refer in any way to the "original" as do many of the analyses of Western thought. Husserl and Heidegger bring up for discussion again all of our knowledge and its foundations, but they do this by beginning from that which is original. This analysis takes place, how- ever, at the expense of any articulated historical content. In- stead, what I liked in Nietzsche is the attempt to bring up for discussion again the fundamental concepts of knowledge, of morals, and of metaphysics by appealing to a historical analy- sis of the positivistic type, without going back to origins. But clearly this is not the only thing that interests me in Nietzsche.
In your writings, I find another more important as- pect; the retum to the discussion of the primacy, or, if you prefer, of the privilege of the subject in the Cartesian or Kan- tian sense, of the subject as consciousness.
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Q: It's precisely on that point that I wanted to ask you another question. I have the impression that for you, as for the majority of French philosophers, the subject coincides with consciousness.
? MF: For me this isn't true; but it is true that the over- whelming majority of philosphers from the 17th to the 19th century has equated subject and consciousness. I would say, rather, that this holds true also for the French philosophers of the 20th century, including Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. I think that this equation of subject-consciousness at the transcenden- tal level is a characteristic of Western philosophy from Des- cartes to our own time. Nietzsche launched one of the first, or at least one of the most vigorous, attacks against this equation.
? Q: It's a question of consciousness as the subject of "I think. " But what I don't understand is the position of con- sciousnenss as object of an episteme. The consciousness, if anything, is "epistemizing," not "epistemizable. "
MF: Are you speaking of the transcendental con- sciousness?
Q: Yes.
? MF: Well, I am not Kantian or Cartesian, precisely because I refuse an equation on the transcendental level be- tween subject and thinking "I. " I am convinced that there ex- ist, if not exactly structures, then at least rules for the function- ing of knowledge which have arisen in the course of history and within which can be located the various subjects.
? Q: I am afraid that all this may be a trap in which we are prisoners. What you are saying is undoubtedly true, but on
? ? An Historian of Culture 79
? the other hand, it is exactly this transcendental consciousness which conditions the formation of our knowledge. It is true that transcendental consciousness arises in a particular phase of our history and civilization, in a particular situation; but it is also true that, once arisen, it manifests itself as a constituting and not a constituted thing.
MF: I understand your position, but it is exacty on this point that our views diverge. You seem to me Kantian or Husserlian. In all of my work I strive instead to avoid any reference to this transcendental as a condition of possibility for any knowledge. When I say that I strive to avoid it, I don't mean that I am sure of succeeding. My procedure at this mo- ment is of a regressive sort, I would say; I try to assume a greater and greater detachment in order to define the historical conditions and transformations of our knowledge. I try to his- toricize to the utmost in order to leave as litu? e space as pos- sible to the transcendental. I cannot exclude the possibility that one day I will have to confront an irreducible residuum which will be, in fact, the transcendental.
? Q: Let's try to look at the question fi-om another point of view. Since it is said that you are a structuralist (for- give me for saying this), I would like to know whether you think that some kind of relationship exists between the concept of "structure" and the Freudian notion of the "unconscious. "
? MF: I'll answer you in an offhand way, though I will begin by making a statement of principles: I am absolutely not a structuralist.
Q: I know that, but public opinion has linked you to the structuralists.
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? MF: I am obliged to repeat it continually. I have never used any of the concepts which can be considered char- acteristic of structuralism. I have mentioned the concept of structure several times, but I have never used it. Unfortunately critics and journalists are not like philosophers; they do not recognize the difference between "mention" and "use. " Thus if I now speak of struchire and the unconscious I do so from a completely external standpoint; nor do I consider myself bound by the answer that I give. Anyway I am quite incompe- tent in this field. I will say that it seems to me that in recent years (I am speaking as a historian of culture) an unexpected discovery has occurred: I mean the discovery of the existence of formal relationships, which can indeed be called structures, exactly in areas that appear in all respects under the control of consciousness, for example in language and formal thought. It has also been observed that these relationships existed and operated even when the subject was not truly conscious of them--conscious first in the psychological sense of the word, but also in the Kantian or Cartesian sense. Thus through lin- guistics, logic and ethnology one arrives at the discovery of a sector which stands outside consciousness in the usually ac- cepted meaning of that word. Is it necessary to fit this sector into the realm of the? unconscious, understood in the Freudian sense? Students of psychoanalysis have found themselves with two choices. The first involves asserting that this "structural" unconscious, if we want to term it that, is subordinate to the Freudian unconscious. Fortunately many investigators have avoided this error, or should I say ingenuousness, and have put the problem in different terms.
The problem is to find out whether the Freudian un- conscious is not itself a locus in which this system of formal relationships operates. These relationships are operative in language, in formal thought, and even in certain social struc- tures. Perhaps the Freudian unconscious as well is, shall we
? An Historian of Culture 81
? say, "touched" by this structural unconscious. This is the point at which many psychoanalytic investigations have arrived.
Q: But doesn't this "structural" unconscious perhaps coincide with the unconscious as defined by Jung?
? MF: Certainly not. One can say with confidence that we are not speaking of an individual unconscious, in the sense that psychoanalysis generally understands that notion. Yet nei- ther is it a collective unconscious, which would be a kind of collection or reservoir of archetypes at the disposition of eve- ryone. The "structural" unconscious is neither of these things.
? Q: Please explain to me your interest in a writer like Sade. Does it have to do with the dissolution of the "ego" in his work, or perhaps with his eroticism, with that kind of alge- braic combination which eroticism undergoes in him?
? MF: Sade's great experiment, even with all that might be considered pathetic in it, lies in the fact that he seeks to introduce the disorder of desire into a world dominated by order and classification. This is precisely the meaning of what he calls "libertinism. " The libertine is a man gifted with a desire stroong enough and a mind cold enough to allow him to succeed in fitting all the potentialities of his desire into an absolutely exhaustive combination of events.
? Q: But according to you, doesn't one perhaps arrive at the death of desire in Sade? These combinations which know neither time nor the dynamics of desire, but only some abstract sexual acts--don't these combinations of all possible modes of behavior lead us perhaps to a situation in which Eros no longer exists, in which Eros becomes only a pretext?
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? MF: I'll say only a few things in reference to this. It is evident that if I want to make love (or rather, when I want to make love) I do not resort to Sade's prescribed methods, to his combinations; not so much because I wouldn't like to try, but because I've never had the opportunity. Thus I agree with you that in these perfect successive combinations it is not possible that desire should be multiplied or divided as it is in Sade's works. But in Sade I don't seek a formula for making love or a stimulus leading to it. For me Sade is a symptom of a curious movement which becomes evident within our culture at that moment when a thought, which was basically dominated by representation, calculation, order and classification, gives way, simultaneously with the French Revolution, to an element which up to then had never been conceived in this way, that is desire or voluptuousness. . .
Q: Thus, according to you, Sade is the last defender of the esprit de geometrie?
MF: Exactly. I see in Sade the last representative of the 18th century (the milieu from which he came also testifies to this), rather than a prophet of the future. Perhaps the real qustion is why we today should be so passionately interested in him. At any rate, I don't make Sade out to be a god, and I don't make him the prophet of our age; my interest in him has been constant principally because of the historical position he occupies, which is at a point of transition between two forms of thought.
Q: Why is our era so interested in Sade?
? MF: The reason probably is that Sade sought to in- sert into the combinations of representations the infinite power of desire, and when he did so he was obliged, almost as an
? An Historian of Culture 83
? afterthought, to take away the ego's privileged position. The ego became just one element within a combination. In the philosophy of the 17th and 18th centuries, the ego was king. Later, in the 19th century, with the philosophy of will, the ego remains king, though in a different way. Yet at the moment at which these two currents are joined, the ego is dissociated and dispersed among the various combinations. I believe that one of the most noteworthy characteristics of our era is that the sovereignty of the ego has been put in doubt. The dissociation which characterizes our own time was already present in Sade.
? Q; But don't you think that the popularity of Sade is due rather to the pansexuality which reigns in our day, the op- position to all order and all morality? I feel that for many people Sade represents above all the liberation of Eros, a spirit that mocks virtuousness, or the victory of the anarchistic Juli- ette ("Vice") over the timid and conformist Justine ("Virtue").
? MF: That's true. However, I maintain that the desire to liberate oneself from sexual taboos has always existed, in all epochs. People have always been famished, from the sexual point of view; there are no societies which do not regulate sex, and thus all societies create the hope of escaping from such regulations. The point is to decipher what form that hope takes today. It's true, today we set Juliette against Justine. But when we do that, aren't we perhaps admitting, or agreeing to, a kind of sexuality which goes beyond the subject, which stands be- hind the ego, so to speak, or which supersedes it? Thus the kind of sexuality that we recognize today in practice contrib- utes to the dissociation of the ego, at least in the form in which that term is understood from Descartes onward. So we see that in fact the basic theme of Sade's Juliette is this: "I will do with you anythiing that my desire wants, though it is agreed that you will do the same with me. No part of you will escape my
? 84 An Historian of Culture
? desire, but the same goes for me. " Thus neither of the two controls his or her own body anymore, and the loss of one communicates with the loss of the other even if the subject itself does not exercise any real control. It is exactiy this orgi- astic quality of contemporary sexuality that has raised the question of the subject's position.
Q: But many, for example Marcuse, speak of the lib- eration of Eros as an affirmation of the ego.
MF: I think that Marcuse is trying to use the ancient themes inherited from the 19th century to salvage the ego, understood in the traditional sense.
Q: Again, for me things appear differemly. Pansexu- ality is a phenomenon analogous to protest; it is a refusal of authority, of morality. The struggle is not so much against the subject as against constituted society, the "establishment. "
? MF: When I speak of the particular forms which ero- tocism assumes today, I don't mean to say that it is the only factor leading to a dissolution of the individual. I believe that we ? ue passing through a profound crisis of our civihzation, in the course of which the ego, the individual person as under- stood in traditional terms, has come to be questioned.
? Q: You have written that moral problems today are entirely reducible to political and sexual problems. Why?
MF: It often happens that I say something just so that I won't have to think about it anymore; then, for this reason, I have some trouble in justifying it. Nevertheless, I made this statement because I was thinking about it and also in order to continue thinking about it.
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