Look, what is Marxism but a different way of
analyzing
history itself?
Foucault-Live
.
.
? Q: This raises the problem of popular memory: of a memory working at its own pace, a pace quite detached from any seizure of central power or from the outbreak of any war. . .
? MF: This has always been the aim of the history taught in schools: to teach ordinary people that they got killed and that this was very heroic. Look at what's been made of Napoleon and the Napoleonic wars. . .
Q: A number of films, including those of Malle and Cavani, leave off talking about history or the struggle over Nazism and fascism; usually, they talk instead, or at the same time, about sex. What's the nature of this discourse?
? ? Film and Popular Memory 97
? MF: But don't you make a sharp distinction between Lacombe Lucien and Night Porter on this? It seems that the erotic, passionate aspect of Lacombe Lucien has a quite easily identifiable fiinction. It's basically a way of making the anti- hero acceptable, of saying he's not as anti as all that.
In fact, if all the power relations in his life are dis- torted, and if it's through him that they keep on running, on the other hand, just when you think he's distorting all the erotic relations, a true relationship suddenly appears and he loves the girl. On the one hand, there's the machinery of power which, starting with a flat tire, carries Lacombe closer and closer to something crazy. On the other hand, there's the machinery of love, which seems hooked up to it, which seems distorted, but which, on the contrary, has just the opposite effect and in the end restores Lucien as the handsome naked youth living in the fields with a girl.
So there's a fairly elementary antithesis between power and love. While in Night Porter the question is--^both generally and in the present situation--a very important one: love for power.
? Power has an erotic charge. There's an historical problem involved here. How is it that Nazism--^which was represented by shabby, pathetic puritanical characters, laugha- bly Victorian old maids, or at best, smutty individuals--how has it now managed to become, in France, in Germany, in the United States, in all pornographic literature throughout the world, the ultimate symbol of eroticism? Every shoddy erotic fantasy is now attributed to Nazism. Which raises a fundamen- tally serious problem: how do you love power? Nobody loves power any more. This kind of affective, erotic attachment, this desire one has for power, for the power that's exercised over you, doesn't exist any more. The monarchy and its rituals were created to stimulate this sort of erotic relationship to- wards power. The massive Stalinist apparatus, and even that of
? 98 Film and Popular Memory
? Hitler, were constructed for the same purpose. But it's all collapsed in ruins and obviously you can't be in love with
Brezhnev, Pompidou or Nixon. In a pinch you might love de Gaulle, Kennedy or Churchill. But what's going on at the mo- ment? Aren't we witnessing the beginnings of a re-eroticiza- tion of power, taken to a pathetic, ridiculous extreme by the porn-shops with Nazi insignia that you can find in the United States, and (a much more acceptable but just as ridiculous version) in the behavior of Giscard d'Estaing when he says, "I'm going to march down the streets in a lounge suit, shaking hands with ordinary people and kids on half-day holidays"? It's a fact that Giscard has built part of his campaign not only on his fine physical bearing but also on a certain eroticizing of his character, his stylishness.
? Q: That's how he's portrayed himself on an electoral poster--one where you see his daughter turned towards him.
MF: That's right. He's looking at France, but she's looking at him. It's the restoration to power of seduction.
? Q: Something that struck us during the electoral cam- paign, particularly at the time of the big televised debates be- tween Franc? ois Mitterand and Giscard, was that they weren't at all on the same level. Mitterand appeared as the old type of politico, belonging to the old left, let's say. He was trying to sell ideas, which were themselves dated and a bit old-fash- ioned, and he did it with a lot of style. But Giscard was selling the idea of power, exactly like an advertiser sells cheese.
? MF: Even quite recently, it was necessary to apolo- gize for being in power. It was necessary for power to be self- effacing, for it not to show itself as power. To a certain extent, this is how the democratic republics have functioned, where
? Film and Popular Memory 99
? the aim was to render power sufficiently invisible and insidi- ous for it to be impossible to grasp, to grasp what it was doing or where it was.
Q: Perhaps we have to talk about a certain powerless- ness of traditional Marxist discourse to account for fascism. Let's say that Marxism has given an historical account of the phenomenon of Nazism in a deterministic fashion, while com- pletely leaving aside what the specific ideology of Nazism was. So it's scarcely surprising that someone Uke Louis Malle, who's pretty famihar with what's going on on the left, can benefit fi'om this weakness, and rush into the breach.
? MF: Marxism has given a definition of Nazism and fascism: "an overt terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary fraction of the bourgeoisie. " It's a definition that leaves out an entire part of the content and a whole series of relationships. In particular, it leaves out the fact that Nazism and fascism were only possible insofar as there could exist within the masses a relatively large section which took on the responsi- bility for a number of state functions of repression, control, policing, etc. This, I believe, is a crucial characteristic of Na- zism; that is, its deep penetration inside the masses and the fact that a part of the power was actually delegated to a spe- cific fringe of the masses. This is where the word "dictator- ship" becomes true in general, and relatively false. When you think of the power an individual could possess under a Nazi regime as soon as he was simply S. S. or signed up in the Party! You could actually kill your neighbor, steal his wife, his house! This is where Lacombe Lucien is interesting, be- cause it's one side it shows up well. The fact is that contrary to what is usually understood by dictatorship--the power of a single person--^you could say that in this kind of regime the most repulsive (but in a sense the most intoxicating) part of
? ? 100 Film and Popular Memory
? power was given to a considerable number of people. The S. S. was that which was given the power to kill, to rape. . .
Q: This is where orthodox Marxism falls down. Be- cause it's obliged to talk about desire.
MF: About desire and power. . .
Q: It's also where films like Lacombe Lucien and Night Porter are relatively "strong. " They can talk about de-
sire and power in a way which seems coherent. . .
? MF: It's interesting to see in Night Porter how under Nazism the power of a single person is taken over and oper- ated by ordinary people. The kind of mock trial which is set up is quite fascinating. Because on the one hand, it has all the trappings of a psychotherapy group, while in fact having the power strucutre of a secret society. What they re-establish is basically an S. S. cell, endowed with a judicial power that's different from, and opposed to, the central power. You have to bear in mind the way power was delegated, distributed within the very heart of the population; you have to bear in mind this vast transfer of power that Nazism carried out in a society like Germany. It's wrong to say that Nazism was the power of the great industrialists carried on under a different form. It wasn't simply the intensified central power of the military--it was that, but only on one particular level.
? . Q: This is an interesting side of the film, in fact. But what in our view seems very open to criticism is that it ap- pears to say: "If you're a typical S. S. man, you'll act like this. But if, in addition, you have a certain inchnation for the job, it will offer you incredible erotic experiences. " So the film keeps up the seductiveness.
? Film and Popular Memory 101
? MF: Yes, this is where it meets up with Lacombe Lu- cien. Because Nazism never gave people any material advan- tages, it never handed out anything but power. You still have to ask why it was, if this regime was nothing but a bloody dic- tatorship, that on May 3rd, 1945, there were still Germans who fought to the last drop of blood; whether these people didn't have some form of emotional attachment to power. Bearing in mind, of course, all the pressuring, the denunciations. . . In La- combe Lucien, as in Night Porter, this excess of power they're given is converted back into love. It's very clear at the end of Night Porter, where a miniature concentration camp is built up around Max in his room, where he starves to death. So here love has converted power, surplus power, back into a total absence of power. In one sense, it's almost the same reconcili- ation as in Lacombe Lucien where love turns the excess of power in which he's been trapped into a rustic poverty far removed from the Gestapo's shady hotel, and far removed, too, from the farm where the pigs were being butchered.
? Q: So we now have the beginnings of an explanation for the problem you were posing at the start of our discussion: why is Nazism, which was a repressive, puritanical system, nowadays associated with eroticism? There's a sort of shift of emphasis: the central problem of power, which one doesn't want to confront head on, is dodged, or rather shoved com- pletely into the question of sexuality. So that this eroticising is ultimately a process of evasion, or repression. . .
? MF: The problem's really very difficult and it hasn't been studied perhaps enough, even by Reich. What leads to power being desirable, and to actually being desired? It's easy to see the process by which this eroticising is transmitted, reinforced, etc. But for the eroticising to work, it's necessary that the attachment to power, the acceptance of power by those over whom it is exerted, is already erotic.
? 102 Film and Popular Memory
? Q: It's that much more difficult since the representa- tion of power is rarely erotic. De Gaulle or Hitler are not particularly seductive.
MF: True--and I wonder if the Marxist analyses aren't victims to some extent to the abstractedness of the no- tion of liberty. In a regime like the Nazi regime, it's a fact that there's no liberty. But not having liberty doesn't mean not having power. . .
? There's a battle for and around history going on at this very moment which is extremely interesting. The intention is to reprogram, to stifle what I've called the "popular mem- ory," and also to propose and impose on people a framework in which to interpret the present. Up to 1968, popular struggles were part of folklore. For some people, they weren't even part of their immediate concept of reality. After 1968, every popu- lar struggle, whether in South America or in Africa, has found some echo, some sympathetic response. So it's no longer pos- sible to keep up their separation, this geographical "cordon sanitaire. " Popular struggles have become for our society, not part of the actual, but part of the possible. So they have to be set at a distance. How? Not by providing a direct interpretation of them, which would be asking to be exposed. But by offer- ing an historical interpretation of those popular struggles which have occurred in France in the past, in order to show that they never really happened! Before 1968, it was: "It won't happen here because it's going on somewhere else. " Now it's: "It won't happen here because it never has! Take something like the Resistance even, this glorious past you've talked about so much, just look at it for a moment. . . Nothing. It's empty, a hollow facade! " It's another way of saying, "Don't worry about Chile, it's no different; the Chilean peasants couldn't care less. And France too: the bulk of the population isn't interested in anything a few malcontents might do. "
? Film and Popular Memory 103
? Q: When we react to all this--against it all--^it's im- portant that we don't hmit ourselves to re-establishing the truth, to saying, about the Resistance, for example, "No, I was there and it wasn't like that! " If you're going to wage any effective ideological smuggle on the kind of ground dictated by these films, we believe you have to have a much broader, more extensive and positive frame of reference. For many people this consists in reappropriating the "history of France" for instance. It was with this in mind that we undertook a close reading of /, Pierre Rivie`re; because we realized that, para- doxically enough, it was useful to us in understanding La- combe Lucien, that their comparison was not unproductive. A significant difference between them, for example, is that Pi- erre Rivie`re is someone who writes, who commits a murder and who has a quite extraordinary memory. While Malle, on the other hand, treats his hero as a half-wit, as someone who goes through everything--history, the war, collaboration-- without accumulating any experience. This is where the theme of memory, of popular memory, can help to separate off some- one like Pierre Rivie`re from the character created by Malle
(and Patrick Modiano, in La Place de I'Etoile)? Pierre Rivie`re, having no way of making his voice heard, takes the floor and is obliged to kill before he wins the right to speak. While Malle's character proves, precisely by making nothing of what has happened to him, that there's nothing worth the ffouble of remembering. It's a pity you haven't seen The Courage of the People. It's a BoHvian film made with the exphcit aim of becoming evidence on a criminal record. The characters in this film--^which has been shown throughout the world (but not in Bolivia, thanks to the regime)--are played by the very people who were part of the real drama it re-enacts (a miner's strike and its bloody repression). They themselves take charge of their picture, so that nobody shall forget. . .
? There are two things going on in the cinema at the moment. On the one hand there are historical documents.
? 104 Film and Popular Memory
? which have an important role. In A Whole Life, for instance, they play a very big part. Or again, in the films of Marcel Ophuls, or of Harris and Sedouy, it's very moving to watch the reality to Duclos in action in 1936 or 1939. And on the other hand, there are fictional characters who, at a given mo- ment of history, condense within themselves the greatest pos- sible number of social relations, of links with history. This is why Lacombe Lucien is so successful. Lacombe is a French- man under occupation, an ordinary Joe with concrete connec- tions to Nazism, to the countryside, to local power, etc. And we shouldn't ignore this way of personifying history, of incar- nating it in a character or a collection of characters who em- body, at a given moment, a privileged relation to power.
? There are lots of figures in the history of the workers' movement that aren't known; there are plenty of heroes in the history of the working class who've been completely driven out of memory. And I think there's a real issue to be fought here. There's no need for Marxism to keep on making films about Lenin, we've got plenty already.
? MF: What you say is important. It's a trait of many Marxists nowadays--^ignorance of history. All these people, who spend their time talking about the misrepresentation of history, are only capable of producing commentaries on texts. What did Marx say? Did Marx really say that?
Look, what is Marxism but a different way of analyzing history itself? In my opinion, the left in France has no real grasp of history. It used to have. At one time in the 19th century, Michelet might have been said to represent the left. There was Jaure`s, too, and after them there grew up a kind of tradition of left-wing, social democratic historians (Mathiez, etc. ). Nowadays it's dwindled to a trickle; whereas it could be a formidable wave, carrying along writers, film-makers. True, there has been Aragon and Les Cloches de Bale--& very great historical novel. But there
? Film and Popular Memory 105
? are relatively few things, compared to what it could be like in a society where, after all, one can say that the intellectuals are more or less impregnated with Marxism.
Q: In this respect, the cinema offers something new: history captured "Live. " How do people in America relate to history, seeing the Vietnam war on television every evening while they're eating.
MF: As soon as you start seeing pictures of war every evening, war becomes totally acceptable. That's to say, thor- oughly tedious, you'd really love to see something else. But when it becomes boring, you put up with it. You don't even watch it. So how is this particular reality on film to be reacti- vated as an existing, historically important reality?
Q: Have you seen The Camisards?
MF: Yes, I liked it very much. Historically, it's im- peccable. It's well made, intelligent and it makes a lot of things clear.
? Q: I think that's the direction we have to take in mak- ing films. To come back to the films we were talking about at the beginning--^we must raise the question of the extreme left's confusion in the face of certain aspects of Lacombe Lu- cien and Night Porter, particularly the sexual one; and how this confusion can be of benefit to the right. . .
? MF: As for what you call the extreme left, I find my- self in considerable difficulty. I'm not at all sure that it still exists. Nonetheless, there really needs to be a thorough sum- ming-up of what the extreme left has done since 1968, both negatively and positively. It's true that this extreme left has
? 106 Film and Popular Memory
? been the means of spreading a whole number of important ideas; on sexuality, women, homosexuality, psychiatry, hous- ing, medicine. It's also been the means of spreading methods of action, where it continues to be of importance. The extreme left has played as important a role in the forms of acticity as in its themes. But there's also a negative summing-up to be made, concerning certain Stalinist and terrorist organizational practices. And a misunderstanding, too, of certain broad and deeply-rooted processes which recently resulted in 13 million people backing Mitterrand, and which have always been disre- garded, on the pretext that this was the politics of the politi- cians, that this was the business of the parties. A whole heap of things have been ignored; notably, that the desire to defeat the right has been a very important political factor within the masses for a number of months and even years. The extreme left hasn't sensed this desire, thanks to a false definition of the masses, a wrong appreciation of what this will to win really is. Faced with the risks a co-opted victory would involve, it pre- fers not to take the risk of winning. Defeat, at least, can't be co-opted. Personally, I'm not so sure. A
? Translated by Martin Jordin Notes
' Lacombe Lucien, a film by Louis Malle, is the story of a French collaborator during the German occupation. Night Porter, a film by Liliana Cavani, is a sado-masochistic love story involving a former Nazi camp worker and prisoner.
^ LIP, a cause ce? le`bre in France, involved the take-over by workers of a factory. Cf. A. Belden Fields, Trotskyism and Maoism: Theory and Practice in France and the United States (New York: Autonomedia, 1988).
' P. Modiano, La Place de l'Etoile (Paris: Gallimard, 1968).
? 9
Sorcery and Madness
? ? Q: For twenty years Thomas S. Szasz has developed the theme that there are fundamental analogies between the persecution of heretics and witches in former times and the persecution of the mad and mentally ill today. It's the prin- ciple subject of his book The Manufacture of Madness, which shows that the therapeutic state has been substituted for the theological state. ' Psychiatrists and more generally workers in the field of mental health have succeeded in bringing back the Inquisition and in setting it up as a new scientific panacea. Does the parallel between the Inquisition and psychiatry ap- pear to you to be historically justified?
MF: When will we be delivered from these witches and misunderstood madnesses that a society without psychia- trists unfortunately condemned to the stake? When will we be rid of this commonplace that so many books are still recount- ing today?
? What's strong and important in Szasz's work is to have shown that the historical continuity doesn't go from witches to madness, but from the institution of witches to the one of psychiatrists. It's not the witch, with her tawdry chime- ras and power over the shades, who has finally been recog- nized as the alienated one by a tardy but beneficent science.
? 108 Sorcery and Madness
? Szasz shows that a certain kind of power is exercized through the surveillances, interrogations and decrees of the Inquisition; and that through successive transformations it interrogates us still, questions our desires and our dreams, disturbs our nights, hunts down secrets and traces boundaries, designates what's abnormal, undertakes purifications and assures the functioning of order.
? Szasz, I hope, has definitively displaced the old question--^were witches the mad ones? --and reformulated it in these terms: What, in the psychiatric set-up, is still recog- nizable as the effect of a power linked to the prying work of the Inquisitors, with their long muzzles and sharp teeth? The Manufacture of Madness, I think, is an important book in the history of the related techniques of power and knowledge.
? Q: In The Manufacture of Madness Szasz describes the insatiable curiosity of the Inquisitors concerning the sexual fantasies and activities of their victims, the witches, and com- pares it to that of psychiatrists. Do you think this comparison is justified?
? MF: We're really going to have to rid ourselves of the "Marcuseries" and "Reichianisms" which encumber us and which would have us believe that of all things sexuality is the most obstinately "repressed" and "overrepressed" by our "bourgeois," "capitalist," "hypocritical" and "Victorian" soci- ety. ^ Since the Renaissance there is nothing that has been more studied, questioned, extorted, brought to light and into dis- course, forced into confession, required to express itself and praised, finally, when it found the words. No civilization has chattered so much about sexuahty as ours. And many people still believe that they are subverting it when they are only obeying this injunction to confess, this secular requisition that subjects us--^we other men of the West--to say all about our
? Sorcery and Madness 109
? desire. Since the Inquistion, through penitence, the examina- tion of conscience, spiritual guidance, education, medicine, hygiene, psychoanalysis and psychiatry, sexuality has always been suspected of holding over us a decisive and profound truth. Tell us what your pleasure is, don't hide anything of what happens between your heart and your sex, and we will know what you are and what you are worth.
? Szasz has seen very clearly I think how the "ques- tioning" of sexuality was not simply the morbid interest of Inquisitors crazed by their own desire, but that what was tak- ing shape there was a modem kind of power and control over individuals. Szasz is not an historian and perhaps one can quarrel with him, but at a time when the discourse on sexuality fascinates so many historians, it was good that a psychoanalyst retraced in historical terms the interrogation of sexuality. And many of Szasz's intuitions confirm what Le Roy Ladurie re- veals in his remarkable book Montaillou.
Q: What do you think of Szasz's idea that in order to understand the psychiatric institution--and all mental health movements--^it's advisable to study the psychiatrists them- selves and not the so-called sick? '
? MF: If it's a question of studying the psychiatric in- stitution, he's obviously right. But I think Szasz goes much further. Everyone dreams of writing a history of the mad, of going over to the other side and tracing the great evasions or the subtle retreats into delirium fi'om the beginning. Yet, under the pretext of tuning in and letting the mad themselves speak, one already accepts the division between the two as a fact. It's necessarily better to put oneself at the point where the machin- ery that makes these qualifications and disqualifications is ac- tually functioning, and putting the mad and the non-mad on two sides facing each other. Madness is no less an effect of
? ? 110 Sorcery and Madness
power than non-madness; it doesn't dart through the world like a furtive beast until its course is halted and it's put in the cage of an asylum. It's a tactical response, in the form of an infinite spiral, to the tactics that invest it. In another of Szasz's books. The Myth of Mental Illness, there's a chapter that I think is exemplary on this subject, where hysteria is shown to be a product of psychiatric power, but also as the reply that opposes it and the trap into which it falls.
? Q: If the therapeutic state has replaced the theological state, and if medicine and psychiatry have today become equally the most restrictive and underhanded means of social control isn't it necessary from the point of view of an indi- vidualist and libertarian like Szasz to fight for the separation of medicine and the State?
MF; On this point I have some difficulty. I wonder if Szasz is not identifying, in a way that's too forced, power with the State.
Perhaps this identification is explained by Szasz's double experience: the European experience, in a totalitarian Hungary where all forms and mechanisms of power were jeal- ously controlled by the State, and an experience of an America penetrated with this conviction that liberty begins where the centralized intervention of the State ceases.
? In fact, I don't believe that power is only the State, or that the non-State is therefore liberty. It's true (here Szasz is right) that the circuits of psychiatricalizing and psycholo- gizing, even if they pass through the parents, the peer group and the immediate surroundings, are finally supported by a vast medico-administrative complex. But the "free" medicine of the "liberal" doctor, the private psychiatrist or home psy- chologist are not an alternative to institutional medicine. They are part of the network, even in the case where they are poles
? ? ? Sorcery and Madness 111
? apart from the institution. Between the therapeutic state Szasz talks about and "liberated" medicine there is a whole play of support and complex cross-reference.
? The analyst listening silently in his chair is not so foreign to the insistent questioning and the close surveillance in the asylum. I don't think one can apply the world "libertar- ian"--Does Szasz himself do it? I don't remember--to a doc- tor who is "liberal," that is, linked to an individual profit that the State protects all the more since it profits from it too. Szasz cites very effectively the anti-State interventions of these lib- eral doctors, and they have had salutory effects. But it seems to me that there you have the combative utilization--against "general abuses"--of a medicine whose destination rather is to assure, conjointly with the State and with its support, the well functioning of a normalizing society. Rather than the therapeu- tic State, it's the normalizing society, with its institutional and private wheels, that it is necessary to study and criticize. Robert Castel's book Le Psychanalysme* seems to me to have cast a very accurate light on this great continuous web which reaches from the sad dormitory to the profit-making couch. A
? Translated by John Johnston Notes
' Thomas Szasz, The Manufacture of Madness (New York: Harper & Row, 1974).
? ^ Foucault's History of Sexuality, which takes this anti-Reic- hian stand, came out at the time of this interview.
' Thomas Szasz, The Myth of Mental Illness (New York: Harper & Row, 1977).
*Robert Castel, Le Psychanalysme (Paris: Maspero, 1973).
? 10
On Literature
? ? Q: What is the place or status of literary texts in your research?
MF: In Madness and Civilization and in The Order of Things, I only mention literary texts, or point to them in passing, as a kind of dawdler who says, "Now, there you see, one cannot fail to speak of Rameau's Nephew. " But these allusions play no role in the economy of the process.
For me, literature was on each occasion the object of a report, not part of an analysis nor a reduction nor an integra- tion into the domain of analysis. It was a point of rest, a halt, a blazon, a flag.
? Q: You didn't want these texts to play the role of expressing or reflecting historical processes?
MF: No. . . The question would have to be broached on another level.
There has never really been an analysis of how, given the mass of things that are spoken, given the set of discourses actually held, a certain number of these discourses (literary
discourse, philosophical discourse) are sacralized and given a particular function.
? I
? 114 On Literature
? It seems that traditionally literary or philosophical discourse has been made to function as a substitute or as a general envelope for all other discourses. Literature had to assume the value for all the rest. People have written histories of what was said in the 18 th century by passing through Fon- tenelle, Voltaire, Diderot or The New Heloise, etc. Or else they have thought of these texts as the expression of something that in the end failed to be formulated on a more quotidien level.
? In regard to this attitude, I passed from a state of uncertainty--citing literature where it was, without indicating its relationship with the rest--to a frankly negative position, by trying to make all the non-literary or para-literary dis- courses that were actually constituted in a given period re- appear positively, and by excluding literature. In Discipline and Punish it's a matter only of bad literature.
Q: How does one distinguish good from bad?
? MF: Exactly. That's just what will have to be consid- ered one day. We will have to ask ourselves just what is this activity that consists of circulating fictions, poems, and narra- tives in a society. We also ought to analyze a second opera- tion: among all these narratives (re? cits), what is it that sacral- izes a certain number and makes them begin to function as "literature"? They are quickly taken up in the interior of an institution that at its origin was very different: the institution of the university. Now it begins to be identified with the liter- ary institution.
? This is a very visible line of decline in our culture. In the 19th century the university was the medium at the center of which a literature said to be classic was constituted. This literature was by definition not a contemporary literature, and was valorized simultaneously as both the only base for con- temporary literature and as its critique. Hence a very curious
? On Literature 115
? play in the 19th century between literature and the university, between the writer and the academic.
? And then, little by little, the two institutions, which underneath their petty squabbles were in fact profoundly akin, tended to become completely indistinguishable. We know per- fectly well that today the literature said to be avant-garde is only ever read by academics; that a writer over thirty has students around him who are doing their theses on his work; and that writers live for the most part by giving courses and by being academics. Thus the truth about something is already evident there, in the fact that literature functions thanks to a play of selection, sacralization, and institutional valorization of which the university is at once both the operator and the receiver.
? Q: Are there intrinsic criteria for [evaluating] texts, or is it only a matter of sacralization by the university as institution?
MF; I know nothing about it. I would simply say this; in order to break with a certain number of myths, like the one of literature's expressive character, it has been very im- portant to establish the great principle that literature is con- cemed only with itself If it has anything to do with its author, it's according to a mode of death, silence, and the very disap- pearance of the one who writes.
? The reference here to Blanchot or Barthes matters little. The essential thing is the importance of the principle; the intransitivity of literature. It was indeed the first stage thanks to which one could get rid of the idea that literature was the place of all transits, or the point where all transits ended up, the expression of totalities.
? But it seems to me that this was still only a stage. Yet, to maintain the analysis at this level is to risk not disman-
? 116 On Literature
? tling the set of sacralizations by which literature has been affected. On the contrary, one risks sacralizing it even worse. And that's actually what has happened, even up to 1970. We have seen a certain number of the themes of Blanchot and Barthes used for a kind of exaltation, at once ultra-lyrical and ultra-rationalizing, of literature as a structure of language sus- ceptible to analysis only in itself and in its own terms.
? The pohtical implications were not absent from this exaltation. Thanks to it, one succeeded in saying that literature in itself was at this point freed from all determinations, that the fact of writing was in itself subversive, that the writer possesses, in the very gesture of writing, an imprescribable right to subversion! Consequently, the writer was a revolution- ary, and the more the writing was Writing (l'e? criture e? tait e? criture), the more it plunged into intransitivity, the more it produced in doing so the revolution! You know that these
things were unfortunately said. .
? Q: This raises the problem of popular memory: of a memory working at its own pace, a pace quite detached from any seizure of central power or from the outbreak of any war. . .
? MF: This has always been the aim of the history taught in schools: to teach ordinary people that they got killed and that this was very heroic. Look at what's been made of Napoleon and the Napoleonic wars. . .
Q: A number of films, including those of Malle and Cavani, leave off talking about history or the struggle over Nazism and fascism; usually, they talk instead, or at the same time, about sex. What's the nature of this discourse?
? ? Film and Popular Memory 97
? MF: But don't you make a sharp distinction between Lacombe Lucien and Night Porter on this? It seems that the erotic, passionate aspect of Lacombe Lucien has a quite easily identifiable fiinction. It's basically a way of making the anti- hero acceptable, of saying he's not as anti as all that.
In fact, if all the power relations in his life are dis- torted, and if it's through him that they keep on running, on the other hand, just when you think he's distorting all the erotic relations, a true relationship suddenly appears and he loves the girl. On the one hand, there's the machinery of power which, starting with a flat tire, carries Lacombe closer and closer to something crazy. On the other hand, there's the machinery of love, which seems hooked up to it, which seems distorted, but which, on the contrary, has just the opposite effect and in the end restores Lucien as the handsome naked youth living in the fields with a girl.
So there's a fairly elementary antithesis between power and love. While in Night Porter the question is--^both generally and in the present situation--a very important one: love for power.
? Power has an erotic charge. There's an historical problem involved here. How is it that Nazism--^which was represented by shabby, pathetic puritanical characters, laugha- bly Victorian old maids, or at best, smutty individuals--how has it now managed to become, in France, in Germany, in the United States, in all pornographic literature throughout the world, the ultimate symbol of eroticism? Every shoddy erotic fantasy is now attributed to Nazism. Which raises a fundamen- tally serious problem: how do you love power? Nobody loves power any more. This kind of affective, erotic attachment, this desire one has for power, for the power that's exercised over you, doesn't exist any more. The monarchy and its rituals were created to stimulate this sort of erotic relationship to- wards power. The massive Stalinist apparatus, and even that of
? 98 Film and Popular Memory
? Hitler, were constructed for the same purpose. But it's all collapsed in ruins and obviously you can't be in love with
Brezhnev, Pompidou or Nixon. In a pinch you might love de Gaulle, Kennedy or Churchill. But what's going on at the mo- ment? Aren't we witnessing the beginnings of a re-eroticiza- tion of power, taken to a pathetic, ridiculous extreme by the porn-shops with Nazi insignia that you can find in the United States, and (a much more acceptable but just as ridiculous version) in the behavior of Giscard d'Estaing when he says, "I'm going to march down the streets in a lounge suit, shaking hands with ordinary people and kids on half-day holidays"? It's a fact that Giscard has built part of his campaign not only on his fine physical bearing but also on a certain eroticizing of his character, his stylishness.
? Q: That's how he's portrayed himself on an electoral poster--one where you see his daughter turned towards him.
MF: That's right. He's looking at France, but she's looking at him. It's the restoration to power of seduction.
? Q: Something that struck us during the electoral cam- paign, particularly at the time of the big televised debates be- tween Franc? ois Mitterand and Giscard, was that they weren't at all on the same level. Mitterand appeared as the old type of politico, belonging to the old left, let's say. He was trying to sell ideas, which were themselves dated and a bit old-fash- ioned, and he did it with a lot of style. But Giscard was selling the idea of power, exactly like an advertiser sells cheese.
? MF: Even quite recently, it was necessary to apolo- gize for being in power. It was necessary for power to be self- effacing, for it not to show itself as power. To a certain extent, this is how the democratic republics have functioned, where
? Film and Popular Memory 99
? the aim was to render power sufficiently invisible and insidi- ous for it to be impossible to grasp, to grasp what it was doing or where it was.
Q: Perhaps we have to talk about a certain powerless- ness of traditional Marxist discourse to account for fascism. Let's say that Marxism has given an historical account of the phenomenon of Nazism in a deterministic fashion, while com- pletely leaving aside what the specific ideology of Nazism was. So it's scarcely surprising that someone Uke Louis Malle, who's pretty famihar with what's going on on the left, can benefit fi'om this weakness, and rush into the breach.
? MF: Marxism has given a definition of Nazism and fascism: "an overt terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary fraction of the bourgeoisie. " It's a definition that leaves out an entire part of the content and a whole series of relationships. In particular, it leaves out the fact that Nazism and fascism were only possible insofar as there could exist within the masses a relatively large section which took on the responsi- bility for a number of state functions of repression, control, policing, etc. This, I believe, is a crucial characteristic of Na- zism; that is, its deep penetration inside the masses and the fact that a part of the power was actually delegated to a spe- cific fringe of the masses. This is where the word "dictator- ship" becomes true in general, and relatively false. When you think of the power an individual could possess under a Nazi regime as soon as he was simply S. S. or signed up in the Party! You could actually kill your neighbor, steal his wife, his house! This is where Lacombe Lucien is interesting, be- cause it's one side it shows up well. The fact is that contrary to what is usually understood by dictatorship--the power of a single person--^you could say that in this kind of regime the most repulsive (but in a sense the most intoxicating) part of
? ? 100 Film and Popular Memory
? power was given to a considerable number of people. The S. S. was that which was given the power to kill, to rape. . .
Q: This is where orthodox Marxism falls down. Be- cause it's obliged to talk about desire.
MF: About desire and power. . .
Q: It's also where films like Lacombe Lucien and Night Porter are relatively "strong. " They can talk about de-
sire and power in a way which seems coherent. . .
? MF: It's interesting to see in Night Porter how under Nazism the power of a single person is taken over and oper- ated by ordinary people. The kind of mock trial which is set up is quite fascinating. Because on the one hand, it has all the trappings of a psychotherapy group, while in fact having the power strucutre of a secret society. What they re-establish is basically an S. S. cell, endowed with a judicial power that's different from, and opposed to, the central power. You have to bear in mind the way power was delegated, distributed within the very heart of the population; you have to bear in mind this vast transfer of power that Nazism carried out in a society like Germany. It's wrong to say that Nazism was the power of the great industrialists carried on under a different form. It wasn't simply the intensified central power of the military--it was that, but only on one particular level.
? . Q: This is an interesting side of the film, in fact. But what in our view seems very open to criticism is that it ap- pears to say: "If you're a typical S. S. man, you'll act like this. But if, in addition, you have a certain inchnation for the job, it will offer you incredible erotic experiences. " So the film keeps up the seductiveness.
? Film and Popular Memory 101
? MF: Yes, this is where it meets up with Lacombe Lu- cien. Because Nazism never gave people any material advan- tages, it never handed out anything but power. You still have to ask why it was, if this regime was nothing but a bloody dic- tatorship, that on May 3rd, 1945, there were still Germans who fought to the last drop of blood; whether these people didn't have some form of emotional attachment to power. Bearing in mind, of course, all the pressuring, the denunciations. . . In La- combe Lucien, as in Night Porter, this excess of power they're given is converted back into love. It's very clear at the end of Night Porter, where a miniature concentration camp is built up around Max in his room, where he starves to death. So here love has converted power, surplus power, back into a total absence of power. In one sense, it's almost the same reconcili- ation as in Lacombe Lucien where love turns the excess of power in which he's been trapped into a rustic poverty far removed from the Gestapo's shady hotel, and far removed, too, from the farm where the pigs were being butchered.
? Q: So we now have the beginnings of an explanation for the problem you were posing at the start of our discussion: why is Nazism, which was a repressive, puritanical system, nowadays associated with eroticism? There's a sort of shift of emphasis: the central problem of power, which one doesn't want to confront head on, is dodged, or rather shoved com- pletely into the question of sexuality. So that this eroticising is ultimately a process of evasion, or repression. . .
? MF: The problem's really very difficult and it hasn't been studied perhaps enough, even by Reich. What leads to power being desirable, and to actually being desired? It's easy to see the process by which this eroticising is transmitted, reinforced, etc. But for the eroticising to work, it's necessary that the attachment to power, the acceptance of power by those over whom it is exerted, is already erotic.
? 102 Film and Popular Memory
? Q: It's that much more difficult since the representa- tion of power is rarely erotic. De Gaulle or Hitler are not particularly seductive.
MF: True--and I wonder if the Marxist analyses aren't victims to some extent to the abstractedness of the no- tion of liberty. In a regime like the Nazi regime, it's a fact that there's no liberty. But not having liberty doesn't mean not having power. . .
? There's a battle for and around history going on at this very moment which is extremely interesting. The intention is to reprogram, to stifle what I've called the "popular mem- ory," and also to propose and impose on people a framework in which to interpret the present. Up to 1968, popular struggles were part of folklore. For some people, they weren't even part of their immediate concept of reality. After 1968, every popu- lar struggle, whether in South America or in Africa, has found some echo, some sympathetic response. So it's no longer pos- sible to keep up their separation, this geographical "cordon sanitaire. " Popular struggles have become for our society, not part of the actual, but part of the possible. So they have to be set at a distance. How? Not by providing a direct interpretation of them, which would be asking to be exposed. But by offer- ing an historical interpretation of those popular struggles which have occurred in France in the past, in order to show that they never really happened! Before 1968, it was: "It won't happen here because it's going on somewhere else. " Now it's: "It won't happen here because it never has! Take something like the Resistance even, this glorious past you've talked about so much, just look at it for a moment. . . Nothing. It's empty, a hollow facade! " It's another way of saying, "Don't worry about Chile, it's no different; the Chilean peasants couldn't care less. And France too: the bulk of the population isn't interested in anything a few malcontents might do. "
? Film and Popular Memory 103
? Q: When we react to all this--against it all--^it's im- portant that we don't hmit ourselves to re-establishing the truth, to saying, about the Resistance, for example, "No, I was there and it wasn't like that! " If you're going to wage any effective ideological smuggle on the kind of ground dictated by these films, we believe you have to have a much broader, more extensive and positive frame of reference. For many people this consists in reappropriating the "history of France" for instance. It was with this in mind that we undertook a close reading of /, Pierre Rivie`re; because we realized that, para- doxically enough, it was useful to us in understanding La- combe Lucien, that their comparison was not unproductive. A significant difference between them, for example, is that Pi- erre Rivie`re is someone who writes, who commits a murder and who has a quite extraordinary memory. While Malle, on the other hand, treats his hero as a half-wit, as someone who goes through everything--history, the war, collaboration-- without accumulating any experience. This is where the theme of memory, of popular memory, can help to separate off some- one like Pierre Rivie`re from the character created by Malle
(and Patrick Modiano, in La Place de I'Etoile)? Pierre Rivie`re, having no way of making his voice heard, takes the floor and is obliged to kill before he wins the right to speak. While Malle's character proves, precisely by making nothing of what has happened to him, that there's nothing worth the ffouble of remembering. It's a pity you haven't seen The Courage of the People. It's a BoHvian film made with the exphcit aim of becoming evidence on a criminal record. The characters in this film--^which has been shown throughout the world (but not in Bolivia, thanks to the regime)--are played by the very people who were part of the real drama it re-enacts (a miner's strike and its bloody repression). They themselves take charge of their picture, so that nobody shall forget. . .
? There are two things going on in the cinema at the moment. On the one hand there are historical documents.
? 104 Film and Popular Memory
? which have an important role. In A Whole Life, for instance, they play a very big part. Or again, in the films of Marcel Ophuls, or of Harris and Sedouy, it's very moving to watch the reality to Duclos in action in 1936 or 1939. And on the other hand, there are fictional characters who, at a given mo- ment of history, condense within themselves the greatest pos- sible number of social relations, of links with history. This is why Lacombe Lucien is so successful. Lacombe is a French- man under occupation, an ordinary Joe with concrete connec- tions to Nazism, to the countryside, to local power, etc. And we shouldn't ignore this way of personifying history, of incar- nating it in a character or a collection of characters who em- body, at a given moment, a privileged relation to power.
? There are lots of figures in the history of the workers' movement that aren't known; there are plenty of heroes in the history of the working class who've been completely driven out of memory. And I think there's a real issue to be fought here. There's no need for Marxism to keep on making films about Lenin, we've got plenty already.
? MF: What you say is important. It's a trait of many Marxists nowadays--^ignorance of history. All these people, who spend their time talking about the misrepresentation of history, are only capable of producing commentaries on texts. What did Marx say? Did Marx really say that?
Look, what is Marxism but a different way of analyzing history itself? In my opinion, the left in France has no real grasp of history. It used to have. At one time in the 19th century, Michelet might have been said to represent the left. There was Jaure`s, too, and after them there grew up a kind of tradition of left-wing, social democratic historians (Mathiez, etc. ). Nowadays it's dwindled to a trickle; whereas it could be a formidable wave, carrying along writers, film-makers. True, there has been Aragon and Les Cloches de Bale--& very great historical novel. But there
? Film and Popular Memory 105
? are relatively few things, compared to what it could be like in a society where, after all, one can say that the intellectuals are more or less impregnated with Marxism.
Q: In this respect, the cinema offers something new: history captured "Live. " How do people in America relate to history, seeing the Vietnam war on television every evening while they're eating.
MF: As soon as you start seeing pictures of war every evening, war becomes totally acceptable. That's to say, thor- oughly tedious, you'd really love to see something else. But when it becomes boring, you put up with it. You don't even watch it. So how is this particular reality on film to be reacti- vated as an existing, historically important reality?
Q: Have you seen The Camisards?
MF: Yes, I liked it very much. Historically, it's im- peccable. It's well made, intelligent and it makes a lot of things clear.
? Q: I think that's the direction we have to take in mak- ing films. To come back to the films we were talking about at the beginning--^we must raise the question of the extreme left's confusion in the face of certain aspects of Lacombe Lu- cien and Night Porter, particularly the sexual one; and how this confusion can be of benefit to the right. . .
? MF: As for what you call the extreme left, I find my- self in considerable difficulty. I'm not at all sure that it still exists. Nonetheless, there really needs to be a thorough sum- ming-up of what the extreme left has done since 1968, both negatively and positively. It's true that this extreme left has
? 106 Film and Popular Memory
? been the means of spreading a whole number of important ideas; on sexuality, women, homosexuality, psychiatry, hous- ing, medicine. It's also been the means of spreading methods of action, where it continues to be of importance. The extreme left has played as important a role in the forms of acticity as in its themes. But there's also a negative summing-up to be made, concerning certain Stalinist and terrorist organizational practices. And a misunderstanding, too, of certain broad and deeply-rooted processes which recently resulted in 13 million people backing Mitterrand, and which have always been disre- garded, on the pretext that this was the politics of the politi- cians, that this was the business of the parties. A whole heap of things have been ignored; notably, that the desire to defeat the right has been a very important political factor within the masses for a number of months and even years. The extreme left hasn't sensed this desire, thanks to a false definition of the masses, a wrong appreciation of what this will to win really is. Faced with the risks a co-opted victory would involve, it pre- fers not to take the risk of winning. Defeat, at least, can't be co-opted. Personally, I'm not so sure. A
? Translated by Martin Jordin Notes
' Lacombe Lucien, a film by Louis Malle, is the story of a French collaborator during the German occupation. Night Porter, a film by Liliana Cavani, is a sado-masochistic love story involving a former Nazi camp worker and prisoner.
^ LIP, a cause ce? le`bre in France, involved the take-over by workers of a factory. Cf. A. Belden Fields, Trotskyism and Maoism: Theory and Practice in France and the United States (New York: Autonomedia, 1988).
' P. Modiano, La Place de l'Etoile (Paris: Gallimard, 1968).
? 9
Sorcery and Madness
? ? Q: For twenty years Thomas S. Szasz has developed the theme that there are fundamental analogies between the persecution of heretics and witches in former times and the persecution of the mad and mentally ill today. It's the prin- ciple subject of his book The Manufacture of Madness, which shows that the therapeutic state has been substituted for the theological state. ' Psychiatrists and more generally workers in the field of mental health have succeeded in bringing back the Inquisition and in setting it up as a new scientific panacea. Does the parallel between the Inquisition and psychiatry ap- pear to you to be historically justified?
MF: When will we be delivered from these witches and misunderstood madnesses that a society without psychia- trists unfortunately condemned to the stake? When will we be rid of this commonplace that so many books are still recount- ing today?
? What's strong and important in Szasz's work is to have shown that the historical continuity doesn't go from witches to madness, but from the institution of witches to the one of psychiatrists. It's not the witch, with her tawdry chime- ras and power over the shades, who has finally been recog- nized as the alienated one by a tardy but beneficent science.
? 108 Sorcery and Madness
? Szasz shows that a certain kind of power is exercized through the surveillances, interrogations and decrees of the Inquisition; and that through successive transformations it interrogates us still, questions our desires and our dreams, disturbs our nights, hunts down secrets and traces boundaries, designates what's abnormal, undertakes purifications and assures the functioning of order.
? Szasz, I hope, has definitively displaced the old question--^were witches the mad ones? --and reformulated it in these terms: What, in the psychiatric set-up, is still recog- nizable as the effect of a power linked to the prying work of the Inquisitors, with their long muzzles and sharp teeth? The Manufacture of Madness, I think, is an important book in the history of the related techniques of power and knowledge.
? Q: In The Manufacture of Madness Szasz describes the insatiable curiosity of the Inquisitors concerning the sexual fantasies and activities of their victims, the witches, and com- pares it to that of psychiatrists. Do you think this comparison is justified?
? MF: We're really going to have to rid ourselves of the "Marcuseries" and "Reichianisms" which encumber us and which would have us believe that of all things sexuality is the most obstinately "repressed" and "overrepressed" by our "bourgeois," "capitalist," "hypocritical" and "Victorian" soci- ety. ^ Since the Renaissance there is nothing that has been more studied, questioned, extorted, brought to light and into dis- course, forced into confession, required to express itself and praised, finally, when it found the words. No civilization has chattered so much about sexuahty as ours. And many people still believe that they are subverting it when they are only obeying this injunction to confess, this secular requisition that subjects us--^we other men of the West--to say all about our
? Sorcery and Madness 109
? desire. Since the Inquistion, through penitence, the examina- tion of conscience, spiritual guidance, education, medicine, hygiene, psychoanalysis and psychiatry, sexuality has always been suspected of holding over us a decisive and profound truth. Tell us what your pleasure is, don't hide anything of what happens between your heart and your sex, and we will know what you are and what you are worth.
? Szasz has seen very clearly I think how the "ques- tioning" of sexuality was not simply the morbid interest of Inquisitors crazed by their own desire, but that what was tak- ing shape there was a modem kind of power and control over individuals. Szasz is not an historian and perhaps one can quarrel with him, but at a time when the discourse on sexuality fascinates so many historians, it was good that a psychoanalyst retraced in historical terms the interrogation of sexuality. And many of Szasz's intuitions confirm what Le Roy Ladurie re- veals in his remarkable book Montaillou.
Q: What do you think of Szasz's idea that in order to understand the psychiatric institution--and all mental health movements--^it's advisable to study the psychiatrists them- selves and not the so-called sick? '
? MF: If it's a question of studying the psychiatric in- stitution, he's obviously right. But I think Szasz goes much further. Everyone dreams of writing a history of the mad, of going over to the other side and tracing the great evasions or the subtle retreats into delirium fi'om the beginning. Yet, under the pretext of tuning in and letting the mad themselves speak, one already accepts the division between the two as a fact. It's necessarily better to put oneself at the point where the machin- ery that makes these qualifications and disqualifications is ac- tually functioning, and putting the mad and the non-mad on two sides facing each other. Madness is no less an effect of
? ? 110 Sorcery and Madness
power than non-madness; it doesn't dart through the world like a furtive beast until its course is halted and it's put in the cage of an asylum. It's a tactical response, in the form of an infinite spiral, to the tactics that invest it. In another of Szasz's books. The Myth of Mental Illness, there's a chapter that I think is exemplary on this subject, where hysteria is shown to be a product of psychiatric power, but also as the reply that opposes it and the trap into which it falls.
? Q: If the therapeutic state has replaced the theological state, and if medicine and psychiatry have today become equally the most restrictive and underhanded means of social control isn't it necessary from the point of view of an indi- vidualist and libertarian like Szasz to fight for the separation of medicine and the State?
MF; On this point I have some difficulty. I wonder if Szasz is not identifying, in a way that's too forced, power with the State.
Perhaps this identification is explained by Szasz's double experience: the European experience, in a totalitarian Hungary where all forms and mechanisms of power were jeal- ously controlled by the State, and an experience of an America penetrated with this conviction that liberty begins where the centralized intervention of the State ceases.
? In fact, I don't believe that power is only the State, or that the non-State is therefore liberty. It's true (here Szasz is right) that the circuits of psychiatricalizing and psycholo- gizing, even if they pass through the parents, the peer group and the immediate surroundings, are finally supported by a vast medico-administrative complex. But the "free" medicine of the "liberal" doctor, the private psychiatrist or home psy- chologist are not an alternative to institutional medicine. They are part of the network, even in the case where they are poles
? ? ? Sorcery and Madness 111
? apart from the institution. Between the therapeutic state Szasz talks about and "liberated" medicine there is a whole play of support and complex cross-reference.
? The analyst listening silently in his chair is not so foreign to the insistent questioning and the close surveillance in the asylum. I don't think one can apply the world "libertar- ian"--Does Szasz himself do it? I don't remember--to a doc- tor who is "liberal," that is, linked to an individual profit that the State protects all the more since it profits from it too. Szasz cites very effectively the anti-State interventions of these lib- eral doctors, and they have had salutory effects. But it seems to me that there you have the combative utilization--against "general abuses"--of a medicine whose destination rather is to assure, conjointly with the State and with its support, the well functioning of a normalizing society. Rather than the therapeu- tic State, it's the normalizing society, with its institutional and private wheels, that it is necessary to study and criticize. Robert Castel's book Le Psychanalysme* seems to me to have cast a very accurate light on this great continuous web which reaches from the sad dormitory to the profit-making couch. A
? Translated by John Johnston Notes
' Thomas Szasz, The Manufacture of Madness (New York: Harper & Row, 1974).
? ^ Foucault's History of Sexuality, which takes this anti-Reic- hian stand, came out at the time of this interview.
' Thomas Szasz, The Myth of Mental Illness (New York: Harper & Row, 1977).
*Robert Castel, Le Psychanalysme (Paris: Maspero, 1973).
? 10
On Literature
? ? Q: What is the place or status of literary texts in your research?
MF: In Madness and Civilization and in The Order of Things, I only mention literary texts, or point to them in passing, as a kind of dawdler who says, "Now, there you see, one cannot fail to speak of Rameau's Nephew. " But these allusions play no role in the economy of the process.
For me, literature was on each occasion the object of a report, not part of an analysis nor a reduction nor an integra- tion into the domain of analysis. It was a point of rest, a halt, a blazon, a flag.
? Q: You didn't want these texts to play the role of expressing or reflecting historical processes?
MF: No. . . The question would have to be broached on another level.
There has never really been an analysis of how, given the mass of things that are spoken, given the set of discourses actually held, a certain number of these discourses (literary
discourse, philosophical discourse) are sacralized and given a particular function.
? I
? 114 On Literature
? It seems that traditionally literary or philosophical discourse has been made to function as a substitute or as a general envelope for all other discourses. Literature had to assume the value for all the rest. People have written histories of what was said in the 18 th century by passing through Fon- tenelle, Voltaire, Diderot or The New Heloise, etc. Or else they have thought of these texts as the expression of something that in the end failed to be formulated on a more quotidien level.
? In regard to this attitude, I passed from a state of uncertainty--citing literature where it was, without indicating its relationship with the rest--to a frankly negative position, by trying to make all the non-literary or para-literary dis- courses that were actually constituted in a given period re- appear positively, and by excluding literature. In Discipline and Punish it's a matter only of bad literature.
Q: How does one distinguish good from bad?
? MF: Exactly. That's just what will have to be consid- ered one day. We will have to ask ourselves just what is this activity that consists of circulating fictions, poems, and narra- tives in a society. We also ought to analyze a second opera- tion: among all these narratives (re? cits), what is it that sacral- izes a certain number and makes them begin to function as "literature"? They are quickly taken up in the interior of an institution that at its origin was very different: the institution of the university. Now it begins to be identified with the liter- ary institution.
? This is a very visible line of decline in our culture. In the 19th century the university was the medium at the center of which a literature said to be classic was constituted. This literature was by definition not a contemporary literature, and was valorized simultaneously as both the only base for con- temporary literature and as its critique. Hence a very curious
? On Literature 115
? play in the 19th century between literature and the university, between the writer and the academic.
? And then, little by little, the two institutions, which underneath their petty squabbles were in fact profoundly akin, tended to become completely indistinguishable. We know per- fectly well that today the literature said to be avant-garde is only ever read by academics; that a writer over thirty has students around him who are doing their theses on his work; and that writers live for the most part by giving courses and by being academics. Thus the truth about something is already evident there, in the fact that literature functions thanks to a play of selection, sacralization, and institutional valorization of which the university is at once both the operator and the receiver.
? Q: Are there intrinsic criteria for [evaluating] texts, or is it only a matter of sacralization by the university as institution?
MF; I know nothing about it. I would simply say this; in order to break with a certain number of myths, like the one of literature's expressive character, it has been very im- portant to establish the great principle that literature is con- cemed only with itself If it has anything to do with its author, it's according to a mode of death, silence, and the very disap- pearance of the one who writes.
? The reference here to Blanchot or Barthes matters little. The essential thing is the importance of the principle; the intransitivity of literature. It was indeed the first stage thanks to which one could get rid of the idea that literature was the place of all transits, or the point where all transits ended up, the expression of totalities.
? But it seems to me that this was still only a stage. Yet, to maintain the analysis at this level is to risk not disman-
? 116 On Literature
? tling the set of sacralizations by which literature has been affected. On the contrary, one risks sacralizing it even worse. And that's actually what has happened, even up to 1970. We have seen a certain number of the themes of Blanchot and Barthes used for a kind of exaltation, at once ultra-lyrical and ultra-rationalizing, of literature as a structure of language sus- ceptible to analysis only in itself and in its own terms.
? The pohtical implications were not absent from this exaltation. Thanks to it, one succeeded in saying that literature in itself was at this point freed from all determinations, that the fact of writing was in itself subversive, that the writer possesses, in the very gesture of writing, an imprescribable right to subversion! Consequently, the writer was a revolution- ary, and the more the writing was Writing (l'e? criture e? tait e? criture), the more it plunged into intransitivity, the more it produced in doing so the revolution! You know that these
things were unfortunately said. .
