Michel Foucault, the Bogeyman of the Culture Wars

One day in the mid-1940s, in the quiet French city of Poitiers, the Surrealist painter André Masson was invited by his doctor to take a look at a curious medical specimen: the preserved corpse of a stillborn human infant, afflicted by a lesion that had opened up its skull. Masson, who was known for his nightmarish images of disfigured bodies, was entranced. He drew a picture that has taken on a legendary status in some circles, though it remains in a private family collection. The artist presented the drawing as a gift to his doctor, the distinguished surgeon Paul Foucault, who held onto it until his death, in 1959, at which time he passed it down to his son, a young philosopher, Michel Foucault.

Foucault propped this weird heirloom up on his desk while he worked on a series of experimental books that changed the course of 20th-century thought. It loomed there while he finished his doctoral thesis, History of Madness (1961), and probably presided over his great studies of institutions, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception (1963) and Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975). In each of those works, Foucault turned a critical eye on experts, analyzing how they had acquired their authority and how they used it.

“Knowledge is not made for understanding,” Foucault wrote, memorably, in an essay entitled “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History”; “it is made for cutting.” In light of lines like those, Masson’s drawing glimmers like a tantalizing clue into Foucault’s character, linking his family life to his mature work as a critical theorist. Cutting was a surgeon’s business, opening up afflicted bodies and brains to see the truth inside. Foucault imagined his own philosophy as scalpel-wielding, but he twisted the blade back toward doctors like his father. Maybe he identified, in some half-conscious way, with the child-specimen.

Now, 40 years after his death, Foucault’s own legacy is open for dissection. Foucault became a celebrity in the 1970s counterculture, embraced by AIDS activists and anti-prison radicals, and generations of intellectuals followed his lead in analyzing psychiatric, medical, and penal systems. His arguments were taken up in several of the past half-century’s most consequential research programs in the humanities, including Edward Said’s studies of orientalism, Stephen Greenblatt’s New Historicism, Judith Butler’s theory of performativity, and Saidiya Hartman’s work on Black subjection. What began as an intellectual rebellion created a new academic regime of its own, as Foucault’s critiques of expert-driven institutions fostered whole new fields of expert knowledge.

For just that reason, however, Foucault has become a target in our culture war. Foucault’s burning insight, that “truth isn’t outside power,” has always disconcerted readers, including many on the left. Foucault has been read as an opportunistic relativist or, in the philosopher Nancy Fraser’s terms, a “rejectionist” who demolished humanist norms without attempting to build any better, more consistent value system of his own. Foucault’s “critical capacity,” in Fredric Jameson’s view, became “paralyzed” in the face of the “increasingly closed and terrifying machine” that the theorist himself constructed.

In today’s online exchanges and opinion pages, the rhetoric against Foucault has risen to a new and feverish intensity. He represents a version of the academic sensibility — erudite, at times elitist, yet hostile to traditional values — resented by conservatives and liberal centrists alike. Ross Douthat, a columnist at The New York Times, has described him as a “satanic figure” who “seems wicked, deceitful, even devilish.” The reactionary American Spectator has blamed Foucault for hatching the “vile serpent” of “deconstruction,” which infested everything from natural gender to national borders. According to Yascha Mounk, “Michel Foucault was a deeply unhappy child” whose “rejection of universal truth” led straight into the “trap” of identity politics.

And so, by a perverse twist of fate, caricatures of Foucault now serve a new campaign against academic experts and our institutions, this time from the right. The public intellectuals who most loudly denounce Foucault’s skepticism often treat working professors with contempt. Writing for The Atlantic in 2017, Kurt Andersen claimed that “Foucault’s suspicion of reason became deeply and widely embedded in American academia,” leaving us defenseless against propaganda and fake news. This is how political attacks on critical theory work, rhetorically: They depict scholars and teachers as enemies of rationality so that a full-scale assault on higher education can be waged in reason’s name. Now and then, beneath the confused, agitated polemics, there are signs of projection, even a kind of identification with Foucault’s most destructive tendencies. When the Republican operative Christopher F. Rufo, in America’s Cultural Revolution (2023), claims that critical theorists destroyed American colleges by politicizing the curriculum, he is not writing a responsible history of our institutions. He is describing his own plans.

Three new books develop a picture of Foucault that is at once more interesting and, well, closer to the truth. Rather than a villain blowing up the foundations of Western civilization — a cartoon figure with the Joker’s penchant for chaos and Lex Luthor’s diabolical bald head — Foucault emerges as a generative thinker for the 21st century. As a philosopher, he is committed to truth-telling. As a political activist, he sought alliances in shared ideas and ethical commitments, not identities. When he questioned orthodoxies in the human sciences, he did so in favor of a more rigorous, less ideological understanding of the world. He wanted to unsettle what we think we know, including how we see ourselves, so that we might learn to think — and live — in different ways. These accounts of Foucault’s life and work avoid nostalgic reveries about the order he supposedly destroyed. They take us back to what he made.

Born in Poitiers in 1926, he was christened Paul-Michel Foucault; he later cut the Paul, his father’s name. Biographers tend to emphasize the unhappiness of Foucault’s early life. Coming of age as a queer, troubled boy, Foucault “had grown to detest his father,” as James Miller tells us in his somewhat-lurid The Passion of Michel Foucault (1993). Changing his name was “an act of self-assertion — and nominal self-mutilation — aimed directly at the bullying patriarch.” A classic case of Oedipal revenge?

In Becoming Foucault: The Poitiers Years, the intellectual historian Michael C. Behrent revisits Foucault’s childhood world and tells a different, subtler version of the story. Behrent advises his readers from the start that this “is not strictly speaking a psychological study, and even less a psychoanalytic one.” Instead of a family romance pulsing with the sex drive and the death drive, he provides a quietly informative account of a prominent family in a provincial city, during and just after the Second World War.

Behrent’s Becoming Foucault gives us the most significant research into the philosopher’s life and world to appear in almost 30 years. Behrent has made new discoveries by widening the territory, looking into the histories of people and places with which Foucault probably had some acquaintance, even when there are only faint traces in the archives.

He introduces us, for instance, to a Poitiers teacher named Georges Duret, a Catholic mystic and radical who appears in a school photograph with a teenage Foucault and other students taken in 1942. Not long afterward, Duret was arrested by the occupying German forces; he died a martyr’s death in a German prison the following year. His presence may tell us something about how Foucault first became interested in practices of ascetic self-discipline. Becoming Foucault also re-examines the case of Blanche Monnier, the legendary séquestrée de Poitiers, who spent 25 years confined to a room in her mother’s house, living in her own filth, before she was rescued by the local police in 1901. The Monniers’ house, 21 Rue de la Visitation, sat just a few doors down from chez Foucault.

Behrent is careful not to adopt a “deterministic” view of Foucault’s genius. “Foucault, no doubt, was marked by his family’s connection to the medical profession and his experience under German occupation,” he writes, then quickly adds: “But not every doctor’s son who lived under German occupation is Foucault.” Definitely not. And yet Behrent himself hesitates to propose a strong account of Foucault’s personality. Becoming Foucault is probably the wrong title for this book, since it does not track its subject’s intellectual development or explain why he grew so critical, even hostile, toward the kinds of bourgeois security that swaddled him when he was young. Here and there, I found myself wishing that Behrent had more to say about just how this doctor’s son became Foucault, the one I care about, the one who took the side of the diseased, the damaged, and the stigmatized, against the wardens and the shrinks.

All his life, Foucault felt a spiritual kinship with the despised — affiliating with people who, as he put it during a visit to New York’s Attica state prison in 1972, “are perpetually rejected, and who, in their turn, reject the bourgeois moral system.” He believed they had a role to play in political life. There was “a force for questioning society” to be found at the margins, among “prostitutes, homosexuals, drug addicts, etc.” These people did not constitute a minority group in any obvious sense. Some came from poverty, and others had dropped out of the respectable economy. Some were straight, others queer. But they had a loose kind of bond, forged in rejection, and a shared habit of noncompliance. Foucault called them the “restless elements.”

Despite Foucault’s own wealthy, bourgeois background, he experienced painful moral rejections. In turn, he developed a severe, almost automatic reflex against pieties and pressures to conform. It was this restlessness, rather than his inherited identity, that drew him toward radical movements. It pushed him into motley solidarities and unfamiliar ways of life.

From Poitiers, Foucault made his way to Paris and the ultra-elite École Normale Supérieure. He disappointed his parents by refusing to train as a surgeon, but they continued to support his education and to call in favors for his benefit. At one point they bought him a Jaguar sedan. Among his friends at the ENS, Foucault was known for his cleverness — they nicknamed him “the fox” — but he suffered from severe depression, often descending into agony. He found no peace away from home. On a few occasions, he attempted suicide.

While Foucault began receiving psychiatric treatment for his breakdowns, he was also taking courses in psychiatry. At the famous Sainte-Anne mental hospital, he attended a kind of diagnostic ritual known as the présentation des malades, where psychiatrists examined new patients in front of an audience. The spectacle disturbed Foucault. Although it was staged for educational purposes, there was some unacknowledged cruelty in the public exhibition of disordered minds. Foucault began to wonder: How had such degrading treatment ever come to seem tolerable?

It was a question about the ethics of modern psychiatric care, but it was also a question about history. According to the conventional wisdom, science had emerged from superstitious darkness into enlightenment. Foucault cast doubt on this narrative; he saw it as a kind of alibi, enabling subtle forms of personal and social manipulation. When he received Masson’s drawing on the occasion of his father’s death, in 1959, Foucault was working on his first major study of science, History of Madness. He began by reconstructing what he called “The Great Confinement,” a forgotten episode from the 17th and 18th centuries when the “mad,” who had traditionally lived in villages and towns, as members of communities, were spirited away to asylums, madhouses, and the notorious ships of fools that drifted along European rivers, bearing them to no place in particular. Foucault was beginning to craft his distinctive way of doing philosophy — he would call it “the archaeology of knowledge” or, borrowing a term from Nietzsche, “genealogy” — using documentary evidence from the past to shine a new light on the present.

In The Birth of the Clinic, published two years after History of Madness, Foucault turned his attention from psychiatry to surgery. Around the turn of the 19th century, Foucault observed, doctors began cutting into the human body, surveying its component parts, mapping various regions and systems. As life was opened up to “the sovereign dissection of language and of the gaze,” in Foucault’s occult phrasing, medical doctors acquired their new, priest-like social role. To introduce his arguments, Foucault discussed a doctor, Gaspard-Laurent Bayle, who had examined a patient and described, in exquisite detail, “an anatomical lesion of the brain.” Masson’s drawing was still hovering in the background.

By focusing on the historical circumstances where knowledge is made and deployed, Foucault seemed, to some critics, to be flirting with a dangerous relativism. His sense of science’s complicity with power tarnished the ideal of neutral reason, in ways that provoked interlocutors like Noam Chomsky and Jürgen Habermas. And today, as the philosopher and editor Daniele Lorenzini notices, Foucault “is regularly accused of being the tutelary father of the contemporary devaluation of truth and ‘facts’ — in other words, of the current ‘post-truth era.’”

In Force of Truth, Lorenzini assembles and analyzes an impressive range of documents, including dozens of Foucault’s lesser-known lectures and interviews, in order to defend Foucault against the charge of committing a “postmodern attack on the existence of truth or facts.” Although Foucault did not publish a treatise on the nature of truth, Lorenzini is able to build a fairly coherent theory. Force of Truth is a short book but a significant contribution to the philosophy of language. Lorenzini knows Foucault’s work as well as anyone alive; his learning and sophistication, along with his good faith, are evident on every page.

Lorenzini begins by pointing out that Foucault did not quarrel with just any type of science. He was not trying to dismantle the intellectual premises of geology or particle physics. Instead, Foucault concerned himself with what are known as les sciences humaines, “human sciences” like criminology and psychiatry, which intervene in people’s lives. Terms like “abnormal” and “perverse” might seem like objective taxonomies of natural conditions. In reality, these designations expose certain people to harm or restraint, under expert supervision. When Foucault raised questions about the truth, he was asking how our ways of producing knowledge about ourselves and others end up serving such coercive purposes.

Along these lines, Lorenzini shifts the critical emphasis from truth to truth-telling, from what we know to what we say and how we say it. Lorenzini places Foucault in the tradition of speech-act philosophy, which concerns itself with verbal performances, such as oaths and threats. As Lorenzini puts it, truth-telling is “never neutral nor merely descriptive; it generates specific ethico-political commitments.” One of Foucault’s favorite examples was the speech act known as the confession, an ancient religious ritual that endures in secular venues like the police station and the tell-all memoir. When you confess, you tell your truth. You might even have the feeling that you are overcoming the blockages of repression and shame. At the same time, however, giving others knowledge about yourself exposes you to their judgments and, in many cases, interventions. Confession is self-expression, under surveillance.

Foucault did believe that different historical situations established different conditions, or norms, for what counts as truth. But this premise does not lead to the cynical conclusion that we can just invent facts or bend reality to suit our politics. On the contrary, it requires putting ourselves in jeopardy, taking responsibility for what we say. Foucault found himself drawn especially to figures who risked their own security, sometimes their lives, in speaking out against authority. Foucault cited classical figures like Antigone and Socrates; he also sought truth-tellers in the psych wards and the prison cells of his own time.

This was the program of the Prison Information Group, an activist organization founded by Foucault, his partner Daniel Defert, and a few other close collaborators in the early 1970s: to treat prisoners, rather than government officials, as experts on prison conditions. The group circulated questionnaires inside prison walls, and then published the responses in newsletters, broadsides, and their pamphlet series, Intolerable. The work shaped Foucault’s own research program, especially his most famous book, Discipline and Punish. From visiting prisons and exchanging ideas with those on the inside, Foucault learned to see how control could be imposed through subtle means, as rehabilitation, rather than brutal punishment or withering neglect. Foucault’s project was not simply a matter of discrediting official knowledges or introducing doubt for its own sake; it was a knowledge-making endeavor, orienting its participants toward political commitments and actions.

During what turned out to be his last decade, Foucault worked mostly on his monumental History of Sexuality. The project was still incomplete when Foucault died of AIDS-related complications, in June 1984, but he managed to draft four volumes, all of which eventually appeared in print. Like Foucault’s earlier books, they deal with power and knowledge, using archival research to defamiliarize the present. All around him, Foucault observed, people seemed to be trying to liberate themselves by discovering and expressing something called their sexuality. They rejected Victorian repression. They felt a need to reveal and act on their desires; in this way, they tried to become faithful to their true selves. But Foucault did not trust this promise of emancipation.

As usual, he posed troubling questions. How did we come to see our sexuality as the deepest, most meaningful aspect of who we are? How did sex become not just an act but also an identity? When he studied the 19th century, Foucault did not find that sex had been forced into silence. He saw discourse, lots of it. Western authorities, from the priest to the psychoanalyst, seemed always to be demanding sexual confessions, in ever more precise detail. The more people talked, the more information they provided to the experts, who used it to measure, classify, and normalize the population.

Foucault considered many kinds of “perversions,” but his most controversial ideas had to do with homosexual identity. There was nothing really new about men having sex with men, he noted, and yet somehow, in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the old acts had come to define a new category of human being, the “invert” or the homosexual. On one side, institutions sought to persecute homosexuality; on the other, activists began to advocate for gay rights. But both seemed to agree that they were talking about a special type of person. What felt like free expression turned out to be compliance, a willingness to expose the truth about oneself in power’s terms. “The effect of sexual liberation has been not, or not only, to free us to express our sexuality,” the scholar David M. Halperin writes in Saint-Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography, “but to require us to express — freely, of course — our sexuality.”

Foucault lived an openly gay life, yet refused to align himself with gay rights as an identity politics. This is why, of all the hyperbolic accusations against Foucault, the worst is the one we hear from liberal critics like Yascha Mounk and Francis Fukuyama: the allegation that Foucault somehow started our identitarian culture war. By destroying our society’s shared faith in facts and universal reason, so the story goes, he left us without common ground, and now we can only wage a tribal struggle for power, where each camp holds fast to its own reality.

Since there are no affirmations of identity politics in Foucault’s writings, his critics tend to attribute the identitarian turn to his “followers,” especially to literary and cultural critics in the U.S. academy. In Mounk’s telling, it was Edward Said and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, both professors at Columbia University, who conscripted Foucault’s legacy into a program of identitarian political action, with American “critical race theory” following suit. There is a grain of truth here. Many on the academic left have cited Foucault in their own critiques of liberal progress narratives, sometimes in an identitarian mode. But this adaptation doesn’t prove that Foucault’s thought was inevitably driving us toward the “identity trap”; it only shows how certain movements in the United States turned Foucault’s thought to their own purposes, in a situation shaped by other forces. Identity politics had already begun to take shape before the reception of Foucault’s philosophy. Foucault himself saw it happening; he explained its origins as a misguided reaction to repression, and he openly rejected its premises.

Far from inventing the “identity trap,” Foucault was already trying to light a way out of it, since he understood identity as its own kind of confinement, one that made him restless. As Foucault explained in his introduction to the second volume of The History of Sexuality, he had always been motivated by a special kind of “curiosity,” an open-ended exploration “which enables one to get free of oneself.” Even the ingrained habits of his own mind became tiresome to him. “There are times in life when the question of knowing if one can think differently than one thinks, and perceive differently than one sees, is absolutely necessary if one is going to go on looking and reflecting at all.” By painstaking intellectual labor, he tried to find a different point of view.

Foucault had begun to educate himself in ancient philosophical traditions dealing with personal ethics and the conduct of life. In classical Greek, Roman, and early Christian traditions, he found an alternative to modern ways of talking about repression and freedom as matters of identity. “Most of the time,” as Foucault said in a 1983 lecture, “The Culture of the Self,” “people think that what we must do is disclose, liberate, and excavate the hidden reality of the self.” They want to actualize their true identity. Express yourself. Be yourself. Foucault could not stand that kind of sloganeering. “The problem,” as he understood it, “is not to liberate and ‘free’ the self but to consider how it could be possible to elaborate new types and new kinds of relationship to ourselves.”

Foucault had spent most of his career criticizing the systems that supervise people’s lives. Now he had begun to explore what it might be like to exercise control over himself. That research put him back in touch with the Catholic teachings he encountered as a child, perhaps (as Behrent suggests) by way of the dissident priest Duret. Contrary to Chomsky’s famous description of Foucault as coldly “amoral,” he became deeply interested in spiritual exercises like prayer and devotional reading; he reconsidered asceticism, the practice of submitting to voluntary restraints in order to change one’s habits and open up new perceptions. Instead of finding and expressing their identities, the classical figures who interested Foucault had tried to shape their own lives as works of art. They were engaged, as Foucault put it, in “the aesthetics of existence” or “the arts of the self.”

Restlessness is not a politics, and it manifests itself in unpredictable ways. Foucault’s thought has been adapted by a range of movements, from prison abolitionists to the occasional libertarian anti-vaxxer. For his part, Foucault never saw himself as an informal adviser to lawmakers or courts. Unlike pundits and columnists, he did not think it was his business to propose new ways of governing society. Instead, he attended to the governed, especially the least of them, without regard to their respectability or their identity. He devoted himself to exploring possible modes of resistance, however incomplete, and elusiveness, however temporary, that might be opened up to anyone who needed them. That restless kind of thinking was known, in the traditions Foucault studied, as critique.

Foucault traced the history of critique back to Kant and other Enlightenment philosophers. But what Foucault cared about was not the systematic arguments that they developed or the practical reforms that they promoted. Foucault wanted to understand critique as a disposition — an “attitude,” he called it, “a way of being wary” and of “seeking to escape.” When that attitude expressed itself in political action, it took the form of resistance; in philosophy, it wrote critique. Foucault was trying to grasp something like the history of restlessness. Philosophy in the critical mode was “the art,” as Foucault put it in a 1978 lecture delivered at the University of California at Berkeley, “of being governed not so much.”

That lecture, “What Is Critique?,” has now been translated and published by the University of Chicago Press, alongside “The Culture of the Self.” In introducing the volume, the editors show how the two pieces “form two poles making it possible to examine the evolution of Foucault’s thought between 1978 and 1983.” The book will be useful to scholars of intellectual history. It teaches us a good deal about how Foucault grappled with Kant. But it also has a more-than-historical interest, the editors suggest, because of what the two lectures have in common, namely Foucault’s “recognizable style,” his peculiar way of thinking and writing. His philosophy depended rather more on rhetoric than logic. It was an art, not a science.

The two newly recovered lectures show us just how deeply Foucault identified his own philosophy with artistry. The aesthetics of existence, the art of being governed not so much: These were not the provocations of a cynical relativist or the pieties of an identitarian culture warrior. They set themselves against official knowledge and common sense, but not for demolition’s sake. Critique, as Foucault said, is “an instrument, a means to a future or a truth that it can never know.” He was improvising a way forward.

There is an old custom among philosophers of displaying human skulls as reminders of mortality. In place of the conventional memento mori, Foucault kept a picture of a dead child with its brain exposed to medical observation. What did the picture mean to him? It was a keepsake from his father and, perhaps, a token of the science that Foucault rebelled against. But it was also a work of art. Masson’s unorthodox talent, honed by discipline, had turned a specimen of abnormality into something even more surreal. This was Foucault’s aspiration, as well: to see the world in a different light, partly by retraining his own eyes. Noticing complicities between truth and power was not the end of his project. It was a starting point, opening onto new experiments. In the end, the great critic of modern disciplinary systems was practicing his own discipline: a restless art.