Foucault's Work: A Reminiscence of Ancient Days

Abstract

Foucault's Work:A Reminiscence of Ancient Days Timothy Hampton (bio) In May of 1982 I received a message from Paul Bouissac, a professor of French at the University of Toronto, to come to his office. I had just completed an MA in comparative literature and was preparing to move south, back to the United States. Toronto's comparative literature program was going through a transition. Several of my favorite professors were leaving. It was time for me to leave, too. Bouissac was a noted semiologist who had been a circus performer at one point in France, and had written a well-received study of the semiotics of the circus. He informed me that the university was hosting a Summer Semiotics Institute in June, at which a number of visitors would be coming to teach for a month. Would I be interested in working for Michel Foucault, as his research assistant, in return for free tuition? Foucault was at that point involved in his work on the techniques of self-construal in late antiquity and the early Christian period. He had just published The Care of the Self. With Jacques Derrida, he was one of the figure heads of a strangely named invention called "French Theory," a fantasy in the American imaginary that there was a club of French guys (and one gal, Julia Kristeva) who sat around in Paris and cooked up new concepts to animate the careers of ambitious American academics. Of the various French theoreticians, Foucault was the one I found most appealing, because of his interest in history. As an undergraduate, I had read and loved his book on madness. So, I signed on. The short-lived Semiotics Institute was a summa of academic stardom. In addition to Foucault, the philosopher John Searle was a headliner, along with Umberto Eco, whose novel The Name of the Rose had just come out in Italian. There were other experts: a scholar of Bakhtin, a hard-core linguistic semiotician, and, for a few weeks, the great medievalist Eugene Vance. Eco was still known mostly as a slightly eccentric essayist who sometimes wrote about modern art. He got third billing, after Foucault and Searle. I was summoned to meet Foucault on opening day, in an office in Victoria College. It was a brutally hot and humid Toronto day—a day on which no reasonable human would venture out in anything more than a [End Page 377] light shirt. Foucault appeared in a black leather biker's jacket, an advertisement, as I took it, of his sexuality, in the midst of the AIDS crisis, and a moment when black leather was still associated with a certain gay male identity. He was friendly and funny, and seemed genuinely interested in what I was reading and trying to do. As the institute shifted into full speed, Foucault offered lectures, to a large crowd, and a seminar, to a group of about fifteen students. The lectures were the main event. Foucault had a set of texts in English that he read from, about the practices of monasticism in late antiquity and the early Christian periods. He was especially interested in John Cassian, the fourth-century monk who had been instrumental in spreading the practices of monasticism to the Christian West. What were the techniques that Cassian proposed? What was the logic he used to justify and shape monastic practice? It soon became clear that my job was not the job of research assistant at all. I was to be a language consultant and a bodyguard. Each day Foucault would read his lecture text, and each day there would be questions. Many of them came from students in Toronto's venerable Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies. These were people who really took medieval Christianity seriously. They were perfect foils for Foucault, because they were skeptical of absolutely everything he said. They were not impressed by his fame, and they pushed back after each lecture. One student, in particular, was writing a thesis on Iamblichus, the third-century Neoplatonist who had been a biographer of Pythagoras. He challenged Foucault insistently on the details of monastic practice. Each time he opened his mouth Foucault would mutter, somewhat...