Introduction

Abstract

Introduction George Rousseau (bio) I Although history will decide the matter, it is impossible not to endorse John Neubauer’s claim in the introduction to this volume’s predecessor that “Michel Foucault was both a historian and a maker of culture.” 1 He was both, of course, despite the caveats of all sorts of professional historians and learned groups whose ideology and politics differed from his. More Cassandra of culture than Goliath among historians, Foucault was also the lens from whose crystal the discourse of our generation has been shaped; predominantly in our concerns for gender and the body, but even more so in the ways in which sex continues to dominate our discourse and obsess us without liberating us. Foucault’s (almost millennial) predictions that we would become obsessed with sex have been entirely borne out; if not in the Starr report, then in the worldwide movements to repress sex in the workplace, legislate it in the social order, and eliminate it on the Internet. Yet nowhere are the antennae more directed against those groups who work for the repression of sex than in the West’s progressive universities—the very place where Foucault’s influence has been most acutely felt. Universities have become virtual sites for the monitoring [End Page 127] and policing of these attitudes, and they deserve much credit for taking on so onerous a task. In precisely this context it is difficult to think of any recent thinker who has had more influence within the contemporary academy, especially in our progressive North American universities. Other French thinkers have left their mark: Derrida has influenced the daily practice of humanists and social scientists, as have his brethren in Paris; and it would be gratuitous to try to prove that Kristeva and other French feminists have not been almost equally influential. But Foucault, more than these, virtually defined, and shaped, our generation’s sense of the mission of the humanities and social sciences, as confirmed by the number of references to him and books written in the crucible of his method—this despite the rhetorical gun held to his head by those seeking dramatic advantage in decrying him as a bandit, especially British historian Lawrence Stone’s claim about “Foucault’s crimes against humanity” and, more recently, Harold Bloom’s view of Foucault’s Satanic approach as the “disease of humanity.” Foucault, having abandoned the folly of the university’s self-proclaimed higher mission to inculcate national morality in the name of the state, taught us instead how language and discourse had been manipulated throughout history for the purposes of power and repression. And he demonstrated that primary authors were not exempt from these processes, no matter how aloof the form and content of their writing. In this sense Foucault’s fate, both during his lifetime and since his death in 1984, has resembled that of Nietzsche (in Neubauer’s words, “his adopted predecessor”). Both thinkers have been microscopically scrutinized and criticized by the practitioners of individual disciplines; yet the lasting significance of their work lies beyond disciplinary boundaries and the borders of “truth” for any given case study or range of problems. Both men ruthlessly challenged the main assumptions of Western culture; each imperiled age-old beliefs thought to have been invulnerable, even immutable. Foucault especially tapped into the body, and the forms in which its modes of expression could become a vehicle for the manipulation of power and the repression of selfhood. He intuited that the humanities, in our modern sense, are commentaries on the body. Little wonder then that his last, unfinished work—a symphony of books in progress—should have been his most ambitious: a history of sexuality from the Greeks to the present time. But not any history: it was a work dedicated to the same galaxy of language, discourse, ideology, power, and repression that enshrines the rest of his intellectual cosmology. For these reasons it is impossible to think of Foucault, the man and his work, apart from the crises of our time more [End Page 128] generally, especially the lingering sense on the eve of the millennium that the twentieth century has been among the most brutal of historical eras...