4 LIBERATION IN FRANCE: SARTRE AND FOUCAULT
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Among the dreyfusards were Catholic writers who sought for a more rooted, less legalistic, kind of patriotism.
Note:IL PRIMO NUCLEO...NN ZOLA O PROUST
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Although sincere Catholics, they wished to give a more territorial character to their devotion,
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Jeanne d’Arc, the warrior
Note:IL LORO NUME
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The leading figure in the movement was Charles Péguy,
Note:LA FIGURA PIÙ CARISMATICA....VOGLIA DI MODERNIZZARE LA FEDE....POST I GIERRA
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Cahiers de la quinzaine,
Note:LA SUA CREATUR
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Péguy’s synthesis of Catholicism and patriotism was highly influential on the philosopher Jacques Maritain
Note:IL SEGUACE
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This post-war renouveau catholique included painters (Georges Rouault), composers (Charles Tournemire and Francis Poulenc), and such writers as Paul Claudel, Jean Cocteau, Francis Jammes, Charles du Bos, Gabriel Marcel and François Mauriac.
Note:QUALCHE NOME
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The cause of French nationalism entered a rocky period, however, when another, more secular, and indeed often frankly atheist, rival began to gain ascendancy. This was the belligerently royalist Action Française of Charles Maurras
Note:L ALA ATEA E IMPRESENTABILE DEL NAZIONALISMO FRANCESE
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Maurras was an anti-Semite who
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the whole idea of French nationalism was thereafter tainted with the crime of collaboration. Much of post-war French literature has been a reaction to this.
Note:DOPO LA SECONDA GUERRA
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Maurras, for example, was a collaborator with the Vichy regime,
Note:LA TRISTE SORTE DELLE MENTI MIGLIORI DEL NAZIONALISMO
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anti-Semitic novelist Robert Brasillach, was shot, notwithstanding a plea to General de Gaulle
Note:UN ALTRO CASO
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Writers after the war divided into the innocent and the guilty, the innocent being often self-styled, and including many who had hastily cobbled together a fiction of membership in the Resistance.
Note:SCRITTORI FRANCESI DEL DOPOGUERRA
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consider those two powerful novels from between the world wars, Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Voyage au bout de la nuit, and Marcel Aymé’s La jument verte,
Note:SULL AMBIGUITÀ DELBBBEE E DEEL MALE...SUL FAR SPARIRE LE TRACC
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Illustrative of the trauma is the writer Drieu la Rochelle. He had fought bravely in the First World War, being three times wounded and obtaining the Croix de Guerre. He emerged from the experience as one of the leading literary figures in inter-war Paris. But he had no taste for the Catholic revival and for the next twenty years led a disordered life, devoted to the seduction of women and the composition of bleak novels in which women and their sexuality occupy centre-stage. He repudiated the nationalist ideas that he believed to have brought about the Great War and advocated a united Europe and a new internationalism as the only way to achieve a peaceful future. At first Drieu supported the communists, as the evident advocates of the internationalist cause, and joined the Party, along with so many of his contemporaries. When he left the Party and declared himself a fascist it was not because he repudiated what he had once believed.
Note:UN CASO ESEMPLARE
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His eventual suicide, which saved him from being tried for treason, was already implicit in the ennui and nostalgie de la boue that fill the pages of L’homme couvert de femmes,
Note:CCCCCCLA VIA DI FUGA
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His life, like his art, was a record of spiritual devastation, for which he searched in vain for a political remedy.
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French Communist Party began to grow rapidly, recruiting many of the leading intellectuals, including the novelist and poet Louis Aragon, the painter Pablo Picasso, and the leading surrealist, André Breton.
Note:DOPO LA I GURA...CATOOLICI A PARTE
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It could be argued that the resulting trahison des clercs was less damaging than that of the Cambridge spies
Note:GB E FRANCIA... INTELLOS ROSSI
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the guilty consciences of the post-war French intellectuals can be clearly seen in their intensely hostile reactions to the Livre noir du communisme
Note:UN SEGNALE DELLA COSCIENZA SPORCA
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This book gives the body-count of communist crimes, and describes the intellectuals’ part in condoning and inspiring them. It also insists on the comparison (for Courtois a near-identity) between communism and Nazism.
Note:INACCETTABILE
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in almost all of them one influence stands out, which is that of Alexandre Kojève, a Russian exile whose lectures on Hegel at the École Pratique des Hautes Études during the 1930s were attended by many of the big names in post-war French literature – Bataille, Lacan, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Lévinas, Aron, Queneau, Merleau-Ponty and many more.
Note:LA FORMAZIONE DEGLI INTELLO COMUNISTI FRANCESESI POST II GIERRA
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softening the intellectual class with the Hegelian dialectic, the foundation of the Marxist religion
Note:LA MISSION DI K
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he declared to all and sundry that he was a follower of Josef Stalin,
Note:IL RIFERIMENTO DI KOJEVE
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the dialectic of freedom, according to which the human being becomes a free self-consciousness through the process of conflict with the Other.
Note:IL CONTENUTO DEL SEMINARIO
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the identity of freedom and self-consciousness, and the dialectic of subject and object.
Note:LE DUE IDEE EREDITATE DALL AUDOTORIO
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I know myself through my free actions, and through acting freely I create the self that I know.
Note:PER HEGEL
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I encounter and wrestle with the ‘Other’, whose will, conflicting with mine, forces me to recognize the Other in myself.
Note:X INNESCARE IL PROCESSO LA SOCIALITÀ È DECOSIVA
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a transition from the ‘life and death struggle’ of conflicting wills, to the relation of lordship and bondage, in which one side has submitted and the other prevailed,
Note:LE DUE FASI HEGELIANE
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slavery gives way from its own inner dynamic to citizenship, legality and mutual agreement.
Note:CccccccccDA NOTARE CHE LO HEGEL VEDE DA CONSERVATORE IL TUTTO
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the vision of radical freedom and the self-created individual.
Note:QUEL CHE IMPRESSIONAVA K E I SUOI RAGAZZI....IL COSTRUZIONISMO
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Self and Other, Subject and Object, Freedom and Alienation – the opposites accumulated and spread like wildfire through the parched brains of Kojève’s devotees,
Note:PASSIONE X GLI OPPOSTI
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For Simone de Beauvoir the dialectic of self and other explained for the first time the subjection of women
Note:OGNUNO HA IL SUO HEGEL
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To Georges Bataille the fascination of the subject with the object became the core component in eroticism,
Note:ALTRO CASO
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For Lacan the Hegelian dialectic was recast as the story of the ‘mirror stage’ of the psyche,
Note:ALTRO CASO
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whatever had gone wrong in the world, it was the Other who was to blame.
Note:INSOMMA....
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Sartre was deeply immersed in the phenomenology of Husserl and its radical reworking in Martin Heidegger’s strangely gripping philosophy of ‘authenticity’.
Note:X SARTRE PERÒ C È UN ALTRA INFLUENZA
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Sartre prospered under the occupation, was able to publish in 1943 his magnum opus, L’être et le néant, without censorship, and was co-founder in 1945 of the successful review Les Temps modernes,
Note:SOTTO L OCCUPAZIONE
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Sartre was never a member of the Communist Party, believing neither in parties nor in any other kind of institution. But Les Temps modernes, under his editorship, was unswerving in its support for communist campaigns. Moreover, his own political denunciations (typified by that directed against his former friend and co-editor Albert Camus in Les Temps modernes) were brutally Stalinist, just as his vision of the modern world was utopian and myopic: facts that approximate him so closely to the spirit of the French Communist Party as to make his self-proclaimed distance from it little more than a gesture.
Note:SARTRE STSLINISTA
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the brief study of the imagination published in 1936 and the novel La nausée of 1938, both reflections on the inner life and its separation from the world of action.
Note:LE PRIME OPERE SONO TUTT ALTRO CHE IMPEGNATE
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The hero of La nausée, Roquentin, is filled with disgust at the world of things.
Note:IL TEMA DELLA NAUSEA
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His disgust therefore acquires a more specific focus, which is other people – and in particular those whom he considers to be ‘bourgeois’,
Note:DISGUSTO DEL BORGHESE...PL ALTRO DI SARTRE
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the bourgeoisie in the family and the state, their easy consolation in religion, in social gatherings and in roles – and his response is a fierce abnegation.
Note:L ALTRO CHE IDENTIFICA LA MIA RIBELLIONE
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Such is Meursault, the narrator of Camus’s L’Étranger (1942), such too is the anonymous first-person narrator of Maurice Blanchot’s Au moment voulu (1951), and such is the ‘absent’ narrator of Alain Robbe-Grillet’s La jalousie (1957), the
Note:ROQUENTON...L' INIZIATORE DI UNA SERIE DI CLONI
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To the sceptical English reader all these suffering observers are so many withdrawn adolescents, who flatter themselves that their revulsion is a kind of holiness.
Note:L IMPRESSIONE DEL LETTORE DI GGI
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his masterpiece, Being and Nothingness (1943),
Note:IL SUO CAPOLAVORO
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an extraordinary combination of philosophical argument, psychological observation and lyrical evocation,
Note:COMBINAZIONE
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If this before me exists then it is something. If it is something, then there is something that it is. And the something that it is – a man, a dog, a stick, a pile of sand – is defined by an essence.
Note:NEL MONDO DI ARISTOTELE L ESSENZA IDENTITÀ PRECEDE L ESISTENZA
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For us, therefore, our existence – our unconceptualized individuality, whose reality is freedom – is the sole premise of all inquiry,
Note:MA X SARTRE QS METAFISICA NN TOENE ...L NS IDENTITÀ VA COSTRUITA
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Man must make his own essence, and even his existence is, in a sense, an achievement: he exists fully only when he is what he purposes to be. Consciousness is ‘intentional
Note:FARSI DA SÈ
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In setting itself up in relation to a fundamentally ‘other’ object, the self creates a separation in its world, a kind of crevasse. I myself occupy this crevasse: it is the realm of nothingness, le néant,
Note:IL NULLA
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For the religious worldview self-consciousness is a source of joy, proof of our apartness from nature, of our special relation to God
Note:DIVERSI APPROCCI ALL AUTOCOSCIENZA
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For Sartre self-consciousness is a kind of all-dominating nothingness, a source of anxiety: proof of our apartness,
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‘How shall I fill this void that separates me from the world?’
Note:LA OMANDA ESISTENZIALE X ECCELLENZA
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Anguish displays itself in the sense that objects are not properly distinct from each other, that they are inert, undifferentiated,
Note:L ANGOSCIA E ALTERITÀ
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Sartre concludes Being and Nothingness with an extended description of slime (le visqueux), evoking the queen of nightmares, who seems to rise from the trough of nothingness and confront me with an ultimate denial. Slime is a melting of objects,
Note:FANGO
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I may hide from myself, burying myself in some predetermined role,
Note:UNA VIA DI FUGA ALL ANGOSCIA
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This happens when I adopt a morality, a religion, a social role that has been devised by others and which provides a specious refuge from my own authenticity.
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Cccccccccccc AUTENTICITA
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the authentic individual gesture: the free act whereby the individual creates both himself and his world together, by casting the one into the other. Don’t ask how this is done, since the process cannot be described. Its end-point is what matters, and this Sartre describes as commitment (engagement). But commitment to what? There is no answer to that question that does not contradict the premise of authenticity.
Note:ALTRO ALTRA DO DI FRONTEGGIARE L ANGOSCIA...L IMPEGNO
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Political commitment is therefore a strange outcome of the cult of authenticity. To understand its necessity for Sartre we must see it in the context of his unremittingly jaundiced view of the ‘objective’ sources of value, all of which involve a kind of self-betrayal.
Note:DALL AITENTICITÀ ALLA POLITICA
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The gaze of a self-conscious being therefore has a peculiar capacity to penetrate, to create a demand. This is the demand that I, as free subjectivity, reveal myself in the world.
Note:LO SGUARDO E L INCONTRO TRA SOGGETTI
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For Sartre all relations with others are poisoned by the body – the spatio-temporal in-itself – that incarcerates our freedom.
Note:IL CARCERE DELLA NS LIBERTÀ
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Although Sartre was ugly, with a flaccid body and the face of a toad, he was highly successful with women,
Note:PLYBOY
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For Augustine it is the sentiment of original sin that is the cause of our disgust at the world.
Note:LA RISPOSTA DI AGOSTINO ALLA DOMANDA DI SARTRE
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We see ourselves as exiles in the world, constantly overcome by the stench of mortality.
Note:L ESILIO AGOSTINIANO
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In sex the body dominates and controls me, overwhelming me with shame at my obscene subservience.
Note:E DOVE COGLIAMO BDI PIÙ I LIMITI DELLA NS LIBERTÀ?
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If we put together the more powerful of Sartre’s observations – and those that play the most important role in his metaphysic of freedom – we are clearly not far from the Augustinian spirit:
Note:UNO SPIRITO AGOSTINIANO
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In short, Sartre requires his ‘commitment’ to fulfil a religious need. The observation has many times been made – not least by the great friend of Sartre’s youth, Raymond Aron – that Marxism fills the gap left vacant by religion.
Note:IMPEGNO E RELIGIONE
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it is a philosophy of opposition, through and through saturated by a quasi-religious contempt for the ‘bourgeois’ order.
Note:XCHÈ IL MARXISMO PIACEVA TANTO A SARTRE...UNO
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it is total in its solution and promises a new reality,
Note:DUE
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Marxism abolishes reality in favour of an idea.
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One word stands out, in that utterance, as particularly burdened by a weight of unconfessed emotion – the word ‘totalization’, which we will encounter again in the writings of Lukács,
Note:IMPEGNO TOTALIZZANTE...MARX È UN MONDO
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Marxism shares the category of totality not only with traditional religion but also with its own arch-enemy and blood-brother, fascism, the political stance that was advocated by Gentile as a ‘total conception of life’.
Note:MA LA TOTALITÀ NN È UNA PREROGATIVADEL COMUNISMO
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Neo-Marxism is distinguished not by the category of totality but by the ritual nonsense with which that category is surrounded and by which its liturgical defences are concealed.
Note:IL NEOMARXISMO...E IL NONSENS CON CUI SI EVADE DA UN ESIGENZA SPIRITUALE...LA RISPOSTA È INDIFFERENTE PURCHÈ SIA GRIDATA CON TUTTO SE STESSO
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mystic union,
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Sartre claims to reject Marxism for its partial and mechanistic account of man’s condition. Nevertheless he expresses his ‘total’ commitment in terms of Marxist categories.
Note:CREDO XCHÈ ASSURDO
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Sartre repeatedly and uncritically attaches these Marxist categories to the theories of Marx.
Note:MARXISMO ACRITICO
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Reading the Critique of Dialectical Reason is a grim experience.
Note:L OPERA PIÙ INCOMPRENSIBILE
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The argument with Marx is in fact of little genuine concern to Sartre. In countless ways – through vocabulary, through example, through structure, and most of all through style – the Critique of Dialectical Reason shows a total rejection of the rules of intellectual enquiry,
Note:GLI ARGOMENTI NN CONTANO PIÙ
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How can praxis in itself be an experience both of necessity and of freedom, since neither of these, according to classical logic, can be grasped in an empirical process? If
Note:VOGLI DI PRASSI SOLUTA
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Sartre tries to induce a knee-jerk acceptance of the Marxist view of modern history.
Note:NN SI DISCUTE SI AGISCE
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In this astonishing work Sartre repeats the standard excuse for the cruelties of the Bolsheviks (made necessary by ‘anti-communist encirclement’). He blames the persistence of communist cruelty on Stalin, and subsequently on the fact that the Communist Party became an institution
Note:SITUATONS VIII IX
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The Communist Party is bad, but only in the way that the Boy Scouts, the Sorbonne or the fire brigade are bad – by requiring collective and inauthentic action according to institutional norms.
Note:ISTITUZIONE CATTIVA IN SÈ
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‘The reasons why a people choose socialism matter comparatively little; what is essential is that they build it with their own hands.’
Note:COSTRUZIONIMO AL CENTRO....RAGIONAMENTO AI MARGINI
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For Sartre, as for Hobsbawm, the cruelties of revolutionary socialism stem from ‘the necessities of the time’ (but who created those necessities?).
Note:GIUSTIFICA DELLE CRUDELTÀ
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The worker is reduced to a mere abstraction, not by the drudgery of capitalist production, but by the fiery rhetoric of the intellectual left. The worker is the means to the intellectual’s exultation,
Note:UN APPARATO DI ASTRAZIONI
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the jihād of ‘commitment’
Note:QUEL CHE CONTA
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In his satanic commentary on the writer Jean Genet Sartre had described good as ‘a mere illusion’, adding that ‘evil is a nothing (néant) that produces itself on the ruins of the good’.34 And in that book he outlines his deep attachment to la morale du Mal.
Note:IL NIENTE...SAINT GENET
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Sartre follows in the path of Baudelaire (another of his obsessions, and the one to whom he is most spiritually akin). His path is that of a soul longing for the good, but whose pride (which will accept as good only what is his own creation) forces him always to destroy the good.
Note:NEL SOLCO DI BAUDLAIRR...UN RICHIESTA NARCISISTICA DEL BENE
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The meeting of the intellectual with his god is therefore a purely inner episode, a private devotion from which the actual proletarian, with his desire for comfort, property and the things of this world, must be permanently shut out.
Note:INTELLETTUALE E POPOLO
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the ‘false intellectual’, a ‘type created by the dominant class to defend its particularist ideology by arguments which claim to be rigorous products of exact reasoning’.36 With those words Sartre dismisses unnamed such writers as Raymond Aron, Alain Besançon and Jean-François Revel who have tried to puncture the leftist illusions and who have met always with anger, contempt or blank disregard.
Note:IL FSLSO INTELLETTUALE
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By reducing his ‘commitment’ to a purely intellectual matter, a combat with the false prophets who rebut his arguments, he reduces the victim of oppression to a purely abstract idea – an excuse for his own heroic posturing.
Note:REVEL ACCUSA...PAN INTELLETTUALIZZAZIONE
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When the 11 members of the Israeli team sent to the Munich Olympics were murdered in 1972 Sartre was loud in justification of the crime, a fact that caused a certain hesitation among those who normally rushed to endorse his judgements. In 1984, four years after Sartre’s death, Marc-Antoine Burnier gathered together the many instances of Sartre’s revolutionary folly.
Note:LE FOLLIE DI UN NTELLETTUALE
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‘By means of irrefutable documents we learned of the existence of actual concentration camps in the Soviet Union’ – so Sartre wrote, 20 years after the truth was common knowledge among those who did not wilfully shield themselves from it. And yet still he could urge his countrymen to ‘judge communism by its intentions and not by its actions’.
Note:URSS
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Following the World Peace Congress in Vienna in 1954 he travelled at Soviet instigation to Moscow, returning to relate that ‘there is total freedom to criticize in the USSR’
Note:1954
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Sartre’s anti-bourgeois rhetoric changed the language and the agenda of post-war French philosophy, and fired the revolutionary ambitions of students who had come to Paris from the former colonies. One of those students was later to return to his native Cambodia and put into practice the ‘totalizing’ doctrine that has as its targets the ‘seriality’ and ‘otherness’ of the bourgeois class. And in the purifying rage of Pol Pot it is not unreasonable to see the contempt for the ordinary and the actual that is expressed in almost every line of Sartre’s demonic prose.
Note:POL POT. ALLIEVO XFETTO
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pride that caused him to scorn the Nobel Prize,
Note:IL BENE RIGETTATO X ORGOGLUO
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Les mots,
Note:IL LIBRO M CUI SI MISURA LA GRANDEZZA DRLLO SCRITTORE
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Childhood for Sartre is not the lifelong refuge evoked by Proust, but the first of many mistakes, in which all subsequent mistakes have their premonition.
Note:L INFANZIA IN LES MOTS
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two distinctive features of the French left: enmity and revolutionary fervour. A deep disappointment with reality and a desire to tear it down in the name of Utopia
Note:LA SINTESI DI SARTRE
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In the ensuing quest for authenticity there is a permanent need for an enemy.
Note:NECESSITÀ DI UN NNEMICO X CREARSI
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He must fortify his position by unmasking the deceptions of others.
Note:LO SMASCHERATORE
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The renewable opponent is the ‘bourgeois’: the pillar of the community, whose hypocritical respectability and social incompetence have inspired every variety of renewable contempt.
Note:IL NEMICO
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Molière
Note:L ANTENATO INNOCUI
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Épater le bourgeois became the signature of the disaffected artist, the guarantee of his social credentials whereby he demonstrated his aristocratic entitlement, and his contempt for the usurpatory dominion of the rising middle class.
Note:IL MARCHIO DI FABBRICA
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Under the dual influence of Marx and Flaubert the bourgeois emerged from the nineteenth century as a monster
Note:IL DIABOLICO DUO
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Its main power base has not been the university but the café:
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VIA DALLE STRUTTURE BORGHESI
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The café becomes the symbol of his social position. He observes the passing show, but does not join it.
Note:Ccccccc
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The gauchiste, in the wake of Sartre’s scandalous narrative, began to be seen as the confessor of the middle class.
Note:CONFESSA I TUOI PECCATI
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The gauchiste therefore becomes the redeemer of the class whose illusions he has been appointed to unmask.
Note:Ccccccccc
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at a certain point, and despite his rudeness – which is, in truth, no more than the necessary virtue of his profession – the gauchiste began to enjoy abundant social privileges.
Note:LA MOSSA SUCCESSIVA
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this symbiotic relation between the gauchiste and his victim
Note:SIMBIOSI
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he does no more than bark at the hand that feeds him.
Note:L INTELLETTUALE DI SINISTRA
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Julia Kristeva, Phillipe Sollers, Roland Barthes, Marguerite Duras, Alain Robbe-Grillet
Note:FACCIAMO QUALCHE NOME DEI NIPOTINI DI SARTRE
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Flaubert and Baudelaire.
Note:I NUMI
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Michel Foucault,
Note:MA LUI FU LA STELLA...IL VERO CONTINUATORE DELLA RETORICA ANTIBORGHESE DI SARTR
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I identify Foucault as a leading thinker of the New Left, but it should be pointed out that his political position was constantly shifting, and that he was always glad to reject any convenient label. Unlike Sartre he was a critic (although, until his later years, a fairly muted critic) of communism.
Note:DIFFERENZE DA SARTRE....PIÙ CRITICO
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all the given ways of shaping civil society are reducible in the last analysis to forms of domination.
Note:COSA VOLEVA DIMOSTRARE
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He is unable to encounter opposition without at once rising, under the impulse of his intellectual energy, to the superior ‘theoretical’ perspective, from which opposition is seen in terms of the interests that are advanced by it.
Note:NESSUN DIALOGO
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the search for the secret structures of power.
Note:IL FILO ROSSO DEL SUO LAVORO
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He originally described his method as ‘an archaeology of knowledge
Note:SMASCHEARE LE TRAME DEL POTERE
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Foucault’s ‘truth’ does not exist in the world independently of our awareness
Note:ANTIREALISMO
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in Les mots et les choses (1966)40 we are told that man is a recent invention: truly an original and troubling idea! On inspection it turns out that Foucault means no more than this: that it is only since the Renaissance that the fact of being a man (rather than, say, a farmer, a soldier or a nobleman) has acquired the special significance that we now attribute to it.
Note:L INVENZIONE DELL UOMO
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the sciences that have taken human beings as their object are recent inventions,
Note:DAL 500
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Each episteme, for Foucault, is the servant of some rising power, and has had, as its principal function, the creation of a ‘truth’
Note:LA FABBRICA DI VERITÀ...NATURALMENTE MARX È DIETRO L ANGOLO
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the relativist method
Note:IL METODO DI F
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In Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (1961) Foucault gave the first glimpse of this thesis.42 In that book Foucault traced the confinement of madmen to its origins in the seventeenth century, associating this confinement with the ethic of work and the rise of the bourgeoisie.
Note:FOLLIA
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the madman is ‘other’. He is other because he points to the limits of the prevailing ethic, and alienates himself from its demands. There is, in his refusal to be ‘normal’, a kind of virtuous disdain.
Note:IL DISPREZZO DEL FILLE
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sanity is the form of behaviour that respects the established structures of domination.
Note:LA SALUTE
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Goya, de Sade, Hölderlin, Nerval, Van Gogh, Artaud, Nietzsche, all are proof, for Foucault, that the voice of unreason (déraison) can no longer be silenced, and that the reign of bourgeois normality is over.
Note:ATTACCO ALLA RAGIONE BORGHESE
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The greatest offence of madness is against the ‘bourgeois family’, and it is the experience of this family that dictates the paternalistic structure of the asylum.
Note:DAL MATTO COME BHESTIA AL MATTO COME BAMBINO
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In the asylum the man of reason is presented as an adult, the madman as a child,
Note | Location: 2,432
Cccccccc
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The madman must be brought to recognize his error, and to reveal to the Father a consciousness of his guilt.
Note:ERRORI E COLPA
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the analyst listens to and translates the language of unreason which sounds from the unconscious,
Note:ANALOGIA CON FREUD
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psychoanalysis has refused to suppress the family structure
Note:LA COLPA DELLA PSICOANALISI
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The world divides conveniently into the ‘classical’ and the ‘bourgeois’ eras, the first beginning at the late Renaissance and ending with the ‘bourgeois revolution’ of 1789.
Note:LA VISIONE STORICA DI F È QUELLA MARXISTA
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nuclear family, transferable property, the legally constituted state,
Note:IL TRIONFO DELLA BORGHESIA
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the idea that the French Revolution involved a transition from ‘feudal’ to ‘capitalist’ modes of production,
Note:BIZZARRO
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there is some intrinsic connection between ‘bourgeois’, ‘family’, ‘paternalistic’ and ‘authoritarian
Note:IPOTESI DI F...PIUTTOSTO AZZARDATA
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peasant family is more authoritarian and the aristocratic family more paternalistic than the family called ‘bourgeois’,
Note:CONTRO
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The reader finds no argument about evidence, no search for instances or counter-instances that might sow the seeds of doubt. For they blur the figures and erase the outline of the necessary icon.
Note:CSTRUIRE OSTRUIRE CONE...ECCO IL MDO DI ROCEDERE DI F
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In Naissance de la clinique: une archéologie du regard médical (1963),44 Foucault extends the ideas of ‘observation’ and ‘normality’, so as to explain, not only the confinement of madmen, but also the confinement of the sick. (He will shortly extend the analysis further, to prisons and punishment.
Note:DAL PAZZO AL MALATO NELLA SOC. BORGHESE...FINO ALLE PRIGIINI
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concept of the Gaze – le regard,
Note:L ALTRO CHE CI SCRUTA CI SCHEDA CI GIUDICA CI MANIPOLA
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when Foucault, dying of AIDS, was in June 1984 taken to La Salpêtrière – the hospital whose former use as an asylum for the insane he had so maliciously characterized in Histoire de la folie – it was in order to escape the public Gaze, and to receive in his last days the compassion that he needed, and which he had dismissed twenty years earlier as one of the masks of bourgeois power.
Note:L IRONIA DELLA SUA MORTE
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most brilliant book, Surveiller et punir, subtitled ‘The birth of the prison’.
Note:IL CAPOLAVORO
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there is something persuasive in Foucault’s initial analysis of the transition from the exemplary punishments of Renaissance Europe to the system of physical confinement.
Note:DALL BESIBIZIONE AL CONFINO
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a kind of corporeal language of crime.
Note:VOGLIA DI RENDERE EVIDENTE IL MALE
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The guillotine takes life almost without touching the body,
Note:L INIZIO DEL CAMBIAMENTO
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just as prison deprives of liberty or a fine reduces wealth.
Note:DOPO TUTTO SARÁ IMPRONTATO ALLO SCAMBIO BORGHESE
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In an impressive description of Bentham’s ‘panopticon’ (a machine à corriger, in which all prisoners could be observed from a single post), Foucault relates the discipline of the prison to the newly emerging power of the invisible over the visible, which is, if I understand him, the power expressed in law.
Note:DAL VISIBILE ALL INVISIBILE
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Such impulsive observations are produced not by scholarship or empirical evidence but by the association of ideas,
Note:IL METODO DI F...ASSOCIAZIONE DI IDEE
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That his writings exhibit mythomania and even paranoia is, I believe, patent. But that they systematically falsify and propagandize what they describe is more difficult to establish.
Note:PARSNOICO MA NN I MALAFEDE
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such a writer is clearly more concerned with rhetorical impact than with historical accuracy.
Note:RETORICA
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Foucault offers no real explanation of what he means by ‘power’.
Note:CLAMOROSO!
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In an interview Foucault admitted that, for him, ‘power is coextensive with the social body’.59 And it is of course indisputable that social order, like every order, embodies power.
Note:OGNI ORDINE È REPRESSIVO
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He at once assumes that if there is power then it is exercised in the interests of some dominant agent.
Note:LA PARTE IDEOLOGICA DI F
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‘I believe that anything can be deduced from the general phenomenon of the domination of the bourgeois class.’
Note:TOTALIZZANTE
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he willingly subscribed to a form of ‘proletarian justice’ that removes all defence from the accused. To think, as he seemed to think, that such a form of justice will free society from the blight of domination is to overlook all that he had reason to know.
Note:E I TRIBUNALI DEL POPOLO....BÈ DOVE LA REPRESIONE È PIÙ VISIBILE F NN LA VEDE
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Through his studies of the asylum and the clinic, and through his comprehensive ‘archaeology of knowledge’, he had tried to show the ways in which normality is manufactured in the interest of the ruling structures of power, and how normality shifts as power is transferred from the aristocratic to the bourgeois class.
Note:RIASSUNTO
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the distinction between normal and abnormal sexual conduct, and the view of sexual activity as intrinsically ‘problematized’, are to be explained in terms of the prevailing structures of domination.
Note:STORIA DELLA SESSUALITÀ...STESSO COPIONE
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The Solidarity movement in Poland made a deep impression on him: not only as the first genuine working-class revolution in history, but as one directed against communism and in favour of a national identity.
Note:IL SUO ULTIMO AMORE
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the style is hesitant, circumspect and without the former belligerence.
Note:NEGLI ULTIM SCRITTI....ORMAI MALTO DI AIDS
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he comes close to recognizing the truth, which is that it is not power but love that makes the world go round.
Note:TRATTANDO IL TEMA DEL BAMBINO F SI NORMALIZZA
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His command of the French language, his fascination with ancient texts and the by-ways of history, his flamboyant imagination and beautiful style
Note:COSA SALVARE
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It was when confronted with the truth of his condition that Foucault at last grew up.
Note:QUANDO LA MATURAZIONE
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Foucault’s belligerent leftism was not a criticism of reality, but a defence against it, a refusal to recognize that, for all its defects, normality is all that we have.
DIFENDERSI DALLA VREALTÀ
