Foucault and Liberalism

Michael C. Behrent published an intriguing paper on the last issue of Modern Intellectual History. According to Behrent, during the late 70’s Foucault endorsed a sort of anti-humanist liberalism, which was in tune with changes in the intellectual landscape in France:

Rather than arguing (as others have) that Foucault’s antihumanism precluded a positive appraisal of liberalism, or that the apparent reorientation of his politics in a more liberal direction in the late 1970s entailed a partial retreat from antihumanism, this article contends that Foucault’s brief, strategic, and contingent endorsement of liberalism was possible precisely because he saw no incompatibility between antihumanism and liberalism—but only liberalism of the economic variety.
Economic liberalism alone, and not its political iteration, was compatible with the philosophical antihumanism that is the hallmark of Foucault’s thought.

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Michael C. Behrent, Liberalism without humanism:Michel Foucault and the free-market creed, 1976–1979, Modern Intellectual History, Volume 6, Issue 03, November 2009, pp 539-568
http://dx.doi.org/doi:10.1017/S1479244309990175

The kingdom of Critique

Sylvie Patron, Critique 1946-1996: une encyclopédie de l’esprit moderne, Editions de l’IMEC, 1999

A few cultural magazines dominated and shaped French intellectual scene in the last 50 years, and provided the ground for the development of influential schools of thoughts. In this study, Patron covers the first 50 years of Critique, the magazine founded by Georges Bataille in 1946 and run by his son in law and associate Jean Piel after his death.
Conceived as an alternative to Jean Paul Sartre’s Le Temps Modernes and to Esprit (periodical of the left-Christian Personalist movement), Critique become the center of the anti-existentialist movement in the early 60’s, helped to launch the Structuralist movement, provided a tribune for the young Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva and Michel Foucault. Patron shows how some of the seminal works of Derrida and Kristeva originated in articles first published in Critique, which then become parts of books published by Minuit, the same publisher that published Critique, to be finally reviewed in the magazine. Barthes seems to have played a seminal role in recruiting new talent while Piel excelled as a couch and manager. One of the reasons behind the success of Critique that Piel could have been the fact that he was a successful and well-connected high ranking public servant.

Critique and the other cultural magazines occupied a middle ground between the academic journals and the popular press. Bataille and Piel were very successful in devising a formula of long and thorough book reviews, a breed of essays and book reviews. This is a formula that was also adopted by the New York Review of Books, though Critique restricted his focus to to literature and philosophical works.

An ingenious invention helped balance the finances of the magazine, which was almost wholly dependent on direct sales, subscriptions and a subsidy of the French government. Critique started early on publishing thematic issues, which were more alike books than an typical magazine issue. Sometimes three ‘special’ issues were published in a year, reaching a wider audiences and ensuring sales for longer periods.

For its luster and its undeniable impact on French culture and beyond, its readership was meager. Its printing runs were usually about 2000 issues, of which half were subscriptions, and half of that went overseas. Some of these subscriptions can also be considered covert governmental subsidies.

In 1967, Critique surveyed its readership and concluded that, based on the 158 responses received and tabulated, that its readership belonged predominantly to the intellectual and teaching professions. Almost 70% of the responses indicated that the readers have written articles or books or were intending to do so, that 40% were teachers or university professors, while another 32% were students. This is not really a surprising conclusion, taking into account the complexity of the articles that Critique favored. They also found out that many respondents seemed to live overseas and used critique to follow the French intellectual scene from afar.

Patron’s book illuminates an important area of our intellectual recent past. Recently published studies on other areas of French contemporary intellectual life (studies on Tel Quel and on the Temps Modernes), together with several intellectual biographies covering the glorious 50 years from the liberation to the end of the 20th century, the workss of sociologist such as Bourdiou o Pinto, provide interesting insights on areas which are still at the center of current debates.

At the same time, the proliferation of historical materials from this period seems to point out to Hegel’s famous claim at the end of the Preface to the Philosophy of Right:”c’est n’est qu’au debut du crepuscule que la chouette de Minerva prend son vol” (trad. Kaan, Gallimard, 1940, p. 45).

A different take on the Assylum

While reading Foucault’s Le Pouvoir Psychiatrique series of lectures I came across a recently published article of Oliver Sacks on the forgotten virtues of the asylum . Unfortunately Sacks’ article is only available on-line to subscribers.

Sacks seem to follow Foucault’s description quite closely, but where Foucault’s tone is sinister, Sacks provides a more nuanced and broader picture of the realities of classical psychiatric hospitals.

In any case, an interesting contrast.