Passion Michel Foucault
On 29 June 1984, the day of the last scene, I cried floods of tears. It was the day of his burial. I see myself outside in a crowd I do not see, he is inside. I am waiting for him to come out. Now he is coming out. What I see of him: his last form. What appears is a body of light-coloured wood. His last costume. On seeing the coffin a part of my heart cracked. Floods of tears burst forth. Would I say I was ashamed? I was undoubtedly the only one in that mourning crowd to cry in torrents, without being able to stop. I saw nothing through the storm of tears, save the stiffened body of clear-coloured wood. And on this body of wood, strange hair of veiled roses. I know those tears well. They are the ones that carry off my soul each time the being that most violently tears apart my heart appears on the stage of the world, and this being is: the marionette. What afflicted me and transported me was not only the feeling of irreparable loss. It was the exact and sublime vision of the whole being and the whole history of Michel in that ultimate figure: the powerlessness of power. Thus he went in the form of the imprisoned and detached soul. A résumé of himself.
Act-Suffer [Agir-Pâtir]. I acted a great deal with Michel Foucault, I played with him, seriously played at the theatre of life. We were characters and spectators in a play that always exceeded us. We knew we were enclosed, and we searched for the exits, each of us in our own way. I shall evoke a few epiphanic scenes, in the story that led our friendship from the year 1968 to the last scene.
Between us it was always a question of prison and of freedom, of acting and of suffering, of doing battle, of overcoming and of failing. In 1968 I proposed to him to join me and a few rare friends in liberating the French University – and I must say here that Jacques Derrida, my absolute friend, my councillor and my accomplice, was always involved in the revolutions that we attempted to accomplish then. I had been charged with overseeing the creation of an Experimental University, and Jacques Derrida wished, as did I, in order for the university to succeed, that Michel Foucault should be part of the adventure, and in the front row.
However, at that very moment, infuriated by French academicism, Michel was about to flee. In a few words I sketched the portrait of the extraordinary action we could accomplish and without hesitation he said yes. There was never any hesitation between us.
From this first yes between us was born the alliance, the friendship and thereupon a pact of engagement: in what followed there was hardly a battle in which we did not find ourselves joining forces. In ’68 he was on the threshold of exile, coming from Tunisia to flee the phallogocentric French empire when I put my hand on his arm and retained him a while longer in this country that was paralysing itself, but in which a number of strong beings lived, captains of thought, deprived of a stage and of autonomy. Jacques Derrida, Deleuze, Lyotard, so many others, disseminated and thus diminished by the separation and who found themselves on the raft of Vincennes.
Immediately afterwards there was the GIP (Groupe Information Prison). One has to imagine happiness in the middle of horror. How we went – we were only a handful, completely mad and fearing nothing – to scream our anger before the prisons. It was the theatre acting in the City: Michel is a dreamer who acted out his dreams. We saw the necessity so clearly that we no longer saw the obstacles. I ‘went’ to the GIP, as one goes to school or to sea. With a naive joy. Here there are two scenes. By chance I had seen Ariane Mnouchkine's production 17891 (I did not know her at the time), and I said to Michel: let's go look her up. Your political theatre needs her theatre. I can see our three-person scene. It happened very quickly. The life-forces recognised each other and came together. Ariane her actors and I created the ‘first play’ of our adventure. It was a four-minute improvisation to incarnate Michel's work, in the streets. Because one must remember that Michel Foucault's thought always took to the streets and stood before the walls. It came running out of the books and became you and me. We never had the time to perform that four-minute play: no sooner has the van stopped in front of the Santé prison, whose monumental leprosy sits in the middle of Paris, the actors unload the staging, the police are upon them, upon us. And what police they were! The police of the 1970s, violent, armed, striking ferociously from behind their shields. The GIP was an informal group, there was no pressure to join or any command structure, it was neither a regiment, nor a brigade, there was no recruitment, no law or authority, there was an inspiration and an aspiration. We came to the GIP with shared wishes and good will, brought together by an attraction, a dream, a revolt. It was a complex, multicoloured body of which Michel was the soul. One cannot imagine a freer, less coercive grouping.
How many actors were we who did not know we were acting in a play of which Michel did not know he was the author? About fifty? We were the mystical marionettes of a superior idea the secret and antique coherences of which we did not see. Did we see that we were modestly but fervently beginning again to storm the Bastille? I believe that we did not think; we were led by the obviousness of life, by the passion of Michel. At the end of this minuscule epic, there was the other epiphany: it happened one day in a meeting. The little group of visionaries met from time to time to devise the next actions (which is to say the next sieges, always audacious and powerless, of the various French prisons), and the militant publications, describing the scandalous state of the fortresses and the condition of the prisoners. This was the day of my great surprise: Michel addressing us and proposing the following theme of reflection: what if now we formulated the theory (or an analysis) of our practice? We have run, fought, spoken, the streets and the walls have seen us. And now let us move on to the causes of all of these consequences. I was literally sitting next to myself, shocked. And I thought: what are you doing here? Why are you here? A great lesson of living philosophy: the master, the boss, turned around to ask the action for its reason! I was amazed! I who believed he knew everything in advance! Someone came to my rescue, among the people present, by responding for me: ‘hadn't I always written about prison and been in prison, as the first sentence of my first book (Dedans) suggested?’2 I had never thought of it. With a sudden flash of light, I saw a kind of virtual prisoner in each of us. Beginning with Michel, the freest and the most imprisoned of thinking beings. Shortly thereafter Michel turned the keys to the action over to the next generation, that of the former prisoners themselves. Because the action which becomes an institution is soon transformed into an unavowed prison. Michel struggled to displace external and internal bars. I said the freest and the most prisoner. This was always my experience, in the very sweet circle of intimacy. We loved, we loved each other, we spoke to each other of love. One summer day I cried in front of him, I was in mourning of love. I say this because we had a space for tears together. Later on I thought that this was accorded to us, him with me me with him, as grace, by the mystery of our love choices, choices which we had not chosen but which had chosen us. I heard him evoke with nostalgia the paradise of ‘childish’ loves, which is to say loves of pleasure without repression without inhibition. He dreamed in front of me of the delicious freedom of certain American communities (in comparison with the somber bourgeois French humour, the Californian vision shone like Beatrice for Dante). Michel lived in an age which is now past but which was still a descendant of the nineteenth century, horribly marked by Judeo-Christian interdictions. He spoke to me with adorable tenderness about Daniel, the boy he loved. With delicacy, with force, he spoke of Daniel's delicacy. With modesty he spoke of his refinement. Naturally, this went beyond the sexual opposition, it was neither on one side nor on the other, it was beyond, because it was love. We were on love's side, the only side which is not an institution.
I ought to talk about homosexualities, about the different loving sexualities which are so complex, so refined, singularities each time, and not at all what we think, but this is not the place.
Back to the marionette. The tears I recognised are tears coming from the deepest and the most mysterious of my psychic mysteries.
They arise [surviennent]. They are the ones that took me by surprise in October 1996 in Washington. I was in that city by chance because of a Philosophical Society conference. I slipped away: I went to the National Mall to see . . .
the solemn stand of the Aids Memorial Quilt.3 I said I left to go see the Quilt. But can what occurred be called seeing? I walked for a long time along this boulevard, with its strange proportions, an immense corridor, this slightly savage forestage which leads to the white mausoleum of power. It was a very beautiful day, as is always the case when there is tragedy. Little by little, people appeared. It was known that for contingent reasons (financial reasons, lack of space, problems of conservation) the thing was being shown here for the last time. I do not know what pushed me. I might have thought it was curiosity. At the end of the dust I finally arrived at the edge of the thing. It was vast like an interior ocean. This ocean was organised. It was a composition, as is well known. Squares of cloth were assembled, sewn together with delicacy. Each square was a thing in itself, a being, a work of art, an altar. It told a story, as is well known. Each piece of cloth had a name. Friends, a family, lovers were brought together in this cloth around this name. This name also had an age. As is well known. It is known and we know nothing. I walked among those beings, those thousands and thousands of loved beings, those forty-four thousand returning children. A breeze made these breasts of cloth breathe. Friends and strangers came to visit this incomparable people. Thousands and thousands of beings who responded with signs, who lifted their dead ones with a sigh, who joined forces against forgetting and negligence, who evoked the charms of their lost life. I began to feel the tears open a path in my body. I had never seen so many dead ones returning together at the call of love. Because it must be said that those who were there, standing or lying, had a common cause: love which never surrenders. A large man smiled sadly while looking at the cloth face of a name who had died at the age of twenty-seven. Is that your son? I asked. – Yes. They came from Texas. Father and son. All of this was terribly miraculous. The biggest the most tender the most obstinate of life-books of the dead. I could no longer hold back the tears. For whom was I crying? For the dead who were very strong, the dead in the full of life, very young, and so to speak dead of life. All of them children, lovers. I had never cried so much for Michel. I cried for the other Michel too. Michel de Montaigne, the first of these lovers touched by a grace so often condemned, the one who loved Etienne de La Boétie more than any being in the world, ‘because it was him – because it was me’,4 so uniquely and so totally that the souls blend and merge into each other, with a mixture so universal that they efface and can no longer locate the stitching that joined them.
‘We embraced each other with our names before having seen each other’ says Montaigne the survivor.5
And so it was that in Washington I saw that innumerable embracing of names, which I called by the name Michel, but each name was a life and a poem.
I cried as I never had, lost in afflicted admiration before this magical transformation of memory into a humble army of marionettes. The wind, the footsteps of visitors, the air and the light of thought moved them [les agissaient] with a superhuman presence. They spoke with slight movements. Escaped from coffins, from prisons, from prejudice, from punishment. Bearers of a tragic freedom.
August 2004
Translated by Eric Prenowitz
Notes
1. |
The Théâtre du Soleil, founded (in 1964) and directed by Ariane Mnouchkine, mounted a celebrated production on the French Revolution, 1789, in 1970. With the notable exception of the ‘“first play” of our adventure’, mentioned below, Hélène Cixous began writing for the Soleil in 1984, and has been the ‘house playwright’ ever since. |
2. |
‘My house is encircled’, Dedans (Paris: Grasset, 1969), p. 13. Cf. Hélène Cixous, ‘My Algeriance’, p. 212. On the last page of Dedans, the title of which means ‘Inside’, we read this, in part a distant echo of King Lear: ‘Viens, dit-il, allons en prison . . .’ (209), ‘Come, he said, let's go to prison . . .’ |
3. |
The Aids Memorial Quilt of the Names Project Foundation, the ‘largest community art project in the world’ (http://www.aidsquilt.org/history.htm). |
4. |
Michel de Montaigne speaking about Etienne de la Boétie: ‘Par ce que c'estoit luy; par ce que c'estoit moy’, in ‘De l'amitié’, Essais, Œuvres complètes, eds Albert Thibaudet and Maurice Rat (Paris: Gallimard (Pléiade), 1962), p. 187. |
5. |
Michel de Montaigne speaking about Etienne de la Boétie in ‘De l'amitié’, Essais: ‘Nous nous cherchions avant que de nous estre veus, et par des rapports que nous oyïons l'un de l'autre, qui faisoient en nostre affection plus d'effort que ne porte la raison des rapports, je croy par quelque ordonnance du ciel; nous nous embrassions par noz noms’, p. 187. |