There is a Foucault who differs from the one assimilated by academic conformism

The events taking place in Italy and around the world to mark the centenary of Michel Foucault’s birth seem like a cross between the titles of 1970s erotic films and those of Lina Wertmüller: ‘The neoliberal modulation of the body in sex-tech and the sex-toy market’, ‘Homosexuals, hermaphrodites and transsexuals’, ‘Swallowing power: contraceptive pills in the biopolitical era’. ‘Sex, Metalworkers and Sheep Farming’ is missing, but I probably haven’t looked hard enough. This is the Foucault digested and excreted by universities, the patron saint of oppressed minorities and the deconstructor of gender identities. But there is another Foucault, less well-known and more surprising. We have forgotten that, in an intellectually Marxist-influenced France, the emergence of a philosophical school of thought that refused to reduce every form of domination to the workings of the economy was no small matter. For legions of academics who, like laboratory dogs, drooled at the sight of the red light of class relations—supposed to explain everything—it was the equivalent of a kick in the shins.

In his 1984 essay ‘Che cos’è l’illuminismo?’, Foucault stated that he preferred tactical and measured interventions to grand strategies for the re-founding of society and to the promises of the ‘new man’. Revolutionaries believe they know what the community of the future should look like and end up imposing a model of existence that is just as restrictive as the previous one. It is more serious and useful to reform specific institutions, such as a psychiatric hospital or a prison, by correcting entrenched hierarchies and loosening the grip of institutions on the private sphere, without claiming to know in advance the perfect order of things. To secure some concrete freedoms, for oneself, rather than pursuing projects of collective emancipation. While he considered the welfare state necessary, he also wondered how to prevent it from fostering dependence on bureaucratic apparatuses and a loss of autonomy. Over the years, Foucault became increasingly individualistic, convinced that people must learn to invent themselves. Each person is both the sculptor and the marble. ‘Why can a lamp or a house be a work of art, but not our own lives?’ Among the examples he offered was Baudelaire’s dandy. The revolutionary seeks to remake humanity; the dandy begins with himself. He does not teach others how they should live. He defies conventions. He constructs a way of being in the world that resembles no other. Even the choice of clothes, conversations, pastimes and idleness become small acts of non-conformist rebellion. Yet the art of living is the opposite of spontaneity; it has its own rules and discipline. And to the young compatriots who are swarming into the squares today, Foucault might well reply as he did to a student at the University of Berkeley: ‘If I had a son, I assure you he would not write on walls. Or, if he did, it would be against my will. But come now!’