Rendez-Vous — M. Foucault

— Cornelis de Bondt

22 October 1971, Twente Technical University. I’ve just watched the VPRO recording by Fons Elders of the debate between Michel Foucault and Noam Chomsky. Now I’m standing in the cafeteria, hoping to ask Foucault a question — perhaps even a few. I’m nervous. Chomsky has already left for his hotel, but I saw that Foucault seemed inclined to have a drink here. I need to find a way to get rid of that horde of groupies around him.

Foucault does indeed enter the cafeteria surrounded by students. But he soon disappears toward the restroom — my chance. I follow him immediately. Moments later we are standing next to each other, draining our fluids into the urinals. “C’est vous qui prenez l’urinoir de Duchamp, ou moi?” The joke was already too silly, but what mattered was addressing him in French — something those groupies were very likely incapable of. He had made his arguments in the debate in French, claiming he did not command English well enough for them. Hard to believe.

“Dafür braucht man Mutt!” he replies, with a subtle grin. “With two t’s.”

“Puis-je vous offrir un verre à boire?”

“Ah, to build up new reserves — cleverly done.” Again that ironic grin.

Is he trying to flirt with me?

I had decided to meet him in the guise of a younger version of myself — not from 1971, but from ’79, the year I wrote Bint. Indeed a somewhat dubious decision, but MeToo did not exist yet. Long hair, blue blazer.

“Peut-être pourrions-nous parler un peu; vous avez un moment?” My French was un peu pauvre, but I think I had him hooked.

“Si vous m’offrez le vin. Rouge, s’il vous plaît. Le vin de la cantine a trouvé son homologue dans cette ‘fountain’.”

A little later we are sitting at a small table, each with two glasses of red wine in front of us. He nods approvingly when I placed two glasses in front of him right away. The groupies, luckily, keep a respectful distance — perhaps intimidated by the French they overhear. Tant mieux!

“Première question,” I begin, “the Dutch translation of Les mots et les choses contains a foreword not found in the original French text. It is present in the English and also the German translation. So it must have been added later. Why?”

“There is a ‘Préface’ in the original text; I believe it is included in those translations as well. That additional ‘Forword’ is meant for the translations, to provide context for non-French readers who presumably are not familiar with the precise French situation.”

“That extra ‘Forword’ feels somewhat defensive, as if you felt the need to counter the criticism that followed the publication of your text in ’66. Or am I misreading it? That foreword did help me understand your text better, I should add.”

“Pas du tout!” He reacts a bit curtly. “It has nothing to do with a defensive posture — my only intention was to provide the necessary context for foreign readers. But, granted, even in my own country there were reactions showing that not everyone understood everything I wrote in that text. Or perhaps did not even wish to understand it.”

“Monsieur Chomsky could well have been one of those critics.” A useful segue.

“Bien sûr, mais je le respecte inconditionnellement.”

“The main point of contention in the debate concerned the concept of ‘justice’,” I continue, “and it’s a pity that this point was never properly elaborated — since it remained incomplete. You were given two minutes to respond to one of Mr. Chomsky’s longer arguments, which you felt was too little, so you ended with a kind of summarising conclusion. What would you actually have wanted to say? Or — if I may be so bold — did those two minutes perhaps suit you quite well?” Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

He looks at me intently, then lits a cigarette. After taking his first drag and sending an admirable smoke ring toward the ceiling, he replies: “If you think I had no answer to Mr. Chomsky’s well-known views, then this conversation has no further purpose.” He tilts his head slightly and examines me.

I lit a cigar; the ring I had imagined dissolves into shapeless wisps. “Enfin, mais le mien est plus grand,” I said, pointing at my cigar. “Je suis désolé, I would very much like to hear your response to Mr. Chomsky.”

Foucault makes a conciliatory gesture with the hand holding his cigarette. The smoke paints a fine spiral in the air. “Naturally, I am not an immoral bastard who believes that something like ‘justice’ does not exist. I only say that its meaning depends on how it has been defined within one culture or another. That meaning is born from a structure of power.”

When he sees that I want to respond, he raises his hand. Another spiral. “Give me more than those two minutes, please.” A lightly ironic smile, not unkind. “So when Mr. Chomsky tells me that the revolutionary struggle must be waged in the name of ‘just’ principles, I am inclined to reply: those principles are precisely the ones belonging to the world you want to destroy. They were born there. This does not mean that only the cynicism of brute force remains. It means that every struggle changes the conditions under which words like ‘justice’ can be spoken at all. In a revolutionary situation it is not only groups that collide; the very forms of rationality, the forms of knowledge, the forms of subjectivity themselves enter into crisis. Justice does not stand above history. I am not against justice; I am for giving it new meaning, on the basis of a new reality.”

I gauge whether I may speak… I may. “If I may play the devil’s advocate for a moment: do you deny the existence of any universal principle whatsoever? Love, hate, fear, jealousy, joy, sorrow — are these not of every time and every culture?”

“With this, you put your finger exactly on the stupidity of my critics. That I supposedly abolished the concept of the ‘subject’, or wish to abolish it. This is possible — I will admit that now — also one of the reasons for that additional preface in Les mots… I end the book with the phrase that man, as a thought subject, will disappear ‘like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.’ By this metaphor I obviously do not mean that the human being as an individual will vanish.”

“But does this analysis not create a gap in our thinking? If I stumble, I fall. Always and everywhere. Gravity is a universal fact. Why should this not also apply to moral, ethical, and even aesthetic issues, without requiring you to abandon your analyses of power? Are overarching human principles — for example concerning ‘justice’ — truly unthinkable within your genealogy of human thought? Perhaps a multilayered structure is conceivable, with on the one hand shifting and thus normative views, and on the other hand universal ones. Compare Kant.”

Foucault takes a few sips of wine and thinks for a moment. “Kant is indeed an interesting example of the multilayeredness you seem to have in mind. He is the beginning of critical thought. He is, as I call him in Les mots…, ‘the inventor of man as an epistemic figure.’ The ‘Enlightenment’ is then not an ‘object’, but an ‘attitude’. At the same time, Kant holds on to man as a given subject — transcendental, certainly — but still a fixed centre in our thought. Where Kant attempts, in his Third Critique, to build a bridge between the causal determination of nature and our freedom, autonomy, and morality, through ‘judgement’, I note that the core of our problem lies precisely in this judgement. The judgements become absolute objects.”

“What do you mean by that last part? You suddenly leap forward in enormous steps…”

“Désolé, but my thinking develops continuously…”

He continues: “At the moment I am reflecting on those moralising forms of judgement, and how they have led in modern times to binary formulas of ‘normal’ versus ‘abnormal’, ‘healthy’ and ‘ill’; I want to show that the ‘subject’ is not a foundation but a historical consequence.”

I am, of course, aware of the titles still waiting to be published, such as Théories et Institutions and La Société Punitive, but I cannot refer to them at this moment. The texts are apparently already germinating somewhere in his mind.

Foucault resumes speaking. “Somewhere in Les mots… I write that it is an ‘open’ work; many things were not clear to me, some seemed too obvious, others too obscure. The book is not a conventional historical study — I see it as a form of archaeology. It is a comparative study in which I started out from various questions and problems, for which I sought answers, but did not always find them. It is highly experimental, a quest. And that attitude differs from conventional academic historiography, which, on the one hand, starts from the processes and products of scientific consciousness, and, on the other hand, reconstructs what has escaped that consciousness: the influences that have shaped it, the implicit philosophies underlying it, the unspoken themes, the invisible obstacles — the unconscious of science. This unconscious forms the negative side of science — that which opposes it, deflects it, or disturbs it. What I would like to uncover, by contrast, is a positive unconscious of knowledge: a level that escapes the scientist’s awareness and yet forms part of scientific discourse, instead of calling its validity into question or diminishing its scientific character. What I aim for is not a universal stance, but an adventure.”

“So that is what you described in that slightly mysterious preface that exists only in the various translations, but not in the original.”

“Hmm, I do not recall precisely how this happened. There was, from abroad, a need for an additional preface.”

“Which translation actually came first — the English, the Dutch, or the German? And do you still have the original French text somewhere?”

“Le texte n’est pas perdu. It has merely been displaced. Each translation gives it a new life… Thus do words and things travel.”

He looks at me again with that lightly ironic expression I still cannot quite decipher. Does he still have the text? Or has it simply vanished? I had found no trace of it online, nor any indication of which translation appeared first.

“Is everything ultimately a form of theatre?” I ask him. “The debate certainly seemed so to me — you both believed what you believed, but you also played with it. For example, that whole business with the ‘two minutes’. Or am I mistaken?”

“Un théâtre, dites-vous?” He smiles with that ironic grin. “Bien sûr. After all, every public utterance is already a mise en scène. What is interesting is not that it is theatre, but rather: Who has written the script? Who decides when the applause falls? And the question whether Mr. Chomsky thinks he is not performing? Those ‘two minutes’ are an amusing aside.”

“So everything is just a game in the end?”

“Your compatriot Huizinga wrote, if I recall, an interesting book on precisely that.”

He lights a new cigarette and finishes his second glass. I take the hint and fetch two more. “A game, yes — but that does not mean it is merely lighthearted; it is often deadly serious,” he continues.

“A game of life and death?” I ask. “You call Freud one of the great ‘archaeologists’ in Les mots…. I do not recall you ever referring directly to his concept of the ‘death drive’. I assume that is because you believe Freud did not truly liberate the subject. He was indeed an archaeologist, but also still a physician. Of the old stamp.”

Foucault nods thoughtfully. “I would phrase it somewhat differently, but broadly speaking, you are right. Freud did not liberate the subject, but he did cease to exclude madness; he gave it a place within the medical regime of meaning — namely through the ‘unconscious’.” He takes a few sips of wine, then continues. “As for the Todestrieb, I have indeed, to my knowledge, not referred to it directly in my books. But the notions of ‘life’ and ‘death’, and thus also the ‘death drive’, have — thanks in part to Freud — shifted from the domain of ‘God’ or ‘Nature’ to the interior of the human being. I am working on a new theory of what I call ‘biopolitics’. The essence of Freud’s concept, in my view, is not a psychological entity but the articulation of an epistemological limit. With this concept, we encounter the boundary of our capacity to analyse biopower. La pulsion de mort, Thanatos, is the name Freud gives to that which escapes the internal economy of his own knowledge. It is a limit-concept, a scar in the very skin of his theory. For Kant this would belong to the noumenal.”

“Meaning that for you the concept is unworkable?”

“Évidemment. Moreover, in my current thinking, the subject is a product of historical regimes.”

“But hopefully our dying is more than only the product of history,” I say with a deliberately crooked grin.

“Tu bois assez?” He pushes his second, still full glass towards me, and asks: “Are you afraid of death?”

“La mort ne me fait pas peur. It is a condition of every life, and by thinking about it you understand what you are actually doing.” I look at him in a rather schoolmasterly way and raise my glass. “Vive la mort!”

“La grande ou la petite?” he asks.

“Does the size really matter?” Worth a try — that rascal.

“One last question,” I say in response to his ironic grin. “Is your genealogical thinking not recursive? A perpetuum mobile? If every universal principle existing outside power is unthinkable, then we are doomed to repeat this game of power endlessly — a game which, for some mysterious reason, becomes the only principle that explains everything. That leaves us in quite a predicament.”

He shakes his head. “Come now! Who convinced you that the world requires a fixed point in order to be thinkable? You reproach me for leaving no escape from power; but I do not describe a labyrinth without exit — I describe the boundaries. And if you see only boundaries, perhaps that is because you are still hoping for a heaven. Power is not a principle. It is the texture of our practices, our words, our things. I reduce nothing to power: I show how things take shape, intertwine, unravel. It is people who dream of an immovable foundation, not history.”

— § —

Two days later I find myself sitting on a small chair, propped up by two cushions, between the two large lime trees, thinking about that mysterious conversation.

After his answer to my last question, we each went our own way. I understood his point, but I now regret not having tried to counter it. Tongue-tied, perhaps? Hmm, no, not only that. He was unyielding… perhaps even irrefutable. It was as if he had developed a vacant system, or rather, an analytical methodology. And that methodology tolerates no contradiction, no rejoinder. I suddenly think of Stravinsky, whose music has a comparable implacability. Stravinsky and Foucault — they are magnificent comets shooting past our world, but do not try to touch them. You won’t survive it. They are Sirens.

I see two kinds of reactions that have wrecked themselves on his cliffs: on the one hand, the groupies who uncritically meow his ideas, and on the other, the critics who, following in Habermas’s footsteps, dismiss him with what is essentially a kind of tu quoque (or circular argument), namely that Foucault’s notion of genealogies lacks a foundation for universal critique. But that was precisely the essence of Foucault’s ideas: that this universal is absent. One may lament that, but perhaps this ‘heaven’ simply does not exist.

It is quite possible that a synthesis is conceivable between Foucault’s analysis of power and the theories of others that rest on universal concepts. In that case Foucault’s analysis would be the antithesis — something he would of course strongly oppose — but so be it, En avant, avec courage! For that, one must rise above the mediocrity of idolisation and demonisation alike.

I have managed to launch a ring of smoke and watch it float upward, toward the crowns of the two trees towering so far above me, and then a final thought comes to me. One must have talent in order to understand and appreciate talent, and if that talent is lacking, then power is the only means that remains. If you are not musical, you will not understand the genius of Stravinsky. And then there remain only extra-musical criteria by which to pass judgment. The same applies, mutatis mutandis, to philosophy. The judgment of Foucault is then determined by structures of power — what a tragedy!

Both the unthinking adoption and pastiche of Foucault’s thought, and its unthinking condemnation and rejection, articulate a lack of talent. They express a mediocrity with which our world is saturated, and for which any true talent has no patience. It stimulates only the objectwise, the predictable, the mundane and the compliant. Long live the mavericks of thought!

— Loosduinen, November 28, 2025