HOW FOUCAULT CHANGED MY LIFE

By

DANIELE LORENZINI

[Description of photo below: Daniele, who has short dark hair, a beard, and mustache, stands in front of a wall with his arms crossed in front of him. He is wearing a long-sleeved shirt with buttons and a watch with a large face.]

I first encountered the work of Michel Foucault twenty years ago. It was March 2006, and I was a second-year undergraduate student at the Scuola Normale Superiore and the University of Pisa. On a rainy winter day, in one of the seminar rooms of Palazzo della Carovana, I heard one of my classmates mention that a famous American professor, based at the University of Chicago, was coming to Pisa to teach a class on Foucault and the history of sexuality. Not only did I know nothing about Foucault, but I also had never taken any course addressing the topic of sexuality. I was intrigued.

The first day of class, I sat in one of the first rows. The room was packed, with some students sitting on the stairs for lack of available seats. Then the professor arrived: slim build, shaved head, a black beard, small round glasses, and a support bandage on his left arm extending to his hand. He spoke perfect Italian, with a slight American accent. His name was Arnold Davidson. I don’t remember the details of that first class. What I do remember is that my world changed in the span of an hour. I wanted to read Foucault, and I wanted to work with Davidson. The minute I came out of the classroom, I ran to Tra Le Righe, the closest bookstore, and got a copy of the first volume of The History of Sexuality, La volonté de savoir [The Will to Know]. I was surprised to discover that it was very short. I started reading it immediately, on my way back to the department. Half an hour later, after finishing the first chapter, I realized I was late for the following class. It was the first time that happened.

That year, I was writing my thesis on Spinoza’s and Hobbes’ respective accounts of the constitution of a political society.[1] So, when I read Foucault’s famous sentence, in the first volume of his History of Sexuality, “In political thought and analysis, we still have not cut off the head of the king,” I felt like he was talking directly to me. It was too late to change the topic of my second-year thesis, but at the end of my oral exam with Davidson, I asked him if he could supervise my third-year thesis on Foucault. He agreed, but warned me: he was going back to Chicago during the fall and winter terms, and would only be back in Pisa in March of the following year, so the time we had to work together was going to be quite limited. It’s hard to imagine it now, but in 2006 Zoom wasn’t yet a thing.

Without even thinking about it, I suggested that I could go to Chicago in the fall, and I did. I wasn’t there as an official exchange student—there was no time to prepare the required paperwork, and it would likely have been too expensive for me anyway. I rented a small room in Hyde Park, close to the Museum of Science and Industry. A good deal, but definitely spartan: there was a closet, a mattress on the floor, a small desk, and a chair. I didn’t need more than that. I spent the following three months reading as much Foucault as possible, and auditing Davidson’s class, thanks to which I discovered two of my other lifelong philosophical companions: Stanley Cavell and Pierre Hadot. I took the bus to go downtown every few days, to explore the city, its museums, and its surroundings. It was my first time in the United States.

What was it about Foucault that struck such a deep chord in me? What is it about his work that I still find so relevant that, twenty years later, I’m still writing about it?

This might be a very personal thing, but every time I read Foucault, I have the feeling that he somehow knows me and can read my mind. That was my feeling reading the first chapter of La volonté de savoir, where he famously rehearses traditional views about power and liberation: power as a repressive mechanism that forces people to remain silent about certain things (e.g., their sexuality), and liberation as a direct reaction to that prohibition—if we’re able to finally speak and express ourselves, then we’re certainly free! That was exactly how I—and every other philosopher I had been reading up to that point—thought about power and freedom. Foucault’s patient debunking of those ideas in the following chapters of the book was for me a real transformative experience, in L.A. Paul’s sense of the term, that is, both cognitively and personally. I began thinking and looking at the world differently.

It is often claimed (including in a very recent and, of course, very inaccurate piece published in the New York Times) that Foucault pointed to the inescapability of power and the illusory nature of freedom—but people keep construing these notions according to their traditional meaning, and they don’t account for the ways in which Foucault radically redefines them. This leads to one of the most common critical charges levelled against him: that he was some sort of nihilist or prophet of doom. I remember closing La volonté de savoir—after reading its iconic last sentence about the irony of the dispositif of sexuality itself pushing us to think that, by talking more and more about sexuality, we would automatically be freer and freer—feeling exactly the opposite.

I felt that Foucault’s book empowered me to finally develop more fine-grained tools to understand how power actually works, in society and in my own life, and therefore how to more effectively resist and oppose its most nefarious effects. “Where there is power, there is resistance,” Foucault writes in La volonté de savoir: such a stunning, powerful idea, that I have never stopped coming back to in all these years to try to unpack it in its multiple theoretical and practical consequences. Ultimately, Foucault taught me that, precisely because power operates even in the tiniest aspects of our everyday life, there’s always something we can do to change things and make them better. We are never helpless in the face of power, because there are always power relations we can act upon and transform.

Foucault also taught me that philosophy and history can be combined in a way that I had never thought possible. History had always fascinated me, and I was taking many history classes at the Scuola Normale Superiore and the University of Pisa, while officially pursuing my degree in philosophy. Reading Discipline and Punish in the summer of 2006 made me discover a philosophical practice of history that Foucault, following Nietzsche, terms “genealogy.” Foucault’s genealogies, differently from Nietzsche’s, are deeply rooted in a patient, meticulous archival work, but at the same time, he uses this archival material in order to unweave the fibers of our own thought and being: if history has made us who we are, it is also possible to use history to unmake us, or at least to undo some of the tighter knots in the fabric of our thought and being. What we had always taken for granted, it turns out, could have been—and could still be—otherwise.

In this sense, Foucault’s genealogies open up new possibilities of thought and being not by prescribing them to us, nor by showing them to us as for instance utopian writers would do, but by unweaving our thought and being and leaving them in an unfinished state, thus pushing us to do something with those now-unwoven, loose threads. Needless to say, after reading Discipline and Punish, knotting my views about crime, punishment, discipline, and the prison back together as they were before was no longer an option. What was I supposed to think then? Foucault doesn’t tell us, and has been criticized for it. But he doesn’t tell us because he thinks transformations should be enacted by social agents themselves and guided by their collective decisions, not by the prophetic words of a philosopher. Indeed, for all of his refraining from giving us ready-made “solutions” to the problems he was addressing, Foucault never refrained, throughout his life, from participating in (and sometimes even initiating) activist campaigns.

Foucault is also routinely accused of being one of the champions of relativism about truth, and unfailingly mentioned at the very top of the list of “postmodernist thinkers” responsible for the worst evils of present-day society—and, we’ve recently discovered, for the unacceptable State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences too. (The Report goes as far as explicitly referencing The Order of Things, but of course I doubt its authors have actually read the book, or any other of Foucault’s works for that matter.) This is especially surprising to me because, once again, reading Foucault’s books, lectures, and interviews left me with the opposite impression:

Foucault cares an awful lot about truth and about getting things right, and as I explain in my book, The Force of Truth, he was actually interested not in offering relativist arguments about truth, but in posing the problem of the “force of truth,” that is, of the ways in which certain truth claims (as opposed to others) come to acquire force in a given context or a given society. Foucault’s main insight here is that addressing truth from a purely epistemic standpoint (what is the truth-value of P?) doesn’t tell us the full story, since this isn’t the only reason that can explain why P does (or doesn’t) carry a certain political and ethical force for people in a given context. From this perspective, I would venture to claim that, far from being the villain and main culprit of the advent of the so-called “post-truth era,” Foucault actually offers us very important tools to understand and navigate our current predicament.

Finally, I was also puzzled when, at the beginning of the 2010s, the controversy about Foucault allegedly endorsing neoliberalism began to erupt. I had read his lecture course The Birth of Biopolitics in Chicago (an apt place to do so, given his discussion of the Chicago School!), and I really struggled to understand how people could in good faith interpret it that way. The course is famously devoted to a discussion of liberalism and neoliberalism as specific arts of governing people, with neoliberalism, more specifically, extending the logic of the market to every aspect of our life. This means, Foucault suggests, that individuals in neoliberal societies enjoy, in a sense, a broader latitude of choice and action, but within an environment that only valorizes and rewards certain choices and certain actions, according to a purely economic rationality. This, as Foucault had already understood in 1979 (and as I feel we’re understanding more and more clearly every day), isn’t paradise on earth, the ultimate realization of our dream of freedom. Rather, it is a historically specific, and very effective way of governing people without the need to explicitly coerce them, which makes this form of governmentality particularly insidious and difficult to criticize—especially if one endorses standard liberal or libertarian views.

These are just a handful of reasons that explain why the encounter with Foucault’s work profoundly transformed my way of thinking and seeing the world. Given how widespread misreadings of his thought still are, and at the same time how unavoidable the reference to it appears to be, I think there’s still a lot of work to do to make his genuine views more broadly available, and to push more people to actually read his books. It is in part for this reason that I, and a wonderful group of Foucault scholars from all around the world, have recently put together The Foucauldian Mind, a new companion to Foucault that aims to provide a scholarly but still accessible roadmap into the intricacies and richness of his thought. Each chapter opens a window onto an aspect of Foucault’s work that I believe to still be relevant for us today. It was an enormous privilege, and a great pleasure, to be able to work on this volume with a group of scholars that I greatly admire, and from whom I’ve learned so much throughout the years.

Among the many things that I could mention to conclude, two are particularly significant to me. The first is that this volume contains a chapter on La volonté de savoir and other texts on sexuality from the mid-1970s that I co-authored with Arnold Davidson. Twenty years after he introduced me for the first time to Foucault, and precisely to that book, I really couldn’t ask for a better way to express my gratitude to him and honor what has developed into one of the most important friendships in my life. The second is that The Foucauldian Mind is being published in the year that marks the 100^th anniversary of Foucault’s birth. I don’t necessarily like “celebrations,” because instead of looking back, I’m convinced it’s important to look forward and ask how certain ideas can (still) be put to work in the present. So, this volume is not a celebratory one. Yet I would like to think of it as a gift of sorts—an impossible gift to someone I have never met, someone who died before I was even born, but whose encounter nevertheless changed my life forever.[2]

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[1] At the Scuola Normale Superiore, students are expected to write a research thesis each of the five years of their fellowship, while also attending courses at the University of Pisa and graduating there for both their BA and their MA.

[2] I would like to thank Shelley Tremain for inviting me to write this post, and for her wonderful contribution to The Foucauldian Mind. Seeing her reflect so openly, in that chapter, on the importance of Foucault to her own philosophical work on disability has inspired me to write this post in a more personal tone than I otherwise would have.

Daniele Lorenzini is associate professor of philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania. He specializes in post-Kantian European philosophy and social and political philosophy. He is the editor of many volumes collecting previously unpublished lectures and writings by Michel Foucault, and the author, most recently, of The Force of Truth: Critique, Genealogy, and Truth-Telling in Michel Foucault (Chicago, 2023).