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In 1966 Michel Foucault published “The words and the things”, which for some critics meant the consecration of structuralism in the face of existentialism. We present a semblance of the critical debates between Michel Foucault and Jean Paul Sartre that this work forged, in the context of the French intelligentsia of the time and the authority that intellectuals then had.
When the Cold War was nearing its end, in 1985, the CIA investigated the French intelligentsia with spies dedicated exclusively to this task. The purpose of the mission was to know their conception of the United States. Among the thinkers most read by spies, according to the report that revealed Los Angeles Review of BooksThere were Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser, Jacques Derrida and Jean Paul Sartre. The CIA report concluded, almost satisfactorily, that some of these poststructuralists had anti-Soviet positions, which was reflected in a survey that indicated that the French now had an unfavorable perception of the United States of less than 30%, being that years ago this percentage passed 50%; however, Derrida, Sartre – who had already been investigated by the FBI – and Althusser continued to differ from the anti-Soviet.
The CIA report clarified that its focus on French intellectuals responded to the role they played when defending or attacking a political party; meanwhile, the thought of Foucault and Barthes landed in the North American academy, giving rise to the coming cultural and gender studies. The writer Laurent Binet wrote about it that the situation was flattering “for the CIA itself. He did not know that there were specialists within it capable of reading and understanding ideas and debates. Deep down, it’s as fun as it is revealing. If the CIA takes the world of ideas seriously, the world of ideas has not (had) died yet ”.
A few days ago the French Guy Sorman accused Michel Foucault of pedophilia. In an interview with The Sunday Times, he said that on a visit he made to the philosopher in 1969 in Tunisia, he saw that he paid minors to have sex at night in the local cemetery. According to Sorman, on that trip there would also be journalists who noticed the situation and who kept silent because, according to him, Foucault was the king of philosophers. And he concludes his revelation with a colonialist analysis: according to Sorman, Foucault did not dare to do this in France, but in Tunisia he did because of white imperialism.
Both the CIA investigation and Sorman’s statements haunt the position of intellectuals in France as figures of authority and power after the second half of the 20th century.
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Foucault’s philosophy provided countless reflections on power and knowledge, and entered into great disputes with some authors. For example, he had a very long one with Jean Paul Sartre. In the wake of The words and the things (1966), Foucault and Sartre starred in a debate on the death of man and the conception of history. Sartre affirms in a 1966 interview that: “A dominant tendency, at least, since the phenomenon is not general, is the rejection of history. The success of Michel Foucault’s latest book is characteristic. What do we find in The words and things? Not an archeology of the human sciences. The archaeologist is the one who searches for the remains of a disappeared civilization to try to rebuild it. (…) What Foucault presents us is, as Kanters has well seen, a geology: the series of successive strata that make up our ‘soil’. Each of these layers defines the conditions of possibility of a certain type of thought that has triumphed during a certain period. But Foucault has not told us what would be the most interesting, to know how each thought is constructed from these conditions, and to know how men pass from one thought to another. To do this, the intervention of praxis, that is, history, would be necessary, and that is precisely what he rejects. It is true, his perspective is still historical. He distinguishes between times, a before and an after. But he replaces the cinema with the magic lantern, the movement with a succession of immobility. The success of his book proves that it was expected. But a truly original thought is not expected. Foucault brings people what people needed: an eclectic synthesis where Robbe-Grillet, structuralism, linguistics, Lacan, say that they are used to demonstrate the impossibility of a historical reflection ”.
Foucault finds in Sartre’s critique a defense of Marxism insofar as, as he said in an interview in 1967, he sees a “curious sacralization of history by certain intellectuals. The ‘traditionalist’ respect for history is for them a comfortable way ‘of putting their political conscience and their search or writing activity in agreement ”.
And a year later, in another interview, he says directly that from Hegel to Sartre philosophy has been totalizing and that now it must be a diagnosis of the present, then the interviewer affirms that Foucault has a reproach for history and Foucault responds: “ No historian has made me this reproach. There is a kind of myth of History among philosophers (…) History for philosophers is a kind of great and rough continuity in which the freedom of individuals and economic or social determinations are linked (…). When one of these three myths is violated, rightly men immediately cry out against the rape or murder of History. (…) As for the philosophical myth of History, that myth of whose murder I am accused, I would like to have really destroyed it because it was precisely with him that I wanted to end and not with history in general. History does not die, but history for philosophers, that, without a doubt, I would like to end with it ”.
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For Foucault, Sartre’s existentialism was a 19th century philosophy trying to explain the 20th century. And for Sartre, structuralism, which for some was a philosophy that was established with the publication of The words and the thingsIt was a sack full of cats of different coats. Sartre saw in The words and the things a wall with which the bourgeoisie stopped the theoretical advance of Marxism. And Foucault suggested in another interview that the busy Sartre surely did not have time to read his book.
These criticisms and counter responses between one author and the other and between one philosophy and another took place for several years, but had a pause when the two philosophers met not to debate but to join in a protest.
It was in 1971. They met at the Maison Verte in the 18th arrondissement of Paris, prior to a demonstration against French police and government racism. They shook hands, talked for an hour, and took to the streets walking shoulder to shoulder. Canguilhem once stated that he believed he saw in Sartre a certain bitterness for who would be his “replacement”, since Foucault wrote his theoretical work in opposition to the distinguished Marxist intellectual.
That day of 1971, when the march reached the agreed point, Sartre felt ill and withdrew. Foucault stayed with the dealers and they went into a restaurant to eat something. A visitor to the place saw him and shouted: “Look, it’s Sartre.” Some time later, Foucault revealed in an interview that he did not know if it was a compliment or not. In 1972 they met again, shoulder to shoulder and megaphone in hand, in front of the Renault factory in protest at the murder of activist Pierre Overney.
