final thoughts on the unusual kind of ‘philosophical life’ he had evidently led.”42
These thoughts were recorded in June 1984, during Foucault's dying days, by one of his closest friends, the young artist Herve Guibert. “Evoking his childhood and its dreams, [Foucault] volunteered what he felt to be the deepest truths about himself.”43 These truths centered on three primal scenes, or “terrible dioramas.” In the first, Foucault, as a small boy, is led by his father, who was a surgeon, into an operating theatre in the hospital at Poitiers to witness the amputation of a man's leg. The father's motive? To “steel the boy's virility.” In the second diorama, the boy walks past a courtyard in Poitiers in which a woman has been living for decades on a straw mattress. She is locally known as “the Sequestered of Poitiers,” and the boy experi—ences an unforgettable chill as he passes by. The final scene is set in the war years. The life of the precocious young student is suddenly interrupted by an invasion of arrogant young Parisians, “naturally smarter than anyone else.” “Dethroned, the philosopher-child is seized by hate, damns the intruders, invites every curse to rain down upon them.” Soon after, these Jewish chil—dren, who had found momentary refugee in Poitiers, did in fact disappear in transports to the death camps of the Third Reich.
James Miller glimpses in these anecdotes many of the themes that will preoccupy Foucault for the rest of life: wanton power (the father forcing his son to witness an amputation); erotic transgression (the woman on the mattress had been confined in a pitch-dark room by her mother and brother, given little food, mired in her own shit, plagued by lice, maggots, and rats, and driven insane, allegedly because she had given birth to an illegitimate child when she was younger); and crushing guilt (for the fascism Foucault had discovered in himself, and the fate of the powerless students he had wanted to disappear).44 Miller's analysis is confirmed, if only obliquely, in the final interview Foucault gave before he died. In a Nietzschean vein, he confesses that all his work amounted to a kind of autobiography, and he abjures the “rhetorically evasive” form of philosophy in which he had disguised the truth about himself.
In the sketches and portraits that comprise this book, I claim no definitive understanding of the thinkers whose lives have engaged my interest. But while they are tentative and tangential, these essays touch on the question of how we might balance modes of thinking, speaking, writing, and living that have, since the Enlightenment, been seen as antithetical. When a trainee social worker or psychotherapist is told not to get too emotionally involved with his or her client, when an ethnographer is counseled not to lose sight of his or her academic objectives by going native, when an analytical philosophy has recourse to symbolic logic when working out what can be reasonably stated or defended rather than adducing examples from the world of which he or she is a part, and when a scientist speaks of subjective experience as a regrettable disturbance that must be neutralized in order for objective observations to be made, we are carrying the burden of culturally and historically determined distinctions that cannot be sustained in reality and that overlook the different contexts in which these modes of being and thinking find a useful place.
We come here to the limits of social science. To understand in depth and detail what transpires within our relations to others, we draw upon the work of social scientists, psychologists, and ethologists to be sure, but it is to the work of artists, novelists, biographers, and nonspecialists that we must also turn for techniques that help us do greatest justice to lived experience. In venturing beyond the borders of orthodox science, we may be accused of departing from empirical truth and being unprofessional, or, worse, of pure invention. But there may be a middle ground, where anecdote enriches rather than invalidates our work.
Let me elaborate by referring to a largely forgotten essay by Lionel Trilling, introducing a 1952 American edition of George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia. Trilling begins by observing how rare it is that a writer's personal identity is fully acknowledged or fully felt in his or her writing. Indeed, both literature and science tend, conventionally, to background or occlude the author's own biography in order to give his or her characters, concepts, and conclusions greater presence and weight. But like Mark Twain and William James, Orwell “presides” over his work, eschewing any false authority and focusing on “fronting the world with nothing more that one's simple, direct, undeceived intelligence, and respect for the powers one does not have, and the work one undertakes to do.”45 Trilling goes on to speak against an etherealizing tradition, dating from the Enlightenment, that privileges abstract, rational thought over the commonplace bodily, emotional, and mental realities of our everyday lives. There are overtones of John Dewey's empirical naturalism and Bakhtin's grotesque realism in Trilling's argument against reification.
The prototypical act of the modern intellectual is his abstracting himself from the life of the family. We have yet to understand the thaumaturgical way in which we conceive of intellectuality. By intellectuality we are freed from the thralldom to the familiar commonplace, from the materiality and concreteness by which it exists, the hardness of the cash and the hardness of getting it, the inelegance and intractability of family things. It gives us power over intangibles, such as Beauty and Justice, and it permits us to escape the cosmic ridicule which in our youth we suppose is inevitably directed at those who take seriously the small concerns of the world, which we know to be inadequate and doomed by the very fact that it is so absurdly conditioned—by things, habits, local and temporary customs, and the foolish errors and solemn absurdities of the men of the past.46
Inevitably, a mode of address that remains faithful to the facts of experience—fpedestrian, unsystematic, ill-focused, and inchoate though they often are—resists the intellectual's demand for analytical coherence and the conventional expectation of narrative closure. It also departs from a long-standing orientation in European philosophy that Ricoeur characterizes as “the school of suspicion.” In the work of the three great “masters of suspicion”—Marx, Nietz—sche, and Freud—consciousness is mostly false consciousness. By implication, the truth about our thoughts, feelings, and actions is inaccessible to the conscious mind and can only be brought to light by experts in interpretation and deciphering.47 Although Henry Ellenberger traces this “unmasking trend” back to the seventeenth-century French moralists,48 it finds ubiquitous expression in the suspicion that “true reality is never the most obvious, and that the nature of truth is already indicated by the care it takes to remain elusive.”49 Among the Mehinaku (Upper Xingu region, Amazonia), “all the things/beings of the world are not what they seem, in a sense they are shells.” The world is a world of surfaces, “of masks (‘mascaras’/shepeku), houses (‘casa'/pái), skins (umay) and most importantly clothing/covering (ënai).” In the Mehinaku view, gifted individuals can change skins as ordinary people change clothes. Even more extraordinary is their view that everything in the world is an inferior copy of an archetypal form that is the “true version” of the replicas that appear before us in the everyday world.50 In Papua New Guinea, the contrast between what is evident and what is obscure is likened to a leaf, one side of which is always turned away from the light. Among the Kuranko of Sierra Leone, the socio-spatial distinction between kenema (open to the public gaze) and duguro (ground in) or duworon (covert, hidden, underhand) echoes the Latin distinction between the res publica (whatever belongs to or conscerns the people as a whole) and the res privata (the domain of the domus, or house). At the same time it evokes the European distinction between the open space of the agora (marketplace) and the space of oblique meanings and of allegory (allos, “other,” + agoreuin, “speak openly, speak in the assembly or market—the agora”) and thus implies a wide array of differences between activities that take place in the light of day—within the hearing and sight of others and are common knowledge—and activities that are clandestine, duplicitous, or veiled by secrecy and darkness.
These non Western perspectives suggest we might move from our preoccupation with the unconscious as a deep recess of interior being and focus on the penumbral field of being that lies about us. Accordingly, consciousness is not so much a mask that must be stripped away to reveal true intentions, ulterior motives, or real essences: the mask mediates our relationships with
