FOUCAULT RECALLED: INTERVIEW WITH MICHEL FOUCAULT
Frank Mort and Roy Peters
This hitherto unpublished interview with Michel Foucault was conducted
on 29 May 1979 at Foucault’s home in the Rue de Vaugirard, Paris. The
circumstances surrounding the conversation deserve some comment, as they
point to one of the routes that ‘advanced’ ideas from France crossed to Britain
in the late twentieth century. In the 1970s we were both postgraduate
students, based at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at
the University of Birmingham, where Foucault’s work on discursive power
was beginning to achieve considerable impact. Foucault’s project was
interpreted at CCCS as part of a broader debate about the importance of
poststructuralist theory, especially the work of Barthes, Saussure and Derrida,
for cultural analysis. It was also read in conjunction with a burgeoning body
of feminist theory that was beginning to problematise unitary and stable
categories of sexual difference and discussions within the gay movement
about ‘coming out’ and identity politics.1 At Birmingham, this body of work
was inserted very uneasily into a pre-existing problematic focused on cultural
interpretations of western Marxism, as that tradition was as represented by
the figures of Gramsci and Althusser.2 The shadow of that marxisante debate
intrudes into our interview with Foucault, especially in our persistent
interrogation of his theory of power and its relationship to the Marxist
paradigm of class and culture. Foucault’s patient responses are very much
those of the middle period of his writing, and this interview should be read
in conjunction with Histoire de la Sexualité: La Volonté de Savoir (1976) and
Surveiller et Punir: Naissance de la Prison (1975), texts that he repeatedly refers
to, rather than the two final volumes of his large-scale history of sexuality,
The Care of the Self and The Use of Pleasure..3 On a more personal note Foucault
displayed immense charm and personal kindness to two young men who
came to interview him apparently from nowhere, with little recognisable
cultural capital. He devoted three hours of his time to us, chatting
apocryphally along the way about why he didn’t like the Parisians, and giving
us his own views about which bars to visit in the city centre. It was intellectual
and personal magic! Given the continual outpouring of commentaries and critical
assessments of Foucault’s contribution to the methodologies of cultural history and to
assessments of Foucault’s contribution to the methodologies of cultural history and to
the history of sexuality, it is worth briefly reviewing those aspects of his work
that appeared most significant to us at the time. Quite as important as
Foucault’s critique of the whiggish narrative of sexual and cultural modernism
was his problematisation of the meaning and status of sexuality itself.
1. For these discussions within 1970s feminism see the work of the journal m/f. For the
emerging debate about sexual identity within the gay movement see the journal Gay Left and
Jeffrey Weeks, Coming Out: Homosexual Politics in Britain, from the Nineteenth Century to
the Present, London, Quartet, 1977.
2. For accounts of these intellectual current at CCCS see Stuart Hall, ‘Cultural Studies
and the Centre,’ in Stuart Hall et al (eds), Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural
Studies 1972-1979, London, Hutchinson, 1980, pp15-47. For their impact on the culture of the New
Left see Dennis Dworkin, Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain: History, the New Left and the Origins of Cultural
Studies, Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 1997.
3. Originally published as Le Souci de soi and L’Usage des plaisirs both Paris, Gallimard, 1984.
Translated as: The Use of Pleasure: the History of Sexuality Volume 2, R. Hurley (trans),
Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1987; The Care of the Self: the History of Sexuality Volume 3, R. Hurley
(trans), Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1990.
This denaturalisation of the object of research was at the heart of Foucault’s
interrogation of all forms of disciplinary power. The central issue was not
whether societies said yes or no to sex, whether they permit or prohibit, but
that both of these positions were part of the way in which sex was put into
discourse. What mattered in consequence was how sexuality was represented;
who speaks, writes and practices and from what subject positions. This
accentuated relativisation of modern cultural phenomena paralleled adjacent
research in the sociology of knowledge and the human sciences. In the field
of sexuality, in particular, Foucault’s insights were partly anticipated by the
post-war, Anglo-American traditions of labelling and role theory, with their
emphasis on the constructed nature of sexual acts and values.4 But in the
1970s and early 1980s Foucault’s agenda was read in conjunction with
poststructuralist linguistics, in order to effect a profound re-interrogation
of the classic terrain of ‘the social’. This field of course not only shaped
modern strategies of government and policy, it also underpinned the
protocols of academic disciplines such as sociology and social history.5
Foucault’s discursive approach raised productive doubts for us about
established historiographical and cultural procedures. Above all, it was his
discursive emphasis which destabilised more conventional methodologies.
As two young men who were already well versed in the methods and practices
of cultural and sexual relativism, this was what we appropriated most
thoroughly from Foucault’s writing. After Foucault and the other
poststructuralists, the representational quality of all forms of historical
knowledge became a key concern. Consequently, Foucault’s method disturbed
commonsense understandings of what a history of sexuality could be about.
It uncovered sex in unlikely places, as well as in more familiar areas: within
sanitary science, household manuals, statistical tables, medical dossiers,
and census returns.
commonsense understandings of what a history of sexuality could be about.
It uncovered sex in unlikely places, as well as in more familiar areas: within
sanitary science, household manuals, statistical tables, medical dossiers,
and census returns.
Sex intruded into the circuits of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century social
government, in addition to signifying bodily acts, identities and desires.
Modern sexuality was a dispersed and decentred field, and it was organised
around multiple points of reference. In La Volonté de Savoir Foucault
highlighted a number of nodal points which increasingly classified and
regulated sex around the principles of reproductive and biological strength
and around the perverse implantations. The significance of these particular
mechanisms of power nomination has been much argued over, but Foucault’s
basic insistence is worth reiterating; that sexuality is plural, rather than
articulated around any single point of reference. One important cultural
consequence of this emphasis for research was that it opened up the space
for an extremely productive exploration of the representational quality of
sexuality, especially from cultural historians working on the construction of
sexual knowledges and identities, in both their formal and informal registers.
For example, rather than seeing visual or literary discourses as expressive
of a sexuality that was assumed to be ‘already there’, these practices were
now assigned a much more active role in the representation of sexual
4. See for example, Mary McIntosh, ‘The Homosexual Role’, Social Problems,
16, 2 (1968) 182-92; John Gagnon and William Simon, Sexual Conduct: The
Social Sources of Human Sexuality, London, Hutchinson, 1974; Kenneth Plummer,
Sexual Stigma: An Interactionist Account, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975.
5. For analysis of the social as a domain of governance and intellectual rationality see
Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller (eds), The Foucault Effect: Studies in
Governmentality with Two Lectures by and an Interview with Michel Foucault, London, Harvester
Wheatsheaf, 1991; Nikolas Rose, Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self, Free
Association Press, London, 1999; Patrick Joyce, The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism and the
Modern City, London, Verso, 2003. For the implications for social history see: Patrick Joyce, ‘The
End of Social History’, Social History, 20, 1, (1995) 73-91.
meanings and experiences.6 In a related sense, the erotic impact of modern
consumerism, with its elaborate scopic and aesthetic rituals has also been
readdressed discursively.7 If one implication of Foucault’s analysis was to
suggest that sex is everywhere, the other was to identify the very particular
networks through which the sexual is produced.
There have been numerous critiques and reassessments of Foucault’s
project, concentrating on among other things his highly particular reading
of the archive, his recourse to the body as an undertheorised arbiter of
power and desire, and his relative disinterest in the realm of the extra-
discursive. Some of the most productive reappraisals have come from
feminist and post-colonial scholars, who have expressed dissatisfaction with
Foucault’s relative gender-blindness and his unreflective Eurocentrism,
but who have nonetheless recognised the importance of a discursive history
for delivering a more sophisticated account of cultural and sexual
difference. Yet Foucault’s overall project for sexuality remains as pertinent
as it was a quarter of a century ago. He insisted that the domain of the
sexual is not simply an interesting but insignificant byway in the grander
histories of modern life. Since at least the eighteenth century this field
has been constituted as a component of the social project of modernity
itself. Mapping the ways in which sexuality enters the social forces the
historian has to confront a more general set of questions, some of which
Foucault touches on in this interview - about language and the
representation of the self, about emotion, affect, and fantasy and about
the local and international geopolitics of place and environment. These
social phenomena are a formative part of the experience of being and
becoming modern. Writing these things into history, in a way that conceives
of them as more than simply epiphenomenal, demands not only a different
set of historical narratives but a new language of the historical itself.
Roy Peters: On a personal note I am full of regrets following the encounter
with Foucault. As a photographer, my biggest regret is that I didn’t ask Michel
if I could take his picture. I didn’t have an idea which could encapsulate the
man in visual terms, and I dared not ask for a snap. The snap is a vastly
underrated cultural form, yet I felt that to ask him to do a picture in this
way was somehow sullied and base - certainly inferior to the more worthwhile
business of exchanging intellectual ideas. I had, and probably still have, I’m
ashamed to admit, a binary and hierarchical view of photography as
secondary to intellectual endeavour - even though I spend much time and
professional energy championing the importance of visual representation.
There was also a further potential embarrassment I wished to dissociate
myself from; that it might have appeared that I was using the interview only
as an excuse or a front to get his picture.
Foucault used to ring me in Orange (Vaucluse) where I was living at the
time, at around eight in the morning. He wanted to discuss the article
and how to proceed. He was excited by the prospect of publishing something
new, but also highly cautious. He didn’t want it published immediately without
some further work on it.
We accepted his concerns and the piece has been left dormant since that time.
In 1994 I made minor modifications to the original text and translation.
I corrected typographical and spelling errors in the original, as seen by Foucault,
and tightened up grammatical inconsistencies. These revisions seemed appropriate
to the presentation of the written text as opposed to the spoken word. I felt that
the translation amendments facilitated the intellectual flow, and I was mindful
that Michel saw the end product ensuing from the interview as a written document
rather than simply as a record of what was said at the time. His intention was to
revise the transcript and compose it as a written piece, with the interview functioning
as a formalised intellectual response. The spoken word being less controlled, and
having touched on certain things for the first time, he was cautious about
how his verbatim flow might appear.
He was not yet ‘out’ about a number of the issues raised here, and he felt
perhaps that he owed it to a French audience to air them in French for the
first time. This was the root of his dilemma which led to his prevarication
over publication. It is indeed a pity that we didn’t get any further along with
the project and with him because he clearly had more to say.
Foucault used to ring me in Orange (Vaucluse) where I was living at the
time, at around eight in the morning. He wanted to discuss the article
and how to proceed. He was excited by the prospect of publishing something
new, but also highly cautious. He didn’t want it published immediately without
some further work on it.
We accepted his concerns and the piece has been left dormant since that time.
In 1994 I made minor modifications to the original text and translation.
I corrected typographical and spelling errors in the original, as seen by Foucault,
and tightened up grammatical inconsistencies. These revisions seemed appropriate
to the presentation of the written text as opposed to the spoken word. I felt that
the translation amendments facilitated the intellectual flow, and I was mindful
that Michel saw the end product ensuing from the interview as a written document
rather than simply as a record of what was said at the time. His intention was to
revise the transcript and compose it as a written piece, with the interview functioning
as a formalised intellectual response. The spoken word being less controlled, and
having touched on certain things for the first time, he was cautious about
how his verbatim flow might appear.
He was not yet ‘out’ about a number of the issues raised here, and he felt
perhaps that he owed it to a French audience to air them in French for the
first time. This was the root of his dilemma which led to his prevarication
over publication. It is indeed a pity that we didn’t get any further along with
the project and with him because he clearly had more to say.
6. For historical work on visual and literary cultures that is influenced by Foucault see among
very many: Lynda Nead, Myths of Sexuality: Representations of Women in Victorian Britain, Oxford,
Blackwell 1998; Ludmilla Jordanova, Sexual Visions: Images of Gender in Science and Medicine Between
the Eighteenth and Twentieth Centuries, London, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989; Jonathan Dollimore,
Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault, Oxford, Clarendon 1991.
7. For Foucault’s influence on the cultural analysis of modern consumption see, Frank Mort, Cultures
of Consumption: Masculinities and Social Space in late Twentieth-Century Britain, London, Routledge, 1996;
Sean Nixon, Hard Looks: Masculinities Spectatorship and Contemporary Consumption, London, UCL Press,
1996; Erica Carter, How German IS She? Postwar West German Reconstruction and the Consuming Woman,
Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1997.
INTERVIEW
Frank Mort (FM) and Roy Peters (RP) Firstly, could we turn to your work on
sexuality. Is the overall project which you outline in La Volonté de Savoir still
underway?
Michel Foucault (MF) Well, you see, I don’t want to write those five or six
books. Just now I am writing the second one about the Catholic Christian
confessional, and also the third one on hermaphroditism. (...)
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