Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling: The Function of Avowal in Justice by Michel Foucault; edited by Fabienne Brion & Bernard E. Harcourt; translated by Stephen W. Sawyer

Author:Michel Foucault; edited by Fabienne Brion & Bernard E. Harcourt; translated by Stephen W. Sawyer [Foucault, Michel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
Published: 2014-02-12T16:00:00+00:00

INTERVIEW WITH CHRISTIAN PANIER AND PIERRE WATTÉ

May 14, 1981

Are there certain things that an intellectual of the left does, in his capacity as actor in a social movement, that only he can do?

I confess that I do not subscribe to the idea of the intellectual intervening or assuming the role of someone who gives lessons or advice regarding matters of political choice—it doesn’t sit well with me. I think people are grown-up enough to choose for themselves who they vote for. To say: “I am an intellectual and I vote for Mr. So-and-so, and therefore you should vote for Mr. So-and-so,” strikes me as a rather astonishing attitude, a kind of arrogance of the intellectual. On the other hand, if for any number of reasons an intellectual thinks that his work, his analysis, his reflections, his way of acting or thinking about things can shed light on a particular situation, social domain, or conjunction of circumstances, and that he can bring to bear his theoretical and practical contributions on them, then in that case one can draw political consequences by taking, for example, the problem of penal law or of justice . . . I think that if he wants to, the intellectual can contribute important elements to the perception and critique of things, from which certain political choices would then naturally follow, if people are so inclined.

Even if it is not necessarily a question of being the bard for a political choice or being a flag bearer, and even if the specific contribution of the intellectual allows people, perhaps, to make a more informed political choice, there are still certain moments and certain problems where you have been directly or are actively involved. What comes, then, of the link between the function of the intellectual that you have just defined and this more concrete engagement, more directly involved in current affairs?

When I was a student, I was struck by the fact that during that period we were in a profoundly Marxist atmosphere where the problem of the link between theory and practice was absolutely at the center of all theoretical discussions.

It seems to me that there was perhaps an easier way, or I would say a more immediately practical way, of posing the question of the relationship between theory and practice correctly, and that was to carry it out directly in one’s own practice. In this sense, I could say that I have always insisted that my books be, in one sense, fragments of an autobiography. My books have always been my personal problems with madness, the prison, and sexuality.

Second, I have always insisted that there take place within me and for me a kind of back and forth, an interference, an interconnection between practices and the theoretical or historical work I was doing. It seemed to me that I was all the more free to reach deeper and farther into history because I also tied the questions I was asking to practice, in an immediate and contemporary way. It was because I spent a certain time in psychiatric hospitals that I wrote The Birth of the Clinic.

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