20

The Masked Philosopher

Between 1979 and 1984 the newspaper Le

Monde published a weekly series of interviews
with leading European intellectuals. On April 6—7,
1980 an interview between Christian
Delacampagne and Michel Foucault was publish­
ed in which the latter opted for the mask o f
anonymity — the philosopher declined to reveal
his name — in order to demystify the power
society ascribes to the "name" o f the intellectual.
Foucault sets out to liberate the consumer o f
culture from a critical discourse that is overdeter­
mined by the characters that dominate our
perceptions. This interview was reprinted in
Entretiens avec Le Monde, I, Philosophies (Paris:
La Découverte, 1984), 21—30. The translation is
by Alan Sheridan.

C.D. Allow me to ask you first why you have chosen

anonymity?
FOUCAULT You know the story of the psychologists who
went to make a little film-test in a village in darkest Africa.
They then asked the spectators to tell the story in their own
words. Well, only one thing interested them in this story
involving three characters: the movement of the light and
shadow through the trees.
In our societies, characters dominate our perceptions.
Our attention tends to be arrested by the activities of faces
that come and go, emerge and disappear.
Why did I suggest that we use anonymity? Out of
nostalgia for a time when, being quite unknown, what I said
had some chance of being heard. With the potential reader,
the surface of contact was unrippled. The effects of the book
324 Notes on the Power of Culture

might land in unexpected places and form shapes that I had

never thought of. A name makes reading too easy.
I shall propose a game: that of the "year without a name."
For a year books would be published without their authors'
names. The critics would have to cope with a mass of entirely
anonymous books. But, now I come to think of it, it's possible
they would have nothing to do: all the authors would wait
until the following year before publishing their books . . .
C.D. Do you think intellectuals today talk too much? That
they encumber what they say with a lot of stuff, much of it
irrelevant to what they really have to say?
FOUCAULT The word intellectual strikes me as odd.
Personally, I've never met any intellectuals. I've met people
who write novels, others who treat the sick. People who work
in economics and others who write electronic music. I've met
people who teach, people who paint, and people of whom I
have never really understood what they do. But intellectuals,
never.
On the other hand, I've met a lot of people who talk
about "the intellectual." And, listening to them, I've got some
idea of what such an animal could be. It's not difficult — he's
quite personified. He's guilty about pretty well everything:
about speaking out and about keeping silent, about doing
nothing and about getting involved in everything . . . In
short, the intellectual is raw material for a verdict, a sentence,
a condemnation, an exclusion . . .
I don't find that intellectuals talk too much, since for me
they don't exist. But I do find that more and more is being
said about intellectuals, and I don't find it very reassuring.
I have an unfortunate habit. When people speak about
this or that, I try to imagine what the result would be if
translated into reality. When they "criticize" someone, when
they "denounce" his ideas, when they "condemn" what he
writes, I imagine them in the ideal situation in which they
would have complete power over him. I take the words they
use — demolish, destroy, reduce to silence, bury — and see what
the effect would be if they were taken literally. And I catch a
glimpse of the radiant city in which the intellectual would be
in prison or, if he were also a theoretician, hanged, of course.
We don't, it's true, live under a regime in which intellectuals
 The Masked Philosopher 325

are sent to the ricefields. But have you heard of a certain Toni
Negri?1 Isn't he in prison simply for being an intellectual?
C.D. So what has led you to hide behind anonymity? Is it
the way in which philosophers, nowadays, exploit the
publicity surrounding their names?
FOUCAULT That doesn't shock me in the least. In the
corridors of my old lycée I used to see plaster busts of great
men. And now at the bottom of the front pages of
newspapers I see the photograph of some thinker or other. I
don't know whether things have improved, from an aesthetic
point of view. Economic rationality certainly . . .
I'm very moved by a letter that Kant wrote when he was
already very old: he was in a hurry, he says, against old age
and declining sight, and confused ideas, to finish one of his
books for the Leipzig Fair. I mention this to show that it isn't
of the slightest importance. With or without publicity, with or
without a fair, a book is something quite special. I shall never
be convinced that a book is bad because its author has been
seen on television. But, of course, it isn't good for that reason
alone either.
If I have chosen anonymity, it is not, therefore, to criticize
this or that individual, which I never do. It's a way of
addressing the potential reader, the only individual here who
is of interest to me, more directly: "Since you don't know who
I am, you will be more inclined to find out why I say what
you read; just allow yourself to say, quite simply, it's true, it's
false. I like it or I don't like it. Period."
C.D. But doesn't the public expect the critic to provide
him with precise assessments as to the value of a work?
FOUCAULT I don't know whether the public does or does
not expect the critic to judge works or authors. Judges were
there, I think, before he was able to say what he wanted.
It seems that Courbet had a friend who used to wake up

1. Italian philosopher, ex-professor at the University of Padua; a leading

intellectual influence in the extreme-left movement, Workers' Autonomy. Underwent
four years and three months preventative detention for armed insurrection against
the state, subversive association, and the formation of armed gangs. Was freed on
July 8, 1983, after being elected a Radical deputy during his imprisonment. His
parliamentary immunity was lifted by the Chamber of Deputies, new warrants for his
arrest were^issued, and he took refuge in France.
326 Notes on the Power of Culture

in the night yelling: "I want to judge, I want to judge." It's

amazing how people like judging. Judgment is being passed
everywhere, all the time. Perhaps it's one of the simplest
things mankind has been given to do. And you know very
well that the last man, when radiation has finally reduced his
last enemy to ashes, will sit down behind some rickety table
and begin the trial of the individual responsible.
I can't help but dream about a kind of criticism that
would not try to judge, but to bring an oeuvre, a book, a
sentence, an idea to life; it would light fires, watch the grass
grow, listen to the wind, and catch the sea-foam in the breeze
and scatter it. It would multiply, not judgments, but signs of
existence; it would summon them, drag them from their
sleep. Perhaps it would invent them sometimes — all the
better. All the better. Criticism that hands down sentences
sends me to sleep; I'd like a criticism of scintillating leaps of
the imagination. It would not be sovereign or dressed in red.
It would bear the lightning of possible storms.
C.D. So there are so many things to tell people about, so
much interesting work being done, that the mass media ought
to talk about philosophy all the time . . .
FOUCAULT It's true that there is a traditional discomfort
between the "critics" and those who write books. The first feel
misunderstood and the second think the first are trying to
bring them to heel. But that's the game.
It seems to me that today the situation is rather special.
We have institutions administering shortages, whereas we are
in a situation of superabundance.
Everybody has noticed the over-excitement that often
accompanies the publication (or reprinting) of some work that
may in fact be quite interesting. But it is never presented as
being anything less than the "subversion of all the codes," the
"antithesis of contemporary culture," the "radical questioning
of all our ways of thinking." One would be justified in
thinking that its author must be some unknown fellow living
on the fringes of society.
On the other hand, others must be banished into total
oblivion, from which they must never be allowed to reemerge;
they were only the froth of "mere fashion," a mere product of
the cultural institution, and so forth.
 The Masked Philosopher 327

A superficial, very Parisian phenomenon, it will be said. I

see it rather as the effect of a deep-seated anxiety. The feeling
of "no room," "him or me," "it's my turn now." We have to
walk in line because of the extreme narrowness of the place
where one can listen and make oneself heard.
Hence a sort of anxiety that finds expression in innumer-
able symptoms, some funny, some less so. Hence, too, on the
part of those who write, a sense of impotence when
confronted by the mass media, which they criticize for
running the world of books and creating or destroying
reputations at will. Hence, too, the feeling among the critics
that they will not be heard unless they shout louder and pull a
rabbit out of the hat each week. Hence, too, a pseudo-
politicization, which masks, beneath the need to wage an
"ideological struggle" or to root out "dangerous thoughts," a
deep-seated anxiety that one will not be heard or read. Hence,
too, the fantastic phobia for power: anybody who writes
exerts a disturbing power upon which one must try to place
limitations, if not actually to put an end to it. Hence, too, the
declaration, repeated over and over, that everything nowa-
days is empty, desolate, uninteresting, unimportant: a declar-
ation that obviously comes from those who, not doing
anything themselves, consider that there are too many others
who are.
C.D. But don't you think that our period is really lacking
in great writers and in minds capable of dealing with its
problems?
FOUCAULT No, I don't subscribe to the notion of a
decadence, of a lack of writers, of the sterility of thought, of a
gloomy future, lacking in prospects.
On the contrary, I believe that there is a plethora. What
we are suffering from is not a void, but inadequate means for
thinking about everything that is happening. There is an over-
abundance of things to be known: fundamental, terrible,
wonderful, funny, insignificant, and crucial at the same time.
And there is an enormous curiosity, a need, a desire to know.
People are always complaining that the mass media stuff
one's head with people. There is a certain misanthropy in this
idea. On the contrary, I believe that people react; the more
one convinces them, the more they question things. The mind
328 Notes on the Power of Culture

isn't made of soft wax. It's a reactive substance. And the

desire to know more, and to know it more deeply and to
know other things increases as one tries to stuff peoples'
heads.
If you accept that and if you add that there's a whole host
of people being trained in the universities and elsewhere who
could act as intermediaries between this mass of things and
this thirst for knowledge, you will soon come to the
conclusion that student unemployment is the most absurd
thing imaginable. The problem is to multiply the channels, the
bridges, the means of information, the radio and television
networks, the newspapers.
Curiosity is a vice that has been stigmatized in turn by
Christianity, by philosophy, and even by a certain conception
of science. Curiosity is seen as futility. However, I like the
word; it suggests something quite different to me. It evokes
"care"; it evokes the care one takes of what exists and what
might exist; a sharpened sense of reality, but one that is never
immobilized before it; a readiness to find what surrounds us
strange and odd; a certain determination to throw off familiar
ways of thought and to look at the same things in a different
way; a passion for seizing what is happening now and what is
disappearing; a lack of respect for the traditional hierarchies of
what is important and fundamental.
I dream of a new age of curiosity. We have the technical
means; the desire is there; there is an infinity of things to
know; the people capable of doing such work exist. So what is
our problem? Too little: channels of communication that are
too narrow, almost monopolistic, inadequate. We mustn't
adopt a protectionist attitude, to stop "bad"information from
invading and stifling the "good." We must rather increase the
possibility for movement backwards and forwards. This
would not lead, as people often fear, to uniformity and
levelling down, but, on the contrary, to the simultaneous
existence and differentiation of these various networks.
C.D. I imagine that at this level the mass media and the
universities, instead of continuing to oppose one another,
might play complementary roles.
FOUCAULT You remember Sylvain Levi's wonderful say-
ing: when you have one listener, it's teaching; when you have
 The Masked Philosopher 329

two, it's popularization. Books, universities, learned journals

are also information media. One should refrain from calling a
mass medium every channel of information to which one
cannot or does not wish to gain access. The problem is to
know how to exploit the differences, whether we ought to set
up a reserve, a "cultural park," for delicate species of scholars
threatened by the rapacious inroads of mass information,
while the rest of the space would be a huge market for shoddy
products. Such a division does not seem to me to correspond
to reality. What's more, it isn't at all desirable. If useful
differentiations are to be brought into play, there must not be
any such division.
C.D. Let's risk a few concrete propositions. If everything
is going badly, where do we make a start?
FOUCAULT But everything isn't going badly. In any case, I
believe we shouldn't confuse useful criticism of things with
repetitive jeremiads against people. As for concrete proposi-
tions, they can't just make an appearance like gadgets, unless
certain general principles are accepted first. And the first of
such general principles should be that the right to knowledge
must not be reserved to a particular age-group or to certain
categories of people, but that one must be able to exercise it
constantly and in many different ways.
C.D. Isn't this desire for knowledge somewhat ambig-
uous? What, in fact, are people to do with all that knowledge
that they are going to acquire? What use will it be to them?
FOUCAULT One of the main functions of teaching was
that the training of the individual should be accompanied by
his being situated in society. We should now see teaching in
such a way that it allows the individual to change at will,
which is possible only on condition that teaching is a
possibility always being offered.
C.D. Are you in fact for a society of scholars?
FOUCAULT I'm saying that people must be constantly able
to plug into culture and in as many ways as possible. There
ought not to be, on the one hand, this education to which one
is subjected and, on the other, this information one is fed.
C.D. What becomes of the eternal questions of philoso-
phy in this learned society? . . . Do we still need them, these
330 Notes on the Power of Culture

unanswerable questions, these silences before the unknowable?

FOUCAULT What is philosophy if not a way of reflecting,
not so much on what is true and what is false, as on our
relationship to truth? People sometimes complain that there is
no dominant philosophy in France. So much the better for
that! There is no sovereign philosophy, it's true, but a
philosophy or rather philosophy in activity. The movement by
which, not without effort and uncertainty, dreams and
illusions, one detaches oneself from what is accepted as true
and seeks other rules — that is philosophy. The displacement
and transformation of frameworks of thinking, the changing
of received values and all the work that has been done to
think otherwise, to do something else, to become other than
what one is — that, too, is philosophy. From this point of
view, the last thirty years or so have been a period of intense
philosophical activity. The interaction between analysis,
research, "learned" or "theoretical" criticism, and changes in
behavior, in people's real conduct, their way of being, their
relation to themselves and to others has been constant and
considerable.
I was saying just now that philosophy was a way of
reflecting on our relationship to truth. It should also be added
that it is a way of interrogating ourselves: if this is the
relationship that we have with truth, how must we behave? I
believe that a considerable and varied amount of work has
been done and is still being done that alters both our relation
to truth and our way of behaving. And this has taken place in
a complex situation, between a whole series of investigations
and a whole set of social movements. It's the very life of
philosophy.
It is understandable that some people should weep over
the present void and hanker instead, in the world of ideas,
after a little monarchy. But those who, for once in their lives,
have found a new tone, a new way of looking, a new way of
doing, those people, I believe, will never feel the need to
lament that the world is error, that history is filled with
people of no consequence, and that it is time for others to
keep quiet so that at last the sound of their disapproval may
be heard . . .