Lord Noel Knows Absolutely Foucault

Whatto! Academics....... 

 

Buried amongst the dusty anals of history is a little known figure who has a great story to tell.

His name is Michel Foucault.....he was born on 15th October 1926 in Poitiers France and died in 25th June 1984 from an aids related illness......
........which suggests that he managed to do quite a lot in the intervening period.
He was a diminutive character and was far shorter than the photographs of him may suggest.....
In fact witnesses from the period state that he was actually only two foot tall.


He was in fact so small that he had to have all his furniture made 'scaled down' so that he would appear to be in the right proportion to anyone casually glancing towards him.
His mother was a wonderful woman who always took a great interest in everything he did and everything he became interested in.......especially his hairdressing and manicuring. And it was she who built him a pair of stilts that he soon became quite expert on.....and these stilts allowed him to mingle quite unobtrusively with normal members of the public.
This saved him being confused with his almost identical twin of the same name who also went on to become a well known philosopher, sociologist and historian.


The other unusual characteristic that this particular Foucault had.......... was that he had a very quiet voice........
......so much so that he had to use mechanical devices to try to bring his voice up to a level that allowed them to be heard by other living persons.
Here is a rare photograph of him trying to have a conversation with his Father on a busy Parisian street.

(He's the one with the megaphone).
In fact in the picture he is actually using the stilts AS WELL!
Quite something I think you'll agree.
Unfortunately his voice was so quiet that even using these devices he remained completely inaudible.
The one unexpected benefit of him having his extremely quiet voice meant that he could talk for hours (even whilst other people were chatting) without anyone actually hearing anything that he was saying.
And it was several years before he learnt to type........... and thus began to share his ideas with the outside world for the first time.
Foucault was never someone who would use one word where four hundred would do........
.....as was experienced by his local newsagent Monsieur Wiget who says "Foucault came in here once and I merely asked him "What do you wish for today Foucault?" and he said to me "...if you are not like everybody else, then you are abnormal, if you are abnormal , then you are sick. These three categories, not being like everybody else, not being normal and being sick are in fact very different but have been reduced to the same thing........"


..........so I gave him a packet of fags."
Fortunately, by this time, scientific advancements had meant that Foucaults voice could be digitally enhanced and played back through a small tape recorder inserted into his left nostril.
Unfortunately his excessive verbosity meant that very few people were actually able to hold a meaningful conversation with him.........being completely untrained in the then unheard of and very rare art of "listening"............. whilst Foucault went on and on and on with his enlightening proposals.
His mother recalled that she had once asked him "What do you wish to eat for tea this evening Michel?".............
....to which he replied "Discourse is not life Mother: its time is not your time; in it, you will not be reconciled to death; you may have killed God beneath the weight of all that you have said; but don't imagine that, with all that you are saying, you will make a man that will live longer than he.".......

.....so she gave him fish fingers.

When he was a youngster it was also his mother who gave him a tube of super glue to play with........
Her original intention had been to use it as a symbol that the bond between them should remain strong...... as apparently she secretly dreaded that he might one day leave home and make a life of his own.
She had sadly overlooked the basic investigative character of her son, who immediately undid the top of the superglue and was found examining the contents quite intently.
It was his brother Claude, who later said "Many people say that my brother spent too long with other men - but he found himself attached to them in a way he had never before experienced. I suppose, when I think about it, that it was natural enough for him to form a relationship with someone he'd been glued to for a fortnight"

Here you can just see a male friend's hand that had become attached to the edge of Foucaults wrist during a short conversation that took place in a public urinal.
His attraction to super glue continued until his adult life....and although he always did his utmost to try to disguise this developing addiction, it is obvious from all the photographs taken of him that the problem had become a virtually impossible for him to hide.
He once conducted an entire interview with the back of his hand super glued to the top of his head........
During which he told reporters: "My field is the history of thought. Man is a thinking being. The way he thinks is related to society, politics, economics, and history and is also related to very general and universal categories and formal structures. But thought is something other than societal relations"..............
By now they had all gone off for lunch....but he continued anyway.......
......." The way people really think is not adequately analyzed by the universal categories of logic. Between social history and formal analyses of thought there is a path, a lane - maybe very narrow - which is the path of the historian of thought."
On another occasion both his arms inadvertently became stuck to a sofa for three weeks.........


 ....but instead of letting this predicament get him down......he taught himself to type with his feet!
And managed to knock out the first of the "History of Sexuality" volumes entitled "The Will to knowledge" in which he discusses the functioning of sexuality as an analytics of power related to the emergence of a science of sexuality.........


But it was when his right hand became stuck to his lips that he became free again to type with his feet AND his left hand...........
This resulted in a prolific outpouring of works such as "The use of pleasure" "The care of the self" and "Confessions of the flesh"..........
......all of which were subsequently made into poor quality porn films.
I've watched them ....they're rubbish!
My own personal feelings about Foucault are that he could easily be described as a "crypto-normativist"; covertly reliant on the very principles he attempts to deconstruct.
But hey what do I know?



Tallyho!
Best wishes - Lord Noel