Does this mean that reason is synonymous with rationalization—a way of providing ex post facto justifications to actions that were not principled, pondered, or chosen? And if thought is more often afterthought than forethought, how does it differ from storytelling, which is another way we give retrospective form to experiences that defied our understanding and lay outside our control?
Consider Totem and Taboo, a work that Freud regarded as one of his greatest achievements. Despite its intellectual ingenuity and scientific pretensions, this work goes well beyond the little that was known about early hominid evolution, even in 1916, and must be read as largely mythological.35
In the earliest state of human society, according to Freud's scenario, “a violent and jealous father…keeps all the females for himself and drives away his sons as they grow up.” One day, the excluded sons band together, kill their father, and, since they are cannibals, devour him. In consuming the body of the father, the sons “accomplished their identification with him, and each one of them acquired a portion of his strength. The totem meal, which is perhaps mankind's earliest festival, would thus be a repetition and a commemoration of this memorable and criminal deed, which was the beginning of many things—of social organization, of moral restrictions and of religion.”36 Freud assumed that the sons felt contradictory emotions toward their father. The sexual desire and lust for power that led them to hate and then murder him was followed by a resurgence of the affection and respect they had also felt toward him. Filled with remorse, the sons attempted to revoke their deed by forbidding the killing of the totem, “the substitute for their father; and they renounced its fruits by resigning their claim to the women who had now been set free. They thus created out of their filial sense of guilt the two fundamental taboos of totemism, which for that very reason inevitably corresponded to the two repressed wishes of the Oedipus complex.”37
It is a central tenet of psychoanalytic theory that even when our thinking appears to represent the external world as it actually is, it is freighted with subjective meanings. In effect, experience-distant language, or the invocation of history, prehistory, or societies remote from one's own, subtly disguises experience-near preoccupations that analysis may be able to disclose. What unconfided, personal issues, then, lie buried in Freud's Totem and Taboo?
In a remarkable essay, Derek Freeman proposes that Freud projected his own ambivalence toward his father onto the “imagined parricidal sons of the primeval Cyclopean family” in order to alleviate his own Oedipal guilt.38 Though he had written Totem and Taboo in a state of “certainty and elation,” Freud became depressed after completing it as though, writes Freeman, he felt guilty at having succeeded in doing something his relatively uneducated father could never have done or understood, even though he had long been driven to demonstrate to his father (who often told Sigmund that he would amount to nothing) that he was worthy of his respect. Freud's reaction, however, was to doubt and demean his achievement, as though this might restore the filial piety and submissiveness appropriate in a son. Even though Freud expressed uncertainty as to whether his thesis in Totem and Taboo was a fantastic hypothesis or based on an actual event, he clung to the reality of the primal deed, writing in the last year of his life that, “I hold firmly to this construction.”39 Modern prehistory provides no evidence that Freud's descriptions of early hominid social life were correct. Modern genetics refutes his assumption that psychical experiences like guilt can be genetically transmitted from one generation to another. And Freud's conflation of contemporary “primitive peoples,” children, and obsessional neurotics is absurd. Yet one has to allow that thoughts generated by a thinker's own inner conflicts can serve as ways in which the thinker works through those conflicts and as ways in which others, whose personal situations are quite different, may comprehend and cope with their particular issues. Such is the case with Freud's model of the Oedipus complex. For though it may have had its genesis in Freud's relationship with his own father, it has served countless others since Freud's time in understanding their own vexed relationships with authority figures, as well as the poignant paradox of the human condition—that the advent of all new life heralds the inevitable passing of the life that made it possible.
Whether our thoughts are concrete or abstract, fantastic or factual, they inevitably reflect who we are and the situations in which we live. Thought is a coping strategy, a way of getting some purchase on experiences that elude our grasp, some distance from experiences that are too close to be clearly seen. But though thinking, like storytelling, begins within our hidden or intimate lives, it finds consummation in the public realm—connecting with others whose incipient thoughts and stories spring from comparable experiences. This is the only sense we can give the term objective—the sense not that our thinking or storytelling has attained a final or an eternal truth, but that it has connected with the thinking and storying of others, and thus made coexistence more possible in a plural world. “This is what I call philosophizing,” writes Henry Miller in his essay on Herman Keyserling. “It is something other than making philosophy—something plus.”40
I confess that it is this “plus” that has always fascinated me as much as the manifest content of any philosophical or anthropological work; the sense that it is the work of a person struggling to become what she is before she is a thinker, to make sense of her situation, to speak rather than be silent, to act rather than remain passive, and, above all, to connect with precursors and contemporaries and so create a sense of human solidarity in a world that is all too often chaotic, incomprehensible, and divided.
These considerations inform James Miller's great biography The Passion of Michel Foucault. Not only does the word “passion” suggest that this thinker, who had erased the subject from the anonymous field of discourse “like a face erased by sand at the edge of the sea,”41 had, ironically, constructed himself as a subject in the course of his intellectual labor; it presages an exploration of how profoundly Foucault's philosophy (logos) implicated a biography (bios). “His oeuvre…seemed to incorporate both his books and his life,” James Miller writes, “and the one could not be understood—least of all philosophically—apart from the other. Indeed, some kind of biographical approach seemed warranted by Foucault's own 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