Michel Foucault jako heterotopia

Abstract

Michel Foucault’s scattered “autobiographical pieces” supported by the vivid biographical reminiscences of Didier Eribon, George Dumézil and others, give the reader a unique opportunity to examine the interrelationship between life and work of that great thinker and unusual person. After Charles C. Lemert and Garth Gillan, I try to interpret the phenomenon of “Michel Foucault” within the scope of terms worked out by the author of “Les mots et les choses”. The key notions here are “heteroclicity” (a word used for the first time in “The Order of Things” [1966] in connection with two other words: “heterotopia” and “utopia”) and “heteroclite” (meaning a thing or person deviating from the common rules, or from common forms). In Foucault’s vocabulary heteroclicity relates to – hidden in language and transcending it – space potentialities that can be found in any type of culture and society. People are split permanently into aspiring to live either in the world of utopias or heterotiopias, in the world of “unreal” and the world of “questioning” of what is imagined as “stable”, or even “everlasting”. By saying that Michel Foucault is heterotopia, I mean – metaphorically – that on both social and intellectual levels he exists as a kind of “non-site – someone destabilized” (from a common point of view on sexuality and, in general, socially acceptable behavior) and at the same time destabilizing e.g. conventions of thought. Crossing the borders of outsider and genius reminds then of a list of paradoxical things placed in an old Chinese encyclopedia and derived from there by George Louis Borges (“vide Introduction to The Order of Things”).