COVER TO COVER

FOUCAULT WITHOUT FOUCAULT

SHŪHEI MASE

October 15, 2026

On Michel Foucault’s hundredth birthday, what can still be heard beneath the weight of his reputation? Here Shūhei Mase revisits an anonymous interview and a handful of obscure lives to ask how names shape our judgments, why recognition so often passes for knowledge, and whether we can still allow a familiar thinker to surprise us.

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Today, Michel Foucault would have turned one hundred. After countless theses, conferences, biographies, arguments, counterarguments, and sentences beginning with “As Foucault has shown,” what remains to be said? Somewhere, presumably, a doctoral student is preparing to answer that question in four hundred pages. The rest of us might begin with a less ambitious possibility. Perhaps the difficulty is no longer finding something new to say about Foucault. Perhaps it is finding a way to hear him through everything we already know we are supposed to hear.

An anniversary encourages a peculiar form of cultural administration. A life becomes an occasion, the occasion becomes a commission, and the commission becomes an assessment of enduring relevance. The subject must be introduced, situated, praised with qualifications, and brought into contact with the present. A philosopher is especially fortunate if the present has supplied a crisis resembling one of his best-known concepts. There is always another camera, another institution asking us to explain ourselves, another authority announcing that its intervention is for our own good. Foucault could keep an anniversary editor occupied indefinitely. The temptation is to assemble these examples and let their familiarity stand for an argument.

We could discuss surveillance, prisons, sexuality, medicine, the management of populations. Foucault’s studies of how knowledge and institutions shape human lives made these subjects central to his intellectual project. His influence extended far beyond philosophy, into the social sciences. Yet the familiar catalog can become an obstacle. Once the headings are supplied, the reader knows where everything belongs. A new instance of observation confirms surveillance. A new classification confirms classification. The world continues to provide illustrations, and the philosopher continues to be right. It is an efficient arrangement, although one begins to wonder which party is doing the thinking.

Before anyone says “As Foucault has shown,” Foucault would like a word.

The more interesting centenary question might concern this efficiency itself. What happens when a name makes an argument intelligible before we have read it? When does intellectual inheritance become a method of anticipating the conclusion? We know the experience from less exalted occasions. A friend names the author of an article, and we immediately adjust our expectations. Someone identifies the publication, and we adjust them again. By the time the first paragraph arrives, several decisions have already been made. Reading proceeds, but under supervision.

In an interview published by Le Monde in 1980 titled “The Masked Philosopher,” Foucault asked to remain anonymous. He wanted his words to be heard without the expectations his identity supplied. He proposed a year in which all books published would be without the authors’ names, then joked that all the authors would simply wait the year out. It is an excellent joke because the proposed experiment immediately encounters the people most likely to approve of it in public and avoid it in practice. Writers want to be read, certainly, but preferably under conditions that allow them to receive the credit. An unsigned masterpiece is an attractive proposition until one has written it.

For an unknown writer, recognition may be the condition of a livelihood. For an established writer, it can become a constraint regarding what readers permit the work to do. The same name that brings someone to a page can tell that person what to find there. Admiration is capable of extraordinary incuriosity. It knows the voice, knows the position, knows the significance. It can praise an essay while scarcely allowing a sentence to be surprising. Hostility does much the same work from the other direction. The admirer and the opponent may disagree about everything except the usefulness of reading with the result settled in advance.

The private one retains its own spectacles.

Imagine finding an unsigned paragraph in an old notebook. It might appear perceptive, mistaken, amusing, unfinished. Attach the name Foucault, and an entire set of obligations suddenly arrives. The passage becomes something to interpret in relation to an oeuvre, defend against an established criticism, or explain as a departure from an earlier position. These may all be legitimate undertakings. But something ordinary and valuable can disappear beneath them: the reader’s immediate encounter with an assertion whose truth has yet to be decided.

Anonymous publication would hardly resolve the matter. Readers would guess identities, publishers would devise clues, and a supposedly nameless book would still carry a vocabulary, a style, a price, and a place of publication. Reputation would find another entrance. Nor should the history of a speaker necessarily be excluded from an assessment of what is said. Experience, expertise, interests, and responsibility matter. An anonymous assurance about a bridge is less comforting than the signature of an accountable engineer. The experiment is useful because it briefly exposes the assumptions that attribution normally allows us to leave unexamined.

A name can tell us something useful without deciding the matter. In intellectual life, however, information about an author has a way of becoming an instruction to the reader. A citation establishes a source, but it can also establish membership. It tells the reader that the writer has entered the right room and knows which people to greet. “Foucauldian” may describe a precise approach. It may also spare everyone the inconvenience of asking how the argument works. A thinker becomes an adjective, and the adjective takes on duties that no individual sentence could possibly fulfill.

There is a particular irony in this fate. Foucault’s investigations make the formation of apparently natural categories into something that can be examined historically. Yet a familiar version of his name can function as one more category into which observations are placed. A reader approaches a school, a hospital, or a museum already equipped with the appropriate suspicion. Suspicion may be justified, but an inquiry still has to establish what is happening, to whom, by what means, and with what consequences. One has to look at the timetable, the admission form, the rules, the exceptions, and the people who administer them. Otherwise the institution has merely been assigned its theoretical address. There is little point in opening an investigation whose findings have been printed on the envelope.

An intellectual gathering at which the ideas will have to introduce themselves.

The difficulty becomes more troubling when we depart from the philosopher’s reputation and turn toward people who had almost no opportunity to establish reputations of their own. In “Lives of Infamous Men,” published in 1977, Foucault considers obscure existences encountered in historical documents. Complaints, reports, and orders helped determine their fates. Some lives remain accessible to us because the language directed against them happened to survive. Here the problem of being described has a severity that the inconveniences of intellectual celebrity cannot approach. A famous writer may wish to remove his name from an interview. Someone confined by an official order cannot remove the official description from its consequences.

One record concerns Mathurin Milan, confined at Charenton in 1707. Among the behaviors it presents as madness are his withdrawal from his family and his belief that he is capable of important employment. Foucault is struck by the intensity of these brief records and by the real lives behind them, while acknowledging that their language may be false or exaggerated. We do not have to settle Milan’s character to notice the disproportion. A few lines stand between a person’s existence and our ability to imagine it. Those lines have outlived almost everything that might have complicated them.

Suppose the only surviving account of your life were a complaint. Suppose it preserved the afternoon when you shouted, the loan you could not repay, the departure somebody resented, the ambition somebody considered absurd. The facts might be accurate. But a life contains repetitions, interruptions, changes of mind, ordinary kindnesses, and long stretches in which nothing meriting a document occurs. The complaint has a purpose. Its reader may inherit that purpose without realizing it, accepting as a portrait what was composed to secure an intervention.

Charenton’s admission register. A few lines about a person, with considerably more than literary consequences.

Set beside the anonymous interview, these records make the question of reputation considerably less comfortable. The philosopher’s name can predispose us to grant his words significance. The obscure person’s record can predispose us to grant an accusation authority. In each case, we encounter speech within a frame that encourages a response before we have considered the particulars. But the difference is enormous. The celebrated philosopher can negotiate the conditions of an interview, while the person in the record likely had little say in the description that followed him into confinement.

There is another inequality inside the act of reading. We can linger over the surviving words, admire their force, extract an insight, and close the book. The person they describe had to live with what the words did. Foucault’s fascination with the intensity of these fragments leaves us with a difficult question about our own pleasure in them. An eloquent denunciation can be excellent writing and dreadful evidence. What obligations follow when the document is more vivid than the person we can recover from it? Literary appreciation alone cannot supply an answer, although refusing to notice the writing would not restore the life either.

The temptation is to rescue the subject by composing a better story. We imagine the misunderstanding, the cruel relative, the official eager to punish an eccentric. Sometimes further evidence supports such an account. Sometimes it does not. Sympathy can fill an empty archive as confidently as suspicion. To turn every obscure person into an innocent rebel would simply exchange one prescribed identity for another. A responsible reading has to make room for what remains unresolved. We may know that the record is partial without knowing the complete truth it conceals. That limitation deserves to remain visible.

To move from these documents to a contemporary search result requires care. The consequences, authorities, and possibilities of reply are different. Yet the question of how a person becomes visible through a description is worth carrying across that distance. An abundance of material does not guarantee an adequate account. It is possible to preserve thousands of words about someone while arranging access to them around a single description. Quantity can grow without correcting the frame through which the material is encountered.

Consider the hypothetical biography assembled from searchable fragments: an announcement, a disagreement, a photograph, a professional title, a sentence detached from its occasion. None needs to be invented for the resulting portrait to mislead. The distortion can lie in prominence and sequence. The first item may supply the heading under which everything else is interpreted. A correction may be available several pages further on, where almost nobody will look. An accurate date and an authentic photograph can give the whole arrangement the reassuring appearance of documentation. What matters is how the evidence has been organized, and what that organization encourages a stranger to believe.

An unknown gentleman, impeccably dressed for two centuries of being unidentified.

Fame and notoriety offer opposite advantages to a similar habit. Both can make a person seem immediately legible. The famous thinker becomes the familiar argument. The notorious stranger becomes the incident attached to a name. In each case, a reader can experience recognition as knowledge. Yet recognition is often only the beginning of a task. It tells us that we have encountered something before, perhaps only as a phrase repeated by others. The next step requires time, and time is precisely what a reputation promises to save.

We arrive, by a somewhat longer route, at the awkward task of writing about Foucault on his hundredth birthday. What can be said about Foucault that has not been said? Perhaps the demand for novelty needs examining before we submit to it. An unprecedented proposition may be exciting, but it may also be wrong. A neglected passage may matter without being a secret. “The Masked Philosopher” and “Lives of Infamous Men” have readers, interpreters, and histories of their own. Claiming to discover them would be another way of allowing the writer’s desired identity to govern the account. There are worse things for an essay to do than bring a familiar object into a less familiar relationship.

The anonymous interview and the obscure lives bring us back to the practical business of reading. A flattering description deserves examination as much as a damaging one. A name may have earned its authority, but that authority still has limits. A document may contain important evidence, but its original purpose remains part of the evidence. None of this supplies the satisfaction of a final verdict. It leaves us with the slower task of deciding what we can reasonably say about the particular words in front of us.

An appeal for anonymity, available in a volume with FOUCAULT printed down the cover.

That resistance would leave room for criticism. Foucault’s importance cannot exempt a claim from evidence, and enthusiasm cannot repair a weak argument. Nor does every mistake abolish the value of an entire body of work. Reading needs the freedom to discriminate at the scale of the question being asked. A sentence may be illuminating without making its author an oracle. Another may fail without turning him into a fraud. This is less convenient than choosing a side and assembling quotations. It requires us to discover, occasionally, that an author we dislike has made a good point, or that one we admire has taken a shortcut. The embarrassment is minor. The alternative is to spend a reading life having our opinions confirmed by books we have scarcely allowed to speak.

On his hundredth birthday, then, we might permit Foucault a brief release from the obligation to explain everything. We could read an unfamiliar page without immediately turning it into a prediction about our age, or proof of what we already believe. We could allow an assertion to be strange, a joke to be funny, a fragment to remain incomplete. The anniversary would still have its name and date. The essay would still have Foucault in its title. And if, halfway through the page, we found ourselves thinking something we had not expected to think, we might leave the attribution alone for another minute.

Shūhei Mase is a writer and independent philosophy scholar based in Nagoya. His interests include French poststructuralism, failed systems of classification, and the private lives of minor philosophers. He is working on a book about philosophers who disliked one another, “Against My Esteemed Colleague: A History of Philosophical Resentment.”

Cover image: Michel Foucault, briefly withholding the explanation everyone has already attributed to him.