It is a distinct possibility that we leave to posterity writers and works from which the future curious will conclude that this century was the stupidest, most verbose and obscene, altogether the worst in the historical record. What else can you say of a century that elected Michel Foucault as one of its mâitres à penser, together with an assortment of Sartrian and Marcusian monsters, structuralists, deconstructionists, decoders, and other homosexuals? Homosexuality occupies about half of this volume (with incest too getting some attention as, of course, a morally neutral practice). The rest is taken up with questions and answers (almost all 330 pages are interviews and debates), most of it exasperating trivialities wrapped in jargon.

With a kind of coquettishness Foucault denies he is a structuralist, though his analyses belie him. On the other hand, he does not deny that he is a homosexual, and delves into that matter with a stomach-turning psychosocio-philosophical seriousness. But even when he wears the mask of a professor at the College de France, his style, approach, and analyses are those of a purely (structurally?) subversive mind for which “structuralism” is a mere pretext. Were he an idealist with Plato, a logician with Aristotle, an orator with Demosthenes, his manner of arguing would still create the impression of an intellectual operator.

Structuralism for such a man is merely the most convenient tool with which to deconstruct and fraudulently decode every human achievement. It is with a certain taste for the morbid that he focuses on such questions as, why does “what we call literature” occupy a privileged position, why not just any assemblage of words? (Shall we propose a train schedule?) Or, why is folly (or pederasty) not regarded as merely a part of things as they are—why is society preoccupied with it as something negative? Playing this game, Foucault is by no means pursuing the Socratic objective of revealing essences and their ultimate substratum; Foucault regards words, concepts, explanations, and judgments, or simply just nouns, as springboards toward verbal dissolution. It is Nietzsche, without the genius.

The overall purpose, if any, is to demonstrate that man is merely an artificial focus (any other would do) put together for no reason, but dissolvable in structure: the structure of grammar, of the prevailing sexual code, or of intratribal relationships. The reader feels he is caught in some kind of enigma and wants to find out what are the last motives of his being and actions, beyond what the other masters of suspicion propose: Freud, Marx, Nietzsche, Sartre. Or is he, our inquiring man, merely his language habits, cooking methods, wedding ceremonial, sexuality, kinship within the clan? Levi-Strauss is at least honest. He concluded long ago that man is nothing but the temporary locus of interacting structures. Foucault has simply no conclusions to offer. He modestly invites unsuspecting students and aberrant intellectuals to endless talkfests where anything may be said—or nothing. He relates to one interviewer that he experienced happiness twice in life: once when he casually met for the first time a German film producer, took him home, “smoked some hash,” and both remained silent for ten hours; the second time when he was hit by a car, was not hurt badly, and burst into laughter. (One wonders if the third time he knew happiness was when he was dying from AIDS.)

How much philosophical credit does one give a man whose happiness takes such morbid forms, who speaks about it as “events,” then goes to class and teaches? Is this a late residue of Marxism (no, he was never a Communist), which teaches that man is his classconsciousness; or is it something beyond Marxism when only destructiveness remains, and only as a gratuitous exercise? If we carry Foucaultism to its logical consequence, Foucault himself evaporates in some final structure of all structures. Put otherwise, can we have a real face, if all we see of ourselves are endless mirror images of what we thought was our face? We can, of course, count them and explore the technique of mirror reflection; but we can also declare, resigned, that indeed we never had a face.

The system of which Foucault is a prominent proponent holds, together with much of modern speculation, that man is not the subject of his beliefs, thoughts, judgments, opinions, and actions, he is their object. Structures act on him, or rather act him (pardon the grammar); he is their random meeting point. But both the meeting point and the converging structures could be something else, in which case the already fragile, vaporous self would not be. Astrophysicists have accepted the hypothesis that nothing in the universe is (certainly not the way it is observed and visualized) and that mathematical formulas make sense only in the light of other mathematical formulas. Why not assume that Foucault’s ambition is a similarly evanescent equation? His structuralist colleague (incidentally, both deny that they are structuralists) Levi-Strauss has admitted that much. The objective is to reduce man to interlocking formulas, to objects of endlessly explorable and shifting nonmeanings—until such time, says Levi-Strauss, that one. can prove that nothing exists besides chemical, then subatomic, agitation. If long stretches of hashish-induced stupor and car accidents can cause happiness, why would meaninglessness not be the supreme beatitude?

Yet there can be no beatitude, not even happiness, only transient sensations of good feeling while smoking hash. Suppose we declare that keeping history’s record, including the present volume, is also an arbitrarily chosen structure; why should one then remember what Michel Foucault said, lectured, or wrote in the meaningless succession of ticked-off zero times?

[Politics, Philosophy, Culture—Interviews and Other Writings, by Michel Foucault, edited by Lawrence D. Kritzman (New York: Routledge, Chapman & Hall) 330 pp., $25.00]