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PARTISAN REVIEW
Foucault's blueprint for combatting the spread of despotic state power
is not clear. Despite his repudiation of Marxism, his politics seems con–
ventionally leftist, for he speaks of struggling with the proletariat against
"the multinational corporations, the judicial and police apparatuses, the
property speculators, etc." Morever, it is difficul t to take Foucaul t's revo–
lutionary aspirations seriously, for he was a member of the French
establishment, holding a chair at the College de France, one of the coun–
try's most prestigious institutions.
Whatever we make of Foucault's radical politics, it is clear that he
often seemed uncomfortable with the idea of objectivity. In 1982, in what
seems an effort to give a Nietzschean coloring to his radical politics, he
said, "What I say does not have objective value.... Each of my works is
a part of my own biography." But it is one thing to offer "my truths," as
Nietzsche did, to other noble souls; it is another to make them the basis
for political action. Despite his reservations about the objective value of
his own critique of the modern era, Foucault thought political theory and
political action went hand-in-hand. "I have always been concerned with
linking together as tightly as possible the historical and theoretical analy–
sis of power relations, institutions, and knowledge, to the movements,
critiques, and experiences that call them into question in reality."
In the late 1960s Foucault, who had been a Communist Party mem–
ber in the early 1950s and a strong anti-Communist in the 1960s, linked
up with one such movement: an ultra-left Maoist group called the
Gauche Proletarienne (GP), which had been founded in the aftermath of
the 1968 student revol t. Foucaul t, his biographer says, "became an oracle
of the ultra-left" who in his capacity as head of the philosophy depart–
ment at Vincennes hired ul tra-Ieftists . Defending his choice of professors
after the department was decertified by the Ministry of Education,
Foucaul t said: "We must free ourselves from ... cui tural conservatism, as
well as from political conservatism. We must see our rituals for what they
are: completely arbitrary things, tied to our bourgeois way of life...."
The notion of "freeing oneself" not only required unmasking the
"regime of truth"; it also required participating in an action that in itself
betokened freedom, insofar as it was what Foucault called a "limit-expe–
rience," an experience that bourgeois society condemned. He remarked in
1971, "It is possible that the rough outline of fi.lture society is supplied by
the recent experiences with drugs, sex, communes, other forms of con–
sciousness, and other forms of individuality." Foucault became increasingly
preoccupied with these "forms of individuality ," implying that a limit–
experience might be the basic building block of a new society. The
limit-experience, he implied, was a positive personal "truth" that somehow
undermined the negative "truths" of the modern state. In another attempt
