An
Interview with Michel Foucault (1976)
Q. If you like, we can begin by discussing your interest in the
publication of the dossier on Pierre Rivière and in particular your
interest in the fact that, at least in part, it has been made into a
film.
MF. For me the book was a trap. You know how much
people are talking now about delinquents, their psychology, their
drives and desires, etc. The discourse of psychiatrists,
psychologists and criminologists is inexhaustible on the phenomenon
of delinquency. Yet it is a discourse that dates back about 150
years, to the 1830s. Well, there you had a magnificent case: in 1836
a triple murder, and then not only all the aspects of the trial but
also an absolutely unique witness, the criminal himself, who left a
memoir of more than a hundred pages. So, to publish a book was for
me a way of saying to the shrinks in general (psychiatrists,
psychoanalysts, psychologists): well, you've been around for 150
years, and here is a case contemporary with your birth. What do you
have to say about it? Are you better prepared to discuss it than
your 19th century colleagues?
In a sense I can say I won; I won or I lost, I don't
know, for my secret desire of course was to hear criminologists,
psychologists, and psychiatrists discuss the case of Rivière in
their usual insipid language. Yet they were literally reduced to
silence: not a single one spoke up and said: "Here is what Rivière
was in reality. And I can tell you now what couldn't be said in the
19th century." Except for one fool, a psychoanalyst, who
claimed that Rivière was an illustration of paranoia as defined by
Lacan. With this exception no one had anything to say. But I must
congratulate them for the prudence and lucidity with which they have
renounced discussion of Rivière. So it was a bet won or lost, as
you like...
Q. But more generally, it's difficult to discuss the
event itself, both its central point which is the murder and also
the character who instigates it.
MF. Yes, because I believe that Rivière's own
discourse on his act so dominates, or in any case so escapes from
every possible handle, that there is nothing to be said about this
central point, this crime or act, that is not a step back in
relation to it. We see there nevertheless a phenomenon without
equivalent in either the history of crime or discourse: that is to
say, a crime accompanied by a discourse so strong and so strange
that the crime ends up not existing anymore; it escapes through the
very fact of this discourse held about it by the one who committed
it.
Q. Well how do you situate yourself in relation to
the impossibility of this discourse.
MF. I have said nothing about Rivière's crime
itself and once more, I don't belive anyone can say anything about
it. No, I think that one must compare Rivière with Lacenaire, who
was his exact contemporary and who committed a whole heap of minor
and shoddy crimes, mostly failures, hardly glorious at all, but who
succeeded through his very intelligent discourse in making these
crimes exist as real works of art, and in making the criminal, that
is Lacenaire himself, the very artist of criminality. It's another
tour de force if you like: he managed to give an intense reality,
for dozens of years, for more than a century, to acts that were
finally very shoddy and ignoble. As a criminal he was a rather petty
type, but the splendor and intelligence of his writing gave a
consistency to it all. Rivière is something altogether different: a
really extraordinary crime which was revived by such an even more
extraordinary discourse that the crime ended up ceasing to exist,
and I think that this is what happened in the minds of the judges.
Q. Well then, do you agree with the project of Renè
Allio's film, which was centered on the idea of a peasant seizing
the opportunity for speech? Or had you already thought about that?
MF. No, it's to Allio's credit to have thought of
that, but I subscribe to the idea completely. For by reconstituting
the crime from the outside, with actors, as if it were an event and
nothing but a criminal event, the essential would be lost. It was
necessary that one be situated, on the one hand, inside Rivière's
discourse, that the film be a film of memory and not the film of a
crime, and on the other hand, that this discourse of a little
Normand peasant of 1835 be taken up in what could be the peasant
discourse of that period. Yet, what is closest to that form of
discourse, if not the same one that is spoken today, in the same
voice, by the peasants living in the same place. And finally, across
150 years, it's the same voices, the same accents, the same
maladroit and raucous speech that recounts the same thing with
almost nothing transposed. In fact Allio chose to commemorate this
act at the same place and almost with the same characters who were
there for 150 years ago; these are the same peasants who in the same
place repeat the same act. It was difficult to reduce the whole
cinematic apparatus, the whole filmic apparatus, to such a thinness,
and that it is really extraordinary, rather unique I think in the
history of cinema.
What's also more important in Allio's film is that
he gives the peasants their tragedy. Basically, the tragedy of the
peasant until the end of the 18th century was still hunger. But,
beginning in the 19th century and perhaps still today, it was, like
every great tragedy, the tragedy of the law, of the law and the
land. Greek tragedy that recounts the birth of the law and the
mortal effects of the law on men. The Rivière affair occurred in
1836, that is, twenty years after the Code Civil was set into place:
a new law is imposed on the daily life of the peasant and he
struggles in this new juridical universe. The whole drama of Rivière
is a drama about the law, the code, legality, marriage, possessions,
and so forth. Yet, it's always within this tragedy that the peasant
world moves. And what is important therefore is to show peasants
today in this old drama which is the same time the one of their
lives: just as Greek citizens saw the representation of their own
city on the stage.
Q. What role can this fact play, the fact that the
Normand peasants of today can keep the spirit, thanks to the film,
of this event, of this period?
MF. You know that there is a great deal of
literature about the peasants, but very little peasant literature,
or peasant expression. Yet, here we have a text written in 1835 by a
peasant, in his own language, that is, in one that is barely
literate. And here is the possibility for these peasants today to
play themselves, with their own means, in a drama which is of their
generation, basically. And by looking at the way Allio made his
actors work you could easily see that in a sense he was very close
to them, that he gave them a lot of explanations insetting them up,
but that on the other side, he allowed them great latitude, in the
manner of their language, their pronunciation, their gestures. And,
if you like, I think it's politically important to give the peasants
the possibility of acting this peasant text. Hence the importance
also of actors from outside to represent the world of the law, the
jurors, the lawyers, etc., all those people from the city who are
basically outside of this very direct communication between the
peasant of the 19th century and the one of the 20th century that
Allio has managed to visualize, and, to a certain point, let these
peasant actors visualize.
Q. But isn't there a danger in the fact that they
begin to speak only through such a monstrous story?
MF. It's something one could fear. And Allio, when
he began to speak to them about the possibility of making the film,
didn't dare tell them what was really involved. And when he told
them, he was very surprised to see that they accepted it very easily;
the crime was no problem for them. On the contrary, instead of being
an obstacle, it was a kind of space where they could meet, talk and
do a whole lot of things which were actually in their daily lives.
In fact, instead of blocking them , the crime liberated them. And if
one had asked them to play something closer to their daily lives and
their activity, they would have perhaps felt more theatrical and
stagey than in playing this kind of crime, a little far away and
mythical, under the shelter of which they could go all out with
their own reality.
Q. I was thinking rather of a somewhat unfortunate
symmetry: right now it's very fashionable to make films about the
turpitudes and monstrosities of the bourgeoisie. So in this film was
there a risk of falling into the trap of the indiscreet violence of
the peasantry?
MF. And link up again finally with this tradition of
an atrocious representation of the peasant world, as in Balzac and
Zola...I don't think so. Perhaps just because this violence is never
present there in a plastic or theatrical way. What exists are
intensities, rumblings, muffled things, thicknesses, repetitions,
things hardly spoken, but not violence...There is none of that
lyricism of violence and peasant abjection that you seem to fear.
Moreover, it's like that in Allio's film, but it's also like that in
the documents, in history. Of course there are some frenetic scenes,
fights among children that their parents argue about, but after all,
these scenes are not very frequent, and above all, running through
them there is always a great finesse and acuity of feeling, a
subtlety even in the wickedness, often a delicacy. Because of this,
none of the characters have that touch of unrestrained savagery of
brute beasts that one finds at a certain level in the literature on
the peasantry. Everyone is terribly intelligent in this film,
terrible delicate and, to a certain point, terribly reserved.
Translated by John Johnston
From Sylvère Lotringer (ed) (1996) Foucault Live: Collected
Interviews, 1961-1984. USA: SEMIOTEXT[E]. (pp. 203-206).
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