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Paul Rabinow est Mort: A Memoir
By Nancy Scheper-Hughes
April 12, 2021
I am no doubt not the only one who writes in order to have no face. Do not ask who I am
and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see
that our papers are in order.
—Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge
How is one to decide where one is? And where one is going? —Paul Rabinow, Marking
time. On the Anthropology of the Contemporary
On January 23, 2002, a few minutes after my Air France Airbus took off, the captain of
the ‘ship’ interrupted our thoughts with a message: “ I am grieved to tell you that Pierre
Bourdieu est mort’. There were gasps, and even some tears as the French passengers
discussed one or other of Bourdieu’s scholarly work but also his status as a public
intellectual. French citizens were proud of him, and even if they hadn’t read any of his
work they embraced him as their own, a French sociologist. His death mattered.
I am amazed that Paul Rabinow has not been given a proper obituary in The New York
Times as had Marshal Sahlins who died on April 5th two days before the death of
Rabinow< https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/10/us/marshall-d-sahlins-dead.html&gt; or
months previously the death of David Graeber
<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/04/books/david-graeber-dead.html&gt; Was it because
Paul was as much a historian of the contemporary, a philosopher , or a molecular
scientist as he was an anthropologist? Paul once told me that he felt alienated in the
2
department of anthropology and that he might be more comfortable in another
department. I told him that we all at various times feel that way. Anthropologists are the
lone strangers of social science. But Paul’s voluminous writings and interpretations of
Michel Foucault should have been enough to be on those NYT’s pages. His classic texts
are read around the scholarly world and his invitation to Foucault to give a series of
lectures in 2008 brought the house down and led to UC Berkeley briefly renamed,
‘Foucault U’.
Paul, I missed saying goodbye to you by a day and now it will be a multitude of days of
regret and sorrow.
AIDS Heretics: Comrades in Arms
In the fall of 1992 Paul and I decided to co-teach the first UCB undergraduate class on
AIDS. By then, AIDS was a disaster, having surpassed cancer, heart disease, and
accidents to become the leading cause of death among men ages 25 to 44 in California.
AIDS accounted for 24% of all such deaths at that time according to the first systematic
study of its kind by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Paul had begun
his research on DNA and molecular anthropology, while I was studying the much
criticized and reviled AIDS sanatorium in Havana. Our class was held in a large room in
Wurster Hall. A hundred students enrolled but just about anyone who wanted to come to
the class were welcome.
Some of our Berkeley students, faculty and other colleagues had died or were dying of
AIDS. For one, the Medical Director of then Cowell Hospital, Dr. Jim Brown had died of
AIDS following an early attempt to educate Berkeley students about the risks of condom-
free sex. Jim was a friend from our Peace Corps days in Brazil. I suggested that we pay
the local poster artist, David Goines, to create a visual message warning of condom-less
sex. The poster he produced and that the university paid for was immediately rejected as
an anti-sex poster complete with a Biblical snake [devil] tempting the ‘innocent’ to eat
the red apple (gay sex)
3
Paul Rabinow had begun his study of the HIV/ AIDS epidemic following Peter Deusberg,
then a still highly respected UC Berkeley Professor of Molecular Biology, who in 1991
released a report entitled “Everything You Know About AIDS Is Wrong”. As a member
of the National Academy of Sciences, Deusberg was one of the world’s foremost experts
on retroviruses and HIV is a retrovirus. However, Deusberg concluded that the
Immunodeficiency Virus—HIV— did not cause AIDS, thus dismissing the most
cherished hypothesis of the world’s AIDS experts. His alternative hypothesis was that
AIDS was caused by toxins in the form of cocaine, speed, and other drug substances that
were popular in the IV and gay communities, and which he said were destroying the
immune system. Going against the grain of medical science, Deusberg described HIV as
a harmless fellow traveler along for the ride. Paul Rabinow was initially intrigued by
Deusberg’s conclusions. Meanwhile I had recently returned from Cuba in 1991 where I
was totally convinced that HIV/AIDS was a global killer and that the Cuban government
was correct in its heretical approach to confining HIV patients to a well-structured
sanatorium that was not a hospital but a complex of residential houses and buildings
including art and recreation until there was a sound medical response to the AIDS virus.
Thus, in the fall of 1992 Paul Rabinow and I agreed to teach an Anthropology 119 class
on “AIDS: The Disease and its Doubles”. Paul covered the history of reason, life, and
science while I covered irrationality, unreason, denial, and death. When I opened a
lecture with Camus’s The Plague, Paul demolished Camus as a weakling intellectual and
brought Sartre into the dialogue.
Luckily, we brought many faculties across the disciplines to speak in the class from
Deusberg to Tom Laqueur. In one of our classes we invited two men from San
4
Francisco, one white an affluent from the Castro district and one Black from Bayview-
Hunters Point each of whom had been diagnosed with HIV. It was during their
conversation and the Q&A period that they compared each other’s T-cells and how these
had interfered in their lives that Paul came up with the idea of biosociality which he
quickly published as “Artificiality and Enlightenment: from sociobiology to biosociality”
in a Zone book.
In November 1992 as our AIDS class was winding down Paul and I co-organized a
special panel at the American Anthropological Association convention in San Francisco.
We sent a late letter to the President of the AAA asking permission to organize a special
event during the convention on December 5th in the Hilton Hotel on “AIDS and the
Social Imaginary”. It was not an official AAA panel but announced as a special event to
all the AAA members. We invited what some members of the AAA saw as an elite
‘celebrity’ panel—Jean Comaroff, Mick Taussig, Renato Rosaldo, Ralph Bolton, Paul
and me. Our purpose was to use whatever influence we might have in anthropology to
make AIDS as visible as possible.
Paul and I entered a tense and over-crowded conference room. We carried a poster that
read: “We All Have AIDS” meaning that we all had relatives, children, neighbors,
students, etc. who were suffering and dying from the virus. It was to be a sign of
solidarity. It did not work. To the contrary the room was over-crowded with protestors,
many from SOLGA, the Society of Lesbian and Gay Anthropologists, now known as
AQA, the Association for Queer Anthropology (AQA) wearing T-shirts and waving
alternative posters: “These Natives Can Speak for Themselves” expressing their
dissatisfaction with the senior, presumably heterosexual anthropologists who would be
the speakers.
The room was a jumble, hot, loud and threating. People were pushing each other to get
inside the room. It felt like the beginning of an insurrection. I wanted to call the hotel
security. But the speakers began. Jean Comaroff discussed the racism associating the
origins of HIV with Black Africa (similar to today’s Asian origin of Covid-19). Mick
Taussig read a paper with extensive quotes from the book Closer to the Knives, an AIDS
memoir by David Wojnarowicz supplemented with four slides of artwork which may
have been painted or sketched by Taussig, but their relevance to the paper was
questioned. I spoke about AIDS and Brazilian women, transvestites, prostitutes and
street kids who had been infected with AIDS and left without any government health
support, which I contrasted to the medical success of the Cuban AIDS sanatorium albeit
at the cost of authoritarianism and individual freedom. Paul Rabinow spoke about AIDS,
ethics, activism and politics in AIDS research. He compared the work of Peter Deusberg
(the AIDS denier) and Robert Gallo, an American biomedical researcher who was once
known for his discovery of HIV as the agent responsible for AIDS. Gallo and his
collaborators published a series of papers in Science demonstrating that a retrovirus that
they alone had isolated, called HTLV-III, was the cause of AIDS beating the French
discovery. Both Rosaldo and Bolton were acutely aware of the situation and both stayed
in the audience in an attempt to show their support for the protestors. When Bolton was
called up to speak as the invited discussant he introduced a second uninvited discussant,
5
Steven O. Murray (who died in California in 2019 from an aggressive diffuse large B-cell
lymphoma) repeated Bolton’s “anti-elitist” and “anti-colonialist” accusation to the
panelists and demanded that all AAA panels must include sexual diversity.
The floor then opened for the audience to respond. One member in the audience, a UC
Berkeley visiting postdoc, rose and read a passage from Mein Kampf calling me a
Hitlerite for my visit to the AIDS sanatorium in Havana. Another protestor was swinging
a chain that had been wrapped around her body toward Paul and me. Time for tea? I
asked.
During the open questions Paul Rabinow tried to respond to some of the criticisms. He
began by saying that AIDS does not belong to one group or another, and that we all live
with the disease in some sense. But when he began to say “Back in 1984, when my dear
friend Michel Foucault died of AIDS.
”
— A loud hiss went up from the audience. Paul
took a step back, shocked. Why could he not talk about Foucault? In the pause someone
yelled out,
“Foucault was a closet case!” Another said; “He never went public with his
AIDS”. “ Foucault never said ‘queer’ he always referred to “homosexual’ another
commented.
But Paul ended the panel defending his right to speak in behalf of the man that he loved,
Michel Foucault, who had died in Paris in 1984. He feared that Foucault had contracted
HIV/AIDS in the bathhouses of San Francisco during his invited series of lectures at UC
Berkeley, in 1983. He felt that he was the cause of Foucault’s AIDS by telling him about
the bathhouses.
Paul Rabinow had this to say after the messy 1992 (AAA) AIDS panel:
“The pain, suffering, death, loss, bigotry, hatred and division brought forth by the AIDS
epidemic are a pressing source of concern to us all. I entered upon the study of AIDS and
co-organized this AAA session in an effort to make a simple statement of solidarity. That
it was not interpreted in this way by some is a source of sadness…AIDS can and must be
studied from different vantage points— from outside as well as from within the groups
that have suffered from it, from the point of view of experts as well as those whose
concerns arise from different perspectives…. There were many panels on the program
that dealt with diverse aspects of the AIDS epidemic. The only group of anthropologists
threatened with silence was we. Threats and attempts to muzzle others have all too often
been the first reflex of those who consider this horrible epidemic their own property.
ACT UP and others have courageously, imaginatively and constructively challenged this
stance. Surely we all know that silencing = death. … I studied the origins and identity of
the HIV strains in Robert Gallo’s Laboratory in 1983-4. Truth and Power are the main
focus of my study. In this epidemic, the scientific establishment has shown us too much
of the corruption of scientific norms, of attempts to silence their opponents, of abusive
ambition of some of its leaders, of endless turf wars, of the manipulative recourse to the
media, of bureaucratic maneuvering…One thing should be clear to all, once special
interest groups control (or attempt to control) the production of truth, science and
democracy are the losers.”
6
Epilogue
Years later Paul and I realized how naïve our early orientations to the AIDS epidemic had
been. For Paul it was his first acceptance of Professor Peter Deusberg’s denial of the
agency and power of the AIDS virus. Prof. Deusberg, now 80 years old, was still sitting
in the Roma café across from what was once Kroeber Hall, until the COVID shutdown. I
wonder what he thinks about the Covid-19 virus? But until 2020 Peter still refused to
accept that HIV is the cause of AIDS. Meanwhile, following the years of controversy
surrounding a 1987 out of court settlement between the National Institutes of Health and
France’s Pasteur Institute, Dr. Gallo finally admitted the virus he claimed to have
discovered in 1984 was in reality a virus sent to him from France the year before, thus
putting an end to a six-year effort by Gallo and his employer, the National Institutes of
Health, to claim the AIDS virus as an independent discovery of the United States.
Paul, of course, was a rational atheist and no believer in an afterlife. I was the irrational
sometimes believer that, whatever an afterlife might be, our spirits will meet again.
I love you Paul, wherever you are.
Reference
A collection of discussions between Foucault and Paul Rabinow in 1983 are available by
UCB archives.(The collection was generously donated to the Media Resources Center by
Paul Rabinow, Professor of Social Cultural Anthropology and digitized, corrected and
arranged by Gisèle Tanasse in 2009.
• Discusion of Biopower in Paul Rabinow’s Office, May 5, 1983
• Further Discussion of Biopower in Paul Rabinow’s Office, May 11, 1983
• Discussion with Michel Foucault in Paul Rabinow’s office, n.d.
• Rabinow-Foucault phone call (in French), May 21, 1983

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September 28, 2015

Dr. Paul Rabinow, c/o Anthropology Dept, UC Berkeley, 232 Kroeber Hall, Berkeley, CA 94720-3710,

Dear. Dr. Rabinow,

I must tell you how much I enjoyed your in-depth interview that you gave Dr. Alan Macfarlane. His series of interviews have been helpful to me and I wish more people would take time to ask questions as he does. Thank for you taking the time to do that interview.

Recently I had the opportunity to come across a very interesting article by Michael Polanyi, LIFE TRANSCENDING PHYSICS AND CHEMISTRY, in the magazine CHEMICAL AND ENGINEERING NEWS, August 21, 1967, and I also got hold of a 1968 talk by Francis Schaeffer based on this article. Polanyi’s son John actually won the 1986 Nobel Prize for Chemistry. This article by Michael Polanyi concerns Francis Crick and James Watson and their discovery of DNA in 1953. Polanyi noted:

Mechanisms, whether man-made or morphological, are boundary conditions harnessing the laws of in
animate nature, being themselves irreducible to those laws. The pattern of organic bases in DNA which functions as a genetic code is a boundary condition irreducible to physics and chemistry. Further controlling principles of life may be represented as a hierarchy of boundary conditions extending, in the case of man, to consciousness and responsibility.

I would like to send you a CD copy of this talk because I thought you may find it very interesting.It includes references to not only James D. Watson, and Francis Crick but also  Maurice Wilkins, Erwin Schrodinger, J.S. Haldane (his son was the famous J.B.S. Haldane), Peter Medawar, and Barry Commoner. I WONDER IF YOU EVER HAD THE OPPORTUNITY TO RUN ACROSS THESE MEN OR ANY OF THEIR FORMER STUDENTS?

Below is a portion of the transcript from the CD and Michael Polanyi’s words are in italics while Francis Schaeffer’s words are not:

My account of the situation will seem to oscillate in several directions, and I shall set out, therefore, its stages in order. 

I shall show that:

1. Commoner’s criteria of irreducibility to physics and chemistry are incomplete; they are necessary but not sufficient conditions of it. 
2. Machines are irreducible to physics and chemistry. 
3. By virtue of the principle of boundary control, mechanistic structures of living beings appear to be likewise irreducible. 

4. The structure of DNA, which according to Watson and Crick controls heredity, is not explicable by physics and chemistry. 

5. Assuming that morphological differentiation reflects the information content of DNA, we can prove that the morphology of living beings forms a boundary condition which, as such, is not explicable by physics and chemistry (the suggestion arrived at in the third item). 

…Now, from machines let us pass on to books and other means of communication. Nothing is said about the content of a book by its physical-chemical topography. All  objects conveying information are irreducible to the terms of physics and chemistry. 

I could throw the article away for some of you that understand what DNA is because Polanyi has shot Francis Crick’s theory through the head and its dead. The argument is: Suppose someone describes a book to you and they only describe it in terms of its physical and chemical properties. What then do you know about the information transmitted by the book? Zero!! Somebody could run a chemical analysis of the book but it would carry nothing about the information contained in the book. That is impossible. This is something added to the chemical and physical properties.

Might machines and machine-like aspects of living things not be shown one day to result from the working of physical or chemical laws? 

We can exclude this for machines. Our incapacity to define machines and their functions in terms of physics and chemistry is due to a manifest impossibility, for machines are shaped by man and can never be produced by the spontaneous equilibration of their material. But morphological structures are not shaped by man, could they not grow to maturity by the working of purely physical-chemical laws? 

So he says it is inconceivable for machines but what about the machine-like parts of man.

Such a highly improbable arrangement of particles is not shaped by the forces of physics and chemistry. It constitutes a boundary condition, which as such transcends the laws of physics and chemistry. 

This of course is his big argument.

Laplace thought we would know all that can be known in the world if we knew the course of its atoms. But for this he required a complete map of atomic positions and velocities to start with. Physics is dumb without the gift of boundary conditions, forming its frame; and this frame is not determined by the laws of physics. 

Polanyi says here you need to know these boundary conditions and without this physics is dumb and the frame is not determined by the laws of physics. There is something else in the structure of what is there. Thinking of my constant emphasis on Jean Paul Sartre’s statement “the basic philosophic question is not that something is there rather than nothing being there.”

Then Albert Einstein’s statement “the universe is like a well formulated word puzzle and only one word fits.” The world has a form but it is so definite that it is like a well formulated word puzzle. Two steps in the structure of the universe. First, something is there that must be explained. Second, the niceness of its form and its order.

What Polanyi is saying is if you are going to understand what is there you must not only understand merely the chemical and physical laws but you have to be faced with the boundary conditionswhich constitutes the form. Do you understand? For some of you this may be a little abstract but it won’t be abstract if you get into a discussion with your university friends if you can really get a hold of it.

The boundary conditions of the physical-chemical changes taking place in a machine are the structual and operational principles of the machine. We say therefore that the laws of inanimate nature operate in a machine under the control of operational principles that constitute (or determine) the boundaries. Such a system is clearly under dual control. 

In the machine made by man you have a dual control.Firstly, the devices of engineering, that is how you are going to make it. For instance, your plans for making a bridge or watch. Secondly,  the laws of natural science. The laws of physics and chemistry and the material you use to make the bridge or watch.

________

Thank you for your time. I know how busy you are and I want to thank you for taking the time to read this letter.

Sincerely,

Everette Hatcher,

P.O. Box 23416, Little Rock, AR 72221, United States, cell ph 501-920-5733, everettehatcher@gmail.com

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

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Page 253 of Volume 1

Francis Schaeffer michel foucault what foucault is finally against, however, is the authority of reason…In this Foucault represents an important tendency in advanced contemporary thought. In his despair of the transcendent powers of rational intellect he embodies one abiding truth of our time–the failure of the nineteenth century to make good its promises.” In other words, the heirs of the Enlightenment had promised that they would provide a unified answer on the basis of the rational. Foucault maintains correctly that this promise has not been fulfilled.

_______

Foucault was not too far removed from Aldous Huxley. He is not to be thought of as too isolated to be of importance in understanding our era,

Michel Foucault is talked about by Schaeffer a lot.

___________________________

on religious belief – don’t believe in God; there are passages in Levi-Strauss’ ‘Tristes Tropiques’ on Buddhism which are relatively close to what I felt much more strongly as a younger person; this question is interesting because in recent years I have been working with a student who has just finished a degree in theology and is now doing a degree in anthropology; he is a practising Christian and we get along remarkably well, discussing ethics etc., but it is clear that the larger theist dimensions are radically disparate; this is an interesting anthropological dimension where ethically this seems to not cause any problem; I frequently related to people with strong but quiet religious beliefs; Michel de Certeau was a Jesuit and I had a number of other Jesuit friends; I think it is the fact that they care about the world and other people, are thoughtful, committed and concerned, and I don’t have to share other parts of their belief system while finding them worthy of friendship; I am uninterested in the Dawkins’ argument of science disproving religion, I am not a positivist, there is a big difference between this form of nineteenth century militant positivism and a Weberian position in which science does not answer ultimate questions; when science becomes a world view, a cosmology, it seems to part company with its deep critical functions; I may not be a believer or theist, but I am not a militant atheist; I also part company with people like Jurgen Habermas or Charles Taylor who feel that unless we have sure foundations for our ethical life that we flounder, which seems wrong; no one has ever proved the ultimate foundations of anything to everyone’s satisfaction yet ethical life and decent human relations seem to me not all that common, but not impossible either; I am not looking for ultimate stopping points, and there is some anthropological dimension to that through respect for the complexity of different commitments; cosmopolitan enlightenment sense that we have to live with difference which can be a good thing, and that intolerance –even in the name of tolerance — is not so admirable

On November 21, 2014 I received a letter from Nobel Laureate Harry Kroto and it said:

…Please click on this URL http://vimeo.com/26991975

and you will hear what far smarter people than I have to say on this matter. I agree with them.

Harry Kroto

Nick Gathergood, David-Birkett, Harry-Kroto

I have attempted to respond to all of Dr. Kroto’s friends arguments and I have posted my responses one per week for over a year now. Here are some of my earlier posts:

Arif Ahmed, Sir David Attenborough, Mark Balaguer, Horace Barlow, Michael Bate, Patricia Churchland, Aaron Ciechanover, Noam Chomsky,Alan Dershowitz, Hubert Dreyfus, Bart Ehrman, Stephan Feuchtwang, David Friend,  Riccardo Giacconi, Ivar Giaever , Roy Glauber, Rebecca Goldstein, David J. Gross,  Brian Greene, Susan Greenfield, Stephen F Gudeman,  Alan Guth, Jonathan Haidt, Theodor W. Hänsch, Brian Harrison,  Hermann Hauser, Roald Hoffmann,  Bruce Hood, Herbert Huppert,  Gareth Stedman Jones, Steve Jones, Shelly Kagan, Michio Kaku,  Stuart Kauffman,  Lawrence Krauss, Harry Kroto, George Lakoff, Elizabeth Loftus,  Alan Macfarlane, Peter Millican, Marvin Minsky, Leonard Mlodinow,  Yujin Nagasawa, Alva Noe, Douglas Osheroff,  Jonathan Parry,  Saul Perlmutter, Herman Philipse,  Carolyn Porco, Robert M. Price, Lisa Randall, Lord Martin Rees,  Oliver Sacks, John Searle, Marcus du Sautoy, Simon Schaffer, J. L. Schellenberg,   Lee Silver,  Peter Singer,  Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Ronald de Sousa, Victor Stenger, Barry Supple,   Leonard Susskind, Raymond Tallis, Neil deGrasse Tyson,  .Alexander Vilenkin, Sir John Walker, Frank Wilczek, Steven Weinberg, and  Lewis Wolpert,

His comments can be found on the 3rd video and the 118th clip in this series. Below the videos you will find his words.

50 Renowned Academics Speaking About God (Part 1)

Another 50 Renowned Academics Speaking About God (Part 2)

A Further 50 Renowned Academics Speaking About God (Part 3)

___________________

Quote from Paul Rabinow:

In other words I am not a believer or a theist, but I am not also a militant atheist. I think that debate leads into a range of different and diverse existential corners that I don’t want to go to and never felt the need to go to.

More lengthy quote from Paul Rabinow:

on religious belief – don’t believe in God; there are passages in Levi-Strauss’ ‘Tristes Tropiques’ on Buddhism which are relatively close to what I felt much more strongly as a younger person; this question is interesting because in recent years I have been working with a student who has just finished a degree in theology and is now doing a degree in anthropology; he is a practising Christian and we get along remarkably well, discussing ethics etc., but it is clear that the larger theist dimensions are radically disparate; this is an interesting anthropological dimension where ethically this seems to not cause any problem; I frequently related to people with strong but quiet religious beliefs; Michel de Certeau was a Jesuit and I had a number of other Jesuit friends; I think it is the fact that they care about the world and other people, are thoughtful, committed and concerned, and I don’t have to share other parts of their belief system while finding them worthy of friendship; I am uninterested in the Dawkins’ argument of science disproving religion, I am not a positivist, there is a big difference between this form of nineteenth century militant positivism and a Weberian position in which science does not answer ultimate questions; when science becomes a world view, a cosmology, it seems to part company with its deep critical functions; I may not be a believer or theist, but I am not a militant atheist; I also part company with people like Jurgen Habermas or Charles Taylor who feel that unless we have sure foundations for our ethical life that we flounder, which seems wrong; no one has ever proved the ultimate foundations of anything to everyone’s satisfaction yet ethical life and decent human relations seem to me not all that common, but not impossible either; I am not looking for ultimate stopping points, and there is some anthropological dimension to that through respect for the complexity of different commitments; cosmopolitan enlightenment sense that we have to live with difference which can be a good thing, and that intolerance –even in the name of tolerance — is not so admirable.

______________

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Related posts:

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