'the whole idea struck me as patronising and silly'

When I arrived, I found a short, mysterious letter from Sartre and Beauvoir waiting for me at the hotel I had booked in the Latin Quarter. ‘For security reasons,’ the message ran, ‘the meetings will be held at the home of Michel Foucault.’ I was duly provided with an address, and at ten the next morning I arrived at Foucault’s apartment to find a number of people – but not Sartre – already milling around. No one was ever to explain the mysterious ‘security reasons’ that had forced a change in venue, though as a result a conspiratorial air hung over our proceedings. Beauvoir was already there in her famous turban, lecturing anyone who would listen about her forthcoming trip to Teheran with Kate Millett, where they were planning to demonstrate against the chador; the whole idea struck me as patronising and silly, and although I was eager to hear what Beauvoir had to say, I also realised that she was quite vain and quite beyond arguing with at that moment. Besides, she left an hour or so later (just before Sartre’s arrival) and was never seen again.

Foucault very quickly made it clear to me that he had nothing to contribute to the seminar and would be leaving directly for his daily bout of research at the Bibliothèque Nationale. I was pleased to see my book Beginnings on his bookshelves, which were brimming with a neatly arranged mass of materials, including papers and journals. Although we chatted together amiably it wasn’t until much later (in fact almost a decade after his death in 1984) that I got some idea why he had been so unwilling to say anything to me about Middle Eastern politics. In their biographies, both Didier Eribon and James Miller reveal that in 1967 he had been teaching in Tunisia and had left the country in some haste, shortly after the June War. Foucault had said at the time that the reason he left had been his horror at the ‘anti-semitic’ anti-Israel riots of the time, common in every Arab city after the great Arab defeat. A Tunisian colleague of his in the University of Tunis philosophy department told me a different story in the early 1990s: Foucault, she said, had been deported because of his homosexual activities with young students. I still have no idea which version is correct. At the time of the Paris seminar, he told me he had just returned from a sojourn in Iran as a special envoy of Corriere della sera. ‘Very exciting, very strange, crazy,’ I recall him saying about those early days of the Islamic Revolution. I think (perhaps mistakenly) I heard him say that in Teheran he had disguised himself in a wig, although a short while after his articles appeared, he rapidly distanced himself from all things Iranian. Finally, in the late 1980s, I was told by Gilles Deleuze that he and Foucault, once the closest of friends, had fallen out over the question of Palestine, Foucault expressing support for Israel, Deleuze for the Palestinians.

Foucault’s apartment, though large and obviously extremely comfortable, was starkly white and austere, well suited to the solitary philosopher and rigorous thinker who seemed to inhabit it alone. A few Palestinians and Israeli Jews were there. Among them I recognised only Ibrahim Dakkak, who has since become a good Jerusalem friend, Nafez Nazzal, a teacher at Bir Zeit whom I had known superficially in the US, and Yehoshofat Harkabi, the leading Israeli expert on ‘the Arab mind’, a former chief of Israeli military intelligence, fired by Golda Meir for mistakenly putting the Army on alert. Three years earlier, we had both been fellows at the Stanford Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, but we did not have much of a relationship. It was always polite but far from cordial. In Paris, he was in the process of changing his position, to become Israel’s leading establishment dove, a man who was soon to speak openly about the need for a Palestinian state, which he considered to be a strategic advantage from Israel’s point of view. The other participants were mostly Israeli or French Jews, from the very religious to the very secular, although all were pro-Zionist in one way or another. One of them, Eli Ben Gal, seemed to have a long acquaintance with Sartre: we were later told that he had been Sartre’s guide on a recent trip to Israel.

When the great man finally appeared, well past the appointed time, I was shocked at how old and frail he seemed. I recall rather needlessly and idiotically introducing Foucault to him, and I also recall that Sartre was constantly surrounded, supported, prompted by a small retinue of people on whom he was totally dependent. They, in turn, had made him the main business of their lives. One was his adopted daughter who, I later learned, was his literary executor; I was told that she was of Algerian origin. Another was Pierre Victor, a former Maoist and co-publisher with Sartre of the now defunct Gauche prolétarienne, who had become a deeply religious and, I supposed, Orthodox Jew; it stunned me to find out later from one of the journal’s assistants that he was an Egyptian Jew called Benny Lévy, the brother of Adel Ref’at (né Lévy), one of the so-called Mahmoud Hussein pair (the other being a Muslim Egyptian: the two men worked at Unesco and as ‘Mahmoud Hussein’ wrote La Lutte des classes en Egypte, a well-known study published by Maspero). There seemed to be nothing Egyptian about Victor: he came across as a Left Bank intellectual, part-thinker, part-hustler. Third was Hélène von Bülow, a trilingual woman who worked at the journal and translated everything for Sartre. Although he had spent time in Germany and had written not only on Heidegger, but on Faulkner and Dos Passos, Sartre knew neither German nor English. An amiable and elegant woman, Von Bülow remained at Sartre’s side for the two days of the seminar, whispering simultaneous translations into his ear. Except for one Palestinian from Vienna who spoke only Arabic and German, our discussion was in English. How much Sartre actually understood I shall never know, but it was (to me and others) profoundly disconcerting that he remained silent throughout the first day’s proceedings. Michel Contat, Sartre’s bibliographer, was also there, but did not participate.


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parte de um artigo de Edward Said, interessante, aqui, no London Review of Books.

para ver, o arquivo da London Review of Books.