The relationship between Michel Foucault and Philip Rieff is best understood through contrast rather than any direct interaction or influence. On the surface, they could hardly be more different. Foucault, an openly gay “historian of the present” closely associated with far-left politics throughout his career, became one of the most cited scholars in the humanities—earning him the informal title of de facto “king of the humanities.” Yet, he still remains reviled and manages to provoke disdain from both ends of the political spectrum.

Some on the radical left even dismiss him as essentially a “CIA psyop,” with accusations portraying him as a subversive architect of neoliberalism. They argue that his influence steered the French left away from Marxism toward a more ambiguous, post-revolutionary political landscape, one that is less confident in the emancipatory potential of authoritarian institutions, such as communist parties, unions, and state mechanisms, and increasingly sceptical of the universal validity of human rights. [i]

Meanwhile, many on the contemporary right continue to vilify him, associating his ideas with the rise of identity politics and critiques of Western institutions as bastions of white supremacy and in desperate need of ‘decolonisation’. His influence has shaped a generation of public intellectuals, academics, writers, journalists, and other opinion makers, thereby consolidating a new cultural elite that in conservative views champions wokeness.

In stark contrast, the American sociologist of culture Philip Rieff was a classically conservative – and openly homophobic[ii] – prophet of cultural demise. In his view, cultural vitality depends on collective action to establish and maintain prohibitions – the sacred ‘Nos’ – that limit individual choices. Rieff posited that a strong culture restricts individual choice, whereas a culture in crisis promotes unfettered individualism. Today, Rieff has largely evaporated from contemporary discourse[iii] and is barely remembered; he is mainly familiar to mainstream audiences for his writings on Sigmund Freud and his controversial marriage to Susan Sontag. He never really addressed the issues raised by French theory as it came to American shores in the late 1960s and peaked in the 1980s but he did have his indirect debate with Foucault in the passages of the famous journal Salmagundi.

Contrary to his “anti-woke” critics, Foucault, as “the godfather of postmodernism,” did not suppose society could do without power structures nor did he buy into the straightforward teleological path of the “liberation” project. He did, however, object to Rieff’s conception of “rules above rules,” particularly in the matter of sexual ethics. “The important question here, it seems to me, is not whether a culture without restraints is possible or even desirable but whether the system of constraints in which a society functions leaves individuals the liberty to transform the [iv]Foucault’s idea of freedom is not liberation from repression, for “a society without restrictions is inconceivable,” but the individual’s capacity to creatively resist it because it was “truly intolerable when the individuals who are affected by it don’t have the means of modifying it.” [v] Rieff replied that the essence of an interdiction lies in its being “clear, well-defined, and unalterable.” [vi] He conceived of authority as something that exists beyond a deliberate manipulation of rational design, emerging from deeper cultural and psychological structures rather than conscious planning.

Yet, if read side by side, their texts reveal an unexpected alignment in their recognition of the relationship between space, selfhood, and authority. Both grappled with the question of how individuals negotiate freedom and identity within the constraints of cultural and institutional frameworks. Despite their differing orientations, the two thinkers converged on the idea that modern society depends on spaces – literal or figurative – that permit individuals to step outside dominant norms, challenge surveillance, and cultivate forms of selfhood distinct from collective expectations, and that there is a possibility for the emergence of authentic existence.

“Unlike utopias, which are conceptualized to criticize and reimagine global world order, heterotopian spaces are, as Foucault describes them, “counter-sites, a kind of effectively realized utopias in which . . . all the other real sites . . . are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted”[viii]. The concept is strikingly expansive, perhaps excessively so. Its lack of precise definition has made it susceptible to what I call “Donald Judd syndrome,” as it became a vehicle for orgies of interpretations. Heterotopias, Foucault explains, fulfill various roles in relation to the dominant social order, and he categorizes them as spaces of crisis, deviance, illusion, and compensation. They span a vast array of examples, including honeymoons, psychiatric hospitals, prisons, cemeteries, theatres, cinemas, libraries, museums, fairs, carnivals, holiday camps, saunas, motels, brothels, Jesuit colonies, and ships. These spaces exist to contrast, undermine and expose the dominant social order, which operates through clearly defined hierarchies and systematic distributions of economic, political, and social capital, that differentiate individuals based on measures of “more” and “less”.  Heterotopias, by contrast, possess a fundamentally destabilizing quality. They are not merely spaces of temporary suspension or subversion but of profound inversion, challenging hierarchical structures, language, and systems of signification themselves. These spaces highlight difference, give room to otherness, and serve as sites for the abnormal, the deviant, and the marginalized. The full significance of architectural or spatial heterotopias lies in their ability to subvert and challenge the established order of things.

However, we must resist the temptation to overestimate their transformative and anti-capitalist potential. Today, heterotopia has become emblematic of modern-day identity politics and post-modern theory, where ‘difference’ is translated into ‘otherness’ – a notion pitted against ‘sameness’ in debates over identity-based social and political issues. This shift has spawned postmodern interpretations that do more than merely analyse these distinctive spaces and their communities; they often romanticize them as near-mythical enclaves with idealized capabilities.

For instance, gay rights activist Denis Altman romantically envisioned “gay baths and saunas” as embodying a “Whitmanesque democracy, a desire to know and trust other men in a type of brotherhood far removed from the male bondage of rank, hierarchy, and competition that characterises much of the outside world”.[ix] While the outside world with liberal democracy might still protect individuals from the humiliations of openly declared hierarchies of human value, these supposedly liberating spaces often harboured their own intense forms of status competition. Social capital, both within and beyond these establishments, along with material resources, became crucial markers of status. Moreover, these spaces frequently imposed even more rigid hierarchies, where your looks, muscles, hair distribution, size of cock and shape of ass became paramount determinants of what one was capable to have access to. While these venues may have offered some men opportunities for a momentary ‘escape from themselves’ they ultimately failed to fulfill their utopian promise of providing genuine escape from the broader societal structures that had initially driven them to seek out these spaces. They remained deeply dependent on the outside world, functioning as sites of contestation and reversal while staying inextricably embedded in the broader urban fabric, weaving alternatives within it but never achieving, nor truly capable of achieving, a complete escape from it.

When viewed through Denis Altman’s lens, heterotopia departs from Foucault’s initial portrayal of it as a quasi-“unrepresentable” concept – and from his later descriptions of heterotopias as inconclusive arrangements marked by permissions, exclusions, and concealment – and emerges as the only realizable realm of material and social possibility. On this reading, heterotopia offers a virtual space of openness, radical transformation, inclusivness and unlimited connectivity that empowers marginalized and minority groups through the deliberate reconfiguration of space. Yet, by treating every deviant space or human groups as inherently subversive and imbued with utopian, transformative potential solely due to their liminality, we miss a crucial aspect of Foucault’s concept. His notion of heterotopia is fundamentally ambivalent – a formulation designed to destabilize discourse and language, characterized by an inherent obscurity and negativity that defies clarity, logic, and order, while simultaneously serving a conservative function. In effect, heterotopias secure the dominant social order precisely by functioning as “remissions” sites, “deflecting the forces of change by locating them outside society, in specially designated spaces where social critique (theatres), foreignism and non matrimonial sexuality (motel rooms) and challenging ideas (libraries) can be filtered, contained, segregated”[x].

A decade before Foucault’s written theorization of heterotopia, which finally went to press in 1984, Rieff articulated a strikingly resonant framework in his book Fellow Teachers: Of Culture and Its Second Death. Rieff wrote from a position of profound disillusionment with American academia’s embrace of 1960s counter-cultural movements and its willingness to suspend overt commitments to the truths of religious authority. He argued that the permissive democratic ethos that defined the era had destroyed character formation, impoverished American thought and culture, and incited violence against political and educational institutions. Yet, beneath his reactionary critique lies a surprising paradox. Rather than advocating a simple cultural restoration, he developed a vision of how maintaining public networks of (institutional) order might paradoxically safeguard private freedoms.

Rieff’s suggests that the thriving of genuine individual autonomy requires not the dismantling of institutional frameworks, but their careful maintenance as protective structures. These frameworks serve not to enforce conformity but, crucially, to shelter spaces of heterotopia – sites in which we become ourselves, pursuing pleasures, politics and ideas that defy public opinion, where nonconformity and even “perversion” might flourish safely beyond public scrutiny. In Rieff’s words, these protected spaces allow for “the secret life… the only life worth living… which is one not too well known, or necessarily (too well) liked by others.” [xi] For Rieff, public life is not inherently liberating; it risks becoming invasive, subsuming individuals not only to the laws and dictates of publicity, but also relentless demands for visibility and conformity disguised as democratic transparency or scientific inquiry.

This was echoed in Foucault’s examination of psychoanalysis in History of Sexuality, Volume 1, which anticipated the modern-day online cult of self-expression replacing the “id” or the “superego” with pop-psychiatric jargon of “trauma,” “grief,” and “love bombing” and quickly turning barbaric for its hyper-pathologisation of the human condition. Foucault’s intervention targeted psychoanalysis as an institutional mechanism for eliciting such “confessions”, a practice which evolved from a much older Christian confessional model that was eventually transformed into a systematic sexual science, or scientia sexualis. He challenged its foundational premise that sexuality was inherently “repressed” and “susceptible to pathology” and then could be ‘liberated’ through verbal self-disclosure which in return would not only offer relief or religious salvation as in the old days but also a direct path to the individual’s most “authentic” identity, as discourse increasingly demands that “sex speak the truth (…) and that it tell us our truth.”[xii]. He questioned the very existence of a coherent “sexuality” awaiting to be discovered through dialogue and introspection with therapist. This scepticism toward “sexual liberation” revealed how the therapeutic imperative to “confess” sexual “secrets” functioned as a mechanism, in which therapeutic experts or medical elites – acting as arbiters of “normality”  – could discipline, regulate, classify, monitor, and ultimately exercise power over the general public. Keeping secrets was, even for Freud, the very mechanism of our existence, of our subjectivity, making it possible to claim respectability in the eyes of others and coherence in our own, a mode of living that resists commodification and public consumption. Secrecy, here emerges not as a guise for deception or an escape from society but a vital condition for authentic existence.

Within these dynamic spaces, both individual identity and the surrounding environment are transformed from within, much like Rieff’s own vision that institutional frameworks, far from being mere instruments of repression, can nurture autonomous “secret” lives that defy the confines of public consumption. Such a position also reinterprets conservativism not as some reactionary ideology advocating for a return to a hypothetical golden age when virtuous and ethical citizens are strictly adhering to uptight sexual codes and mores and when eros is always opposed to repressive power, as Philip Rieff was to one orthodoxy or another: ““For me, too,” he has affirmed, “orthodoxies of all sorts smell of the narrowness that they permit in their characters”[xiii]. It is, instead, a politics in which transgression, festivity, suspension of hierarchy, taboos and individuals and groups that may be related to taboo are even tolerated as long as these forces are confined and segregated to physical or cultural peripheries. In such views these politics of bordering are even necessary for the maintenance of order and ‘purity’. Culture is, after all, a dialectic of prohibition and permission, renunciation and release.

Despite their differences, Foucault and Rieff can both agree with Virginia Woolf on one thing: the struggle for private space is the struggle for freedom itself.

 

Notes:

[i] For more see Rockhill, G. “The CIA Reads French Theory: On the Intellectual Labor of Dismantling the Cultural Left.” The Philosophical Salon, February 28, 2017. https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/the-cia-reads-french-theory-on-the-intellectual-labor-of-dismantling-the-cultural-left.

[ii] This deserves further clarification as Rieff’s views on homosexuality were complex: while he appeared more tolerant of it as a private matter, he opposed to it when it emerges as a public ideology, viewing it as a threat to what he termed the ‘vertical of authority’ as it threatens traditional male/female distinctions. He drew parallels to Roman society, arguing that widespread acceptance of homosexuality, particularly among the upper classes, contributed to cultural dissolution “homosexuality did its job in the destruction of Roman society. From the top down, Roman society indulged the homosexual taste” (for more see Rieff, P. The Crisis of the Officer Class. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007.) This was widely contested as ancient Roman concepts of sexuality differed fundamentally from modern sexual identities

(For more see Veyne, P. “Homosexuality in Ancient Rome.” In Western Sexuality: Practice and Precept in Past and Present Times, edited by Philippe Ariès and André Béjin, 26-35. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1985).

[iii] However, there has been renewed interest in him not only in Eastern Europe academia but also in the popular press. For more check out Blake Smith’s essay in Tablet, Park MacDougald’s essay in UnHerd and Paul Gottfried’s essay in the American Conservative.

[iv] Foucault, M., and O’Higgins, James. “Sexual Choice, Sexual Act: An Interview with Michel Foucault.” Salmagundi 58/59 (Fall 1982–Winter 1983): 10–24.

[v] Rieff, P. The Crisis of the Officer Class: The Decline of the Tragic Sensibility. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2007, 122; citing James O’Higgins, “Sexual Choice, Sexual Act: An Interview with Michel Foucault,” Salmagundi, no. 58–9 (Fall–Winter 1982): 10–24, esp. 16.

[vi] Ibid.

[vii] Paraphrased quote from Foucault, M. “Of other spaces.” In Heterotopia and the City: Public Space in a Post Civil Society, edited by M. Dehaene and L. De Cauter, 14

[viii] Ibid., 17.

[ix] Altman, D. The Homosexualization of America, The Americanization of the Homosexual. St. Martins Press, 79-80.

[x] Allweil, Y., and Kallus, R. “Public-space heterotopias: heterotopias of masculinity along the Tel Aviv shoreline.” In Heterotopia and the City: Public Space in a Postcivil Society, edited by Michiel Dehaene and Lieven De Cauter, 191. Routledge.

[xi] Rieff, P. “Fellow Teachers.” Salmagundi 20 (1972): 14.

[xii] Foucault, M. The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage, 1978. Print. 69

[xiii] Rieff, P. The Jew of Culture: Freud, Moses, and Modernity. University of Virginia Press.