The Bleak Genius of Michel Foucault
compactmag.com
compactmag.com
Unfortunately, he was terminally French, leading to some very bad stances that were sadly popular around that time (that petition...), and was slandered by a fraud and reactionary (Sorman) who admitted recently to making it up. This has allowed the dimwitted and incurious to discount his trenchant analyses out of hand rather than engage critically (for example, look how much of the conversation in here concerns salacious rumors rather than biopolitics or the disciplinary society ).
Him being openly gay and one of the first major AIDS casualties also fuels this discourse, as when I search for "Sartre" here, I see next to no discussion of his hobby of (heterosexually) raping young girls with the aid of Simone de Beauvoir. I temper my expectations because this is a tech/stem centric place, but the general lack of philosophical literacy is always disappointing to me in such crowds!
As the article notes, his disgusting behavior was already a known rumor in Tunisia. Sorman's testimony neither added nor removed from that - all it did was bring Foucault's perversions into the Western spotlight.
Lamblin was 16 when the De Beauvoir's seduction began. The age of consent in France was 15 at the time.
Foucault was facing rumors of credibly reguarly raping prepubescent boys well before Sarman (Sarman did not admit "he made it all up"), which follows a pattern many other famous pedophiles, like Arthur C. Clarke, did and many do today; prey on children in developing countries.
>In a second interview with the British newspaper The Sunday Times on March 28, he recalled that “they were eight, nine, ten years old, he was throwing money at them and would say ‘let’s meet at 10pm at the usual place’”,
There's a, uh, strange coincidence between advocates of queer theory and their undermining age of consent laws that's hard to explain merely by calling it French.[0]
Anecdotally, the post-structuralists were still a curiosity in the 80s.
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Chomsky%2CDele...
Baudrillard both admired the depth of Foucault's historically informed philosophical analysis but questioned its objectivity especially given Foucault had little to say about how power evolved with mass media & technology - and was in a sense always fighting the last war:
> "If Foucault spoke so well of power to us — and let us not forget it, in real objective terms which cover manifold diffractions but nonetheless do not question the objective point of view one has about them, and of power which is pulverized but whose reality principle is nonetheless not questioned — only because power is dead?"
> "We are no doubt witnessing, with sexual liberation, pornography, etc., the agony of sexual reason. And Foucault will only have given us the key to it when it no longer means anything"
https://medium.com/@noahjchristiansen/jean-baudrillards-call...
https://teddykw2.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/je...
I assume this is an oblique defense of Foucault's lifelong and vocal campaign to remove the age of consent so adults could have sex with children. Foucault was also recently accused of having purchased boys for sex by his friend Guy Sorman.
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2021/4/16/reckoning-with-...
It's difficult to value the "genius" of people (and frankly entire fields) who seem to apply most of their cleverness towards being inscrutable for no good reason.
https://markkukoivusalo.org/thinkers/foucault/cp/pierre-rivi...
I mostly remember the feeling there is something wrong with this guy.
Guy Sorman wasn't Foucault's friend, and later said (about his statement) that he never actually saw anything he described, but just a 'convergence of disturbing clues'. You have to bear in mind that accusing gay people of pedophilia is pretty standard fare for homophobes up and to this day.
Source?
"In a sense, all the rest of my life I've been trying to do intellectual things that would attract beautiful boys."
> After interviewing residents of Sidi Bou Said who had known the philosopher, his report concluded: "Michel Foucault was not a paedophile, but he was seduced by the young Ephebes."
Not exactly vindicating, but not the same level of horror, I suppose. It's not exactly a crazy idea given Foucault's own words quoted elsewhere in this thread.
My sense is that, by "recognizing Foucault's bleak genius," the subtext is "we need God because otherwise there's nothing but depravity".
If anyone is aware of other non-rationalist western philosophies, I'd be curious as I'm only aware of the Lacanian schools and then more standard post-structuralist stuff like Foucault and Deleuze.
I'd also be careful of trying to read a philosopher's life inside their ideas. Deleuze led a very bog-standard life for a white man in the postwar era in Europe despite advocating for fairly radical philosophies. It's the ideas that take root and shape the academy and then society. If you wish to push back on post-structuralism, criticize the idea, not the people. Foucault himself may have been depraved, but others certainly weren't.
Stirner was prophectic in calling out Hegel's and Marx's bullshit, and the way that his work triggered Marx so hard that Marx felt the need to write an entire book calling him a doo-doo head (The German Ideology) shows that he was subversive in the best way possible - he got under the skin of a thinker whose legacy is hundreds of millions of people dead. I suggest giving him a read, as he has a truly non-rationalist philosophy which is very different from any that you've read before.
Re: Deleuze being "bog standard". You think that doing tons of LSD with his homie Guattari while they wrote Anti-oedipus was "normal"? One of them even killed themselves by throwing themself out of a window (supposedly due to "chronic pain" but who the heck knows with their literal schizoanalytical ideas)
Foucault's writing is problematic because the conclusions he makes are too broad and are backed up by too much conjecture. So were a lot of other writers of the time, many of whom Sokal covered in his book "Fashionable Nonsense."
The debate is a fun thing. Some people hear Foucault make no sense, others see him slicing Chomsky up into so many pieces he appears to not even notice.
Then at the end it turned more towards morality and Foucault showed himself to be quite clearly completely, illogically, disturbingly amoral - as Chomsky himself later more or less described him (a video which has been linked in other comments)
No person with a shred of moral character or intellectual honesty could ever conclude anything remotely close to Foucault winning, let alone "cooking" him.
edit: It starts building up to the real conflict/debate around maybe 45min, but it really becomes concrete at 54:13. Foucault just finished rambling about "destroy the bourgeoisie " and Chomsky says "surely you believe that your role in the war is a just role" and then further lays down some very sensible, insightful ideas about justice.
Foucault then says something to the effect of "the proles dont fight for justice, they fight to have power for the first time in history. One wages war to win, not because it is just".
Chomsky disagrees, but remains patient and extends an olive branch to him to say something less insane - suggesting that if such an overthrow would lead to a terroristic police state (e.g. the USSR, north korea etc...) , then I wouldn't want the proles to win. The only justification for such action is if one thinks - rightly or wrongly - that some fundamental human values will be achieved".
Foucault just doubles and triples down and they go back and forth.
YET, he even ends up agreeing with Chomsky by saying that the "suppression of class power" is the goal. Chomsky says ah hah, so you finally agree with me then.
And foucault just dodges it and rambles some more. Chomsky then again shares some beautiful and insightful, yet humble, ideas.
And then it ends.
Foucault - and postmodernism in general - is all about narcissistic resentment.
The link is here. Its very much worth watching. https://youtu.be/3wfNl2L0Gf8?si=954dTZp7G_C9PTMr&t=3255
The Loneliness of Noam Chomsky by Arundhati Roy http://www.rarre.org/documents/roy/The%20Loneliness%20Of%20N...
When Chomsky Wept by Fred Branfman- https://www.salon.com/2012/06/17/when_chomsky_wept/
Absolutely beautiful writing about a beautiful person.
"He struck me as completely amoral, id never met anyone who was so totally amoral" ... "I mean, I liked him personally, it's just that I couldn't make sense of him. It's as if he was from a different species, or something."
this is a far cry from calling him a morally bankrupt person