The Bleak Genius of Michel Foucault

https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-bleak-genius-of-michel-foucault/

by Caiero • 2 years ago

54 52 2 years ago

janice1999• 2 years ago

In practical terms, Foucault’s and his followers’ assault against sexual normalization has helped bring about institutions that disavow normativity at every turn.

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-...

dralley• 2 years ago

Aside from this, the pretension is literally dripping from that sentence, my god.

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.

prewett• 2 years ago

I think the purpose of the inscrutability serves is to "idea launder" obvious falsehoods into something believable, much like the convoluted path one takes to convert stolen money into believably-legal money.

hackandthink3• 2 years ago

The article about Foucault's pedophilia is worth reading. I'm not really surprised. When I read the piece on Pierre Riviere decades ago, it creeped me out.

https://markkukoivusalo.org/thinkers/foucault/cp/pierre-rivi...

lores4• 2 years ago

I don't think you copied the right link.

pasabagi2• 2 years ago

Apparently bullshit, though: https://www.lexpress.fr/idees-et-debats/michel-foucault-et-l...

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.

complaintdept• 2 years ago

IIRC Focault still signed a petition to legalize sex with children. Not sure why, but it wasn't an entirely unpopular opinion among (often) leftist intellectuals in Europe at the time.

Amezarak• 2 years ago

That article says they were probably teenagers, not young children.

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.

slibhb2• 2 years ago

The author is a social conservative. He's by no means defending Foucault's "assault against sexual normalization".

My sense is that, by "recognizing Foucault's bleak genius," the subtext is "we need God because otherwise there's nothing but depravity".

slowhadoken8• 2 years ago

Noam Chomsky called Foucault a morally bankrupt phony. I think Chomsky was being kind.

idontknowtech2• 2 years ago

Foucault is the primary intellectual force behind the contemporary social science trend of seeing everything through a power relationships lens. His influence cannot be overstated, at least in the American academy. It's bizarre.

slowhadoken8• 2 years ago

I’ve read Foucault. I’m familiar with western and continental philosophy. I studied psychology, sociology, and political science too. Foucault‘s influence, as well as French existentialism and post-structuralism in general, are to blame for the current state of social science. Boiling everything down to a cultural power struggle is a pyramid scheme, a cult that infiltrated American academia. It’s certainly not a moral philosophy and Foucault’s life reflects that.

vinteruggla• 2 years ago

Why? Any context or reference?

dcre• 2 years ago

You can watch Foucault and Chomsky debate! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wfNl2L0Gf8

viccis4• 2 years ago

Was that before or after Foucault cooked him in the debate?

paulpauper4• 2 years ago

it is wrong. Chomsky said no such thing about him as a person. He was referring to Foucalt's belief system as being amoral

rvense• 2 years ago

I think it was after they met for the debate. I don't remember Chomsky calling Foucault a phony. The quote I remember is Chomsky calling him "amoral".

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.

slowhadoken8• 2 years ago

I guess if you're a 16 year old with an IQ of 85 and are stoned out of your mind Foucault cooked Chomsky, sure why not. lmfao. get out of here.

nchmy2• 2 years ago

Cooked him? They had a perfectly pleasant and interesting conversation for the first 75% of the talk - both regularly shooshing the clueless moderator.

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

paulpauper4• 2 years ago

No. He said his philosophy was amoral. He had nothing bad to say about him as a person. the opposite actually.

slowhadoken8• 2 years ago

Incorrect. After their debate Chomsky said "he struck me as completely amoral, I'd never met anyone who was so totally amoral". Chomsky doesn't think Foucault has a philosophy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9js6LdkRE6Y&t=263s

viccis4• 2 years ago

Foucault was a genius with many of his critiques of power. The panopticon, biopower, his genealogical historical narrative techniques, etc. His works are also often a surprise to people I know who read them for the first time because they expect chattering gibberish like Derrida, Lyotard, etc., but instead meet fairly sober minded critiques grounded in historical evidence (that can and has been argued against and critiqued itself, but that's par for academic discourse)

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!

lores4• 2 years ago

Er, do you have any sources for Sartre and de Beauvoir raping young girls? I can't seem to find one.

ddulaney• 2 years ago

The allegations are originally from Bianca Lamblin. A quick-and-dirty summary is on Sartre's Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Paul_Sartre#Allegations_o..., and you can follow the citations back to Lamblin's original allegations and later reporting on it.

Cyph0n• 2 years ago

and was slandered by a fraud and reactionary

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.

slibhb2• 2 years ago

Isn't it ironic that Foucault died of AIDS? He denied the existence of HIV and famously argued something like "before medicine, there was no disease".

nataliste• 2 years ago

This is revisionism, hagiography, and whataboutism.

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]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJsf5QY12rg

viccis4• 2 years ago

You can just say what you mean.

paulpauper4• 2 years ago

Similar to Chomsky, Derrida, Rorty and other contemporary intellectual 'greats' of the post-war era , Foucault owes some of his inflated legacy to existing during a pre-internet, pre-Twitter era, when the marketplace for intellectualism was less saturated and academic press and the mainstream media provided a funnel for the masses and other academics to be fed these ideas or a diluted version of them. Thanks to twitter, podcasts, e-zines, and blogs, anyone with a degree can do a good enough job imitating someone like him and also get a lot of acclaim and status. Anyone with a doctorate or a master's degree can write a book and go on podcasts to promote it, or write a Substack blog. The funnel and gatekeeper institutions like the École normale supérieurem, Eton, or Oxford and the exclusivity and prestige they signaled during the 60s and 70s, is long gone or also diluted. In some ways this also parallels the post-Cold-War decline of Continental Europe as an economic and cultural superpower, as most of those intellectuals originated from there.

financltravsty• 2 years ago

What is next?

hackandthink3• 2 years ago

My unscientific research contradicts this thesis. Foucault became a classic who approaches Aristotle and Plato.

Anecdotally, the post-structuralists were still a curiosity in the 80s.

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Chomsky%2CDele...

light_triad• 2 years ago

If you're looking for an intellectual critique of Foucault, one of the best is Jean Baudrillard's book Forget Foucault from 1977.

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...

The Bleak Genius of Michel Foucault

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