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!
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.
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]
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.
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.
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"
> 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.
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.
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.
Foucault (and others) wanted to be rid of the law because (a) it seemed incoherent to hold minors to be responsible for crimes while denying them agency in matters of sex, (b) he did not think minors were automatically unable to give consent and that a test of maturity should be used instead, (c) the law was discriminatory and gave different consent ages for homo- and heterosexual sex, (d) historical precedent showed that laws about sex became more and more restrictive, and he did not want any law at all to be specifically about sex, and (e) it was his mission to challenge power structures, so he may have been trolling a bit, or at least making a point to give power a good sweat.
I mean, it seems a bit unclear what his political positions actually were, but it does seem they were just opinions. As philosophers go, that's pretty small beer: Thales used to roast people alive in a brass container, Marcus Aurelius was responsible for numerous genocides, and Heidegger was a card-carrying Nazi.
Foucault, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Jacques Derrida signed a petition to decriminalise pedophilia [0]. The age of consent at that time in France was 15.
"In a sense, all the rest of my life I've been trying to do intellectual
things that would attract beautiful boys."
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.
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.
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.
Well to be fair there are two arguments, one is that you can't use normal commonplace phrasing to describe something that's at odds with the 'normal'; the other is that in a publish-or-perish academic world each new generation of thinkers invents a new jargon to differentiate themselves from their predecessors (and keep their jobs). Not that both couldn't be simultaneously true, but I think it's a little too cheeky to say they're making it up for no reason at all.
"Idea laundering". You've neatly summarized what I believe Curtis Yarvin to have been doing, both with his political writing and his computational silliness like Urbit.
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.
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.
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.
It's bizarre to see you argue on the one hand that he negatively impacted the quality of social science research, then on the other hand declare by fiat that his personal life counts as data point against the quality of the same work!
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."
I'm saying he used for moral relativism as a way to rationalize his immorality. Foucault's "Fashionable Nonsense" was problematic because it rationalized things like pedophilia which he also strongly advocated for in public along with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.
With the problems of modernism apparent in the philosophical academy, continental and especially leftist philosophy had a huge void of ideas. Post-structuralism took root precisely because it shrugged the idea of having An Answer but also explained many of the problems with modernism and salvaged the ideas of the Left as best as it could without having to exhume Hegel viz Marx. Rational critiques of post-structuralism remain as lurid as ever but I still see a huge void in modern western philosophy that post-structuralism dances in the ashes of.
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.
You can analyze the philosopher and their work. Socrates' system of thought can be understood without knowing he fought in the Peloponnesian War, that he was beloved, and that his wife was a shrew. But his philosophy makes even more sense when you know those personal details because context matters. For instance David Hume was an empiricist but accounts of his life make little to no sense. Besides motivations, personal details usually illustrate the limitations to a philosophy. That being said I don't think of Foucault as a philosopher, I think of him as a rhetorician and charlatan.
The very fact that Max Stirner, and anything from anyone with some notion of "Anarchism" in their ideological descriptions is explicitly not something you're aware of is very telling of how the main stream academy has unjustly left Egoism and related ideas to languish in obscurity.
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)
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
"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
According to the moral nihilists and atheists that are Christians, it was God who dictated what is objectively good, bad, ethical, and sociopathic cultural destruction.
So social conservatives are just upset that their authoritative God being is dead. Harsh but true.
That's pure melodrama. There is no God, so he can not die. Good and bad, right and wrong, are usually pretty obvious but people are greedy, weak, and stupid. 16% of the population can't comprehend morality and 50% struggle with the idea. After that it's context, willpower, and virtue. In a game theory sense most people are going to tend towards selfishness and pretend it's self-preservation. It's human behavior.
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.
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.
Chomsky said "he struck me as completely amoral, I'd never met anyone who was so totally amoral". Chomsky doesn't consider post-structuralism, and by extension Foucault system of thought, to be a philosophy. Foucault is a rhetorician.
Interpreting charitably: someone who had what was at the time a death sentence of an infectious disease and (if allegations are true) sexual relations with people who could not legally consent ... might suggest a certain amorality or immorality.
(I'm not specifically familiar with either Foucault's behaviours or Chomsky's description, I'm simply referring to the discussion here on HN, and its guideline "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith." <https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>.)
You said "Chomsky called Foucault a morally bankrupt phony". He never said anything like that, and you should not use Chomsky's name to prop up your opinion of Foucault's philosophy.
This is a Monty Python skit. Chomsky called him amoral and his philosophy fake. He doesn’t disagree with Foucault’s “philosophy” he thinks it’s fake. A moral person doesn’t swingle people with lies. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ohDB5gbtaEQ
I am contradicting you because you are taking his words out of context.
Chomsky disagrees with the philosophy, but he never called Foucault morally bankrupt nor a phony. Those are your words, not Chomsky's.
PS: I'm actually genuinely sorry you and Chomsky don't understand Foucault. It's very illuminating when you do. I don't have a great deal of sympathy for your attempted character assassination on Foucault, though. And I do appreciate a lot of Chomsky's writings, and that's why I react so negatively to your attempts to bring Chomsky into that. Chomsky's dismissal of post-modernism as "not philosophy" is simply dim, and I'd say a variant of his obnoxious habit of dismissing linguists who take a different or broader view of the subject by simply saying that what they're doing "isn't linguistics". And I actually think that the intellectual quirk that causes him to do that is the same thing that makes him struggle with understanding the actual content of Foucault.
Contradiction isn’t a valid antithesis. Also I never used quotation marks around “morally bankrupt”, I put it together based on statements Chomsky made about moral relativism, post-structuralism, and Foucault, over a 30 year period from debate, talks, and his books including Manufacturing Consent. I understand Foucault, I understand that he’s a charlatan. Are you denying that Foucault advocated for eliminating age of consent in France or are you okay with that?
It’s not a “personal attack”. If a man drinks to excess everyday and I refer to him as an alcoholic I’m not attacking him. It’s simply an unpleasant fact. If I provide evidence to support a statement and someone irrationally denies it then it’s fair to say they’re in denial.
Search HN via Algolia for "by:dang personal attacks" to see his guidelines. In some cases he'll spell these out in more detail and the rationale behind them, which should further clarify rule, intent, and rationale.
Generally, mods' goals are something of a dual mandate: intellectual curiosity (see: <>), and trying to keep the discussion from boiling over, which it's constantly on the verge of. I'm not finding the comment I'd had in mind yet, but this one at least hints at the concept: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32588063>.
For clarity: I'm not a mod, I occasionally disagree strongly with mod's positions. But I've also come to understand, if at times grudgingly accept, their principles.
The point is that if you're consistently violating HN's guidelines, you'll find yourself penalised. Mostly by ordinary participants such as myself, but if you're persistent and insistent, mods will eventually step in.
And "just telling the truth" isn't a defence, justification, or excuse.
If you want to explore this issue further, you are free to search though dang's voluminous set of responses on this and other topics.
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!
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