The Bleak Genius of Michel Foucault

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!

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"

https://medium.com/@noahjchristiansen/jean-baudrillards-call...

https://teddykw2.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/je...

> 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-...

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