chapotraphouse

Wow I didn't realize there was such violent debate about this. Are you aware of any evidence that he knew he had AIDS and tried to give it to others? some people directly say he didn't know, e.g. Edmund White:

He himself wasn’t sure what his illness was until the last few months (he died in 1984). He was horrified at the thought that he might have infected his partner but fortunately he hadn’t.

In my cursory search, claims that he was deliberately infecting other people seem to come from one book, The Passion of Michel Foucalt. John Knoblock sums up the opposing view:

Foucault was in Berkeley only in 1979, 1980, when no one knew about the epidemic, and in the spring of 1983, when he was not yet ill. When he became ill in the summer of 1983, he thought initially that his persistent coughing was a pulminary infection which get better "as soon as I am in California." His experiences in California in the fall of 1983 are not well known, and those in a position to know--which means a very small number of confidents in the French department there who shared his tastes, suggest there were few experiences. James Miller assembles what gossip he could find in an effort to test the idea that Foucault deliberately infected others, but concludes that the answer "may never be known" because there is very little evidence, and what there is is contested by people in a position to know.

Much more willing to believe charges of pederasty, Allen Ginsberg style, without investigating. But intentionally spreading AIDS is pretty unusual.

Yeah mans was a piece of garbage. The older he got the more reactionary his politics and the more idealistic and maturbatory he became. If what people are interested is in his earlier, more structuralist work, then frankly they can find that elsewhere. If they are interested in his later work on sexuality, well frankly there are far better works on the history of sexuality. And that's not even touching his politics (that of a self-indulgent petit pourgeois pseudo-radical who clearly deeply distrusted the working class) or his personal life. There's been alot of debate of it, but frankly I think it's clear that Foucault had clear preferences over socialist alternatives for the form of Neoliberal culture and ideology that was emerging in the late 70s and 80s, given that that he saw it as genuinely opening up new fields of possible identities and practices. Whether that is true is, in a sense, secondary, as it reveals a lot about his thoroughly un-Marxist understanding of the relationship between politics and identity, and ignores the question and what would be sacrificed in that process. Frankly he was an individualist to the bone.

I was recently reading Maurice Godelier (an actual great French Marxist anthropologist), and in a foreword he wrote in the late 70s he speaks with utter and justified contempt of the useless petit bourgeois masturbation of Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze and Guatari, speaking about it as basically already outdated. The thing is that he was correct. These thinkers were revitalized due to their being taken up in during the Neoliberal period beginning at the end of the 70s, notably in the US under the guise of 'French Theory', and was then imported back into France. In other words the favoring of these theories over Marxism in the disproportionately influential American bourgeois academy contributed to reestablishing the legitimacy of these theories in their country of origin.

People really need to ask themselves why the bourgeois academy, and reactionary bourgeois academics, and so infatuated with these thinkers and why they are willing to have entire courses on them whereas there is nothing similar when it comes to Marxism, despite the fact that the latter is one of if not the most influential political tradition of the 20th century, and that Marx is one of if not the most influential philosopher of the last several hundred years. The reason is that they provide the perfect web of intellectual masturbation in which people can think that they are doing or thinking something politically and socially radical, when frankly there is not actual much original contribution of value in their work. All the worthwhile comments of Foucault on the nature of science can be found in other, superior thinkers of the Historical Epistemology School or among Marxists of the time and before.

Honestly it's especially infuriating given how much pernicious influence this has had on the modern social sciences and humanities. As an example, I was recently having a conversation with a bourgeois, liberal historian, and they were essentially saying that my application of Marxist concepts to the past was 'anachronistic' because I was applying a 'metanarrative' to explanation of the past, by trying to apply a general model to explain historical phenomenon, and that capitalism was "not a concept at the time". Like motherfucker. Adam Smith never uses the word capitalism. So did it not exist as a social phenomenon at the time? Did neutrons not exist before we theorized them? Honestly the intellectual level of the social sciences and humanities in the West has declined to such a degree that literal leading fucking professors are not able to think in concepts but just in words based on the most braindead social and linguistic relativism applied to theoretical entities or the references of the terms of our theories that we'd normally only hope to expect from an edgy teenager reading Nietzsche. For him, and many others, history has increasingly become the actitivity of collecting more and more particular, minute details without daring to use them in a broader structure for explanation. He was literally basically defining history as anti-scientific, and it's not surprising given that frankly I'm not sure how anyone can seriously study history and not come out with a generally Marxist POV, and given he is a bourgeois liberal who therefore has to avoid Marxism at all cost, so therefore obviously the history he does will be theoretically weak af. Another point here is that he is a liberal who is not explicitly postmodern or poststructural in orientation, but is still so influenced by and so passive towards that general culture in the social sciences and humanities that he nevertheless shares their anti-scientific conception of social science.

And YES, Foucault did explicitly justify pedophilia. Whether he ever committed those acts is something that is uncertain, but fuck him regardless.

I recommend reading the following:

https://monthlyreview.org/2023/06/01/the-myth-of-1968-thought-and-the-french-intelligentsia-historical-commodity-fetishism-and-ideological-rollback/

https://mronline.org/2021/12/31/the-fbi-file-on-foucault/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_petitions_against_age_of_consent_laws

That's a bit of a contrarian hot take. I don't rate the postmodernists all too highly but they did make meaningful contributions to studies of power relations and so on. To say a 'significant' amount of his philosophy was about pedophilia justification isn't true, even if it is true that the French postmodernists did have a tendency to veer in that direction on rare, but still noticeable and notable occasions.

gotta separate the art from the artist a bit here, can't deny he was onto something with "everything is a prison, basically". It's a useful lense to be able to look at the world through