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Foucault was a genius with many of his critiques of power. The panopticon, biopower, his genealogical historical narrative techniques, etc. His works are also o
by viccis 2y 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!
- lores 2y agoEr, do you have any sources for Sartre and de Beauvoir raping young girls? I can't seem to find one.
- ddulaney 2y agoThe 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_of_sexual_abuse 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.
- lores 2y agoThanks!
- Cyph0n 2y 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.
- slibhb 2y agoIsn'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 2y agoThis 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJsf5QY12rg
- viccis 2y agoYou can just say what you mean.
- stefantalpalaru 2y ago[dead]