This is a great project and you are the perfect person to undertake it. Foucault scholarship has given us a reasonably precise idea of what he was up to at different point in his career, and the many people on Substack who are hostile to "theory" could stand to absorb his work in one of the ways in which it has to be absorbed—he's a great, iconic writer, he has phases one can study, he's in the Pléiade. He stands with Wittgenstein, Arendt, Keynes, (sorry) Carl Schmitt as a thinker whose life/work combination has a fascination similar to that of a poet or novelist. (He would at least have pretended to dislike being studied in this way but that's his problem.)
The more precise academic version of Foucault doesn't tell us what we should think of Foucault, but starting from it helps eliminate widespread dumb caricatures. (I'm a Hegel guy and whenever we venture out of our hothouses into the wild we meet all these ideas that seem too boring to refute about Hegel the proto-Nazi worshipper of the Prussian state. Foucault the evil nihilist is a similar straw man.) I also think it is good to start from the gay Foucault. The people who went after the neoliberal Foucault were right but they've more than made their point. (It is a very damming point if you assume your audience are the sort of people who'd be ashamed to admit they weren't part of the 5% of the French population who voted for Lutte Ouvrière in 2002 + foreign sympathizers.) Substack writing about Focuault and homosexuality that's text-focused but not academic is something we could all learn from.
Agree. He's such a pleasure to read, just for the palpable passion for learning and the feeling you're in the presence of a great mind.
Also agree about the neoliberalism lit. French anti-totalitarianism was dumb and Foucault's participation in it was also dumb. I'm sympathetic to the critics in that I'm also a pretty staid advocate of traditional party politics and social democracy, so I'm not impressed with "new style of politics" gestures (though I understand the impulse from a historical perspective). But I also just don't think what intellectuals think has much to do with long-term political outcomes; they are as determined by their historical moment as everyone else. So I find prosecution and blame-games of that sort to be boring.
Yeah, anti-totalitarianism brought out the worst side of Foucault, the academic Machiavellian. The way I see it, he promoted a bunch of shallow media stars because he wanted to take the suddenly fashionable mantle of anti-totalitarianism from the Socialisme ou Barbarie crowd (Castoriadis, Lefort et al.), who meant something serious by it and who were intellectually far closer to his own level. They’d been left-wing anti-Stalinists when this was genuinely unfashionable and they tried to define a ’68-ist politics without taking the Maoist detour.
The neoliberal-curious Foucault is imo separable from that lamentable performance and is fine. He was trying to make sense of what politics amounted to after the revolutionary horizon had faded and he was dead right to see the major neoliberal thinkers as important guides to what was coming, not fossils or dumb ideologues. The History of Sexuality Foucault is asking the more central question of how do we live in this new world, which for him conjugates the question “what does sex mean now” (especially gay sex of course) and “how do we situate our current self-understanding in the widest possible historical perspective?” “How does all this history look different seen from our current, new situation?” The people who want to wrap all of this up with neoliberalism aren’t exactly wrong, but they have unmerited confidence that there’s some easy or at least clear way out of neoliberalism, that what Foucault thought was the end of Revolution was really just a postponement.
Cheers for this. It looks like an interesting project - one I’d be interested in reading and thinking about.
This is a great project and you are the perfect person to undertake it. Foucault scholarship has given us a reasonably precise idea of what he was up to at different point in his career, and the many people on Substack who are hostile to "theory" could stand to absorb his work in one of the ways in which it has to be absorbed—he's a great, iconic writer, he has phases one can study, he's in the Pléiade. He stands with Wittgenstein, Arendt, Keynes, (sorry) Carl Schmitt as a thinker whose life/work combination has a fascination similar to that of a poet or novelist. (He would at least have pretended to dislike being studied in this way but that's his problem.)
The more precise academic version of Foucault doesn't tell us what we should think of Foucault, but starting from it helps eliminate widespread dumb caricatures. (I'm a Hegel guy and whenever we venture out of our hothouses into the wild we meet all these ideas that seem too boring to refute about Hegel the proto-Nazi worshipper of the Prussian state. Foucault the evil nihilist is a similar straw man.) I also think it is good to start from the gay Foucault. The people who went after the neoliberal Foucault were right but they've more than made their point. (It is a very damming point if you assume your audience are the sort of people who'd be ashamed to admit they weren't part of the 5% of the French population who voted for Lutte Ouvrière in 2002 + foreign sympathizers.) Substack writing about Focuault and homosexuality that's text-focused but not academic is something we could all learn from.
Agree. He's such a pleasure to read, just for the palpable passion for learning and the feeling you're in the presence of a great mind.
Also agree about the neoliberalism lit. French anti-totalitarianism was dumb and Foucault's participation in it was also dumb. I'm sympathetic to the critics in that I'm also a pretty staid advocate of traditional party politics and social democracy, so I'm not impressed with "new style of politics" gestures (though I understand the impulse from a historical perspective). But I also just don't think what intellectuals think has much to do with long-term political outcomes; they are as determined by their historical moment as everyone else. So I find prosecution and blame-games of that sort to be boring.
Yeah, anti-totalitarianism brought out the worst side of Foucault, the academic Machiavellian. The way I see it, he promoted a bunch of shallow media stars because he wanted to take the suddenly fashionable mantle of anti-totalitarianism from the Socialisme ou Barbarie crowd (Castoriadis, Lefort et al.), who meant something serious by it and who were intellectually far closer to his own level. They’d been left-wing anti-Stalinists when this was genuinely unfashionable and they tried to define a ’68-ist politics without taking the Maoist detour.
The neoliberal-curious Foucault is imo separable from that lamentable performance and is fine. He was trying to make sense of what politics amounted to after the revolutionary horizon had faded and he was dead right to see the major neoliberal thinkers as important guides to what was coming, not fossils or dumb ideologues. The History of Sexuality Foucault is asking the more central question of how do we live in this new world, which for him conjugates the question “what does sex mean now” (especially gay sex of course) and “how do we situate our current self-understanding in the widest possible historical perspective?” “How does all this history look different seen from our current, new situation?” The people who want to wrap all of this up with neoliberalism aren’t exactly wrong, but they have unmerited confidence that there’s some easy or at least clear way out of neoliberalism, that what Foucault thought was the end of Revolution was really just a postponement.