He's like our god in France

Michel Foucault's The History of Sexuality: 4: Confessions of the Flesh has just been published in English translation.

Foucault's History of Sexuality changed the way we think about power, selfhood and sexuality forever. Arguing that sexuality is profoundly shaped by the power structures applied to it, the series is one of his most important and far-reaching works.

It's reviewed in today's Sunday Times:

Foucault famously resisted any direct interest in his personal life. “I am no doubt not the only one who writes in order to have no face.” (You can see why.) “Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same . . .”...

Yet, conversely, he did propose that the writer’s key work is, “in the end, himself in the process of writing his books. The private life of an individual, his sexual preference, and his work are interrelated not because his work translates his sexual life, but because the work includes the whole life as well as the text.”

In the most revealing biography of him, The Passion of Michel Foucault (1993), James Miller accordingly explored the way in which S&M in the bathhouses, the various forms of domination and submission Foucault practised there, those “violent orgies”, were deeply connected with his writing, dedicated as it was to uncovering the power relations behind all social and cultural forms in history.

For, startlingly various as his 20 books were, Foucault’s aim was always to show how power operates in all forms of knowledge...

The conjunction of power and sexuality is surely revealed most clearly in the exploitation of the young by the old - in particular if the young and vulnerable are African children and the old and powerful are rich white men. Like, um, Michel Foucault:

The philosopher Michel Foucault, a beacon of today’s “woke” ideology, has become the latest prominent French figure to face a retrospective reckoning for sexually abusing children.

A fellow intellectual, Guy Sorman, has unleashed a storm among Parisian “intellos” with his claim that Foucault, who died in 1984 aged 57, was a paedophile rapist who had sex with Arab children while living in Tunisia in the late 1960s.

Sorman, 77, said he had visited Foucault with a group of friends on an Easter holiday trip to the village of Sidi Bou Said, near Tunis, where the philosopher was living in 1969. “Young children were running after Foucault saying ‘what about me? take me, take me’,” he recalled last week in an interview with The Sunday Times.

“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’.” This, it turned out, was the local cemetery: “He would make love there on the gravestones with young boys. The question of consent wasn’t even raised.”

I'm not sure "make love" is quite the right phrase there.

Sorman claimed that “Foucault would not have dared to do it in France”, comparing him to Paul Gauguin, the impressionist said to have had sex with young girls he painted in Tahiti, and Andre Gide, the novelist who preyed on boys in Africa. “There is a colonial dimension to this. A white imperialism.”

Sorman says he regrets not having reported Foucault to police at the time or denounced him in the press, calling his behaviour “ignoble” and “extremely morally ugly”.

But, he added, the French media already knew about Foucault’s behaviour. “There were journalists present on that trip, there were many witnesses, but nobody did stories like that in those days. Foucault was the philosopher king. He’s like our god in France.”

Oh dear. No wonder he resisted any direct interest in his personal life.

For Sorman, Foucault’s behaviour was symptomatic of a distinctly French malaise dating back to Voltaire. “He believed there were two morals, one for the elite, which was immoral, and one for the people, which should be restrictive.”

He continued: “France is still not a democracy, we had the revolution, proclaimed a republic but there’s still an aristocracy, it’s the intelligentsia, and it has had a special status. Anything goes.” Now, though, “the world is suddenly changing,” Sorman added.

Foucault's other great claim to fame, apart from his apparent paedophilia, was his enthusiasm for the Iranian revolution, which he celebrated as signifying a new "political spirituality". That was just before they started hanging the gays.

Comments

[DD]

You have the word of one French right-winger for this lurid story. Sorman is a climate denialist to boot. No victims.

[Mick H]

A French right-winger and a climate denialist! Sacré bleu!

[Sherr]

This sort of thing goes back a long way in France. A recent WSJ article details some. It's quite a read [1].

[1] https://archive.is/Oeath

The WSJ is about Kouchner vs Duhamel, but goes over ground back to the 60's e.g. Sartre, Roland Barthes, Bernard Kouchner. Cohn-Bendit is also tarnished [2]

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/jan/28/kateconnolly.theobserver

The French report regards a petition set up in 1977, signed by many great and good personages, to free some men accused of child molestation.