Talk:Michel Foucault

Is he teh Pendulum guy?   ^Contribs_Talk 08:19, 19 June 2008 (EDT)

Nope. That's a Foucault of a different stripe - Leon Foucault was a physicist who did work on the Earth's rotation, the pendulum was part of his experimentation.PFoster 09:40, 19 June 2008 (EDT)

You need to read La Fornication comme acte culturel if you can find a copy. Most of them have disintegrated, being printed on Algerian toilet rolls rejected by Quality Assurance as unsuitable for their primary purpose. In Malcolm Bradbury's trenchant exegesis of this seminal work, he remarks that shouting "Foucault!" (to anglophone ears it sounds an awful lot like fuckall) outside a pub is a common theme in certain postmodernist circles. Sprocket J Cogswell (talk) 16:30, 23 December 2009 (UTC)

I had not heard that Foucault was an AIDs denialist, is there a possible reference for this?

trolling troll trolls?--En attendant Godot 16:18, 18 July 2011 (UTC)

ooops, my bad, good annon reader. I see the picture now. slap me for thinking you a troll.--En attendant Godot 17:25, 18 July 2011 (UTC)

That was a meme in my high school policy debate team. Policy debate relies on biopolitics arguments a lot, and some seniors told us things about Foucault like that he fucked goats and the whole denying AIDS->dying of AIDS thing. I added that to the article, and I admit that I have no clue if it's true. I do believe that he was a signer of a European petition to legalize pedophilia. I read that on Wikipedia, and I didn't look at the source, though.--User:Brxbrx/sig 18:31, 18 July 2011 (UTC)

He was a self admitted sexual headonist. and he in one very out of context quote "denied" aids, but that wasn't waht he was denying, really. he wasn't, you know, an "HIV denier". he was denying what was comming out of both france and Reagan's mouth that this was a GAY disease. saying "gosh, i don't see how a disease cares what or who you fuck, just if it can get into your system". Most of these "foucalt was a perv" quotes come from Miller's The Passion of Michel Foucault. Which may or may not be truthful, but is very much sensationalized. I was trying to find a way to still have something fun in the picture, but i'm not good at humor and what i said kept being worse than what you said. :-) --En attendant Godot 18:37, 18 July 2011 (UTC)

This is a pretty good article that brings up somethign i never considered, seeing as I read Foucault in the 90's when i knew about gays, aids, etc. the issue: how do you write about a man who loves sex, and who is also gay. do remember, in france, the street word for gay is Pede. It's no coincidence he's said to have had sex with animals, children, and probably dead people. His lover denies all but the more headonistic aspects of gay adult male on male wild night out sex. http://www.cross-x.com/topic/29164-rumors-about-foucault-aids-objectivity-etc/ --En attendant Godot 18:41, 18 July 2011 (UTC)

Most of this paedo stuff sounds like plain ordinary slander to me - I've read numerous interviews where Foucault explicitly draws the line at paedophilia and says children should be 'protected'.--Feline1 (talk) 14:13, 18 June 2012 (UTC)

Cabeza's edits

Cabeza, do you have a cite for this:

Though his anarchistic ideas are strongly associated with the academic New Left following the 1970s, by the late 70s his interests had settled upon right wing alternatives to the liberal welfare state, such as revolutionary theocracy (exemplified by the Islamic Revolution) and the economic ideology of the Chicago School.

Although I make no claims to be an expert on Foucault, it seems very odd to me that an out gay man would support the Islamic revolution... or that a French intellectual would lend his support to the Chicago school. Sounds fishy. (((Zack Martin)))^™

Oh no, I thought you were making this up... now I realise that you are largely right, Foucault was really really stupid. My estimation of him suddenly plummets... (((Zack Martin)))^™ 13:34, 13 August 2011 (UTC)

If I'm honest I never thought the sort of philosophy and sociology that Foucault represents was ever a legit subject. ADK^{...I'll scratch your alpaca sandwich!} 13:39, 13 August 2011 (UTC)

good old hegemony, telling us what are "legit subjects"... --Lord Shang (talk) 14:04, 17 June 2012 (UTC)

He had mixed feelings about the right-wing "nouvelle philosophie," and endorsed a book written by one of that ilk, but to say he was on the right is absurd. Foucault never wrote about welfare. In fact, I'd say that letting the poor starve for the comfort of those with money would likely chafe with his ideas of biopolitics, that quarantining undesirable elements of society is wrong.--User:Brxbrx/sig 13:53, 13 August 2011 (UTC)

But what is a gay man doing supporting the Islamic revolution, which to this day executes homosexuals? Words can't explain how wrong, how dumb, how speechless, this is... (((Zack Martin)))^™ 23:50, 13 August 2011 (UTC)

Personally, i think the author of the quote you tossed up is playing a bit with the terms. NOthing I've read of MF's (in his french writings, at least) would lead me to think he's advocating anything about Islam as we know it. He wrote **specifically** about an Iranian revoulution that was Islamic Rev Theology, which is ***not*** islam as most people know it, it's a revolt against trad Islam from within islam.En attendant Godot 23:58, 13 August 2011 (UTC)

Well, I suppose Ayatollah Khomeini did indeed revolt against traditional Islam within Islam. Traditional Islam said, well, we've got these things in our scriptures that say kill these people, kill those people, etc (to be fair, Jews and Christians have the same things in their scriptures too); but let's take that in context, let's show a bit of discretion, let's engage in a bit of interpretation, we don't have to always do exactly what they say. Khomeini rebelled with the radical, revolutionary idea, that when the scriptures say KILL, one must KILL. None of this oppressive contextualism and non-literalism.... I suppose in the same way, Osama bin Laden and friends represent a revolt against traditional Islam from within Islam. Traditional Islam emphasises seeking peace, avoiding war when possible, protecting the lives of innocents, showing respect to non-Muslims, etc. — bin Laden and his fellow travellers are rebelling against those oppressive constraints, in favour of the right to war, and the right to kill as many infidels as you can... I wonder what Foucault would have said about bin Laden if he had lived to see 9/11... would he have found something transgressive, revolutionary, in that act too? Probably... (((Zack Martin)))^™ 00:14, 14 August 2011 (UTC)

As a fan of Foucault (something that will doubtlessly get me some flak on here; *prepares flameshield*), I'd really like to see a citation for that claim as well. I know he had some odd views at times, but that just doesn't seem like him at all. HolyKatana (talk) 05:22, 5 November 2011 (UTC)

A good example of one of said odd views would be his very controversial defense of a petition to remove age of consent laws entirely. Although it's worth noting that he was not the only prominent French intellectual to sign the petition, at least according to him. He said Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Louis Althusser, and others signed it in addition. Which is a bit odd. I haven't read the transcript of the radio dialogue between him and two other supporters of the petition, Jean Danet and Guy Hocquenghem, which is where he defended it, so I can't state my opinion on it, but being familiar with his philosophy, it's not surprising at all that he would defend it. It's something I'm pretty uneasy about, but as I said, it's consistent with his philosophy. The claim that he supported radical Islam and the Chicago School, on the other hand, doesn't sound like him at all, although he did change somewhat in his later years, so maybe he did. I'll attempt to find some sources, because I'm curious about this. HolyKatana (talk) 17:54, 5 November 2011 (UTC)

I consider myself Foucauldian. I can't find any evidence that Foucault "supported" the Chicago School, though he wrote about them with a certain level of sympathy as aiming to resist the expansion of government authority (Slavoj Zizek also writes about Ayn Rand with a certain level of sympathy too, so that doesn't mean he identified with neoliberalism). As for the Iranian Revolution, I do hold that a great mistake in Foucault's thought precisely because it was inconsistent with the rest of what he was saying, but on the other hand I see the appeal of it as a subaltern movement (though that's not a term that Foucault himself would ever have used as far as I know). -Lord Shang (talk) 14:03, 17 June 2012 (UTC)

Incidentally I'm mildly amused that liberals (in the technical sense) will look at Foucault and then get surprised and angry at him for not being liberal, that's kind of the whole point --Lord Shang (talk) 14:38, 17 June 2012 (UTC)

Peculiarly French?

I don't know if the idea of a public intellectual is peculiarly France, I can think of plenty of German examples (Habermas is even still alive) :P --Lord Shang (talk) 18:05, 18 June 2012 (UTC)

Possibly. But they kinda disqualified themselves from the game in 1939 ;) --Feline1 (talk) 19:22, 18 June 2012 (UTC)

How is Foucault a moonbat ?

He seems pretty rational. Diacelium (talk) 17:01, 8 December 2016 (UTC)

The pic of Nosferatu

Hi ! Is there a reason for the picture of Nosferatu, which is not a picture of Foucault ? 82.233.212.182 (talk) 15:02, 12 April 2018 (UTC)

It's a joke. This wiki will occasionally put silly gags like that. Monochroma (talk) 05:49, 17 November 2021 (UTC)

Politics.

I can't understand the moonbattery category. Foucault was very moderate politically all his life. On the other hand, he was anticommunist for most of his adult life, which says a lot considering the rapid conversion of the French intellectual milieu to maoism.--190.174.108.161 (talk) 07:48, 30 July 2018 (UTC)

I too find it strange that he is described as a socialist or authoritarian moonbat, given he wasn't particularly known as a socialist thinker AFAIK, and given that much of his writing is explicitly about analyzing authoritarian structures. I'm willing to accept the category of moonbat given his controversies, but I don't think it's accurate to call him socialist, and most certainly not authoritarian. I'm going to remove them and put him under "left-wing moonbattery", since I think that is at least general enough. Monochroma (talk) 05:49, 17 November 2021 (UTC)