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Comment by janice1999 | Hacker News Reader

janice1999

> In practical terms, Foucault’s and his followers’ assault against sexual normalization has helped bring about institutions that disavow normativity at every turn.

I assume this is an oblique defense of Foucault's lifelong and vocal campaign to remove the age of consent so adults could have sex with children. Foucault was also recently accused of having purchased boys for sex by his friend Guy Sorman.

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2021/4/16/reckoning-with-...

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The author is a social conservative. He's by no means defending Foucault's "assault against sexual normalization".

My sense is that, by "recognizing Foucault's bleak genius," the subtext is "we need God because otherwise there's nothing but depravity".

Apparently bullshit, though: https://www.lexpress.fr/idees-et-debats/michel-foucault-et-l...

Guy Sorman wasn't Foucault's friend, and later said (about his statement) that he never actually saw anything he described, but just a 'convergence of disturbing clues'. You have to bear in mind that accusing gay people of pedophilia is pretty standard fare for homophobes up and to this day.

IIRC Focault still signed a petition to legalize sex with children. Not sure why, but it wasn't an entirely unpopular opinion among (often) leftist intellectuals in Europe at the time.

I mean, it seems a bit unclear what his political positions actually were, but it does seem they were just opinions. As philosophers go, that's pretty small beer: Thales used to roast people alive in a brass container, Marcus Aurelius was responsible for numerous genocides, and Heidegger was a card-carrying Nazi.

>Thales used to roast people alive in a brass container

Source?

That would be Phalaris of brazen bull fame, not Thales.

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

Foucault, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Jacques Derrida signed a petition to decriminalise pedophilia [0]. The age of consent at that time in France was 15.

"In a sense, all the rest of my life I've been trying to do intellectual things that would attract beautiful boys."

[0] https://x.com/AuronMacintyre/status/1806019580315463689

Foucault (and others) wanted to be rid of the law because (a) it seemed incoherent to hold minors to be responsible for crimes while denying them agency in matters of sex, (b) he did not think minors were automatically unable to give consent and that a test of maturity should be used instead, (c) the law was discriminatory and gave different consent ages for homo- and heterosexual sex, (d) historical precedent showed that laws about sex became more and more restrictive, and he did not want any law at all to be specifically about sex, and (e) it was his mission to challenge power structures, so he may have been trolling a bit, or at least making a point to give power a good sweat.

That article says they were probably teenagers, not young children.

> After interviewing residents of Sidi Bou Said who had known the philosopher, his report concluded: "Michel Foucault was not a paedophile, but he was seduced by the young Ephebes."

Not exactly vindicating, but not the same level of horror, I suppose. It's not exactly a crazy idea given Foucault's own words quoted elsewhere in this thread.

Aside from this, the pretension is literally dripping from that sentence, my god.

It's difficult to value the "genius" of people (and frankly entire fields) who seem to apply most of their cleverness towards being inscrutable for no good reason.

I think the purpose of the inscrutability serves is to "idea launder" obvious falsehoods into something believable, much like the convoluted path one takes to convert stolen money into believably-legal money.

Well to be fair there are two arguments, one is that you can't use normal commonplace phrasing to describe something that's at odds with the 'normal'; the other is that in a publish-or-perish academic world each new generation of thinkers invents a new jargon to differentiate themselves from their predecessors (and keep their jobs). Not that both couldn't be simultaneously true, but I think it's a little too cheeky to say they're making it up for no reason at all.

"Idea laundering". You've neatly summarized what I believe Curtis Yarvin to have been doing, both with his political writing and his computational silliness like Urbit.

The article about Foucault's pedophilia is worth reading. I'm not really surprised. When I read the piece on Pierre Riviere decades ago, it creeped me out.

https://markkukoivusalo.org/thinkers/foucault/cp/pierre-rivi...

I don't think you copied the right link.

I no longer have the book. Unfortunately, I can't find a corresponding quote online that I seem to remember.

I mostly remember the feeling there is something wrong with this guy.

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