La chute de Michel Foucault (mon article en anglais paru aux Etats-Unis)

Pour l'infirmation de mes lecteurs, je signale la parution dans l'e-magazine chrétien américain Culture Wars (mai 2021) de mon article (en anglais) qui tire toutes les conséquences des révélations récentes de Guy Sorman sur le fait que le philosophe français "post-structuraliste" Michel Foucault en 1969, maître à penser international depuis 50 ans, exploitait la misère économique des enfants tunisiens en leur imposant des rapports sexuels nocturnes dans des cimetières. En voici le début ci-dessous :

The Fall of Michel Foucault

Last month, March 2021, during an interview on France TV-France 51 channel, philosopher Michel Foucault’s former friend and “right wing” columnist Guy Sorman (who’s 77 years old now), declared: 

I think it is important to know when an author was or wasn’t a bastard (“salaud”). And when we learn that he was a bastard – just like Celine and Morand – we still can read his works. I’m not asking to burn Celine’s or Paul Morand’s books, but I believe it is important to know when an author was a terrible person. I’m talking about Foucault. What Foucault did with kids in Tunisia (in 1969) – and I saw it and I blame myself for not having denounced it at the time – drives me, not only to reject Foucault’s work, but to look back at it in a different way. It’s not about “cancel culture” like in the US, but we have to look at culture with a double sight. These things were completely despicable – with young children! – not to mention the problem of consent. They [the children] were not white, not even French. This is extremely ugly morally stuff.” Mainstream British Newspaper The Sunday Times2 was even more specific on the subject after interviewing Sorman: “Young children were running after Foucault saying ‘what about me? take me, take me’ he recalled … They were eight, nine, or ten years old. He was throwing money at them and would say ‘let’s meet at 10pm at the usual place.’ He would make love there on the gravestones with young boys. The question of consent wasn’t even raised.”

This news, coming a few days after his very anti-Christian book (mainly aimed at the early Fathers of the Catholic Church) Confessions of the Flesh: The History of Sexuality, Volume 4, published in an English translation, had the effect of a bombshell. Many French speaking mainstream media in France like Yahoo!3, weekly Le Point,4 French TV CNews,5 etc., in the Maghreb like Courrier de l’Atlas6, but also various media in different languages from Middle-Eastern Al-Bawaba7 to Argentinian Pagina128 spread the news.

Although most media outlets commented on the fact that the matter of the consent of those abused children was never raised and on the silence of the journalist who witnessed the facts in Tunisia 52 years ago, none emphasized the Satanic nature of these sexual orgies performed on tombs, something which connects to demonic realms and shows the real deadly face of the so-called “liberation sexuelle” whose most prominent 20th century prophet was Foucault.

As a matter of fact, from the French public perspective, this was just one more nail in Michel Foucault’s coffin. Foucault used to enjoy an unparalleled reputation in French intellectual left wing circles (which means in the vast majority of intellectual milieux) in the 1970s, just after the “revolution” of 1968, as a brilliant advocate of the “liberation des moeurs” (sex liberation) attacking Christianity, but also psychoanalysis and other forms of State or institutional repression of individual desire. But that tide had already begun to ebb at the end of the 1980s. When I was myself a student at the prestigious Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris (“Sciences Po”) and the Paris-Sorbonne University (from 1989 to 1991), most scholars commented on Luc Ferry’s book La Pensée 68, published in 1985.9 Professor Ferry, a proponent of neo-Kantian secular humanism and typical member of the elite, who would later become the minister of public education under Jacques Chirac at the time of the Iraqi war, rightly pointed out (with his co-author Alain Renault) that all the intellectual post-1968 trends rooted in structural linguistics like Louis Althusser’s Marxism, Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology, Jacques Derrida’s deconstructivism, Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalysis or Gilles Deleuze’s and Michel Foucault’s versions of Nietzscheanism dangerously undermined the notion of free will and moral responsibility which was an essential part of the thought of figures like Saint Augustin and René Descartes.

During the course of the 1990s, Foucault lost his influence at philosophy departments in French universities, which became more and more interested in analytical philosophy imported from English speaking countries, Foucault being considered less a philosopher and more like a historian of social institutions and their relation to the body. Paradoxically, Foucault’s second wave of success in France in the first decade of the 21st century came more as a boomerang effect from the USA through two kinds of strongholds: gender studies and LGBT lobbying on the one hand and health care sociology on the other.

Even after losing his reputation as a “real philosopher,” Foucault remained a kind of icon in the gay community as a heroic fighter for the rights of minorities. Activist writers like his former companion Daniel Defert (who sold Foucault’s archives to the Franch national library for 3.8 million euros (4.5 million dollars) in 2014 on the 30th anniversary of his death after selling part of his library for 350,000 dollars to Yale university 10 or like Didier Eribon11 who published his biography in 1989 and was a columnist in prestigious liberal media outlets like L’Observateur, Le Monde, Libération, Les Inrockuptibles, tried to preserve the cult of Foucault amongst their bourgeois (“bobo”) readers making him indispensable for the gay cause in general  and in particular for the gender studies that popped up in the 2000s and 2010s, which used Foucault as a deconstructivist tool against the legacy of patriarchy.

This influence of Foucault declined from what it had been in in the 1970s, because no one could seriously believe any more that social reality was the mere product of “discourse,” as the structuralists had claimed. But there were other reasons for the decline of his reputation. Fallout from the Sokal hoax12 after 1996 combined with the development of neurosciences and evolutionary psychology studies in the 2000s challenged the cultural hegemony of all post-structuralist thinkers,13 while the prestige of human science universities declined.

The legacy of Foucault might have survived in the ghettoes of gay rights and gender studies if another stronghold for Foucauldism hadn’t emerged around the same time, namely, the field of biopolitics and biopower that Foucault had developed as the last part of his oeuvre after 1976. As the corporate global power of Big Pharma became more and more visible after the first SARS and H1N1 pandemics, multiple controversies arose concerning the side effects of chemical medication in all fields from psychology to oncology, and exposed the grasp of medical technostructures on the public long before the outbreak of Covid19. SUITE DE L'ARTICLE ICI AVEC LE RESTE DU NUMERO DE MAI POUR 4 DOLLARS