Michael C. Behrent - The True Foucault The issues most import | Политическая теория и философия (Political theory and philosophy)

Michael C. Behrent - The True Foucault

The issues most important to Michel Foucault have moved from the margins to become major preoccupations of political life. But what did Foucault actually teach?

As Foucault’s standing has climbed on the right, it has fallen on the left. A decade ago, left attention focused on whether Foucault’s discussions of neoliberalism in the 1970s suggested that his philosophical commitments harmonized with the emergent free-market ideology: hostile to the state, opposed to disciplinary power, and tolerant of behaviors previously deemed immoral. Recently, the locus of the leftist critique has, like its conservative counterpart, shifted to cultural politics. Thus the social theorists Mitchell Dean and Daniel Zamora maintain that Foucault’s politicization of selfhood inspired the confessional antics of “woke culture,” which seeks to overcome societal ills by making the reform of one’s self the ultimate managerial project. At the same time, Foucault’s standing has suffered a debilitating blow in the wake of recent claims that he paid underage boys for sex while living in Tunisia during the 1960s. These charges have brought new attention to places in his writing where like some other radicals of his era he questioned the need for a legal age of consent.

https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/the-true-foucault