Re: foucault-digest V2 #567

> From: Daniel Smith <t22ds@xxxxxxxxxx>

> Nice to see the list discussing some real fundamentals of Foucault's work.

Yes, and while this list may not always be interesting at least it doesn't
reach the depths of articles like the one excerpted below. You have to
wonder sometimes.

--Jeremy

_________________

French intellectuals don't age well

Robert Fulford
National Post

Saturday, July 27, 2002

The most famous exports of France have always been cheese, wine, and ideas.
The cheese is excellent, the wine has good and bad years, and the
illustrious ideas are consistently dreadful. Today, in universities across
the West, Michel Foucault (1926-1984) exemplifies the bad French idea at its
most brilliant and its most poisonous.

Foucault spent his life proving that the institutions of modern civilization
do nothing but disguise one essential truth: the powerful oppress everyone,
always. He yearned for revolution, the bloodier the better. In 1971 he said
that when the workers take power, they may create a murderous dictatorship:
"I can't see what objection could possibly be made to this." When he visited
Tehran he praised the Ayatollah Khomeini's movement as a "religion of combat
and sacrifice." He paid no attention to data and instead sprayed the air
around him with ideas informed by paranoid fantasies. He received his
reward: Dissertations on Foucault now fill university archives while armies
of art critics, feminist rhetoricians, and post-colonial theorists spend
their days quoting him.

He was wrong about everything, which only adds to his stature. He followed
the path of Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-80), who found excuses for the crimes of
all communist despots but considered the United States profoundly evil
("America is a mad dog"). Sartre was so wrong that he was considered truly
great. Charles de Gaulle compared him to Voltaire.




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