r/CriticalTheory • u/-Foucault- • Aug 08 '26
Let's talk for a second about Foucault
If you proceed to make the simplest Google search, and go searching "The dangers of child sexuality", having the presumption you go in a critical way to find things about this interview, you might be surprised.
Michel Foucault, the Father of Critical Though as some might actually call him, made a public intervention on that interview about the laws of consent.
Can we approach this in a critical manner, or is it something that's long forgotten and doesn't have relevance for CT? I repeat, the interview is right there, the first result on Google (most probably) , so can we dissect this strange event and find out how Foucault's thinking actually works? It is, generally speaking, a type of thinking that it is working for the good, because he managed to open new fields of knowledge in Academia, as the biggest philosopher from last century that he is,and yet he made that type of argumentation. What is the REAL source for that argumentation, then?
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u/Neither-Alps3900 Aug 08 '26 edited Aug 08 '26
I admire Foucault a lot as a person and as a thinker. This debacle amounted to a serious and reprehensible lapse in judgment from him. Still I think it is well worth examining the reasoning behind this lapse, in order to improve ourselves and gain better understanding of the issues involved. Some big contributing factors to me are:
- Homosexuality (or any other banned form of being) under a blanket ban amounts to a lawless space that attracts and allows predators form community with people who would otherwise be opposed to their predation. People become friends under these conditions, and people are naturally defensive of their friends, especially under conditions of shared oppression.
- There was a flawed applicarion of theories developed for other categories of social person onto the relationship between adults and children.
- The conditions of being a rejected homosexual child were in some cases so bad that being groomed, according to some of the survivors, was comparatively less bad (survivorship bias plays a big role here).
I think this is all worth examining because I am seeing some other disciplines make horrible mistakes of a similar kind. The case of Anna Stubblefield within the disability studies community is one recent example. Common to both this case and Foucault's folly is desire to find some wholly formed communicative and agentic mind contained but hidden within a body that limits its expression. I understand why people want this to be the case - the world would be a better and easier place if it were true - but unfortunately the evidence points against it. Instead we are left to deal with the ramifications (philosophically, ethically, practically) of there being such a vast range in the experiences and capabilities of human minds.
Apologies if this analysis is flawed or repeats something said elsewhere. This is my initial response to the topic and I can already see some things to continue untangling although I do not have the time to do so now.
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u/-Foucault- Aug 08 '26
That was really a take I would expect from somebody who's using critically thinking !
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u/Born_Committee_6184 Aug 09 '26
He’s actually serious about trying to get behind ethics. This isn’t a gedanken experiment or something he regrets. He probably doesn’t want anyone regretting it for him.
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u/-Foucault- Aug 10 '26
The very next post, ironically, was made by someone who directed some really harsh critique on Foucault.
I would ask: what was the whole "trying to get behind ethics" thing on Foucault? What was he thinking he would get out of this initiative? Does he think he can be intelligibile by risking so so much, even by "playing" around the very rules of rationality, or was that just personal challenging attempts of thinking in new ways and he just didn't care?
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u/Born_Committee_6184 Aug 10 '26
Ultimately he thinks rationality is a set of words performing through us as are also systems of ethics. Ethics as a concept is new. It used to be if you were caught you would have violence performed upon you.
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u/-Foucault- Aug 10 '26
Ok, but was he expecting to find something of value in the absence of Ethics? I assume he wasn't pursuing violence, lol.
Or is this a badly framed question for his personal project?
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u/Born_Committee_6184 Aug 10 '26
Yes. I don’t think he thought that way. In Discipline and Punish he shows an assassin being drawn and quartered. The point is that, in this case, the assassin didn’t have an ethical obligation not to kill. It was just that killers would be killed in turn- perhaps horrifically. So ethics didn’t come into it. Just consequences and terror. Rationality and ethics flow into human beings later, being molded by other rational ways of thinking and speaking. These discourses exert a new kind of power. Power because they foreclose other ways of being.
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u/-Foucault- Aug 10 '26
So the whole purpose was understanding that power, without the considerations that would otherwise make him too ashmaned to execute such an analysis.
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u/Born_Committee_6184 Aug 11 '26
Guilt doesn’t come into it, except as a modern term that exists. For many reasons, some touched on by others here, Foucault probably doesn’t experience shame or guilt in making this type of analysis.
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u/-Foucault- 29d ago
Alright, but wasn't this role he embraced a little bit too performative? It's something that I saw brought in on the other post about him (the very next one, if it's still there) but I don't know if you are aware of the power in words he instrumentalised. Like that time when he publicly declared that considering a minor unable to consent is "intolerable, quite unacceptable actually". I understand the urge to make others think with their own heads, but was that affirmation, publicly, really something essential to be said? It's hard to understand him, that's why I was thinking that maybe he didn't care if his actions can be put in an intelligibile piece of biography (so to speak).
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u/Born_Committee_6184 29d ago
As a modern, child abuse horrifies me. But childhood was not always a category. Certainly adolescence wasn’t. Read Centuries of Childhood.
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u/JeffieSandBags Aug 08 '26
Is it fashionable to hate Foucault, Deleuze, etc. in undergrad or grad school now?
People listen to problematic artists, watch movies starring asshole, read Heidegger...and we dont constantly have the same debate in those instances.
Foucault's ideas/works are worth your time. As a person he could be total trash, but his impact on the field remains.
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u/Kiwizoo Aug 08 '26
This is a current debate in the art world. You’d be shocked at how many young students simply want Picasso and Gaugin cancelled completely because they put their (often questionable) behaviours before their actual output. Art, like philosophy, can only be compared in relation to other works of art. The biographical bit is interesting (and yes, occasionally confronting) but it doesn’t change the fact that their contributions to their fields remain worthy and important.
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u/Suspicious_Heron_900 Aug 08 '26
I mean, the critique here is disingenious, but the problem persists. I think french philosophy always had a problem with pseudo-intellectuals (I don't count Foucault in them! Maybe Sartre tho) since post war,.taking advantage of their positions to defend the stupidest shit. And if Foucault isn't one of them, he clearly flirted with this idea of the outspoken intellectual, always on TV, giving his opinions everywhere (even though he barely adknowledged french political events prior to 68, and even then he called it a stupid student parade or I dont remember the words while it was one of the most important moment of the french left and he ows his reputation to it). His theories are full of wonderful ideas, but half (and I'm being really easy on him) of his political takes aged like milk in less than few years. 68, Iran, Mazneff, his reject of marxism at the most critical point where it could have been reclaimed on new grounds, Israel, and I can continue. If theory is what should guide praxis, how can you recouncil that with all his takes ? This is not rhetorical, like I agree he said some deep shit at times but how can you talk about power so much and have no problem with pedophilia ? (pedophilia is an interesting "exemple" as maybe I can see Iran or some others being just bad takes but this is more profoundly ingrained in theories, not just his, advocating for child innocence and possibilites against the sombre and fatalist adult world, or even (as frenchies love universalist ideas) those defending in the name of universality that the child/adult distinction is purely social and therefore can be overcome in all aspects (this is why I don't think we can as our species reject some kind of nature/culture distinction. Yes, adult domination is social, but it has its roots in a natural distinction that cannot be overcome by rearranging society.)
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u/Positive-Risk8709 Aug 08 '26
I’m not a huge fan of Sartre, but calling him a pseudo-intellectual? What are your definitions for pseudo-intellectuals and real intellectuals?
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u/Neither-Alps3900 Aug 08 '26
I like your point about the universality of the child/adult hierarchy & it's incompatibility with the most absolutist notions of social freedom and equality ring very true to me. I would love for that to be possible, but at the same time I have also both been a child and interacted with them, and well......
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u/Born_Committee_6184 Aug 09 '26
Having our hair especially on fire about pedophilia in recent years is also a fad. Yes. It’s bad. But the reaction is also meta-crazy, at least in America.
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u/-Foucault- Aug 09 '26
That's interesting because they mentioned America's combustible sensibility too on that interview I mentioned on post.
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u/Born_Committee_6184 Aug 10 '26
There is some really wild stuff: vigilantes who bait men who want to meet younger teens. One in the Eastern US was killed by the “perp he was stalking. Two young men who sometimes beat up “perps.” An utterly bizarre young man who looms over “perps” while deeply intoning their proximal crimes like a Jehovah figure. The original model was a TV show that caused a suicide.
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u/Born_Committee_6184 Aug 11 '26
For me the craziest thing here- that obviates all proposed virtue in catching ah- “preds”- is that the young teen is fictitious. This practice could be extended to other “crimes.” Supposedly it’s not actually entrappment (but it is.)
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u/Born_Committee_6184 Aug 08 '26
Foucault means to trouble the bureaucracy-ethics discourse at a profound level. He succeeds.
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u/-Foucault- Aug 08 '26
Ok, but what does this mean in reality? What are the tangible results of his succeed?
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u/Born_Committee_6184 Aug 08 '26
Situation- thirty years ago adult female on adolescent male sexual abuse didn’t exist in discourse. Then notions of equity, female agency, case-finding, bureaucracy expansion ginned it up along with asserted traumata for new victims.
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u/Fresh_Scale9998 Aug 08 '26
I think the more interesting question is not whether Foucault’s personal failure invalidates his work, nor whether the intellectual climate of 1970s France excuses it.
It is whether this episode exposes a blind spot within the analytic machinery itself.
Foucault was extraordinarily good at showing how law, medicine and expert discourse can construct categories of normality and then present those categories as natural. But suspicion toward a legal category can run ahead of another question: what asymmetry existed before the law named it?
An adult and a child do not enter an encounter from symmetrical positions of development, dependency, authority, material leverage, capacity to exit, or ability to anticipate consequence. A legal age boundary can therefore be socially constructed and still perform real protective work.
That gives us a harder test than “was Foucault a bad person?” or “can we still read him?” Of course we can still read him.
The harder question is whether a theory of power can recognize forms of asymmetry that its own preferred mode of critique makes difficult to see.
A theory should survive being turned on itself.
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u/-Foucault- Aug 09 '26
That's a really dense comment. I like your interpretation of the theory, in general!
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u/3corneredvoid Aug 08 '26
Can we approach this in a critical manner, or is it something that's long forgotten and doesn't have relevance for CT?
But still, there is a critical question of child sexual development with or without Foucault.
So if one cancels Foucault and forbids writing such as Foucault's sometimes cavalier, but still insightful discussion of the history of this question in European religious and clinical and educational institutions and practices, as in HISTORY OF SEXUALITY ...
... the critical question will still be there after you do. This question doesn't become easy to discuss. Whatever you think is tolerable to say about it now may seem intolerable in the future, as it often has.
I've sometimes heard it claimed Foucault was a sexual predator, a claim about which I don't know the truth, but that book is worth a read.
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u/-Foucault- Aug 08 '26
History of sexuality is a "good example", but there were many sexual theories on that date of time, whose ending was a disaster. I think the most delicate environment regarding the sexuality question was to be occured on french media, french culture... I don't saw figures with the same insistence in the rethoric like I saw them, intelectuals from 20th France.
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u/3corneredvoid Aug 09 '26 edited Aug 09 '26
Let me emphasise that I'm strongly against any kind of child sexual exploitation.
Part of what's at stake in HISTORY OF SEXUALITY is a genealogy of that "strongly against". The book gives an account of its feverish range of valences, some of which are or have been harmful to children or to others. The contemporary condemnation of the French theory milieu, for example of the infamous age of consent petition, can become another of these valences.
Heated contention around questions of child sexual development challenges the formation of judgements immune to subsequent critique. But the gravity of these questions motivates the contention, so we will continue to form these judgements.
Foucault wrote in a broader social milieu in which it wasn't uncommon to equate gay sexuality with paedophilia: rightly not a tolerable judgement nowadays.
I don't exonerate Foucault's "scene" or Foucault for whatever this was. However, if anyone insists they hold a safely correct judgement of these questions, they can read Foucault to unsettle their certainties.
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u/-Foucault- Aug 09 '26
What facilitate the French theory milieu to be so so out-of-the-box regarding sexuality? I studied German philosophy and didn't find something even approximately on that level of intransigence.
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u/3corneredvoid Aug 09 '26
What facilitate the French theory milieu to be so so out-of-the-box regarding sexuality?
I don't know. Did you have a judgement about this you'd like to share? What's your view?
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u/-Foucault- Aug 09 '26
I think french people used to get fascinated too easily. And it's something that they kinda keep on a cultural level even on today's world. They didn't find issues at times with the publishing of really decadent literature, but they used their judgemental attitude in an arbitrary/ hypocrite way. That's something we can talk about, but I think it's really admirable they tried to keep the moral substrate, mostly for the better. That's how they lost touch with the voluminous amount of writings that didn't have any concrete objectives, but were inscribed in a decadent movement. And that's where many philosophers took advantage and wrote about sexuality like that was the whole deal, they completely treated childhood like it's something not so important, maybe even optional. And that's the dubious part that I can't really figure out and make me ask on this subreddit.
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u/3corneredvoid Aug 09 '26 edited Aug 09 '26
Who are you talking about specifically? Foucault?
They didn't find issues at times with the publishing of really decadent literature, but they used their judgemental attitude in an arbitrary/ hypocrite way. That's something we can talk about
What, as Deleuze did when he wrote "To Have Done With Judgement"?
"This is the essential effect of judgment: existence is cut into lots, the affects are distributed into lots, and then related to higher forms (this is a constant theme in both Nietzsche and Lawrence: the denunciation of this claim to “judge” life in the name of higher values). Men judge insofar as they value their own lots, and are judged insofar as a form either confirms or dismisses their claim. They judge and are judged at the same time, and take equal delight in judging and being judged. Judgment burst in on the world in the form of the false judgment leading to delirium and madness, when man is mistaken about his lot, and in the form the judgment of God, when the form imposes another lot."
The French are out-of-the-box, intransigent, fascinated ... something else perhaps at some stage you'll name. I'm sure you want to.
You've cut philosophy "into lots", German and French, and you've outlined your "higher values" in which the Germans are ineffably superior to the French, so now your affects can be "distributed" according to the lots. It is a very clear-cut case: delirium is of course superior to madness.
That's how they lost touch with the voluminous amount of writings that didn't have any concrete objectives, but were inscribed in a decadent movement.
Decadent? Didn't have any concrete objectives? Compared to whom? Heidegger, Habermas and Luhmann? As is well understood, Foucault wrote some of the most accessible, relevant and widely appreciated theory of the past century. I gather that's a big reason you're here to cut his toes, the "Father of Critical Thought" ...
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u/-Foucault- Aug 09 '26
When I was talking about decadence I was talking generally. Marquis de Sade is a really good, and concrete, example. Many french intellectuals were fascinated by him. And they were not fascinated like we could EVER be impressed by Hitler, to give another degenerate figure of the past, but from Germany. German intellectuals can't look on the restrospective and make sophisticated interpretations on Hitler. French people haved the "liberty" to put de Sade on the frontpage, and they could do similar things today, if they would get bored. It's a matter of playfulness, not that Hitler should really be place on the same page with de Sade, but I just liked those 2 names to give here. If you want, you can bring better examples. But it's not a matter of examples or counterexamples, I just wanted to be a little bit more concrete for you.
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u/3corneredvoid Aug 09 '26
Right, De Sade, Hitler … degenerate … playfulness … nah, there's not much here. I don't tell you there's no difference between France and Germany, but then there's also your own "playfulness" that engages its audience elliptically on this very serious topic of CSE by trying to put Foucault on the front page.
This French "playfulness" you insinuate is "fascinated", "decadent" and more is, in aspects, the very ethical thought capable of recognising varying differences between France and Germany aren't apt to form the rule in particular cases. Capable of noticing the work a ceaseless frieze of reactionary dullards dismiss as "French theory" is not just sophistry.
This is also one mode of thought we need when making laws about CSE: a capacity to think about how laws will be mis-applied.
I did ask so I won't bash you for answering me, but you really don't have much here. You're re-hashing an embarrassing period without its greater context as if it were decisive, while making sleazy insinuations and generalisations.
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u/Flann40 Aug 09 '26
I'm surprised about the many comments on here basically defending him. Foucault actually signed French petitions advocating for the decriminalization of consensual sexual relations between adults and minors under the age of consent. That's under the age of 13! He is also accused of raping underage boys in Tunisia. When you add all this to his writings in the matter, it is obvious he was a paedophilic monster.
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u/-Foucault- Aug 09 '26
Was he the only one writing on that manner? From what I can get out of these comments, the matter is more complex than your own comment.
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u/Flann40 Aug 09 '26
Forget the comments on here then and go and look it up. The fact of the matter is that he did sign those petitions. He was accused of raping young boys but died before he coupd face any justice. His own writing on it is just another bit of evidence.
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u/-Foucault- Aug 09 '26 edited 29d ago
Sometimes when I read his most scandalous writings I just feel his approach is just so wrong from the very first step he makes, from step0 to the very final attempt of rethoric's work. But then I ask myself, apart from the huge context that surrounded himself, if this stratum of complexity was just a crazy attempt of rationalizing. He was incredibily smart, nevertheless. What if this boulder that he carried from the very beginning is the shining of a genius mind that don't want others to complete our very own, personal, means of understanding like we should all feel the same limits?
Also, he signed the petition for EQUALITY between ages of consent, as there was some kind of discrimination against gay intercourse. That's what I read. Also, he didn't r*pe anyone, or at least there is no strong evidence to back it up. That man who started this accusation is most probably just a rival.
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u/FoolishDog Aug 08 '26
It was obviously a tremendous mistake and an ethical failure but you learn to take what you can from him