What Foucault Got Right

On violence, libel and Queer Theory.

[CONTENT NOTE: THIS ESSAY DISCUSSES HOMOPHOBIA, TRANSPHOBIA AND CHILD SEXUAL ASSAULT]

In these days of climate collapse and collective moral crisis, it helps to be able to pin your existential dread on outsiders. Preferably-fictional outsiders, who, being fictional, cannot fight back. The modern moral panic against queer and gender non-conforming people is escalating, and moral panics need strawmen.

Enter French philosopher Michel Foucault, who was dubbed “a beacon of today’s “woke” ideology” by the Sunday Times, despite having died thirty-six years previously. The same article repeats with undisguised glee the allegation that Foucault was “a paedophile rapist”, as if the two were linked. It’s true that Foucault’s writings on power, sexuality, crime and discipline have influenced generations of authors, activists, artists and scholars, including feminist, anti-racist and socialist thinkers as well as the LGBT movement.And it’s hardly surprising that his legacy has been attacked in the years since his death What is surprising is how enthusiastically he has been demonized by people who obviously have no interest in any of his actual ideas, up to and including the British Foreign Secretary, presumably on the basis that it’s fine to libel the dead and fun to libel the French.

As ‘anti-woke’ sentiment has snowballed around the Anglosphere, Foucault has been recast as a satanic avatar of wokeitude and the godfather of ‘Queer Theory’ - which, for today’s reactionaries, means a degenerate ideology promulgated by sinister intellectual perverts who want to destroy all social norms, ban pronouns and dethrone God.

As with most moral panics, the version of Queer Theory that exists in the minds of the morally outraged bears about as much relationship to actual Queer Theory as any given North American herbivorous megafauna does to buffalo dressing.

Actually existing Queer Theory refers to a loosely affiliated collection of writers and theorists who are all interested in gender, power and langauge and and seem to spend a lot of time looking for hidden meanings in Pixar films. Their work gets taught to hungover liberal arts students and turns up in the free libraries of squatted communes next to ‘the anarchist cookbook’ and ‘The Da Vinci Code’*. Some of them are feminists, some of them are socialists, and many are neither. Foucault is neither - nor, in fact, did he ever call himself a Queer Theorist. He was a theorist of transgression - but not of abuse.

In this essay, I will attempt the impossible.

In this essay, I am going to talk about the works and legacy of the latest folk-devil as if what actually happened actually mattered to people in the grip of a paranoid cult. I intend to take seriously the notion that Foucault and other mid-century philosophers were defenders of child abuse, and ask what actually happened there, and why.

I’m subjecting myself to this for three reasons: firstly because I believe that any vaguely credible allegation of abuse should be treated seriously. Secondly, because it’s ethically and intellectually important. And thirdly, because - well, because I’ve got some karma owing. I didn’t read Foucault properly when I was actually supposed to, in university, when I was too young, drunk and horny to properly pay attention to teachers who were just trying to expand my mind.

Foucault would not have considered this an excuse, and nor would my teachers, who nonetheless tolerated our panicked cramming with patience.

In honor of that patience, I’m doing what I never did back then, and what very few people appear to be doing now - I’m actually reading the books, interviews and sources, at least enough to form a considered opinion based on something other than wild stereotyping and rumor.

Buckle up.