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PAGLIA, C. What I Hate About Foucault
PAGLIA, C. What I Hate About Foucault
Camille Paglia
I never met or saw Foucault in the flesh. (He died in 1984.) My low opinion of
him is based entirely on his solipsistic, mendacious writing, which has had a
disastrous influence on naïve American academics.
Derrida's reputation was already collapsing (thanks to the exposure of his ally
Paul de Man as a Nazi apologist) when I arrived on the scene with my first
book in 1990. Lacan, however, still dominated fast-track feminist theory,
which was clotted with his ponderous prose and affected banalities. The speed
with which I was able to kill Lacanian feminism amazes even me. (A 1991
headline in the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera blared my Achillean
boast, "I and Madonna will drive Lacan from America!")
Though much diminished with the waning of the theory years, Foucault still
survives, propped up by wizened queer theorists who crave an openly gay
capo in the canon. I base the rhetoric of my anti-Foucault campaign on
Cicero's speeches in the Roman Senate against the slick operator and
conspirator Catiline ("How long, O Catiline, will you continue to abuse our
patience?"). Greek and Roman political history -- about which Foucault knew
embarrassingly little -- remains my constant guide.
"Sex, Art, and American Culture." One of my observations was that Foucault's
works are oddly devoid of women. Shouldn't that concern you as a feminist?
It is simply untrue that Foucault was learned: He was at a loss with any period
or culture outside of post-Enlightenment France (his later writing on ancient
sexuality is a garbled mishmash). The supposedly innovative ideas for which
his gullible acolytes feverishly hail him were in fact borrowed from a variety
of familiar sources, from Friedrich Nietzsche, Emile Durkheim and Martin
Heidegger to Americans such as sociologist Erving Goffman.
Foucault's analysis of "power" is foggy and paranoid and simply does not
work when applied to the actual evidence of the birth, growth and complex
development of governments in ancient and modern societies. Nor is
Foucault's analysis of the classification of knowledge particularly original --
except in his bitter animus against the Enlightenment, which he failed to
realize had already been systematically countered by Romanticism. What
most American students don't know is that Foucault's commentary is painfully
crimped by the limited assumptions of Sussurean linguistics (which I reject).
I'm afraid I bring rather bad news: Over the course of your careers, your
generation of students will slowly come to realize that the Foucault-praising
professors whom you respected and depended on were ill-informed fad-
followers who sold you a shoddy bill of goods. You don't need Foucault, for
heaven's sake! Durkheim and Max Weber began the stream of sociological
thought that still nourishes responsible thinkers. And the pioneers of social
psychology and behaviorism -- Havelock Ellis, Alfred Adler, John B.Watson
and many others -- were eloquent apostles of social constructionism when
Foucault was still in the cradle.
When I pointed out in Arion that Foucault, for all his blathering about
"power," never managed to address Adolph Hitler or the Nazi occupation of
France, I received a congratulatory letter from David H. Hirsch (a literature
professor at Brown), who sent me copies of riveting chapters from his then-
forthcoming book, "The Deconstruction of Literature: Criticism After
Auschwitz" (1991). As Hirsch wrote me about French behavior during the
occupation, "Collaboration was not the exception but the rule." I agree with
Hirsch that the leading poststructuralists were cunning hypocrites whose
tortured syntax and encrustations of jargon concealed the moral culpability of
their and their parents' generations in Nazi France.