Confronting Foucault

Michel Foucault - pronounced fu-ko, "the martialartist" to Michael Brown - is commonly relegated to the Derrida set of pomos. I find his harshest critics among the Marxists, whose ranks as of the 1980s may even have included Bernard Lewis (unnoted in Brown's bibliography). To Brown, Foucault is vital.

The Right might be more-inclined to Foucault presently. Here is why:

Foucault didn't just write about "gender studies" or whatever. He wrote Folie et Déraison and Surveiller et punir. These proposed an outsider-view of how we handle madness (in 1961 France) and how we handle crime (more timelessly). This all had to do with power/knowledge. The state imposes Commandments. Thinking otherwise is folie; doing otherwise is crime.

Foucault doesn't exactly take sides. He seems to consider all this inevitable. Such be the price of not living as the Nuer live. "Foucauldians", by contrast, by demystifying insanity and crime - as antonyms to docility - run close to raising up insanity and crime as manly virtues, against the Sheeple.

Foucault may end up remembered as more like Darwin even Ehrman, than like Nietszche. A cataloguer with an incomplete theory, picked on as representative of his sillier followers.

ASSMANN 7/11: besides cosmotheism, Jan Assmann also considered the alliance between power and memory: Cultural Memory and Early Civilization: Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 53f.