In the latest Investigate, conservative Catholic Wishart stable occupant Agnes Mary (Amy) Brooke, obsessive author of repetitious attacks on “neo-marxist” social theory in New Zealand higher education, launched a vitriolic ad hominem attack on the late French gay philosopher, Michel Foucault (1926-1984) in the letters column of the tragic tabloid gutter glossy.

For those who haven’t read his work, Foucault was one of the key philosophers and social theorists of last century. He wrote extensively on issues like LGBT rights, women’s reproductive freedom, prison reform and capital punishment, although he didn’t always get it right- I find his positive evaluation of paedophilia abhorrent, and his initial optimism about the Shia Islamic Revolution in Iran turned out to be grotesquely optimistic. He published a string of books dealing with these concerns, of which the most thought-provoking are Discipline and Punish (1977) (penal reform, surveillance and welfare state/police regulation and classification) and his final  History of Sexuality trilogy (1979-1984), in which he challenges feminists and LGBT theorists to develop a new theory of non-coercive sexual ethics from our own narratives and cultural resources, much as the Ancient Greeks and Romans did before the advent of compulsory Catholic sexual morality and its confessional interrogation of the psyche.

And yes, Foucault did engage in consensual adult sadomasochism, and yes, he did die of HIV/AIDS. Much of that has to do with the initial denial that unprotected anal sex served as a source of transmission, as well as France’s problematic approach to any other social identity than generic republican citizenship, be it sexual or ethnic. Insofar as the consensual sadomasochism angle goes, this form of consensual adult sexual activity may be stigmatised, but has never been prohibited outright in New Zealand. I could go on- most contemporary Friedrich Nietzsche scholarship points out that Nietzsche himself was no anti-Semite, and that his work was bowdlerised by his fascist sister, Elizabeth, after his death.

However, the fact remains that over a quarter century after his death, Michel Foucault’s legacy and theoretical frameworks continue to inspire political and social movement strategy and public policy analysis. Ignorant populist ad hominem attacks like Brookes serve only to enhance his reputation as one of the foremost theorists of social change of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Biographies:

David Halperin: Saint Foucault: Toward a Gay Hagiography: New York: Oxford University Press: 1995.

David Macey: The Lives of Michel Foucault: London: Vintage: 1994.