Re:The Bleak Genius of Michel Foucault
by slowhadoken on Sunday June 30, 2024 @07:11PM
(#40841179)
Contradiction isn’t a valid antithesis. Also I never used quotation marks around “morally bankrupt”, I put it together based on statements Chomsky made about moral relativism, post-structuralism, and Foucault, over a 30 year period from debate, talks, and his books including Manufacturing Consent. I understand Foucault, I understand that he’s a charlatan. Are you denying that Foucault advocated for eliminating age of consent in France or are you okay with that?
Chomsky disagrees with the philosophy, but he never called Foucault morally bankrupt nor a phony. Those are your words, not Chomsky's.
PS: I'm actually genuinely sorry you and Chomsky don't understand Foucault. It's very illuminating when you do. I don't have a great deal of sympathy for your attempted character assassination on Foucault, though. And I do appreciate a lot of Chomsky's writings, and that's why I react so negatively to your attempts to bring Chomsky into that. Chomsky's dismissal of post-modernism as "not philosophy" is simply dim, and I'd say a variant of his obnoxious habit of dismissing linguists who take a different or broader view of the subject by simply saying that what they're doing "isn't linguistics". And I actually think that the intellectual quirk that causes him to do that is the same thing that makes him struggle with understanding the actual content of Foucault.