Foucault Glances
One of the first things I was told in my undergraduate training, when I was an unwary 18-year-old teenager, was: "Foucault is undoubtedly one of the greatest thinkers of the twentieth century”. This was said by an important sociology professor, holder of the highest professorial rank.
The fact is that some - somewhat problematic - questions are not taught in the academies, whose bias is clearly identifiable. Foucault: this (undoubtedly erudite) figure has some "striking" aspects, such as the fact that, towards the end of his life, between 1979 and 1984 (when he died of AIDS), he had undergone an ideological conversion that led him to be accused in France by his own co-religionists as a "neo-liberal". We will deal with this in another article. If Foucault were alive, he would perhaps appear alongside figures such as Huerta de Soto or Hans Hermann Hoppe in the name of individual freedom. But this is too little.
Unfortunately, in this article we must deal with a highly problematic aspect of this figure: the recent statements of Guy Sorman - historian and essayist - about Foucault's pederasty in North Africa during his youth. This has been revealed in multiple Spanish-speaking, Anglo-Saxon, and other media. See news.
After the death throes of the classical Marxist narrative in rich and developed societies, where the worker gained access to sumptuous goods and services thanks to the capitalist system in its post-industrial phase, classical Marxism, which spoke of class struggle and revolution of the working class with the seizure of the State apparatus by means of arms, anti-democratic discourse and the most explicit anti-republican violence, was forced to recycle itself, to metamorphose like a caterpillar into a butterfly, paying heed to Antonio Gramsci and, therefore, to rethink its struggle in terms of achieving cultural hegemony by other means and with other inputs. To this are added other highly problematic additions: the Frankfurt School with its Freudo-Marxism, as well as the substitution of the worker as the subject of the class struggle discourse by the socially excluded as the "subject of social liberation" of populist discourses (Laclau, etc.). In other words, and appealing to the lexicon of classical Marxism itself, the lumpen and the outcast of society came to take the place of the wage worker in the once class struggle, now in a struggle for social and gender liberation. The new Marxism (neo-Marxism) no longer appeals to the bourgeois worker who votes for the center-left (sometimes the center-right), but to the "excluded social minorities". Within this sociological group there are very diverse subjects: drug users, junkies, broad spectrum sexual minorities, illegal immigrants, marginalized Afro-descendants, destructive and violent Trotskyites, unemployed living on the subsidies of the social democratic welfare state model who no longer wish to work or produce, young outsiders of society, rabid gender feminists, anomic criminals, and even covert refugee terrorists who have no qualms about annihilating tens or hundreds of defenseless people in monstrous collective massacres.
Of course, "if in spite of everything Foucault’s teaching should not be excluded in the academies despite his inclinations", one could not miss the allusion that the same is done with Martin Heidegger, even though he was rector of a German University for 10 months during the National Socialist regime... Such is the prevailing "logic": if a university rector (who voluntarily resigns his position) is "forgiven", why should the same not be done with someone who summoned children in clandestine cemeteries and offered them money in exchange for acts of pederasty...?
And this is something that gradually gained special place and validity after May of 68 in France, that farce of young bourgeois and nihilists disenchanted with life, which in the words of Jean Hallier was nothing but sea foam. Jacques Lacan called them hysterical in search for a new Master. Or, as the British philosopher Roger Scruton has said in various interviews with the English media such as The Guardian, during May 68 we see the rise of a tide of authentic pathology of Western culture and the most pronounced decline of customs and morals. Of course, these opinions are those of thinkers (and I have said thinkers, not intellectuals) who are reactionary and conservative. The thing is, the decay and the degree of destruction is such in cases of certain avant-garde pop intellectuals, that becoming reactionary and conservative becomes a healthy act that reaffirms life and not death, nor perversion and nihilism disguised as wired academicism that dazzle the unwary youth of all times.
We will see here the ominous implications of two figures: the French intellectual and homosexual activist Michel Foucault, and Guy Hocquenghem, French activist and inventor of queer gay theory, who endorsed the proposals of post-structuralist intellectuals such as Deleuze and Guattari, mainly contributions of a work like the Anti Oedipus, entertainment for ruminant minds if there was every any.
(On the left Guy Hocquenghem, on the right Michel Foucault) Google Pictures
There is much talk about Foucault's intellectual contributions in the most diverse academic branches (Social Sciences, Psychology, Medicine, Pedagogy, Law, Political Science, Communication, Humanities, etc.). Contributions such as the concepts of device, discourse, statement, panoptic, disciplining, criticism of Structuralism, History of Sexuality, the word and the thing, and countless etcetera. Absolutely none of that interests us here, at least not in the way in which these concepts are presented in the classrooms of today's public and private Universities, with their prevailing political correctness.
We are interested in talking about the practical, concrete and factual implications, that is, what the thought of St. Foucault leads to (Foucaultian eulogist David Halperin dixit). And in this case, we will show one of the most perverse and execrable edges of the French intellectual. One of Foucault's biographers, James Miller, -whose biography I considered the most interesting compared to other ones- reveals the following:
“Foucault and Hocquenghem also proposed that the laws regulating sexual activity between adults and minors should be substantially liberalized. In reality, the two men argued, in principle, against the imposition, by law, of any age limit of consent. "Nobody signs a contract before making love," Hocquenghem said during a radio show (along with Foucault) in 1978. "By the way," Foucault said, "it is very difficult to establish barriers," particularly because "it may happen that it is the minor, with his own sexuality, who wants the adult '. During another public conversation in those same months, Foucault went even further and hinted the complete abolition of criminal sanctions that regulate sexual activity, including those that punish rape. 'I think, in principle, it could be said,' he explained, 'that under no circumstances should sexuality be subject to any kind of legislation... When one punishes rape, one should punish violence and nothing else. And to say that it is only an act of aggression: that there is no difference, in principle, between inserting a finger into someone's face or the penis in their genitals.” (Miller, 1995, pp. 346-347)
As far as my knowledge goes, no one has denied this piece of information. This is simply not spoken about: the other biographers do not speak, and academics and intellectuals do not speak about it. I don't know if it's ignorance or attempting to cover-up, but the data is there. Foucault is not mentioned as the pedophile activist he was. This is not the well-groomed Foucault that we read in the books, with an a prose oozing with scholars, declamatory and caliginous philosophical abstractions and ellipsis, but the Foucault of everyday life, the political activist, the homosexual hedonist and day-to-day nihilistic fighter, in the France that has long lost its Christian soul. All this began in 1789, and we can go back to a work like Philosophy in the dressing table of the Marquis de Sade, revealing the other face of the Jacobin revolutionary and Rousseaunian project for the destruction of the traditional social order. I am sorry if I offend some modernist Francoist, but someone must tell the truth. I am a friend of Plato but more of the truth. I said it. And so has the historian and psychoanalyst Elisabeth Roudinesco:
“(...) Debauchery found its most finished political form, to the point that it marked the entire century and was one of the causes of the advent of the Revolution. Orgies, profanity, economic speculation, passion for prostitution, luxury, waste and debauchery, a taste for the whip and transgression: all those practices helped to put into question the values of tradition, to which they opposed the desire to instant splendors.” (Roudinesco, 2009, p. 50)
Read carefully what is stated in this radio debate Miller mentions: we see here a typical feature of postmodern discourse (though Foucault rejected that adjective, which honestly matters little to us), the abolition of the idea of limit in the dynamic tension of the links and power relations between subjects, in this case an adult and a minor in the consent of sexual acts. The abolition of the millenary, necessary and healthy idea of limit is not only observable in the sexual, we also see it (and suffer it) in matters of criminal law: where do you think the ideological criteria came from (yes: ideological I said ) to privilege the criminal over the subject that respects the legal and social norms of coexistence? Just guess. We are not talking only about Foucault: we are talking about the progressive Intelligentzia imported into the Third World, which goes from Foucault to the School Frankfurt, and through the entire spectrum of the neo-Marxist and Gramscian postmodern progressive Intelligentzia. Who were the first "Foucaultians" outside France as soon as his works began to be translated into English? The new British left (the British New Left) of the 70s, which saw in Foucault a great and tasty spice added to their recipes for a criticism of "the social" field, as well as many "Gramscian organic intellectuals" of the Communist Anglo-Saxon underworld. (Peters, 2001, pp. 76-77)
Needless to say, what Foucault stated, in moral and practical terms, seems nefarious and despicable. This is an aspect of Foucault that is hardly widespread. We wonder what would happen to the reputation of such a famous intellectual were it more widespread in the progressive academies that speak so much about "human rights", willingly showing the purest nihilistic, dark and perverse facet to which French thinking leads when it is taken out of the books and applied social reality. Papers can resist any nonsense, but it remains unknown how many Foucaultians could bare Foucault himself without feeling sick. The conception is fully functional to the system of the new postmodern consensus imposed by the American academies co-opted by cultural, hedonistic and liberal neo-Marxism. Those inspired by the Foucaultian prose believe they can find there their supplies for liberation. They do not realize that they themselves are the stream that was already planned and driven by the reconversion of the Left and the new liberal post-Soviet consensus for decades now. The table was already laid when the dinners of liberationism felt that they should be released, only the table needed to be served, and, in the background, the rock’n’roll theme of the Rolling Stones I Can’t Get No Satisfaction sounds.
Are there any doubts about the truthfulness of the information provided by Miller? Let's see another one. The logic that Foucault defended is fully inscribed within the one defended by an organization like NAMBLA. What is NAMBLA? This is the acronym for the North American Man / Boy Love Association, an organization founded by certain sectors of homosexual minorities organized in the USA whose fight was the abolition of an age of consent to obtain sexual pleasure from minors. It is homosexual and pedophile activism, and precisely someone like Foucault not only presents similarities with the logic of these organizations, but also proclaimed himself in favor of it, at least according to certain sources. (Baldwin, 2009) NAMBLA was the object of an intelligence and undercover operation of the FBI since the late 1980s. They appointed agent Bob Hamer in the task of infiltrating and dismantling this authentic organization of perverse homosexuals and pedophiles.
FBI agent Bob Hamer
Bob Hamer is a brilliant and skilled former agent, who has left his experience in the field of infiltrating in his book ‘The last undercover...’ (2008). There, he revealed all the features of NAMBLA: Bob Hamer, in order to carry out the undercover operation, pretends to be a pedophile eager to get some insights of the organization, its dynamics, as well as its leaders and spokespersons. Little by little, he meets some of them, who bring him illegal pornographic material. The members of NAMBLA, in Hamer's words, were authentic sexual predators. (2008, p. 30) The organization moved throughout different cities of the USA, such as New York, Los Angeles and Miami. They were all over the country. In their secret meetings, they gradually revealed their purposes: the struggle to abolish the minimum age of consent. (2008, pp. 40-41) The proposal was not even to go down to an existing age, but to directly abolish any reference age, that there should be no minimal age. NAMBLA spokesmen defined the organization as a liberation movement against the inequities of the system; and their logic, according to themselves, is comparable to that of any other minority liberation movement, such as being their own homosexual movement in general. The members argued that any liberation movement has three progressive stages: a first stage where the movement is perceived as ridiculous or condemnable by social morality. A second stage, where media quotas are won through the exercise of opposition to the dominant system and mentality, and a third, where acceptance is finally installed. (2008, p. 58) All this must be gradually accomplished for the sake of a “new awakening”, a new awakening of social consciousness. One of its members, “Joe,” said things like this: ‘I’m a boy lover... it’s a universal impulse, the impulse to love the young is not immoral. It's an impulse to nurture, not something I'm ashamed of. ' (2008, p. 57). Aberrant, monstrous. Simply perverse and abject.
NAMBLA was welcomed by the US gay community from the beginning, even became part of ILGA, the International Lesbian and Gay Association. (2008, pp. 89-90). Thus, it was part of the radical faction of the gay movement. Those who claim that NAMBLA is an alien organization that has nothing to do with the commonality of the gay community and its "noble struggles" cannot hide the fact that NAMBLA was accepted at the time by ILGA, as confirmed by the former FBI agent Hamer. It was expelled only in the 90s, under pressure of the government of Bill Clinton. It was subsequently dismantled by the FBI. It is assumed that today NAMBLA is no longer active, although we ask ourselves (without being able to demonstrate anything empirically) if perhaps it may have had an impact on the last attempt of the APA elites to depathologize pedophilia in 2013.
We have seen that the APA was recently about to depathologize pedophilia. That's right: this has been about to happen recently, in 2013, during the development of the new DSM 5 psychiatry manual. It was handled in the Anglo-Saxon press media that APA would now include pedophilia as a mere "diverse" variant more of the human sexual orientation in its catalog. Once the news proliferated, with its predictable effects of scandal even on social networks, there was a mysterious reversal of the APA spokesmen, who said that in saying "sexual orientation", it should actually have read "sexual interest" reading between the lines, and not a "normal" variant (we assume, interpret) of human sexuality:
“'Sexual orientation' is not a term used in the diagnostic criteria for pedophilic disorder and its use in the DSM-5 text discussion is an error and should read 'sexual interest.' In fact, APA considers pedophilic disorder a 'paraphilia,' not a 'sexual orientation.' This error will be corrected in the electronic version of DSM-5 and the next printing of the manual.” (Leclaire, 2013, Charisma News)
Someone could say, in an attempt to rescue them with political correctness, that this could well have been a malicious manipulation of certain "conservative media." However, the funny thing is that the official document of the APA communiqué not only does not affirm that it was a misrepresentation of bad faith on the part of the press, but would even continue to correct the draft of the manual as the press itself said : 'This error will be corrected in the electronic version of DSM-5 and the next printing of the manual.' A strange "error."
Although we have no way of proving it in actual fact with primary documents and testimonies, we think that it is not unreasonable to ask ourselves if perhaps the ideas of NAMBLA and Foucault continue to operate in the deepest bosom of organized minorities, who publicly are responsible for denying any historical and political link with NAMBLA, but whose ideas continue to operate clearly from the shadows. Similar to NAMBLA is the Dutch association "Martijn", which, led today by Marthijn Uitenboogaard, has been compensated by the Court of Appeals of Arhem (Holland), whose ruling annulled the previous judicial order that aspired to dissolve such organization. When the former court order had been issued, Uitenboogaard called it an "attack on freedom of expression." (Corder, The Huffington Post, 2012). This network (founded in 1982 in the tolerant Netherlands as a "platform to discuss pedophilia"), promotes the "consensual sexual relationship" between adults and children, but yes: it is declared against any form of abuse ... however, its former president Mr. Ad van den Berg was sentenced to three years in prison in 2011 for possession of illegal pornographic material. According to him, the videos and other material of child pornography were "scientific in nature." For those who continue to doubt the similarity between Foucault's criteria and an organization like NAMBLA (we have already quoted biographer James Miller and Steve Baldwin), we can offer Foucault's own words in a 1981 interview published posthumously, where he discusses the social triumph of sexual pleasure and the reform of the system of laws of our societies, in order to open the way to “other types of relationships”, erotic and loving. And Foucault says:
“We live in a relational world whose institutions have greatly impoverished. The society and the institutions that constitute its framework have limited the possibility of establishing relationships, because a rich relational world would be extremely complicated to manage. We must fight against that impoverishment of the relational fabric. We must ensure that provisional coexistence relations are recognized, relations of adoption.” (2013, p. 116)
Then, interviewer Gilles Barbedette seemed to sense Foucault's logic of reasoning and asks:
- [adoption] Of children?
- Or - why not? - that of one adult for another. Why not adopt a friend ten years younger than me? And even ten years older? (...) We should try to imagine and create a new relational right that would allow the existence of all possible types of relationships, without any relationally impoverishing institutions being able to prevent, block or cancel them.” (2013, p. 117)
That "or" by Foucault is very tenuous and generates some suspicion: children too ...? At least the minors too, according to the philosopher. And below he says that all possible types of relationships should be allowed as part of the achievement of that struggle to be undertaken. All, and without being prevented by "impoverishing" institutions of the relational world. Finally we have seen an interesting aspect of Foucault, the minority thinker, the left-wing Nietzschean - paying tribute to Ernst Nolte's expression - that behind abstruse works where he proclaimed the death of Man (remember a work like Words and Things), and from a prose of high and bland abstraction, he was building a nihilistic thought, organic to the new liberal postmodernist consensus.
And Guy Hocquenghem? This youth activist of the 68, a Communist militant and disciple of the theories of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, was, it is said, the first openly gay man in the French media, and also founder of the "queer theory".
Queer is an Anglo-Saxon word that connotes "odd” and has become popular to denote in the social field all those small groups and subjects who resist identifying with the so-called "patriarchal" and dominant heterosexual society (what they call heteronormative, oppressive and androcentric society), making use of ultimately deconstructivist approaches applied to the conventional social world, as well as gender social constructivism. In fact, given that even American academies today consider heterosexuality itself only one more variant of the “trans spectrum” (which is highly far-fetched), those subjects who do not even know exactly where in the trans spectrum they are, the current Orwellian New Language gives them the calming category of genderqueer.
He was one of the co-founders of the FHAR: Homosexual Revolutionary Action Front and a strong advocate for multiculturalism, which does not surprise us at all. See France today. Guy Hocquenghem was obsessed with fighting against the oppression of the "normative society" and his repressive apparatus towards the homosexual subject, and he wished to import into France the model of the Anglo-Saxon sexual revolution (which I have discussed in depth in my book). Great critic of psychoanalysis (which he saw as an enemy), he considered Freud a monstrous man because of his theoretical links between homosexuality and paranoia. Hocquenghem even says it poetically with examples of the literature of the cursed French poets of the nineteenth century:
“We will find in Les Chants de Maldoror the most beautiful paranoid description of the murderous pedophile: taking advantage of the child's confidence, Maldoror sinks his nails into the child’s chest. The paranoid association between homosexuality and criminality not only constitutes a defense to homosexual libido, but also embellishes it with the charms of the bloody.” (2009, p. 42)
We have already observed how both French intellectuals - Foucault and Hocquenghem - were in favor of the abolition of the minimum age of consent for sexual acts: 'Nobody signs a contract before making love' ... The question once again is: which is the limit? If it must not be 21 years of age (as it was in the French penal code at that time), should it be 18 or 17? And if it's 17, why not 15 or 13? And if it's 13, why not 10 ...? We have already seen where this perverse logic leads.
The things is, Hocquenghem was convinced that homosexual desire is part of everyone's human nature. We do not expect an intellectual and homosexual activist to say otherwise, the point is he should argue. And his arguments come from the delusional theories of Deleuze & Guattari:
“In truth, sexuality is everywhere: in the way a bureaucrat caresses his dossiers, as a judge does justice, as a businessman runs the money, as the bourgeoisie gives the proletariat in the ass, etc. (...) Hitler put the fascists in tension. The flags, the nations, the armies, the banks put a lot of people in tension.” (Deleuze & Guattari, 2009, p. 303)
And we feel tense because of what they said. Hocquenghem adheres to the thesis of the "microscopic transsexuality" of his mentoring teachers of the Anti-Oedipus. (2009, p. 305) That is, the desiring repertoire, the one that has not been captured (or that resists the capture) of the great social and prohibitive agencies (the law of culture, the prohibition of incest, the family instance, etc.), would tend to what the authors of Anti Oedipus called "n sexes." Thus, this alleged microscopic transsexuality: “makes the woman contain as many men as the man, and the man, women, capable of entering into each other, with each other, in relations of production of desire that disrupt the statistical order of the sexes. Making love is not reduced to making one, not even two, but making a hundred thousand. That is, desiring machines or non-human sex: not one or even two sexes, but n ... sexes.” (2009, p. 305) Rarely has anything been said as far- fetched as this in the history of Philosophy and Psychology. We should see what the current Neuropsychology and Neuroscience say about it, but that would lead us to write another article.
It should not surprise us that there already exist activist movements that pretend to "legalize" incest. To the skeptics of all hours, we could mention a very recent case: the one of the Australian judge Garry Neilson. This judge surprised public opinion, but not us so much: he affirms that the time may come when we should consider incest and pedophilia as “acceptable” practices given that what is a taboo is ultimately defined by social consensus, what has been known in good Psychology for a century now as Public Opinion. And from Walter Lippmann, Kurt Lewin and Edward Bernays, we know that public opinion is manufactured with specific techniques of social Psychology and media engineering. The real truth will never be the repeated truth of the flock.
Neilson claims that, if homosexual relationships are accepted today because the cultural consensus changed, we could undertake homologous changes concerning incest and pedophilia. Perhaps - he affirms - a jury should not see so badly that a brother has sex with his sister if she is biologically prepared and “without a partner”: 'a jury might find nothing ahead in the advance of a brother towards his sister once she had sexually matured, had sexual relationships with other men and was now 'available,' not having [a] sexual partner ', and in case of getting pregnant, after all there is easy access to abortion to get rid of that stumbling thing. (Russia Today News, 2014) The offspring among relatives is more prone to chromosomal abnormalities, and that is the only “objective” reason, Neilson argues, for not wanting incest, but this can easily be avoided with contraception and / or interruption. (Molloy, 2014, The independent) Public opinion is still scandalized by these things, as it happened in Australia with Neilson, but nevertheless: may the day come when it is less and less scandalized ...? After all, as we have already shown, there is a whole tendency of writers, philosophers, judges and even mental health professionals who do not and who feel that way and fight politically for the establishment of a new moral and social order. Our time seems to have difficulties in the following aspect: the question of limits.
At least since the 1960s we have embarked ourselves on a very dangerous path, with gradual and successive “liberations”. How do you destroy a society, even a people or a civilization? Attacking the family and its most basic parameters of existence and functioning, its necessary and unavoidable preconditions: union between men and women, prohibition of incest, acceptance, and internalization of authority as a limit to desire against the rules of coexistence and respect for the elder and traditions. All this is in jeopardy. To the nihilist destroyers of our culture and civilization we say, as the Gospel says, it would be better for them not to have been born.
Sources:
APA Statement on DSM-5 Text Error. Pedophilic disorder text error to be corrected (2013, October) American Psychiatric Association. Link: http://www.dsm5.org/Documents/13-67-DSM-Correction-103113.pdf
Baldwin, Steve. (2009) Child Molestation and the Homosexual Movement. Link: http://www.steve-baldwin.com/articles/43-articles/184-child-molestation
Carena, Lucas & Dávoli, Pablo (2015) Foucault: cuando los extremos se tocan. (Programa de La Brújula en Canal TLV1). Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdbOhk5Xqg4
Corder, Mark. (2012, 27 de Julio) Martijn, Dutch Pedophile Association,
Outlawed. The Huffington Post. Link: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/27/martijn-dutch-pedophile- association_n_1630170.html
Deleuze, Gilles & Guattari, Félix. (2009) El Anti-Edipo. Capitalismo y esquizofrenia. Buenos Aires: Paidós.
Foucault, Michel. (2013) La inquietud por la verdad. Escritos sobre la sexualidad y el sujeto. Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI.
Hamer, Bob. (2008) The last Undercover. The true Story of an FBI Agent’s dangerous dance with Evil. New York: Center Street.
Hocquenghem, Guy. (2009) El deseo Homosexual. Terror anal. España: Melusina.
Leclaire, Jennifer. (2013) APA Associated Pedophilia With Sexual Orientation but Claims It Was an Error. Charisma News. Link: http://www.charismanews.com/us/41605-pedophilia-associated-with-sexual- orientation-but-apa-claims-it-was-their-error
Miller, James. (1995) La pasión de Michel Foucault. Santiago de Chile: Andrés Bello.
Molloy, Antonia. ‘Incest is no longer a taboo,’ says Australian judge Garry Neilson. (11 de Julio, 2014) The Independent. Link: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/australasia/incest-is-no-longer-a- taboo-says-australian-judge-garry-neilson-9599552.html
Outrage as Australian judge says incest, pedophilia ‘may be accepted’ by society. (11 de Julio, 2014) Russia Today. Link: http://rt.com/news/171868- australia-judge-incest-homosexuality/
Peters, Michael. (2001) Poststructuralism, Marxism, and Neoliberalism. Between Theory and Politics. Lanham & New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
Roudinesco, Elisabeth. (2009) Nuestro lado oscuro. Una historia de los perversos. Barcelona: Anagrama.