Veeky Forums's opinion on Foucault?

Also Foucault's generally pessimistic outlook on power and its omnipresence doesn't fit well with the rosy/naive view of the world of "leftists", and emancipatory movements

ultra faggot that took reactionary nazi philosophy and used it for leftism and therefore invented the regressive left and SJWism.
press.princeton.edu/chapters/i7705.html

>member of the communist party
>anti marxist

Pretty much. I've read Focault as an outright reactionary, and it's very pleasing reading from that perspective. He's skeptical of any notion of 'progress'. The History of Sexuality triggers SJWs hard. He basically predicted tumblrism and laughed at it before Tumblrism was a thing.

>When I say 'liberal', I mean regressive Leftist
you need to start using words correctly.
liberalism is enlightenment based
post structuralism/postmodernism is anti enlightenment

One thing I like about Foucault: he argues that any attempt to address oppression and power imbalances will just shift the power imbalance elsewhere, such that oppression (and repression) will continue to exist in less noticeable but equally, if not more, insidious and controlling ways.

This is certainly pessimistic, but Foucault is probably right in many respects; laws against "hate speech" and the rise of counter-terrorism surveillance to keep us safe seem to illustrate his point.

>took reactionary nazi philosophy

How so? As a Neo-Reactionary myself, I must wonder what you mean.

Foucault was extremely anti-power and anti-hierarchy, whereas we advocate hierarchy.

Again, this is probably where us Europeans and you Americans (I'm assuming you're American) get caught up in semantics.

It doesn't matter anyway/. But considering the fact that Classical Liberals advocated a non-hierarchical structure, I fail to see how he was anti-Liberal.
If anything, he was anti-authority.

I actually don't care about him personally but he gets used as SJW justification so often I have come to hate him by association. I know that is unfair but at this point I don't give a shit.

Yes, he is often used to justify Queer theory and social constructivism, which are both pillars of Social Justice and the regressive Left.

But Foucault himself would have absolutely hated the regressives and SJWs. They are very pro-censorship, which is a form of power, which obviously Foucault was very against.

I think he'd be ashamed to find his theories being used the way they are nowadays.

I feel sorry for the guy in that way, because many people's first exposure to him will be through those course. Indeed, I myself was first introduced to him by watching a lecture on Queer theory on YouTube.

This one to be precise:
youtube.com/watch?v=7bkFlJfxyF0

Did he change his way of life in the end? He was reading a lot of virtue ethics.

Way of life?

Do you mean his personal life or his beliefs?

Either way, it's no to both.

He remained very anti-authority, although he very reluctantly showed his support for the Socialist Party in France in 1981 (source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Foucault#Final_years:_1980.E2.80.931984)

Personal life.

What do you mean?

a terrible influence

In my country pedagogists teach future Math or Language teachers that School is like a prison because of him.

I can't see someone who studied virtue ethics hard participating in orgies and things like that.

No, he was still a fag at the end of his life.

>future Math
what

Well then, can you explain how I could prove it to you empirically?

It is not as if there is a study on "how many times in a debate individuals get called a homophobe on average."

An avid producer of unsophisticated ideas that parade themselves as sophisticated ideas.

Shit, sorry, wrong thread.

Literally every continental ever.

>Foucault was extremely anti-power and anti-hierarchy, whereas we advocate hierarchy.
I wouldn't say reaction necessarily means an advocation of hierarchy, but an awareness of it's origins, and skepticism of it's easy dismissal. A lot of Veeky Forums neo-reactionaries are monarchists, but monarchs themselves, especially monarchical authority being divine right, was a modern imposition, on a much more level society, in order to curb the inordinate power of nobles.

Focault seems like he would agree with the theory that Louis XVI was overthrown not for holding too much power, but not holding enough. The revolution imposed a stronger hierarchy with the mandarins of the centralized French state at the top, using not only hard, but soft power at their disposal.

You seem like you would have some decent reading material. Care to share?

>I wouldn't say reaction necessarily means an advocation of hierarchy

You're right. After all, all Reactionaryism is in a sense is a reversion to a previous era in time wherein a desired system was in power, and that of course depends on the country and culture.

For example, Neo-Reactionaryism in the West is meant to signify a wish a return to Conservatism and traditionalism, whereas Neo-Reactionaryism in China would likely mean a reversion to Maoism.

>Focault seems like he would agree with the theory that Louis XVI was overthrown not for holding too much power, but not holding enough.

I agree. He held too little power over his subjects.

Well, I'm working through two of Focualt's books right now. He's a very difficult read, because French academia fetishizes obscure language. Actually, it's not just French Academia, it's the French public. In order to be as widely read as Focualt, you basically HAVE to be unreadable. He's much more direct about his ideas in interviews and such.

Anyway, the two books are "Madness: The Invention of a Concept" and "A history of sexuality."

Madness the History of Concept is mainly a good place to understand where Focault is by training a psychiatrist. 90% of the book is just his thoughts of psychiatric care. But in trying to write about that, he comes to a problem: The premise of modern psychology is bullshit.

He starts with relatively mild criticisms: Models of how psychiatric illness function tend to use metaphors of childlike states and loss of function. This, as a practical matter doesn't work, because you simply can't understand things that way. Neurosis has constant positive function. Not positive in a 'is a good thing' sense, but positive in a 'the brain is actually doing something' sense.

He gives the example of a kleptomaniac. Kleptomaniacs would be, and still are, frequently are, talked about as people who simply are incapable of not stealing, or resisting the urge to steal.

This, Focault points out, is inadequate as an explanation. What a kleptomaniac actually does is a lot more difficult than what a thief does. You see, a Kleptomaniac puts on a very convincing attempt to fool people into thinking he is sincerely stealing, and let them see it. The shopkeeper, the police, the judge, etc. Not that what he's doing doesn't genuinely break the law, but what he really wants is to be caught in the act.

This alone can resolve the competing desires to be chastised and to receive affection, and kleptomaniacs when blocked off will find novel ways to resolve this complex.

(ugh, had to rewrite this all)

He then traces back the origin of this comparison to diminished capacity and childlike states to the origin of psychology. And there he finds, more or less, that it's a bunch of fedora tippers using their enlightment to label anyone they don't like as sheeple.

The History of Sexuality is interesting. It's the book that starts the whole 'gender and sexuality is a social construct'. But reading the actual book leaves a much more complex legacy then SJWs can take. Afterall, reactionaries know social constructs are IMPORTANT. And it's not like this is unprecedented. Simple Biologism tell us that men are, by definition, masculine, performing the social roles of men. The Romans didn't think this way. For them, Masculinity was an ideal, and one that not all men and peoples achieved.

His central contention so far though is that rather than introducing a repression of primitive sexuality, the modern age has turned sexuality into a discursive object, that is, a thing best expressed and formed in words, in an almost platonic sense. And these choices of words have real meaning. And as I mentioned, in doing so, this book laughs at Tumblr before Tumblr existed:

"We must... abandon the hypothesis that modern industrial societies ushered in an age of increased sexual repression. We have not only witnessed a visible explosion of unorthodox sexualities; but – and this is the important point – a deployment quite different from the law, even if it is locally dependent on procedures of prohibition, has ensured, through a network of interconnecting mechanisms, the proliferation of specific pleasures and the multiplication of disparate sexualities."
This also creates things that, as mentioned, trigger the fuck out of SJWs such as "Homosexuals didn't exist before the 19th century".

Going back to his bugaboo of tracing the origin of ideas and the power behind them, and his work in Madness, he finds that those same founders of psychology had the key role. In their attempt to pathologize behaviors, they created the concept of homosexuals as people, and in doing so, inadvertantly created the idea that that that particular people have rights.

A good way to understand the discursive/non-discursive distinction is to think of the distinction between Veeky Forums and tumblr (and tumblr's other face, /pol/)

Veeky Forums doesn't differ from tumblr because of a repressed, buttoned up, het only sexuality. We have /d/ /aco/ and blatant fetish threads on every board including this thread. Nothing captures this non-discursive trend better than Veeky Forums's fascination with traps (and to a lesser extent, futa).

This eroticism defies conventional modes of sexuality. It resists classification the 'heterosexual' nor the 'homosexual' mode. But just as important, it is not 'something else' either. We have no trapsexuals on Veeky Forums. Trap threads come and go, with no interest in verbalization of the concept beyond 'shut up and fap'. We have the physical drive existing in it's own state, without abstraction.

To fit things into a sort of Hegelian dialect, we then get the Victorian and /pol/ish discursive reasoning: Certain sexual desires are 'degenerate', and people who engage in them or even have an interest in them, fall under a different rubric, the other tribe. And once created, the other tribe immediately begins defending itself, it now has a common identity and is more dangerous.

He died young, but not young enough

Hmmm, I'm a biochem major and this shit about psychology would trigger so many psych majors I know. But for the most part I do have to say psychology in it's beginnings and all the way up to the 80's was hilariously fucked up. The fact that people were treating it like a hard science is probably the reason why so many people have a huge mistrust of the field today. You should read up on some of the psychologists of the 50's and 60's and their shenanigans.

>homosexuals didn't exist before the 19th century
Not sure about this. I've heard this before from a Stalinists trying to justify Stalin making homosexuality illegal. Homosexuality was it's own subculture in many places across the world, even before the 19th century. It was more acceptable, but definitely not in public in most societies. That's just looking at it from a Eurocentric perspective. I get what he's saying though, with the idea that all these gender/orientation identities being fixed descriptions of variable preferences.

Gotta reaffirm my position here.

I get what you are saying about homosexuals being created, but hatred of homosexuals and their subsequent "othering" has been a thing far longer than . Plus, homosexuals weren't just treated as bad by themselves, but they were lumped in with pedophiles, rapists, and other people the society would deem degenerate. The homosexual tribe was created long before the first official psychologists.

An article mentioning queer theory and gender performance framed biopower in the context of the child-producing man-woman system, how faithful is this to Foucault's original literature on biopower and if so in which literature?

If my conception of Foucault is correct, if you happen to be one that /pol/ considers degenerate your most promising strategy and the value of Foucault's observations is an ability to exploit predictables in the man-woman-children systems, IE families use more perishables, are reliably more conservative and paranoid in regard to their choices, infrastructure since the dawn of civilization has been essentially an electrical circuit for feeding and garrisoning pregnant women and programming men to keep the circuit alive and stable

Participants in Male on Male sexual behavior was often criminalized and widely hated by society. I'm a medievalist so this provides my perspective, but the wide understanding before the modern era was that homosexuality was a particular form of fornication and a result of the sin of lust. A sin that virtually everyone one is tempted to in some form.

The 'lumping together' is working at things from the back end. We now 'know' that homosexuals are a different thing from pedophiles, but for example, the Uranist subculture didn't see themselves that way. We'd now say some of them were homosexuals, and some of them were pedophiles, and some of them were both, but those would all be labels imposed on these people, who thought they were Uranists.

The Stalinists are being absolutely retarded, because the terms homosexuality and even earlier, sexual inversion were made explicit in the 1870s. Stalin's criminalization of homosexuality was couched in 'scientific' terms.

AIDS

Sodomite

Seems like I have to get cracking on Foucault when I get the time.

>medievalist
Is that the same as monarchist?

No, that's a category of academia. Interdiscplinary approach to the study of the Medieval period.

A marxist post-structuralist continental Ecole Normale Supérieure professor and feminist activist was teaching a class on Martin Heidegger, known hermeneuticist.

”Before the class begins, you must get on your knees and worship Nietzsche and accept that his genealogical method was the most highly-evolved theory the continent has ever known, even greater than Hegel's dialectics!”

At this moment, a brave, rational, positivist analytic philosopher who had read more than 15000 pages of Popper and Wittgenstein and understood the raison d'être of empiricism and fully supported all modern hard sciences stood up and held up the constitution.

”How universal is this text, frenchfag?"

The arrogant professor smirked quite Jewishly and smugly replied “It's not universal at all, fucking positivist, its 'truth' is rooted in our shared understandings about culture, the subject and the nexus of power and knowledge”

”Wrong. It’s been 225 years since human reason created it. If it was not universal, and post-modern relativism, as you say, is real… then it should be regarded as a myth now”

The professor was visibly shaken, and dropped his chalk and copy of On Grammatology. He stormed out of the room crying those ironic post-modern crocodile tears. There is no doubt that at this point our professor, Michel Foucault, wished he had pulled himself up by his bootstraps and become more than an AIDS ridden sadomasochist interested in fisting. He wished so much that he had some kind of truth to hold on to, but he himself had written to disprove it!

The students applauded and all rolled into American universities that day and accepted Wittgenstein as the end of philosophy. An eagle named “Formal logic” flew into the room and perched atop the copy of "Principa Mathematica" and shed a tear on the hardcover. The last sentence of "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus" was read several times, and Karl Popper himself showed up and demonstrated how dialectics is nothing but a means of justifying contradictions.

The professor lost his tenure and was fired the next day. He died of the gay plague AIDS and his "books" were disregarded for all eternity.

You need to understand what said. Foucault identified "oppresive structures", sure, but he never implied that any sort of tumblrism would be able to fix them. If anything, he implied that any sort of holier-than-thou behavior in the name of "good" or "progress" is a big fucking red flag.

>regressive Leftist
>classic liberal
>Libertarianism
>Gender Studies courses
>identity politics

Literally everybody in the west is a liberal. Most people are just retards and have no idea what words mean.

Saying humans should have freedoms is liberal as fuck.

Do leftists hate identity politics or something?

>2016
>using the acronym "SJW" unironically

You'll never find a person who uses those buzzwords who knows anything about the world, I'm just quoting them to mock the person.

>The arrogant professor smirked quite Jewishly
>He died of the gay plague AIDS
I love it when you can use the same shit for this pasta.

I swear it's literally the same guy who chimps out every time he sees any internet buzzword making fun of leftists and liberals.
You don't have to like the terms but getting assblasted every time you see them is kinda dumb. You're no better than /pol/tards when it comes to smugness and childish insults.

sup tumblr

How are classic liberal, Libertarianism, Gender Studies courses, and identity politics buzzwords?

What word should we use to describe your extremist group then? Or are you one of those people who pretend the people's front of judea and the judean people's front are completely unrelated?

>chimps out
>assblasted
>smugness
>childish insults

*tips*

what's a tumbler?

i don't have a group

the way 4channers use the words is so divorced from reality you can't engage with it seriously

>the way 4channers use the words is so divorced from reality you can't engage with it seriously
That's the point, faggot.

Then why are you here?

Your shitposts aren't funny, and you have nothing to contribute intellectually.

Trying derail threads is /pol/ level garbage and you know it. You've just replaced SJW/reddit with fedoras.

wait who's the assblasted one?

i'm only here to upset people like you, because it's really easy to make you into a tantrum-throwing manbaby.

>The Stalinists are being absolutely retarded

Of course they are, they're Stalinists.

FPBP

>anyone reading Foucault
Half of Foucault's works are just pure philosophical wankery. Not saying much, just revelling in the sound of his own (written) voice.

Overrated IMO.