From: adolphso@mizar.usc.edu (adolphson)
Newsgroups: alt.sex,alt.politics.homosexuality
Subject: Re: Regrets
Date: 15 Apr 1992 14:22:05 -0700
Organization: University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA
NNTP-Posting-Host: mizar.usc.edu

In article <1992Apr15.051437.27390@spdcc.com> 
dyer@spdcc.com (Steve Dyer) writes:
| In article <92105.215647HERSCH@auvm.american.edu> 
| Herschel Browne <HERSCH@auvm.american.edu> writes:
...
| >Foucault was perhaps the single most brilliant thinker of our time, and 
| >his fields were history and philosophy, not literary theory.  
| >His is a tradition to cherish, not only because he was a radical 
| >gay activist, but because he was a genius.
...
| Ask la otra Dolfa.  I'm not sure everyone shares your warm fuzzies
| about Foucault--quite a few people think he was a charlatan.  It must
| be a measure of the esteem in which he's held.

I suppose I'm "la otra Dolfa", and I'll pretend that I have been asked.
Foucault was extremely coy about his sexual orientation until quite late
in his career and life, and even when he came out of the closet, he was
not what *I* would consider a "radical gay activist".  As to whether he
was a "genius", I'll pass.  I think I'll quote "the single most brilliant
thinker of our time", though, to save myself the trouble of refuting your
assertion that he is somehow valuable to gay/lesbian thought.  The passage
comes from "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History", an essay which is described as 
invaluable in understanding Foucault's objectives.

    The _Entstehung_ of history is found in nineteenth-century Europe: the 
    land of interminglings and bastardy, the period of the "man-of-mixture."
    We have become barbarians with respect to those rare moments of high
    civilization: cities in ruin and enigmatic monuments are spread out 
    before us; we stop before gaping walls; we ask what gods inhabited 
    these empty temples.

I must jump in here and point out that this Romantic look at the past and 
rather shocking yearning for racial purity are uncomfortably similar to 
official Nazi ideology.  Let's continue.

    Great epochs lacked this curiosity, lacked our excessive deference;
    they ignored their predecessors: the classical period ignored Shakespeare.

I must jump in again.  Foucault's provincialism, which is common among 
French intellectuals, is in evidence here.  Perhaps the *French* classical 
period ignored Shakespeare, but the English classical period was most 
interested in him.  Think of Dryden, Johnson, Pope.  Minor detail?  Well, 
is this sentence true at all?  Augustan Rome was, by any yardstick, a great 
epoch, yet it measured itself and patterned itself against the Greece of 
several centuries before, in addition to looking back at Rome's legendary 
past.  Back to Michel.

    The decadence of Europe presents an immense spectacle (while stronger
    periods refrained from such exhibitions), and the nature of this scene 
    is to represent a theater; lacking monuments of our own making, which 
    properly belong to us, we live among crowded scenes.  But there is more.
    Europeans no longer know themselves; they ignore their mixed ancestries 
    and seek a proper role.  They lack individuality.  We can begin to 
    understand the spontaneous historical bent of the nineteenth century: 
    the anemia of its forces and those mixtures that effaced all its 
    individual traits produced the same results as the mortifications of 
    asceticism; its inability to create, its absence of artistic works, and 
    its need to rely on past achievements forced it to adopt the base 
    curiosity of plebs.

Perhaps someone can let me know how *this* kind of thinking is valuable to 
queer liberation.

Arne