Must We Cancel Foucault?

Michel Foucault’s name has never been far from scandal. Indeed, he has proven to be a perennially controversial figure. He rose to prominence in controversy, his ponderously scholarly 1966 book The Order of Things becoming a bestseller because marginal denunciations of humanism and Marxism therein brought it massive publicity in the form of shrill denunciations by elements of the French intellectual establishment. As Foucault himself wryly noted, he has been denounced by conservatives as an agent of the KGB and by communists as an agent of the CIA.^[1] I would suggest that this phenomenon is related to the disturbingness of Foucault’s analyses: as long as Foucault’s conclusions remain difficult for people to cognize, there will always be an attempt to dismiss them for ad hominem reasons.

Since one cannot libel the dead, there has effectively been open slather for accusations against Foucault, no matter how baseless, for almost four decades. After his death, it was alleged that Foucault had deliberately spread the virus, HIV, that had killed him, an accusation that hardly made sense given the state of knowledge about the virus at the time he died. In the opening two decades of the third millennium, the period of my career as a Foucault scholar, the dominant scandal narrative around Foucault has shifted twice. During the first decade, the period of the War on Terror, the great scandal was Foucault’s support for the Islamic Revolution in Iran, which was always interpreted baselessly to mean Foucault had endorsed the theocratic regime that was its ultimate result. During this period any public seminar or event on Foucault would seem to be attended by an audience member who would rise to denounce Foucault’s supposed sympathy for Islamism. The great scandal for the following decade was Foucault’s alleged support of neoliberalism, provoked by the publication of Foucault’s lectures on this topic, The Birth of Biopolitics, in English in 2008. The coordinates of this controversy were quite different from the others in that a number of serious Foucault scholars agreed with the allegations from a sympathetic standpoint, though I nonetheless maintain they were ultimately without foundation.^[2]

In recent years, there has been a rising chorus of criticism of Foucault as an apologist for pedophilia. While I will not here discuss the basis for such claims in full, since they potentially include a detailed consideration of Foucault’s scholarly views on sexuality, perhaps the most widely repeated claim, that Foucault was a signatory to a petition demanding a reduction in the French age of consent, is simply false, inasmuch as this was not a demand of anything that Foucault put his name to.^[3]

The latest scandal has appeared in this context, seeming to confirm all these suspicions and then some, namely, a novel claim that Foucault was himself a pedophile. It is this contention that I will address here. I am moved to do so by the fact that, although these allegations have been addressed in French-language sources to the point that they have been effectively debunked, this has yet to happen in English. I do not expect a piece such as this present one can perform such a debunking, however. What is needed in English, as exists now in French, is coverage of the falseness of the claims in legacy media outlets to match the presentation of them as true in such venues.

This scandal began in a recently published book by French professor Guy Sorman, the (perhaps aptly titled) Mon dictionnaire du bullshit. To give a complete and succinct summary of the charges against Foucault contained within it, in an entry on “Pedophilia,” Sorman claims that while Foucault was living in Tunisia in 1969, Sorman visited him at Easter and witnessed young boys, between the ages of eight and ten, running after Foucault, with Foucault showering them with cash and arranging to meet them at 10pm at a cemetery, where Foucault then raped them on the gravestones.^[4]

The details of this account as presented are prima facie unlikely. Is it really credible to suggest that eight-year-olds would knowingly seek out a sexual encounter with an adult man? That they would be able to meet him so late at night without their parents becoming alarmed? That he would have sex with children so young, who surely would be physically harmed in the process, and on gravestones, without this attracting serious notice? The story seems to imply the complicity both of very young boys and of a community that allowed its children and its cemeteries to be defiled. It also leaves obscure the mechanism by which Sorman is supposed to have such knowledge of Foucault’s alleged activities. Did he witness them? Or did Foucault himself relate these details to Sorman, in which case one would have to wonder whether this was a kind of sick joke by Foucault to shock the young Sorman rather than a credible confession?

One must either suspect Sorman of serious credulousness, or—more likely given his seniority at this point—of significant hyperbole and embellishment, at least that he lowered the ages by a few years, or sensationalized the details.

I would suggest though that there is actually no reason to take any element of Sorman’s story at face value. Did Sorman know Foucault at all, or visit Tunisia? Both things are possible, but there is no independent corroboration of either fact. Foucault and his biographers never mention Sorman. Of course, it’s possible the two did become acquainted since they were both in and around Paris during the 1960s, but since Sorman was a student in his early 20s at this time, it does not seem particularly likely that he was close enough to a prominent academic a generation older than him to visit him in Tunisia and be immediately inducted into the secrets of the older man’s illegal sexual activities—unless Foucault and Sorman were themselves lovers, which certainly is not something Sorman has claimed.

Foucault was moreover not living in Tunisia in 1969. Foucault did visit there at least once in 1969, but in July—but this doesn’t fit the description of Sorman and others visiting Foucault themselves. Foucault moreover would have had to be very cautious on this visit, since he was also visiting imprisoned former students of his there and was likely under surveillance.^[5]

But perhaps Sorman got the year wrong—after all, this was a long time ago. It is not clear to me when an Easter visit to Tunisia to see Foucault by Sorman could have taken place prior to 1969 either. Foucault was only based in Tunisia for approximately two years, from November 1966 till October 1968. Around Easter 1968, there was political tumult in Tunisia, with Foucault involved with helping his students in a way that would have made him a target, so again unlikely that he would have been behaving in the way described, even if he had such proclivities—in April, when Easter fell that year, he also spent time out of Tunisia, on a trip to Libya. In 1967, Foucault was in Paris in March at least until the 17th, although he might have been back in Tunisia by March 26th for Easter, making this the only remotely likely year.^[6]

Beyond the prima facie improbabilities of Sorman’s account, evidence has now in any case been brought to light to debunk it relatively conclusively. Sorman’s book did not initially receive widespread attention. It first came to prominence as a result of Sorman’s airing his accusations against Foucault in an interview on French television. This still did not see wide publicity for Sorman’s story, however. It was only widely reported inside France after it was picked up by a British newspaper, the Sunday Times, a fact that is surely indicative of a certain contemporary French reflex in relation to the Anglosphere.

This reporting in French newspapers in turn spurred a quick debunking of Sorman’s account in Francophone media. By contrast, there has been nothing equivalent in the Anglophone media, to the point that the idea that Foucault was a pedophile now seems established as a commonplace in English-language para-academic social media.

The debunking began crucially with a story by the Tunisian correspondent of the Francophone African news weekly Jeune Afrique, who actually visited the site of the alleged crimes and interviewed locals who declaimed against the accusations. The idea that such things could be allowed to take place in a cemetery was a matter for indignance for locals, having been characterized as implausible by North Africans on social media previously. Locals reported that Foucault had been “seduced by youths” of 17 or 18 years of age, not 8 or 9.^[7]

The debunking was effectively, if unintentionally, completed by the German daily Die Zeit. In an article that is as a whole dedicated to repeating calumnies about Foucault in the service of an illegitimate conclusion that there is a conspiracy of silence in France around Foucault’s nefarious sex life, the Zeit journalist interviewed both Sorman and his sometime partner Chantal Charpentier. Sorman now admitted his knowledge of the matter was entirely indirect, based in remarks he had overheard—that is, that he was repeating gossip. Charpentier for her part repeats the impossible detail of an Easter 1969 visit to Foucault in Tunisia, adding a fresh confounding detail, that the visit was in the company of the French philosopher Gilles Châtelet:^[8] Châtelet himself was on record as regretting that he had never met Foucault.^[9]

It seems then that Sorman ultimately has no revelations to make and that Foucault’s Tunisian paramours were not children aged 8–10, but youths of 17 or 18. Of course, sex with a 17-year-old would be considered pedophilia in many American jurisdictions, and indeed it was illegal in France in the 1960s for a man to have sex with another man under the age of 21—but given that the heterosexual age of consent at that time was 15, applying that standard seems nothing short of homophobic. The Tunisian standard incidentally was then, as now, that homosexual congress is illegal.

Of course, one cannot claim to know with apodictic certainty that Foucault never raped a young child: since one cannot prove a negative, ultimately no one can claim to know such a thing with full certainty about any individual. The only positive reasons for thinking that Foucault was a pedophile then are: (1) a homophobic prejudice that all gay men are pederasts; (2) the circumstantial evidence that Foucault condoned pedophilia in the form of pronouncements that failed categorically to condemn it or to downplay its seriousness; (3) the isolated testimony of one man who indeed does not even claim direct knowledge of this fact but seems to have inferred it, whose testimony is contradicted by others and seems prima facie quite unlikely to be true.

There is also a subsidiary question whether one should “cancel” Foucault even if he was a pedophile. In the abstract, the value of Foucault’s intellectual contribution is of course independent of whether he was a moral monster. However, people cannot easily abstract such things away from their knowledge of concrete deeds. It thus seems to me to be Janus-faced at best when figures like Sorman, or James Miller, the author of salacious biography of Foucault, who endorses Sorman’s claims as plausible,^[10] link Foucault’s thought itself to his alleged predilections while maintaining that nonetheless Foucault should not be “canceled.” Such allegations cannot but have an effect of discrediting the ideas of the man against whom they are made. I certainly do not mean to suggest that we should keep scrupulously silent about the misdeeds of intellectuals where there is evidence of them, but to trade in gossip to bring them into disrepute while blithely claiming that in fact this gossip doesn’t ultimately matter is disingenuous.

Rather, making such allegations is itself a maneuver in the war of ideas. At stake here are not just Sorman’s ludicrous accusations but also the fact that the Sunday Times decided to transmit these to an English-language audience without critical assessment of them and now without retraction. Sorman and the Sunday Times both deliberately targeted Foucault for ideological reasons. And this is doubly pitiful because Foucault’s thought eludes the ideological categories within which they think to confine it. For Sorman, the point was to attack the left-wing French intellectual establishment at large, as it has existed for decades or even centuries, from the right as a kind of elite that sees itself as above morality. The Sunday Times framed its coverage in terms of a fightback against “‘woke’ ideology,” presenting Foucault as a “beacon” thereof in the opening line of its article.

The idea that Foucault’s thought is seminal to contemporary “woke” ideology is true only to the extent that it is part of its genealogy, but a number of mutations have occurred that makes the thought of the contemporary “woke” ultimately inimical to Foucault’s positions, which were thoroughly anti-identitarian and resisted the binarization of good and evil that characterizes so much of contemporary left invective.^[11] It is for such reasons indeed, I think, that there has been no rush to defend Foucault from English-language left-wing media. Far from seeing Foucault as one of their own, the left is generally uncomfortable with the complexities of his thought, and as such might be quite content for him to be canceled. And it is precisely for that reason that I want to resist his cancellation.

Notes

1. Michel Foucault, The Foucault Reader (New York: Pantheon, 1984), p. 376.

2. See Mark G. E. Kelly, “Foucault and Neoliberalism Today,” Contrivers’ Review; Mark G. E. Kelly, For Foucault: Against Normative Political Theory (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 2018), ch. 8.

3. For a discussion of what Foucault did put his name to in relation to sex and the age of consent, see “Les messes noires de Michel Foucault, le bullshit de Guy Sorman,” lundimatin, April 16, 2021.

4. Matthew Campbell, “French Philosopher Michel Foucault ‘Abused Boys in Tunisia,'” Sunday Times, March 28, 2021.

5. Daniel Defert, “Chronologie,” in Michel Foucault, Dits et écrits (Paris: Gallimard, 2015). This particular detail was inserted in this 2015 edition, having been absent in earlier ones. I acknowledge Twitter user @stoicfoucault for posting a photo of the relevant detail, and Twitter user @sextheology for bringing that to my attention.

6. The temporal coordinates here are drawn from Daniel Defert’s “Chronology,” in A Companion to Foucault, ed. Christopher Falzon, Timothy O’Leary, and Jana Sawicki (Oxford: Blackwell, 2013). Of course, one might question the veracity of such an account produced by Foucault’s partner, but this was produced in the early 1990s for the first publication of Foucault’s miscellanea, Dits et écrits, so could hardly be thought to have been constructed to obviate these allegations that emerged only in 2021.

7. Frida Dahmani, “Tunisie: ‘Michel Foucault n’était pas pédophile, mais il était séduit par les jeunes éphèbes,’” Jeune Afrique, April 1, 2021.

8. Georg Blume, “Foucaults tunesische Jungen,” Die Zeit, April 7, 2021.

9. Philippe Chevalier, “Michel Foucault et la pédophilie: enquête sur un emballement médiatique,” L’Express, April 9, 2021.

10. James Miller and Andrés Gómez Bravo, “Why We Shouldn’t Cancel Foucault,” Public Seminar, April 8, 2021.

11. I tried to address this in part in Mark G. E. Kelly, “Foucault and the Politics of Language Today,” Telos 191 (Summer 2020): 47.