Foucault and Paglia

I have never been much of a fan of Michel Foucault or the school of post modernism. I am, though, something of a fan of Camille Paglia, despite her self-promotional lunacy. For one thing, you can never be quite sure what she will come up with next. She also writies with such passion about culture that after reading her chapter in Sexual Personae on Spencer I found myself in the library reading Faerie Queene. She even got me started on Emily Dickenson! Good or bad, an author who can do that to a reader has real power. It helps, of course, if you have a taste for crazed invective.

Anyway, here is her take on Foucault*. Its title, "Why I hate Foucault," says it all, but here is a taste:

Foucault's analysis of "power" is foggy and paranoid and simply does not work when applied to the actual evidence of the birth, growth and complex development of governments in ancient and modern societies. Nor is Foucault's analysis of the classification of knowledge particularly original -- except in his bitter animus against the Enlightenment, which he failed to realize had already been systematically countered by Romanticism. What most American students don't know is that Foucault's commentary is painfully crimped by the limited assumptions of Saussurean linguistics (which I reject).

She also stresses one part of the historical critique of Foucault that a number of writers have commented:

Foucault, for all his blathering about "power," never managed to address Adolph Hitler or the Nazi occupation of France, I received a congratulatory letter from David H. Hirsch (a literature professor at Brown), who sent me copies of riveting chapters from his then-forthcoming book, The Deconstruction of Literature: Criticism After Auschwitz (1991). As Hirsch wrote me about French behavior during the occupation, "Collaboration was not the exception but the rule." I agree with Hirsch that the leading poststructuralists were cunning hypocrites whose tortured syntax and encrustations of jargon concealed the moral culpability of their and their parents' generations in Nazi France.

And she concludes:

American students, forget Foucault! Reverently study the massive primary evidence of world history, and forge your own ideas and systems. Poststructuralism is a corpse. Let it stink in the Parisian trash pit where it belongs! [my emphasis - you can see why I like her]

*thanks for the link to Andrew Sullivan.