Balanced Primer on a Post-Modern
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While Foucault has become a popular
icon to postmodernists, his personal life and political judgements
continue to offend, shock, and sometimes amuse conservative intellectuals.
This concise biography provides brief summaries of his most important
intellectual works, introduces some of his key concepts, and acknowledges
the profoundly deluded political predictions of this controversial
French philosopher. If the personal is political, then Foucault's
private life as a hyper-sexual gay hedonist and seducer of young
boys - and death from AIDS - can be seen as the logical consequences
of his peculiar belief systems where there is no objectivity and
everything is subjective.
This comic book biography explores the paradox of Foucault, one
of the most influential modern philosophers, right from the first
page. "Should we look at the life of the man himself, who as
a boy wanted to be a goldfish, became a philosopher and historian,
political activist, leather queen, bestseller, tireless campaigner
for dissident causes? What about his literary skill, combined with
painstaking historical inquiry, his excellence as a pasta cook,
captivating lecturing style, passion for sex with men, occassional
drug-taking, barbed sense of humour, competitiveness, fierce temper
- and the fact that he came from a family of doctors and dearly
loved his mother?" The cartoon of the bald intellectual includes
the caption/quote from Foucault: "Do not ask who I am and do
not ask me to remain the same." Fairness and multidimensional
from the beginning.
While many academics will inevitably find this introduction too
brief and too superficial, this thin and accessible book draws readers
into Foucault's ideas, passions, and lives. Far more lively and
engaging than than most secondary sources for undergraduate philosophy
students, this black and white, adult comic book provides a comfortable
entry point into some of the great intellectual debates of the late
20th and early 21st centuries. It also delights in contradictions
and paradoxes.
Did you know that the man who subtley explored the connections between
order and brutality promoted the new Islamic Government in Iran
in 1979? How could a gay, leftist western intellectual support religious
fanatics? "An Islamic government cannot restrict people's rights
because it is bound by religious duty," claimed Foucault to
reporters while visiting Tehran. "The people will know what
is right." The harsh objective reality of public executions
and stonings -including women who refused to wear the proscribed
veil- soon silenced Foucault. The authors cover this embarrassing
situation with an admirable directness on p.79. His other questionable
political crusades are also examined in a sympathetic, yet critical
light.
This thin book, digestible in a few hours, would make an excellent
companion text for both undergraduate and graduate philosophy students
confronted with reading a Foucault tome. It would be a valuable
addition to college libraries and belongs on the bookshelves of
postmodernists - and Foucault's critics.
