[lbo-talk] Chomsky on Foucault

[Brian Siano]

On Mon, 1 Sep 2003 13:15:11 -0400, Dennis Perrin <dperrin at comcast.net> 
wrote:

>> What exactly of Foucault's ideas did you
>> want to know somjething about? He wrote a lot about a
>> lot of topics? Was there something in particular that
>> puzzled you, or did you want the whole thing inm a
>> paragraph? jks
>
> I don't know much about his ideas to begin with, so a specific request is
> pointless. I suppose I want someone to explain F's importance in language 
> I
> can understand. I've watched his exchange with Chomsky several times, and
> each time F simply lost me. It seems he engaged in a form of techno- 
> speak,
> understood by the Smart Ones or those otherwise "inside," but to me it
> sounds like verbal wanking.

I reda a couple of biographies of Foucault a while back. I think Macey's 
book suggests that Foucault was both a) under the influence of hashish, and 
b) purposely trying for an even _more_ radical stance than that offered by 
Chomsky-- suggesting that summary justice in the streets was a worthwhile 
goal for society. When asked about the exchange, Chomsky said that he liked 
Foucault personally, but he seemed to be arguing from an entirely different 
moral universe. But the "wanking" comment is probably close to the truth, 
as Foucault certainly seems as though he wanted to be the more provocative 
of the two.

By the way, I'm pretty certain that the transcript of this exchange came 
from, of all places, Me. It was published in a book called _Reflexive 
Water_, which was a short collection of transcripts of that TV show's 
debates. I remember OCR'ing the text in a few years back, and posting it to 
the Chomsky newsgroup, since a lot of people had been asking about it. 
(Same thing happened with that piece by Hitchens, "The Chorus and 
Cassandra.")