[lbo-talk] Foucault on AIDS, was Fidel

[wrobert at uci.edu]

It's also worth mentioning that Miller's book is fairly infamous for its
own inaccuracies.  In particular, it is famous for a lurid and phobic
depiction of homosexuality and the gay liberation movement of the
seventies.  (My old professor Liz Kotz referred to it as a camp classic.) 
The Macey book and the Eribon book are supposed to be much better.

                                  robert wood


> James Miller quotes Berkeley philosophy professor Hans Sluga warning
> Foucault about AIDS:
>
> 'He didn't believe it. He thought that Americans were basically
> puritanical
> and anti-sexual; and that it was all coming out in this sudden hysteria
> about this mysterious disease.' (345)
>
> Sluga is echoed by English professor D.A. Miller:
>  '"Je n'y crois pas," Miller recalls the philosopher [that's Foucault]
> saying: "I don't believe it."' (349)
> ... Clinching to his point, Foucault leaned towards the professor.
> "Besides," he said, "To die for the love of boys: What could be more
> beautiful."' (350)
>
> To today's strangely moralistic hedonists, Foucault's early reactions to
> (what was then called) GRIDS sounds outrageous. But I think that even if
> he
> was factually incorrect on the existence of AIDS the disease, he was still
> right about AIDS the moral panic. And if the last comment seems unbearably
> flippant, it is closer to the meaning of hedonism than anything else one
> could say.
>
> Quotes from James Miller's The Passion of Michel Foucault, HarperCollins
> edition, London, 1994