Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography

"My work has had nothing to do with gay liberation," Michel Foucault reportedly told an admirer in 1975. And indeed there is scarcely more than a passing mention of homosexuality in Foucault's scholarly writings. So why has Foucault, who died of AIDS in 1984, become a powerful source of both
personal and political inspiration to an entire generation of gay activists? And why have his political philosophy and his personal life recently come under such withering, normalizing scrutiny by commentators as diverse as Camille Paglia, Richard Mohr, Bruce Bawer, Roger Kimball, and biographer
James Miller?

David M. Halperin's Saint Foucault is an uncompromising and impassioned defense of the late French philosopher and historian as a galvanizing thinker whose career as a theorist and activist will continue to serve as a model for other gay intellectuals, activists, and scholars. A close reading of
both Foucault and the increasing attacks on his life and work, it explains why straight liberals so often find in Foucault only counsels of despair on the subject of politics, whereas gay activists look to him not only for intellectual inspiration but also for a compelling example of political
resistance. Halperin rescues Foucault from the endless nature-versus-nurture debate over the origins of homosexuality ("On this question I have absolutely nothing to say," Foucault himself once remarked) and argues that Foucault's decision to treat sexuality not as a biological or psychological
drive but as an effect of discourse, as the product of modern systems of knowledge and power, represents a crucial political breakthrough for lesbians and gay men. Halperin explains how Foucault's radical vision of homosexuality as a strategic opportunity for self-transformation anticipated the new
anti-assimilationist, anti-essentialist brand of sexual identity politics practiced by contemporary direct-action groups such as ACT UP. Halperin also offers the first synthetic account of Foucault's thinking about gay sex and the future of the lesbian and gay movement, as well as an
up-to-the-minute summary of the most recent work in queer theory.

"Where there is power, there is resistance," Michel Foucault wrote in The History of Sexuality, Volume I. Erudite, biting, and surprisingly moving, Saint Foucault represents Halperin's own resistance to what he views as the blatant and systematic misrepresentation of a crucial intellectual figure,
a misrepresentation he sees as dramatic evidence of the continuing personal, professional, and scholarly vulnerability of all gay activists and intellectuals in the age of AIDS.

Author: David M. Halperin
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 06/15/1995
Pages: 256
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.02lbs
Size: 8.57h x 5.79w x 1.07d
ISBN: 9780195093711


Review Citation(s):
Library Journal 06/01/1995 pg. 121
Publishers Weekly 06/05/1995 pg. 45
Kirkus Reviews 05/15/1995 pg. 686

About the Author

About the Author:

David M. Halperin is Professor of Literature at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A founding editor of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and GayStudies, and a coeditor of The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, he is the author most notably of One Hundred Years of Homosexuality, which Outweek called the single most important contribution to the interpretation of gay history in nearly a decade.