Perhaps this can shed some light about the apparently unfounded accusations by Guy Sorman: www.reddit.com/r/CriticalTheory/comments/msmece/the_black_masses_of_michel_foucault_the_bullshit/

read Nietzsche

Thank you for your question. My response today would be similar to the one I gave to someone who had written here about 6 years ago. Even though you can find it below, here it is again for your ease--it is the one called "Belated response to a lost comment". I wish I had the time to elaborate further, but hopefully this will answer most of your question: Belated response to a lost comment: I think the most important question at stake in the important comment in question is to do with Foucault and the use of language to subvert thinking. Allow me to explain: Seven months ago somebody with the Google pseudonym of “MarieLubie" wrote an interesting and fair comment. I’ve been meaning to respond for a long time and today finally got to it. My apologies to Marie Lubie for not having done so earlier. Her comment, however, has disappeared, making it impossible to respond directly (Google does not allow me to write to her). So instead I’m including below first her comment as it appeared verbatim, as well as my response below. I’m hoping it is helpful to others and I’m also hoping that she will get to read this one way or another: MarieLubie’s comment: “Oh, .. oh!!!. It seems that there is an … .. the translation in the film says '' I say things because I do not think them anymore''.. this is not his point. He says that he says them to stop thinking about them. The very end explains this idea, (destruction) It is a hard concept, and not an easy translation, but even without an explanation, the error is obvious for a francophone. The idea is that he says them to stop, not because he has stopped thinking before telling them. Tell me, if I can help you, and what I can specifically do! Did you translate the video or does it come from a larger source?.. it would be worth checking it because it gives a wrong idea of his idea!.. I mean, do not only rely on me, check it with others.. and let me know!” My response: Thank you for your feedback, I very much appreciate it. The lines that you are referring to actually happen to be my favorites in the whole interview (not just in this 15 min video excerpt), but out of the whole interview itself published as a book under the title of “Freedom & Knowledge”, which is in part a translation of an interview that was actually a little over an hour long. For me the lines in question are also important because in Lynne Huffer’s wonderful introduction to this interview in the book, they are unfortunately not taken up. You seem to assume I need help with the French. To be clear, however, I am a native French speaker! Not that it means my French is always perfect, but it is better than what you probably had in mind. I actually went through many revisions of these lines before settling down on this translation that you find problematic. I even wrote about it in my dissertation; about how hard it was for me to translate it, because of all that’s at stake. I will only mention a couple of things here. The first thing I’d say is that what you quote as being my translation is actually incorrect. It doesn’t say in the video “I say things because I do not think them anymore”. It says something similar but with an important difference: “I don’t say the things I say because they are what I think, I say them as a way to make sure they no longer are what I think…”. Either way, for you this is a mistranslation, it seems, because it doesn’t say that what Foucault actually means is that he wants to “stop” thinking them. However, please note that this is your word (“stop”), not Foucault’s. Indeed, in the French he says: “Je ne dis pas les choses parce que je les pense, je dis les choses pour ne plus les penser.” So he doesn’t actually use any word to express the notion of actively stopping those thoughts. He doesn’t even use the word “arrêter”, which as you know is a synonym of “stopper” that is very common in French. So much so, by the way, that in Quebec the stop signs on the roads usually say “Arrêt” and not “Stop” as it does in France! The very important thing when translating Foucault here it seems to me is that what we might refer to with a Derridean term as the “deconstruction” of thought or belief in question, is not just, or even primarily, the result of will. In fact, it is arguably when it is forced by will that quite unwittingly the very belief or thought is reaffirmed. My assumption is that Foucault is well aware of this paradox here, and that is in part why he is not using a direct word like “stop”. In fact, we hear Foucault in the video again just a minute later, concluding with the same point, and still not exactly using the notion of stopping: “And so I don’t say the things I say because they are what I think, but rather I say them with the end in mind of self-destruction, precisely to make sure they are no longer what I think.” In the original French: “Et je ne dis donc pas les choses parce que je les pense, je les dis plutôt dans une fin d’autodestruction, pour ne plus les penser.” It seems here the key word is “autodestruction” (self-destruction). Indeed, the wonderful thing about Foucault’s use of this word, especially in French, is that it gets better into the not-fully volitional nature of the destruction of the attachment to thought or belief that he seems to be after. He wants to position himself in the direction of such deconstruction, but once again, he recognizes that doing so too volitionally would defeat the purpose. Building on Foucault, the question for me is about this practice of freedom from the self generally, and from thoughts and beliefs more specifically. More interesting still is what Foucault says right after: “Pour être bien sûr que, désormais, hors de moi, elles vont vivre une vie ou mourir une mort, où je n’aurai pas à me reconnaître.” In English: “To be really certain that from now on, outside of me, they are going to live a life or die in such a way that I will not have to recognize myself in them.” Here again, I think it is clear that the point for Foucault is not to actively stop “the things I say” but on the contrary to let them live and die, to let them be in a certain sense. For Foucault this would appear to require a different use of language (as he goes into a little earlier in the recording): not self-expression as a way to reinforce the self, but the expression of oneself in such a way--with less self-assurance--as to become witness to the deconstruction always already at work within language. One last thing to consider is Elder’s quoted comment to me in my written introduction to the video: “Translating Foucault is a very difficult task because his style of thinking serves two opposite aims: to express and to hide simultaneously.” With that in mind, the goal in translating, of course, should be to be clear enough so that the words that are translated are understood. However, it's not the only goal, especially when dealing with Foucault. Indeed, when the goal of clarity actually renders unintelligible the more subtle point in what is being communicated, we must resist using words that are too direct, like “stop”, especially when they’re not even used in the first place in the original text! In any case, the final words shouldn’t be mine but that of people out there who can be the true judges of my translation. Some people at least seem to relate to it, as is evident from the comments. For example, one says: “ ‘I don't say these things because they are what I think, I say them so that they no longer are what i think’..so simple and profound.” Thank you again so much for writing and for questioning the accuracy of my translation. I appreciate the opportunity to try to clarify. Hopefully this message will have made its way to you and will have been helpful to your understanding why I translated the lines the way I did, and maybe even it will have shown you another side to what Foucault seems to be after.

@@lionelclaris5858 please do correct the translation of that line, it is confusing to many.

That's interesting and good to know. Thank you. That is what Fons Elders himself had told me to write. I do not speak dutch. If you don't mind, go ahead and translate it. I can add it to the description up above. Thank you again either way.

System has been trying to push the dissolution, so now dissolution is not creative, but self-destructive, the "unconcious" is like the God or God-like structure of the leftists, it's some sort of ever-positive invisible but undoubtful truth, they rely on. It's just another dead-end

France has the highest birthrate in Europe. I just thought it was worth mentioning

Yes, by all means, thank you for asking. Would love to read how you use the content of the video once you've used it if you want to share. Be well.

@@lionelclaris5858 thank you very much, shall i put any specific reference or the way it is written here under the video? i can send you the work, if you like.

@@kristynakoprivova8675 If you use the video only you can use the KZbin reference. If you use the book (which has the whole interview and not just the 15 min here), you can use this reference: Michel Foucault, Freedom and Knowledge, eds. Fons Elders and Lionel Claris (Amsterdam: Elders Special Production BV, 2013), 25-47. Yes, would love to read how you are using it... Hope this helps. Thank you!

@@lionelclaris5858 thank you, please, give me your email so that i can share it with you.

Yes, he's basically saying the opposite...! Maybe the confusion is because of my translation... Thank you for writing.

@@lionelclaris5858 I doubt it's the quality of your translation. First, the original edit is choppy. Second, unless someone instructs a person ahead of time about what Foucault's beliefs are, his pontificating word salad is hard to follow. Speaking of Chomsky, you can find videos of him discussing the post-modernists rather dismissively. (Who's laughing now? Chomsky's worldview if fading, becoming more marginal on the left, but PoMo in many forms is ascendant.)

Marko Csokasi Discipline and Punish is a great book and it was published only 4 years after this interview, which itself may be said to be placed right in between the early and middle period of Foucault’s thought. His next book published in 1976 is much shorter and it is where his theory of power came together in a mature way. It is also probably Foucault’s most influential book: « Histoire de la Sexualité 1 : La Volonté de Savoir ».The latter part of the title is important: « The Will to Knowledge » which unfortunately the title in the US rendered all-too- reductively as « An Introduction ». The British edition, however, does not make this mistake. I am not sure I understand the connection you are making to Carl Rogers but I will say the following about Foucault’s treatment of the self. At the time of this video he is controversially critical of humanism and what he calls there « the virtues of self-expression ». That is in line with his position on the subject (the individual) from the early to the middle period of his work in which he was interested in analyzing the forces that shape society and the subjects living within it. He would eventually, however, become interested in almost the opposite question-« technologies of the self »-how the subject might still have agency despite the influence of power (this is not, however, the Foucault that is most known). To help you navigate these complex and evolving ideas all throughout his work, I recommend the book by Johanna Oksala (How to Read Foucault-that series is very good, in particular because it uses actual passages from the thinker in question and helps the reader unpack them. In my view this is a more authentic way to introduce the ideas of a philosopher). For an accessible and a sort of culmination of Foucault’s thought at the moment of his untimely death, his book « Fearless Speech » (one of his last lecture series and maybe the last he gave in English). Finally, also about his critique of « self-expression », I invite you to read another response on a KZbin comment I wrote called « Belated Response to A Lost Comment ». Hope this helps. Thank you for writing!

@@lionelclaris5858 ​ Thank you Lionel. I'm getting a copy of Oksala as we speak. The explanation of willful deconstruction of thought in your "belated response" as a reaffirmation of the thought itself is also incredibly helpful. When we consider what Foucault's desired position of deconstruction may be without too much volition, a lecture on Greek alchemy by Marie Louise-Franz springs to mind in which she speaks of how identification with a profound, novel thought results in the inflation of the Ego, and so one must strive to not credit the self with the expressed observations explicitly. Von-Franz's view seems to encapsulate Foucault's approach here as "hidden expression". In terms of my very hasty and clumsy Rogers reference, I might've completely misunderstood the context in which Foucault spoke. You mention that Foucault at this point of his thought was heavily critical of humanism. Since self-actualization is rooted in potential, it seems to imply - resulting in frequent presumptions, myself included - a process of growth becomes the "best", highest self. However, I understand the journey to the highest self to be the ability to continuously expand one's perspectives by the gradual dissolution of the self-image (through understanding one's predisposed thought patterns and behaviours in a way which one can allow new perspectives to be understood and integrated). What I understand virtues of authentic expression to be are ones that fit under this process of dissolution. Am I right to assume that this is what Foucault might've become interested in later on in his life as the technologies of the self? To dissolve itself? Excited to dig further. I'm a psychology undergraduate and this is a mere side-hustle for now, but so far I find Foucault fascinating. Thanks again.