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I have noticed he quotes Foucault in one of his gibberish filled papers. That is hardly surprising. Foucault is incredibly influential with postmodern scumbags
I think Foucalt himself admitted that most of his intellectual "quests" were motivated by the desire to get closer to young boys.
Atleast he was more brutally honest than many of his followers.
Quick story. So I've been doing the PhD thing in my department for three years now. On two separate occasions, in two completely different seminars, I've brought up the same example to challenge people (mainly my professor, who I like and respect and get along with very well but who is regrettably a hardcore poststructuralist and who loves Barthes, Derrida, and Foucault) and have been met with silence both times. The first seminar was devoted to Volume 1 of Foucault's The History of Sexuality and the second one was just a general seminar. In both instances, I was trying to demonstrate the dangerous consequences of doing away with the concept of objectivity in favor of ideas of "social constructs" and all that.
The example that I brought up was Foucault's position on pedophilia. He addresses pedophilia in The History of Sexuality and gives it the standard twist with the poor and oppressed pedophile who just wants to be free to express his honest-to-goodness sexuality. I couldn't make this shit up if I tried. It's pages 31-32:
"One day in 1867, a farm hand from the village of Lapcourt, who was somewhat simple-minded, employed here then there depending on the season, living hand-to-mouth from a little charity or in exchange for the worst sort of labor, sleeping in barns and stables, was turned in to the authorities. At the border of a field, he had obtained a few caresses from a little girl, just as he had done before and seen done by the village urchins round about him; for, at the edge of the wood, or in the ditch by the road leading to Saint-Nicolas, they would play the familiar game called 'curdled milk.' So he was pointed out by the girl's parents to the mayor of the village, reported by the mayor to the gendarmes, led by the gendarmes to the judge, who indicted him and turned him over first to a doctor, then to two other experts who not only wrote their report but also had it published. What is the significant thing about this story? The pettiness of it all; the fact that this everyday occurrence in the life of village sexuality, these inconsequential bucolic pleasures, could become, from a certain time, the object not only of a collective intolerance but of a judicial action, a medical intervention, a careful clinical examination, and an entire theoretical elaboration [...] This was undoubtedly one of the conditions enabling the institutions of knowledge and power to overlay this everyday bit of theater with their solemn discourse. So it was that our society - and it was doubtless the first in history to take such measures - assembled around these timeless gestures, these barely furtive pleasures between simple-minded adults and alert children, a whole machinery for speechifying, analyzing, and investigating."
This story never ceases to turn my stomach. You can see the equivocation, going from ignorant children playing a "game" to "alert children" who know exactly what's going on. But, putting that shit aside and focusing on the philosophical issue: If there is no such thing as objectivity, then you can't say that pedophilia is objectively wrong and that people shouldn't be free to engage in sex with children.
First off, pedophilia is just a social construct, and the concepts of "right" and "wrong" don't apply to mere constructs. But even if I were to be granted use of the concepts of right and wrong, if objectivity is out the window, then my thinking pedophilia is wrong is just an arbitrary, subjective opinion no better or worse than Foucault's arbitrary, subjective opinion that it's right. Who am I to say, and on what grounds can I possibly prove, that any sexual desire - or, really, who am I to say, and on what grounds can I possibly prove, that anything - is wrong? Since it's all just a power game, my position that pedophilia is wrong is really just my desire to arbitrarily oppress the righteous pedophiles (ignore the fact that, in the absence of concepts of right and wrong, Foucault still thinks he's right), and if I were a halfway decent person, then I'd make the "institution of knowledge and power" that is "solemnly" trying to stop, just for the sake of "pettiness," the "inconsequential bucolic pleasures" of kids jerking off hobos stop oppressing those poor upstanding citizens and let them be free.
My professor has two small children, so I'd like to think that he finds Foucault's pedophilia shit suitably horrifying - though I wouldn't be surprised if he wasn't even aware that Foucault, along with a number of other members of the French intellectual "elite" of the era like Sartre and Althusser, signed a petition in 1977 to get rid of consent and statutory rape laws - but nobody knows how to respond to simple shit like this. It's easy to talk the postmodernist/poststructuralist talk, but when confronted with the kind of world they'd actually be living in/are helping to bring into existence, there's always silence as the gears of denial start to go into overdrive the second it comes time for them to walk the walk.
When people like Peterson talk about how this shit isn't just "academic" in the sense of being trivial and having no bearing outside of pretentious classrooms, this is what he's talking about. Ideas can have practical effects and consequences that FAR exceed what the ideologically possessed have ever fathomed/are capable of fathoming, and it's so often the case that, if anybody was even half paying attention to what their ideological leaders were saying - and, even more importantly, why they were saying it - then they'd run for the fucking hills.