Customer Reviews

Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography

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Halperin's book is very interesting: it stakes a somewhat extreme position on Foucault (be forewarned that the title isn't ironic!) and attempts to mount a case for Foucault's critical centrality to gay studies and gay theoretical discourse in very clear (and very emotional) rhetoric.

It's useful to have book of this sort as a kind of diatribe, and it's actually quite refreshing to have someone stake such a claim to poststructuralist thinking in such a candid and emotional manner. But it's very easy to pick apart Halperin's arguments, to see his blind spots and where his adoration of what he thinks Foucault stood for actually misrepresent Foucault, or (in other places) aren't as useful or as empowering for gay men and women as he would like to believe. Still, realizing this is in-and-of-itself quite instructive (I should note that its flaws make the book teach very well in courses on sexuality or gender--the students have a great deal to pick apart), and it's still a bracing little polemic.

The first thing you need to know about David Halperin's SAINT FOUCAULT is that the title is only moderately ironic. That is, Halperin really sees Foucault as a sort of liberating force for the Western gay world: although he makes his case quite passionately, his claims seem very blinkered by his adoration. This is a good book to assign students insofar as it makes a useful argument to tear apart, but time has shown that Halperin's vision of Foucault has more to do with Halperin and less to do with Foucault himself and what he actually said.

This is the best book I have ever read on Foucault, no contest--though one must be clear that Halperin is EXPLICITLY NOT attempting any general and comprehensive explanation of Foucault's life work and thought, which Halperin makes quite clear, though there seems to be some confusion below regarding this point. In fact, the tone of some of the reviews only serve as a demonstration of some of Halperin's points.

My main criticism is that I would go even a little further than Halperin with respect to Foucault's actual purpose or mission in _The History of Sexuality_. I would say that, with volumes two and three, Foucault has shifted his purpose from a general "history" (hence the title) of the rise of "sexuality" to a deconstructive and very narrow focus on certain discourses in antiquity that ostensibly SEEM to mirror our own while actually being quite alien to it. It just so happens that these ancient discourses are about men. From this perspective, all the complaining of a small but very loud minority of feminists merely reflects a failure to understand what Foucault was doing. He wasn't trying to give us a general history; rather, he became fascinated by how the ancient world's most familiar discourses (which are about men) could, in fact, be extremely different, by the demonstration and analysis of that difference. As for general history, Foucault repeatedly refers the reader to Dover's _Greek Homosexuality_, which was published between volumes one and two, and which he just as repeatedly tells us he accepts in basic outline. Feeling there was no longer an urgent need for a "history," he gave us his actual second and third volumes. Should he have given us a hint he was changing course? He did!--in the introduction of the second volume. Readers need to learn to be a bit more active--though, clearly, as original, good, and rigorous as the thinking and analysis may be, it does make for a rather uniquely structured set of books.

This book is probably the best book on how to ground and use Foucault in relation to contemporary social movement politics - an incredibly important rejoinder to the depoliticized, sterile versions of Foucault that do the rounds today in British sociology departments etc.Halperin is one of the best (and certainly most entertaining) readers of the History of Sexuality Vols 2 & 3. Do yourself a favour & get it!

I will pay this book a high compliment for a book of criticism: It made me want to look up and read the end notes. Even further, it reawakened my interest in Foucault (for a time partly under the sleeping spell of Camille Paglia). Halperin does a wonderful job of pointing out the political biases and even the lapses of "critical reasoning" among Foucault's detractors, while making a strong case for his hyperbolic claim that the philosopher was "a f****** saint," presumedly with apparent oxymoron intended. Especially strong is the book's argument of Foucault's importance in AIDS activism and subsequently to so-called queer theory. The writing is lucid, compassionate, sometimes (justifiably) angry, candid, and often witty. Halperin does not fall into the usual postmodernist traps of excessive jargon and redundancy. The last section of the book points out the problems of biography in general, while attending to the specific strengths and weaknesses of three recent attempts to narrate Foucault's life. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in philosophy and/or issues of gender and sexuality.

This book stands against everything SACRED in Foucault's oeuvre. For one, Foucault often commented in interviews that he hated CONFESSION. For another, Halperin conducts a reduction of a thinker for whom the very parameters of engagement was to avoid reduction in all discourses. And also, Halperin conducts his EULOGY, I mean 'pentetrating' study, with an annoying rhetorical style that can only be described as: chatty.

For a more intesting look at Foucault and any possible relationship with the SAINTS, see "Religion and Culture," edited by Jeremy Carrette. One should work harder than to merely canonize a thinker. This is not to say that Foucault's gayness is a non-factor; on the contrary, such investigation should be undertaken with the utmost care--the kind of care with which Foucualt wrote his books. The last thing that gay-lib needs is a SAINT.

Throughout his works, Foucault consistently proposed one important idea: that what is said is more important than the person; that the effects of discourse is what must be seized and uncovered over facts and data. We should undertake a study of the effects of this little book (and thank GOD that this is a short book!): for HEAVEN forbid that people should read such nonsense.

But then again, Foucault was an admirer of long-forgotten works just like this book will be in a few years. If the SAINTS be willing...

I very much enjoyed Prof. Halperin's early book, *Before Pastoral.* There, his familiarity with classics and with the pastoral and bucolic traditions led to insightful observations about important literary modes, their definitive characteristics, and their evolution. Unfortunately, *Saint Foucault* is symptomatic of a problem that has been plaguing English departments for some time now: English professors dismiss their primary object of study---literature---as "bourgeois" or "elitist" or "oppressive" or "economically superstructural," and they become dilettantes in a mish-mash of fields that they end up calling "cultural studies" or "cultural poetics." As his work was received in North America, Foucault had a great deal to do with that shift in English studies. Nonetheless, I do find it amusing that Halperin can create an only half ironic "cult of personality" around the very man who argued that the category of the individual "subject" was infinitely less important than a transpersonalized, discursive and ultimately ill-defined "POWER/KNOWLEDGE." Whatever my serious reservations about Foucault's ideas may be, I know for sure that he would find the idea of a "gay hagiography" very unsound.

I must agree with the first review. Although this book is well-researched, it suffers from a complete lack of understanding. Foucault's entire philosophy is junked in this attempt to apotheosize yet another French thinker... And if the author abstains from excessive jargon, I say it is because he cannot understand and effectively use that jargon; he is beneath the contemporary intellectual current.

Don't be mislead by the dust jacket. It promises that Halperin answers those who disagree with him, but it doesn't. I was especially looking forward to Halperin snarking back at Camille Paglia for her devestating review of his book "100 Years of Homosexuality", but Paglia's infamous "Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders" is never addressed. When he does approach his dissenters, it is in a roundabout, inconclusive, Foucaltian way. Very irritating.

The worst thing about Halperin is his dependence on theory and on other theorists. He doesn't seem to know that there are sciences (psychology, sociology, anthropology, biology, etc.) which might address his Queer Theory dilemmas. Instead, we get incessant name-dropping and logrolling. A disgrace.