Print Price: $42.50

Format:
Paperback
256 pp.
5 halftones, 135 mm x 203 mm

ISBN-13:
9780195111279

Publication date:
April 1999

Imprint: OUP US

Saint Foucault

Towards a Gay Hagiography

David M. Halperin

"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.

Reviews

• "...[a] much needed defense of Foucault's life and work.... Halperin deserves credit for taking on Foucault's biographers and untangling some of the confusions and mistruths that have been circulated about him in the press and elsewhere."--Journal of Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Identity
• "David M. Halperin's Saint=Foucault is an uncompromising and impassioned defense of the late French philosopher and historian."Lambda Book Report
• "Saint FOucault seeks to rescue Foucault from his critics and to portray him as a model of an engaged gay life, an attempt that requires a certain intellectual sleight of hand and close reading of the sort Halperin excels at. The book is remarkably engaging, combining elements of both brilliance and silliness."--Arena Magazine
• "David Halperin's Saint Foucault is one of the most provocative and exciting books on the work of Michel Foucault published to date. It is clear and eminently readable, acute even at its most impassioned, and very often wickedly funny. Moreover, what gives Halperin's book much of its passion as well as its clarity is its uncompromising scholarly fidelity to FOucault's texts."--Journal of the History of Sexuality
• "Foucault, the worm having turned, needs defenders these days, and Halperin fills the position well, arguing that Foucault provides the radical gay movement with both the philosophical underpinnings and political means with which to resist suppression by mainstream culture. Foucault...would no doubt be pleased to see some of his ideas...made relevant once more."--The Los Angeles Times Book Review
• "Saint Foucault is not only the most stimulating analysis to date of 'the Foucault effect': it is a major contribution in its own right to the political effect of Foucault's work. It is required reading for everyone interested in Foucault's thought, in philosophical thought and contemporary politics, as well as everyone interested in Queer Theory and in the ongoing controversies and struggles of the gay movement."--Didier Eribon, author of Michel Foucault and Michel Foucault et ses contemporains
• "Without even setting out to do so, David Halperin has provided the most lucid explication of the later work of Foucault that I've read. As if this were not rebuke enough to those who have got it all wrong, Halperin goes on to demolish, point by point, those liberal critics and biographers who would make of Foucault that object of their homophobic knowingness. For all of that, the book's real utility resides in something more: its extraordinarily able demonstration of the ways that Foucault's strategies of resistance are enacted in queer political and cultural practices."--Douglas Crimp, author of On the Museum's Ruins and co-author of AIDS Demo Graphics
• "Bracingly clear-headed and endlessly smart, David Halperin's new book commands attention. Saint Foucault represents a major contribution to the philosophy of sexuality and a magisterial introduction to one of the twentieth century's most important thinkers. Unafraid to take real intellectual risks, Halperin delivers Foucault at last from the pedants and the purists, the doubters and the debunkers. A sage, searching, and sensible book."--Diana Fuss, Department of English, Princeton University and author of Identification Papers
• "For those concerned with the thought of Foucault and the politics of gayness, an absolutely necessary book."--Kirkus Reviews
• "Halperin's book...stands as a moment in the continuing dialog among some scholars and some gay activists about the meaning of Foucault's personal life, including his philosophy."--Library Journal
• "A demanding, eloquent and caustic book. Halperin offers close readings of Foucault's thought, forging a link between menucharacterization of political resistance as a creative process and gay politics."--Publishers Weekly
• "Saint Foucault is a slim but sharply entertaining book....Saint Foucault is smart, well-written, never dull. It is a fascinating view, through the prism of Foucault, of matters ranging from ACT-UP to gym culture, from Queer Nation to Bersani, Mohr, and James Miller. It indeed gives you an idea of what the commotion in academe is all about."--The Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review
• "This is David Halperin's passionate, comprehensive, and personal defence against attacks on the Franco-Californian sage's ideas and personal life--and on Halperin's own. Strongly recommended, both as a thorough introduction to Foucault and current issues, and for many intriguing ideas and observations by the author of One Hundred Years of Homosexulality."--Gay Times (London)
• "One of the valuable things about Saint Foucault is that it shows us a Foucault who was...anything but strictly stringently Foucauldian....Halperin...manages to rehabilitate his hero...in exactly that area where, in life and after it, he has been felt to be most wanting, as a political theorist who wanted to be useful, to offer not counsels of despair but strategic thinking."--London Review of Books
• "Halperin's study is a major contribution to understanding Foucault."--The Readers Review
• "That Oxford University Press should have seen fit to issue this ill-written, indigestible and repugnant polemic is grotesque."--Donald Lyons, The Baltimore Sun