“The CIA reads Foucault” - Foucault’s third adventure

 July 11, 2022

Now, of course, monks were only men and lived among themselves and so on and so forth, in a high degree of chastity and discipline, etc.

Let's observe how Foucault was willing to put his body on the line to deal with the inevitable question that would have to be investigated - the question about women on the "outside" and what that experience would have been like for the cloistered male monk. It's an approximation but we have to respect that he was willing to sacrifice his gay identity toward the goal of producing good work, and he has.

The assignment for procurement this time around is, let's say, a chicken for laying eggs. The important part about this, given the difficulty of judging a chicken, is the following statement, given upon return to the cloister, as follows:

"If, on the one hand, it is true that man could not exist, and that only the juridical notion of the subject of right could exist when the problem of power was formulated within the theory of sovereignty, on the other hand, when population becomes the vis-a-vis of government , rather than of sovereignty, then I think we can say that man is to population what the subject of right was to the sovereign."

Chew on that. It's good work. And, Foucault's identity can't be dismissed, but his identity politics has nothing to do with this work that came out of him acknowledging fully his true identity, in that region.

If we wish to return to our adorable story about Foucault as a medieval monk, it seems plain and common sense that such a thoughtful and energetic young monk in such a position might be involved in a puzzling thought process about the reproductive system (that is, "natural history and biology") before journeying out to collect an egg-laying chicken.