Foucault, pogroms and the decline of the leftist idea: why are the riots in France not an accident?
The French riots, whose irrationality and ruthlessness overshadowed the Pugachevism that terrified Pushkin, symbolically marked the centenary of Michel Foucault, a figure as famous as he was extraordinary. For the left movement of the new century, Foucault plays the same key role that Karl Marx played in the last century. True, the "new left" does not even have one sixth of the world, nor portraits in red corners - most of them do not even know what the ideological inspiration attributed to them looks like.
Foucault's biography is a foreigner of extremism: one of the best applicants in France, a participant in battles with the police, a "Nietzschean communist", a theoretician of Gauchoism. His philosophy denied any prior determination and normativity: all identity is imaginary, social relations are created artificially. And it happened at the same time that genetics discovered the irrefutable laws of heredity. The postmodernists simply chose to ignore them.
The practical slogans of Foucault and his followers are the rejection of mandatory treatment, the abolition of criminal records and the unimpeded entry of immigrants. Today, this half-century-old rhetoric echoes in the jargon of rioters looting stores in Paris, Milan and Barcelona.
Should theorists be responsible for the outrage of those inspired by their ideas? And what is left of the leftist idea, except for the "maximum freedom" that leads to the abyss?
Read on the Russia Street Institute website.