Saint Foucault Towards a Gay Hagiography: Towards a Gay Hagiography - Softcover

Halperin, David M.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0195111273 ISBN 13: 9780195111279

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 1997

Synopsis

Saint Foucault The acclaimed author of One Hundred Years of Homosexuality offers an uncompromising and impassioned defense of the late French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault 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. Illustrations. Full description

About this title

Review:

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. (Alan Sinfield, Gay Times, October 1995)

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)

a provocative read ... Halperin's book is highly engaging. (Times Higher Education Supplement)

Synopsis:

'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? Offering a no-holds barred rebuke to recent criticism of Foucault by Camille Paglia, Richard Mohr, biographer James Miller, and others, Saint Foucault is an uncompromising and impassioned defence of the late French philosopher and historian. A sometimes scathing, sometimes moving exploration of truth and sexual politics, it shows Foucault as a galvanizing thinker who will continue to serve as a model for gay intellectuals and activists.

About this edition

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0195111273
• ISBN 13: 9780195111279
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256