Date: Thu, 30 Jan 1997 08:42:14 -0500 (EST) From: louisgodena-AT-ids.net (Louis R Godena) Subject: M-I: Re: Foucault on the USSR It should be remembered, in the course of this excellent discussion, that Foucault had himself an uncertain and ambivalent attitude toward both the USSR and the PCF due in part to his earlier experiences as a Party member in the early 50s. This assumed a special poignancy during the Algerian War for Independence -- a watershed in French intellectual life -- toward which the PCF exhibited a number of ambiguities, behavior in fact which cost it dearly in terms of support among youth and intellectuals. Foucault, to the end of his life, identified most closely with youth, and his shifting position *vis a vis* the Soviet Union mirrored the growing disillusion of a new generation in Paris occasioned by the loss, globally, of French power and prestige (no small matter in a country whose culture had always been bound up in national glorification) and the "betrayals" of the USSR in Czechslovakia and elsewhere. Official Soviet attitudes toward buggery, I rather imagine, played a secondary role in shaping Foucault's attitudes toward Moscow. More important to Foucault -- and this is borne out in again and again in the course of his 1978 interview with the *Unita* journalist Duccio Trombadori (reprinted in Foucault's *Remarks on Marx* [New York, 1991: Semiotext(e)] -- was the view of "official" Marxism (i.e., the ruling Communist and Workers Parties of the USSR and eastern Europe, as well as the Communist Parties in France and Italy ) toward structuralism. Foucault's attempts to identify an historical sequence of fundamental structures of thought (*epistemes*) never enjoyed official favor with the Marxism of "Actually Existing Socialism" and was scarcely welcomed among Marxists in the West, who denounced it as a form of "idealistic humanism". Foucault himself, after receiving an official invitation to give a series of lectures in Budapest, was cut short by the authorities when it came time to speak on structuralism. "There are three things we cannot discuss [here]", he was told; "nazism, the Horty regime, and structuralism". This in my view explains more about Foucault and the USSR than do the ambiguities of sexuality and the family under the Soviet regime. Louis Godena --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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