A philosopher who had a great influence on contemporary intellectuals, Michel Foucault, it would have been a pedophile that she would have had sex with Arab children while living in Tunisia in the late 1960s.
Guy Sormon’s reference to the sexual crimes of the French philosopher, who died in 1984 at age 57, was published this month in his book “My shitty dictionary”, and then reiterated by the author on a television program. The presenter was amazed: “You are talking about Foucault, for you a pedophile, something that people do not usually remember when they talk about him.”
Sorman, 77, said he visited Foucault with a group of friends on an Easter holiday trip to the town of Sidi Bou Said, near Tunis, where the philosopher lived in 1969. “Little children ran after Foucault saying ‘what about me? take me, take me ‘”, he recalled in an interview with the British newspaper The Sunday Times this Sunday.
“They were eight, nine, ten years old, I threw money at them and said: ‘See you at 10 at night at the usual place.’ This, it seemed, was the local cemetery: “There I made love on the tombstones with the boys. The question of consent has not even been raised.”
Sorman said that “Foucault would not have dared to do that in France,” comparing him to Paul Gauguin, the impressionist who had sex with girls who painted in Tahiti, and Andre Gide, the novelist who persecuted boys in Africa. “There is a colonial dimension to this. White imperialism.”
Sorman said he regretted not reporting Foucault to the police at the time or to the press, calling his behavior “ignoble” and “extremely morally ugly.”
But, he added, the French media were already aware of Foucault’s behavior. “There were journalists present on that trip, there were many witnesses, but no one did stories like that at the time. Foucault was the philosopher king. It is like a god in France. “
Foucault, the son of a surgeon, was one of the first famous intellectuals of the 20th century, author of works that until today remain as absolute references in the academy, such as “Watch and punish”, “Microphysics of power” and the volumes of “History of sexuality. “” The philosopher is also remembered for signing a petition in 1977 to legalize sex with 13-year-olds.
His best-known biography, “The Passion of Michel Foucault” (1993), by James Miller, describes his interest in gay and sadomasochistic toilets in the United States – he was one of the first openly homosexual figures in public life and died of AIDS – but he does not mention his sexual experiences in Tunisia.
Sorman’s remarks surprised experts in Britain, where Foucault’s latest volume on the history of sexuality in four parts has just been published for the first time in English. For Sorman, Foucault’s behavior was symptomatic of a distinctive French malaise dating back to Voltaire. “He believed that there were two moral principles, one for the elite, which was immoral, and one for the people, which should be restrictive.”
He continued: “France is not yet a democracy, we had the revolution, we proclaimed a republic, but there is still an aristocracy, it is the intelligentsia, and it has had a special status. Anything will do. “Now, however,” the world is suddenly changing, “Sorman added.
The intellectual said, however, that Foucault should not be “canceled.” “I have great admiration for his work, I am not inviting anyone to burn his books, but simply to understand the truth about him and how he and some of these philosophers used their arguments to justify their passions and desires,” he said. “He thought his arguments gave him permission to do what he wanted.”
