Tuesday marks the 40th anniversary of the death of Michel Foucault. Four decades since complications from AIDS brought his career to a premature end, the French philosopher—a role he both embraced and pushed away—continues to top rankings of the most-cited scholars in the humanities. This is to the chagrin of conservative critics of higher education, for whom his influence is synonymous with the perversions, figurative as well as literal, of the academy and of modern life. His vast authority is equally lamented by many orthodox Marxists, who hold him responsible for the shift away from class as the central fact of social organization and the proper locus of radical activism—and toward boutique “identitarian” causes and the emancipation of the self from normative structures of all kinds.
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