What Foucault liked to do with Arab boys — excerpt from Murray’s book

It is always unpleasant—as well as unwise—for thinkers to lambaste each other because of the habits of their personal lives. The personal is not always political and is certainly not always philosophical. Yet in March 2021, a most interesting fact emerged about the personal life of Foucault. During an interview, his fellow philosopher Guy Sorman revealed a fact that had long been rumored. Sorman revealed that in the late 1960s, when Foucault was living near Tunis, Foucault would have sex with the local children. Sorman said that on a visit to Sidi Bou Said, near Tunis, he witnessed young children running after Foucault asking him for the money he offered other children before raping them. According to Sorman, these boys of eight, nine, or ten years of age would have money thrown at them by Foucault, who would arrange to meet them late at night ‘at the usual place.’ The usual place turned out to be the local cemetery, where Foucault would rape the children on the gravestones. As Sorman said, ‘The question of consent wasn’t even raised.’ Foucault would not have dared to do this in France, according to Sorman, but there was ‘a colonial dimension to this. A white imperialism.’

   One of the many oddities of these revelations is that, to date, they seem to have done nothing to dent Foucault’s reputation. Nor has the fact that along with other French intellectuals, he once signed a letter recommending the age of consent in his country be lowered to twelve. His work continues to be cited. His books continue to be published, and there is no significant campaign to have them pulled. Indeed, a final, previously unpublished volume in his History of Sexuality was published after these revelations came out. The repercussions of Foucault’s theories continue to be felt, and nowhere has there been any recantation by his disciples in disciplines across America or anywhere else because of the revelations of racially motivated child rape.

   Like the double standard over Marx’s racism, this fact is suggestive. For it would surely be different if it had worked the other way around. If one of the twentieth century’s great conservative thinkers had been revealed to have traveled to the developing world in order to rape young boys on a tombstone in a graveyard at night, it might be considered suggestive. The political Left would likely be unwilling to let the issue slide by completely. Nor would they be willing to pass up the opportunity to extrapolate some extra lessons. They might say that this habit was revealing of a wider conservative mindset. That it revealed the pedophilic, rapist, racist tendencies at the heart of traditional Western thought. They might even try to point out that a whole cultural movement or societal tendency was tarred by association with this nocturnal and noxious habit. But with Foucault, no such thing has happened. He remains on his throne. His work continues to spill out. And nobody to date seems to think there is anything especially telling about one of the founding icons of the anti-Westernism of our time having found personal pleasure in purchasing native children of foreign countries to satisfy his sexual desires.”