Michel Foucault was accused of sexually abusing children in Tunisia

French philosopher and economist Guy Sorman caused a great stir in the cultural world when, during an interview, claims to have witnessed events which would indicate that the philosopher Michel Foucault, during a visit to Tunisia with a group of friends at Easter 1969, I would have paid to have sex with children.

Sorman said that the French philosopher, who died in 1984 at the age of 57, lived in Tunisia in a town called Sidi Bou Said, 20 kilometers from the capital. According to his words, the children ran through the streets of the city after Foucault shouted to him: “Why not me? Take me too!” and the philosopher gave money to the children in front of his eyes to “meet at the usual place at ten in the evening”. This space turned out to be the city’s cemetery.

Sorman said that today he considers himself “sleazy” and “morally dirty” for not having denounced the conduct of the philosopher at the time. “Foucault would not have dared to do that in France,” he said. in the interview for the British newspaper Sunday Times, taken from what he reveals in his recent book “My shit dictionary”.

He then drew a parallel between the behavior of the philosopher and the actions of legendary French artists like the painter Paul Gaugin, who allegedly had sex with his young models in Tahiti, and the novelist André Gide, who is accused of similar behavior in Africa.

According to Sorman, the French media knew it And remember that on this trip several journalists witnessed the events, but at that time no one thought to write down what they saw: “Foucault was the king of the philosophers. He was treated like a king of France.”

The charge against Foucault differs in several respects from the baseline, which has been typical since the Me too. The famous accused, on the one hand, is long dead, so he cannot defend himself. On another side, It was not his former victims who delivered him, but a third person.

An important circumstance for the contextualization and handling of accusations, for example, is that Foucault himself, like many of his French counterparts, fully supported open sexual relations between children and adults. There was a petition signed in 1977 by big names including Foucault, but also Simone de Beauvoir, Jean Paul Sartre, Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Alain Robbe-Grillet o Louis Aragon, who argued that if French law considered minors under the age of 13 having rights in various fields, these should also be extended to sexual and emotional life. This attitude was born from the reformist movement of 68 to reject all the taboos which they considered to be bourgeois.

Sorman also said he had “great admiration” for Foucault’s work and that he “does not invite anyone to burn his books, but simply to understand the truth about him and how he and some these philosophers used their arguments to justify their passions and desires. He thought his arguments allowed him to do what he wanted, ”he concluded.

Telam Agency