“As a philosopher sympathetic to Foucault recently remarked to me, Foucault failed in each of his major inquiries and, in desperation, went further afield from his areas of expertise. The History of Sexuality is a disaster. Page after page is sheer fantasy, unsupported by the ancient or modern historical record.”

— Camille Paglia

Source: Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992), Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders : Academe in the Hour of the Wolf, p. 187

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "As a philosopher sympathetic to Foucault recently remarked to me, Foucault failed in each of his major inquiries and, i…" by Camille Paglia?

Camille Paglia photo

Camille Paglia 326

American writer 1947

Related quotes

“The elevation of Foucault to guru status by American and British academics is a tale that belongs to the history of cults.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992), Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders : Academe in the Hour of the Wolf, p. 174
Context: The truth is that Foucault knew very little about anything before the seventeenth century and, in the modern world, outside France. His familiarity with the literature and art of any period was negligible. His hostility to psychology made him incompetent to deal with sexuality, his own or anybody else’s. The elevation of Foucault to guru status by American and British academics is a tale that belongs to the history of cults.

“In writing a history of madness, Foucault has attempted-and this is the greatest merit, but also the very infeasibility of his book0to write a history of madness itself. Itself. Of madness itself. That is by letting madness speak for itself.”

Jacques Derrida book Writing and Difference

Cogito and The History of Madness, p.37 (Routledge classics edition)
Writing and Difference (1978)

“A page from a journal of modern experimental physics will be as mysterious to the uninitiated as a Tibetan mandala. Both are records of enquiries into the nature of the universe.”

Fritjof Capra book The Tao of Physics

Source: The Tao of Physics (1975), Ch. 2, Knowing and Seeing, p. 36.

“When the modern scholar cites from a classic text, the quotation seems to burn a hole in his own drab page.”

George Steiner (1929–2020) American writer

Source: The Death of Tragedy (1961), Ch. IX: (p. 314).

“There is a constant rush to judgment in Foucault. He is filled with specious generalizations, false categories, distortions, fudging, pretenses to knowledge in areas where he was ignorant. He had no ability whatsoever to distinguish among historical sources, where he makes terrible blunders.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992), Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders : Academe in the Hour of the Wolf, p. 224

“The sports page records people's accomplishments, the front page usually records nothing, but man's failures.”

Barbara Walters (1929) American broadcast journalist, author, and television personality

Occasionally attributed to Walters; actually said by Earl Warren, as quoted in Sports Illustrated (July 22, 1968).
Misattributed

“The most serious flaw of Foucault's system is in the area of sex. I view his hurried, compulsive writing as a massive rationalist defense-formation to avoid thinking about (a) woman, (b) nature, (c) emotion, and (d) the sexual body. His attempt to make the body passive property of male society is an evasion of the universal fact so intolerable to him: that we are all born of human mothers. By turning women into ciphers, he miniaturizes and contains them.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992), Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders : Academe in the Hour of the Wolf, p. 230

“No man is truly great who is great only in his lifetime. The test of greatness is the page of history.”

William Hazlitt (1778–1830) English writer

"The Indian Jugglers"
Table Talk: Essays On Men And Manners http://www.blupete.com/Literature/Essays/TableHazIV.htm (1821-1822)

“The sages and heroes of history are receding from us, and history contracts the record of their deeds into a narrow and narrower page. But time has no power over the name and deeds and words of Jesus Christ.”

William Ellery Channing (1780–1842) United States Unitarian clergyman

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 61

“The observers had a logbook recording the assaults, bombings, and artillery attacks on the area. Each page was ruled in vertical columns: DATE, TIME, LOCATION, DAMAGE, CASUALTIES. The columns headed ACTION TAKEN BY THE UN were completely empty.”

P. J. O'Rourke (1947) American journalist

All the Trouble in the World (1994)

Related topics