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Thank you for this. Foucault stands clearly apart from the other post-modernists, whether self-described or (as in his case) adopted after the fact without his consent. Prominent amongst the first group are self-confessed intellectual frauds such as Derrida and Lacan. Foucault in contrast represents, as you detail, a disciplined progression of the Enlightenment liberal project. In my view Foucault is indispensable for navigating not just the murky interplay between ontology and power, but also the specific use and misuse of ontology in the service of identity-based power. Thank you for differentiating Foucault, and debunking the caricatures of him, in this piece. It is so depressing when Foucault is routinely and ignorantly lumped in with charlatans.

I do think that that it's important to recognise that the misuse of Foucault's thought has been central to insulating the magical thinking of identity.politics within an purportedly impregnable shield of relativism. In fact it is worse than just an insulating shield, because intrinsic to this shield is a backlash that labels anyone who challenges the shield as at best naive, at worst a hypocritical self-serving bigot. So it is equally important to demonstrate how Foucault's thought has been misused, as it is to differentiate the wealth of his anaysis from the poverty of the rest of what is lumped together under postmodernism.

Thanks again for this article.

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