Join James Lindsay as he sits down with Jon Gower of Near Dark Radio to talk about the controversial French postmodern philosopher Michel Foucault and whether his thought and legacy can be recovered from its clear adaptations and exploitation by the Critical Social Justice movement. Jon and James discuss the specifics of Foucault’s philosophy, methods, intentions, and legacies and indicate that, indeed, the great postmodernist himself would almost certainly find much to be at odds with regarding today’s critical movement for Social Justice.
Chasing the Norm on Near Dark Radio
5 comments
I agree that prisons shouldn’t be resort or excessively punitive. I also feel like we shouldn’t criminalize victimless crimes as well:
Prison should be limited exclusively to crimes with very clear victims: robbery, armed robbery, manslaughter, murder, assault, things like this.
The US has no business handing out prison sentences for smoking pot. Those who take hard drugs should be viewed as addics, not criminals. I also don’t believe in the death penalty.
My issue with Critical Race Theorists, however, is they always gave me the opposite impression: there is nobody more retributive than a Critical Race Theorist.
Can you please get a podcast player that allows one to rewind and jump forward to specific moments without having to restart the entire 2-hour podcast?
Hi, you might try one of the options below. For embed, we’re limited to the platforms Near Dark Radio chooses to distribute on. Hope this helps.
Spotify
Apple Podcasts
Google Play
On a desktop or laptop screen you can right-click on the podcast and, depending on your browser, choose an option to view the frame on its own in a new window or tab — the timeline is visible as a pale purple bar along the bottom.
I enjoyed this conversation, by the way: the myriad references to Foucault proliferating across the internet in the fallout from postmodernism are invariably opaque at best, more often than not casually dismissive and generally low in detail. Unhelpful, in short.
It is good to hear a reasonable discussion of his work.
Ah, the embed code provided was chopping off the bottom, should be fixed now. Sorry about that.