David M. Halperin, Foucault’s Queer Critique, In The Routledge Companion to Queer Literary Studies, ed. Melissa E. Sanchez, Routledge 2025.
A preliminary version of this chapter can be found online here.
First paragraphs (extract)
Critique has fallen out of favor lately among exponents of queer theory as well as among participants in the recent debates in literary studies over reading methods. Critique often finds itself displaced, or replaced, in such contexts by one or another version of something called “postcritique.” And so it happens that a tradition of intellectual and political contestation dating back to the European Renaissance and Reformation, which came to be identified with enlightened resistance to modern forms of knowledge and power, now meets with routine expressions of contempt from those who style themselves as adherents of insurgent intellectual or academic movements that aspire to function as cutting-edge vehicles of opposition to contemporary practices of rule.
In order to buck that trend, and to rehabilitate critique as a specifically queer enterprise, I appeal to a little-known but dominant theme in the late thought of Michel Foucault. Foucault is often considered one of the founders, or at least one of the intellectual sources, of queer theory. But that is not because of his thinking about critique, or “the critical attitude” (as he liked to call it), much less because of his elaborate genealogies of critique, an activity which he traced back to the ancient Greek world and to the practice and ethos of parrhēsia: a somewhat enigmatic term that signifies unguarded, risky, courageous speech—speech that forthrightly, even defiantly, conveys the speaker’s sincere beliefs and articulates an unsafe truth.
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