Saint Foucault: Toward a Gay Hagiography

Rating:
Summary: Daft and Incoherent
Review: Don't be mislead by the dust jacket. It promises that Halperin answers those who disagree with him, but it doesn't. I was especially looking forward to Halperin snarking back at Camille Paglia for her devestating review of his book "100 Years of Homosexuality", but Paglia's infamous "Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders" is never addressed. When he does approach his dissenters, it is in a roundabout, inconclusive, Foucaltian way. Very irritating.

The worst thing about Halperin is his dependence on theory and on other theorists. He doesn't seem to know that there are sciences (psychology, sociology, anthropology, biology, etc.) which might address his Queer Theory dilemmas. Instead, we get incessant name-dropping and logrolling. A disgrace.

Rating:
Summary: Daft and Incoherent
Review: Don't be mislead by the dust jacket. It promises that Halperin answers those who disagree with him, but it doesn't. I was especially looking forward to Halperin snarking back at Camille Paglia for her devestating review of his book "100 Years of Homosexuality", but Paglia's infamous "Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders" is never addressed. When he does approach his dissenters, it is in a roundabout, inconclusive, Foucaltian way. Very irritating.

The worst thing about Halperin is his dependence on theory and on other theorists. He doesn't seem to know that there are sciences (psychology, sociology, anthropology, biology, etc.) which might address his Queer Theory dilemmas. Instead, we get incessant name-dropping and logrolling. A disgrace.

Rating:
Summary: Agree with the first review...
Review: I must agree with the first review. Although this book is well-researched, it suffers from a complete lack of understanding. Foucault's entire philosophy is junked in this attempt to apotheosize yet another French thinker... And if the author abstains from excessive jargon, I say it is because he cannot understand and effectively use that jargon; he is beneath the contemporary intellectual current.

Rating:
Summary: english departments and cultural studies
Review: I very much enjoyed Prof. Halperin's early book, *Before Pastoral.* There, his familiarity with classics and with the pastoral and bucolic traditions led to insightful observations about important literary modes, their definitive characteristics, and their evolution. Unfortunately, *Saint Foucault* is symptomatic of a problem that has been plaguing English departments for some time now: English professors dismiss their primary object of study---literature---as "bourgeois" or "elitist" or "oppressive" or "economically superstructural," and they become dilettantes in a mish-mash of fields that they end up calling "cultural studies" or "cultural poetics." As his work was received in North America, Foucault had a great deal to do with that shift in English studies. Nonetheless, I do find it amusing that Halperin can create an only half ironic "cult of personality" around the very man who argued that the category of the individual "subject" was infinitely less important than a transpersonalized, discursive and ultimately ill-defined "POWER/KNOWLEDGE." Whatever my serious reservations about Foucault's ideas may be, I know for sure that he would find the idea of a "gay hagiography" very unsound.

Rating:
Summary: Useful polemic; not really an airtight study
Review: I will pay this book a high compliment for a book of criticism: It made me want to look up and read the end notes. Even further, it reawakened my interest in Foucault (for a time partly under the sleeping spell of Camille Paglia). Halperin does a wonderful job of pointing out the political biases and even the lapses of "critical reasoning" among Foucault's detractors, while making a strong case for his hyperbolic claim that the philosopher was "a f****** saint," presumedly with apparent oxymoron intended. Especially strong is the book's argument of Foucault's importance in AIDS activism and subsequently to so-called queer theory. The writing is lucid, compassionate, sometimes (justifiably) angry, candid, and often witty. Halperin does not fall into the usual postmodernist traps of excessive jargon and redundancy. The last section of the book points out the problems of biography in general, while attending to the specific strengths and weaknesses of three recent attempts to narrate Foucault's life. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in philosophy and/or issues of gender and sexuality.

Rating:
Summary: A useful but problematically blinkered study
Review: The first thing you need to know about David Halperin's SAINT FOUCAULT is that the title is only moderately ironic. That is, Halperin really sees Foucault as a sort of liberating force for the Western gay world: although he makes his case quite passionately, his claims seem very blinkered by his adoration. This is a good book to assign students insofar as it makes a useful argument to tear apart, but time has shown that Halperin's vision of Foucault has more to do with Halperin and less to do with Foucault himself and what he actually said.