Postmodernism, Criminality, and Madness: On the crazy French origins of today’s crazy academic ideas.

In recent years, one frequently hears the charge by critics that much of what is presented to students in American college classrooms seems “crazy.” “Words are violence”; “Gender and even sex are social constructions with little or no basis in biology”; “All moral claims are relative, and so all ideas about law and criminality are too”; “Human identities are infinite and wholly personal, and nothing anyone does in the expression of identity can legitimately be classed as pathological.” The list of bizarre ideas now commonplace in higher education is long.

It turns out that there is more to the “crazy” descriptor than just a throwaway epithet. A good deal of the warped ideas propagated in today’s universities is the product of alienated, troubled minds that gave every indication of mental illness.

About a year ago, a story appeared that brought one of the most important radical thinkers of the late twentieth century into the vision even of those who never read him in a university. A former friend of the celebrated French philosopher Michel Foucault reported that Foucault had committed serious crimes of sexual abuse against children during his time living in Tunisia during the late 1960s. The allegation was that Foucault, a homosexual who died in his mid-50s of complications from AIDS and admitted having heavily participated in risky anonymous sex in gay bathhouses, was a “paedophile rapist” who paid young Tunisian boys for sex during an extended stay in the North African country, a former French protectorate.

The interest in this story for anyone with an eye on academic politics extends beyond the obvious moral and criminal issue of a French citizen apparently getting away with awful crimes against children. Foucault’s work—a good portion of which deals with sexual identity, criminality, and mental illness—has had a vast influence on leftist academic thought and teaching. Is there a relationship between this writing and the mental health of the individual who did it? And what might such a relationship help us understand about the current academic world, which takes the ideas of people like Foucault—and others in his influential radical cohort—on identity, mental illness and madness, and criminality so seriously?

The question extends well beyond Foucault. A substantial number of the influential European thinkers who produced the literature on which much of the radical American professoriate draws for their teaching were no strangers to psychological pathology. One of the most evident and well-known examples is Louis Althusser, the Marxist philosopher who spent decades in the prestigious Parisian École normale supérieure, influencing generations of leftist students. Althusser was hospitalized numerous times during his life for mental breakdowns and was eventually diagnosed with schizophrenia. He murdered his wife in their rooms at the ENS during a psychotic episode in 1980. Subsequently, he spent the final decade of his life as an inmate in a psychiatric hospital, ruminating on the possibility of receiving an audience with Pope John Paul II so he could instruct the Holy Father on how to prevent the Apocalypse.