Rod Dreher: What’s Coming After Liberalism?
Foucault was fairly brilliant — the Panopticon section of Discipline & Punish reads like a virtual prediction of the technological surveillance state — but he was also the leading voice in the so-called “discursive turn”: the idea that discourse is everything, that we cannot ever find any truly real/essential/ideal form beneath our terms for things. We create the world as we speak it, and there is nothing under that. That world we speak-create is all about forms of power, as you note in your post. So the scholar’s main concern becomes finding a locus of power — which, in case it’s not clear, is always and everywhere synonymous with discrimination and oppression — and disrupting it. Thus Hamlet goes from being a high point of Western literature to being a cesspool of misogyny, patriarchy, etc., and thus democratic deliberation goes from being a Habermasian process of “collective rationality” to being a tool of the elites. Power is the overarching concern of all things, and (crucially) the job of the academic is no longer to transmit wisdom or teach knowledge but simply to teach the next generation how to point out yet another locus of power.
.. The project of the Willed Self is a natural outgrowth of Enlightenment thinking. (I share your opinion that Submission is not a great book, but a very important one in terms of exposing the internal contradictions of the Enlightenment.) The whole intellectual movement of the last three centuries has at its core the principle of freeing the willed self from all constraints. The trans movement represents this idea’s apex: if we can free ourselves from basic biology and anatomy, then truly we have become gods. “I am that I am” is no longer confined to Exodus 3; it is the mantra of the willed self freed from all external barriers. There is nothing beyond the subjective, the personal, the therapeutic, because all that matters is how I define my own self, my own existence, and my own gratification.