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Foucault was shielded from scandal by French reverence for intellectuals

31 July 2021

9:00 AM

31 July 2021

9:00 AM

Confessions of the Flesh: The History of Sexuality, Volume 4 Michel Foucault, edited by Frédéric Gros, translated by Robert Hurley

Penguin, pp.416, 25

The Last Man Takes LSD: Foucault and the End of Revolution Mitchell Dean and Daniel Zamora

Verso, pp.256, 17.99

Consider the hare and the hyena. The hare, Clement of Alexandria told readers of his 2nd-century sexual self-help manual Paedagogus, was thought to possess both male and female sexes and swapped their roles from year to year. As for the hyena, it was believed to acquire an extra anus annually and ‘to make the worst use of these added orifices’, as Michel Foucault puts it in the newly translated fourth volume of his History of Sexuality.

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