Switched at birth?

The Birth of Biopolitics by Michel Foucault:

The Assault on Reason by Al Gore:

Foucault is…

…a demi-god

…a hallucination

…a truth-denier

…a “Franco-phoney”

…regrettably a dominant figure in law schools (along with Marx)

…a pseudo-scientific sophist transmitted by relics

…besotting the French chattering classes

and finally:

…is responsible for the Virginia-Tech killings

Adding:

I think I have in fact been situated in most of the squares on the political checkerboard, one after another and sometimes simultaneously: as anarchist, leftist, ostentatious or disguised Marxist, nihilist, explicit or secret anti-Marxist, technocrat in the service of Gaullism, new liberal and so on. An American professor complained that a crypto-Marxist like me was invited in the USA, and I was denounced by the press in Eastern European countries for being an accomplice of the dissidents. None of these descriptions is important by itself; taken together, on the other hand, they mean something. And I must admit that I rather like what they mean.

“Polemics, Politics and Problematizations”

Update: The Nation weighs in on Phyllis Schlafley’s claim (above) that the Virginia Tech shootings were caused by reading Foucault and other “fringe” writers.