Philosophy has a long and storied tradition of the intellectual punch-up, a noble lineage stretching from the Socratic gadfly to the Frankfurt School's earnest polemics. But there is a particular, exquisite delight in watching a French intellectual sucker-punch his most celebrated contemporary in the pages of a small, incendiary pamphlet. It is the delight of a perfectly timed 'coup de grâce', delivered not with a fist but with a concept, and it is this delight—bracing, acerbic, and deeply hilarious—that awaits the reader of Jean Baudrillard’s 1977 masterpiece of impertinence, “Forget Foucault”.
The publication history alone is a farce worthy of Ionesco. In 1976, Jean Baudrillard, a provocateur in training, wrote a bracing 12,000-word critique of Michel Foucault’s newly published “The History of Sexuality”. He sent it to the prestigious journal “Critique”, where, in a deliciously awkward twist, Foucault himself sat on the editorial committee. The essay was rejected, naturally. Undeterred, Baudrillard offered the manuscript to his publisher at Gallimard, who also turned it down, fearing, with considerable justification, the wrath of Gallimard’s star author, Michel Foucault. What follows is the stuff of intellectual legend: a chance encounter between Baudrillard and the owner of a rival publishing house, Éditions Galilée, who, sensing a scandalous opportunity, agreed to publish the attack. In early 1977, “Forget Foucault” appeared as a slim pamphlet and immediately caused a small sensation, becoming perhaps the first of Baudrillard's works to reach a wide French audience.
The titular command—"Forget Foucault"—was, of course, preposterous. It was the philosophical equivalent of telling an ocean to forget the moon. At the time, Foucault's intellectual power was, as Baudrillard himself later recalled, "enormous". To command his erasure was not to invite silence but to demand a fight. And yet, the most famous response was no response at all. According to legend, when pressed to reply, Foucault reportedly quipped that he would have more problems remembering Baudrillard. The master, it seems, had chosen the ultimate weapon: a sphinx-like, devastating silence.
And this, right here, is where we must begin to laugh. Because in refusing to reply, Foucault may have unwittingly proven Baudrillard’s central thesis. The point was never to win an argument. The point was to demonstrate that the very game of "arguing" about power was a trap. Baudrillard, with the glint of a card sharp in his eye, had dared Foucault to pick up a gauntlet that could not be picked up without losing.
Before we descend too far into the giddy whirlpool of French intellectual gossip, it is worth pausing to consider what Baudrillard actually argues in these pages. And the truth is, beneath the headline-grabbing title lies a critique that is both devastatingly simple and, by his own logic, completely impossible.
At its core, “Forget Foucault” is not a rejection of Foucault but an acceleration. Baudrillard argues, with a kind of gleeful nihilism, that Foucault’s entire project is an elaborate ouroboros, a snake eating its own tail. Foucault’s great innovation was to demonstrate that power is not a top-down, repressive force wielded by a sovereign, but a productive, capillary network that circulates through the very fabric of society, producing discourse, identities, and even desire itself. As summarised by the MIT Press description: "In Baudrillard's eyes, desire and power were interchangeable, so desire had no place in Foucault's work".
Baudrillard’s counterpunch is simple: if power is everywhere and produces everything, then it is ultimately nothing. A concept that explains everything explains nothing. He contends that Foucault’s power discourse functions in the same manner as the very powers it claims to analyse, establishing practices with no previous, actual foundation. In other words, Foucault’s genealogy of power, for all its subversive intent, ends up creating a new, absolute interpretive grid—a new "truth" about how society works. It is, Baudrillard suggests, a simulation of a critique.
For Baudrillard, power has not become more entrenched or diffuse; it has "dissolved" into what he calls the hyperreal, a state where simulations have replaced any underlying reality. To analyse power in the old terms is to miss the point entirely. To analyse sexuality, as Foucault does, as the product of a discourse on sexuality, is to fall for the very trick of modernity, which is to generate endless chatter about things that have, in their essential form, ceased to exist. As one analysis of the text puts it, "power, much like sexuality, has no computable basis in the real world".
If this sounds bracingly cynical, it is. If it sounds self-defeating, well, that is precisely the point—and the humour.
What makes “Forget Foucault” genuinely funny—a quality not often associated with postmodern theory—is its performative contradiction. The book is a classic example of a man building a ladder just so he can kick it out from under himself. Baudrillard spends a slim volume dismantling Foucault’s theory of power only to leave his own reader with no theory whatsoever, and certainly no easy alternative. His proposed alternative is the concept of "seduction," a term he uses to denote a kind of reversible, playful, and non-productive challenge to the seriousness of "production" and "power".
But as one critic has wryly observed, "Baudrillard’s notion of seduction gradually reveals itself as a picture no less problematic". Indeed, to offer "seduction" as an alternative is already to have lost the game. It is to propose a new master concept to replace the old one, precisely the kind of intellectual power move that Baudrillard claims to abhor.
The humour, therefore, resides in the absurdity of the situation. “Forget Foucault” is a high-wire act with no net. It is a book that declares the death of grand narratives while itself being a grand narrative about the death of grand narratives. It commands us to forget a thinker in a text that ensures we will never be able to forget either him or its author. The sheer brazenness of it is intellectually refreshing, akin to a court jester pointing out that the emperor's new clothes are not only invisible but have also been outsourced to a sweatshop in a simulation.
Moreover, the book’s attack on Foucault's contemporaries, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari—"those philosophers... who believed that desire could be revolutionary"—adds another layer of comedic conflict. It is one thing to take on the master; it is another to also casually dismiss the revolutionaries of desire in a single, devastating aside. Baudrillard plays the role of the true radical, the one who is so radical he has rejected radicalism itself.
This brings us back to the silent man himself. What are we to make of Foucault’s famous non-response? Commentators have debated it for decades. Some see it as an act of intellectual hauteur, a refusal to dignify a lesser provocateur with a reply. Others have read it as a more canny strategic move.
Perhaps the most interesting reading is the one that takes Baudrillard seriously. As a 2022 paper titled "Foucault After Baudrillard" suggests, we can view all of Foucault’s later work—the second and third volumes of “The History of Sexuality”, which focus on the aesthetics of existence and the care of the self—as a silent, profound, and successful response to Baudrillard's critique. Foucault, in this reading, does not deign to argue. He simply changes the subject. He moves away from the analytics of power and toward the practices of self-formation, effectively admitting that a pure "power" analysis is insufficient.
The thesis argues that "after "Forget Foucault". Baudrillard and Foucault are in a 'seductive' relationship with each other, with each having to be read as offering an explanation not only of the other but of their relationship with the other". In other words, the attack and the silence create a new intellectual configuration. Neither can be understood in isolation. Foucault’s refusal to play the game becomes a move within the game.
This is where the "truthful" aspect of our essay must reside. The truth is that “Forget Foucault” is not a successful critique in any conventional sense. It is not a book that refutes Foucault’s ideas, nor does it offer a viable alternative. Instead, it is a book that illuminates a fault line, a tension, a point of fundamental disagreement about the nature of the social world. And by doing so in such a hyperbolic and self-immolating manner, it forces its readers to think for themselves.
By now, you might be asking yourself a question that would be entirely reasonable to ask of any piece of late twentieth-century French philosophy: why should I care? Why spend 128 pages with a philosopher who, by his own admission, is leading you into a dead end?
The answer, I think, is that “Forget Foucault” is less a work of philosophy and more a work of philosophical performance art. It is a bracing splash of cold water in the face of academic seriousness. In an era of endless, cautious, citation-heavy scholarship, Baudrillard reminds us what it looks like to take a genuine intellectual risk. He is wrong with such style and conviction that he becomes, paradoxically, right. His book diagnoses a sickness in contemporary thought: the tendency to critique systems from within the very language those systems provide.
As one review on LibraryThing puts it, "Baudrillard does an extraordinary job at imploding the micropolitics/physics of both Foucault and Deleuze-Guattari’s theories". But he does so in a way that leaves rubble, not a blueprint. The point, perhaps, is that the only honest response to the hyperreal, all-encompassing, simulated nature of modern power is not to build a better theoretical model, but to simply forget it all and start again from somewhere else. Somewhere outside. Somewhere, dare we say, a little more human.
And isn't that, in its own maddening way, a hopeful message? When the master tells you that you are trapped in a prison house of language and power, the jester invites you to simply walk out, not through an act of heroic resistance, but through an act of forgetting. Laugh at the seriousness of it all. “Forget Foucault”. Forget his disciples. Forget the whole fraught, tangled web of intellectual anxiety. Take a walk. Pet a cat. Maybe, just maybe, that is the most revolutionary act of all.
In the end, “Forget Foucault” is a trick. It is a book that pretends to be about Michel Foucault but is really about the seductive, performative power of a single, brilliant, and utterly impossible command. It is a pamphlet that wants to be forgotten so badly that it has ensured its own immortality.
The only proper response to Jean Baudrillard is, of course, to follow his advice. Forget Foucault. Forget Baudrillard. Forget this essay. Close the book, step outside, and experience the world directly, without the mediating filter of a hundred French nouns ending in ‘-tion’. It is exactly what the master would have wanted. Probably. Or not. And that, dear reader, is the final, infuriating, and deeply human punchline.
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Baudrillard, Jean. “Forget Foucault”. Translated by Nicole Dufresne, introduction by Sylvère Lotringer, Semiotext(e), 2007. Originally published as “Oublier Foucault” (Galilée, 1977)
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