ABSTRACT
In 1988 conference at Paris, convened to discuss the legacy of Michel Foucault, the liberal pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty praised Foucault as a 'Romantic intellectual'. Foucault is remediated by liberals as a 'Romantic intellectual', which in turn implies a remediation of Romantic selfhood as autonomous, ironical and fundamentally limited in political ambition. Foucault's study of the games of truth in the empirical sciences of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and then of those games implicit in the power relations of punitive practices, gives way to the study of those games in the history of human desire. Posthumous biographies of Foucault suggest that this development came about because he found that his own body, as it negotiated the endless play of power relations in certain sexual practices, was the only site of resistance to that power. Foucault becomes, then, the 'Romantic intellectual', sidelined by a liberal consensus informed by, and largely the gull of, what McGann termed 'the Romantic ideology'.
