”White imperialism" and epistēmē or Foucault ‘abused boys in Tunisia’ (1)

　The following article was published in The Times (Sunday edition) on March 28, 2021. It is a paid article, so you can only read a snippet of it from the Internet. I found out about it from the article on the Japanese website at 2).

１）French philosopher Michel Foucault ‘abused boys in Tunisia’ | World | The Sunday Times
２）20世紀の知の巨人フーコーに小児性愛と白い帝国主義者の疑惑：日経ビジネス電子版

 2), you can read this article by becoming a free registered member. The author of this Japanese article is Shuji Hosaka, a Maghreb researcher. Hosaka himself has read very little Foucault, but he seems to have taken up the subject because he cannot overlook it as a Maghreb researcher.　

　For more details, please read Hosaka's article. The "white imperialism" is inescapable and latent in Western Europeans and Western intellectuals. Even one of my mentors, St. Max Weber, has to admit that it is inescapable. It is better for non-Westerners to have a suspicion that it is inexorably infiltrating their "epistēmē," the framework of academic intellectual perception. This is because that framework is the very "discipline" that non-Westerners are forced to learn once they are in modern institutions of higher learning (i.e., universities, etc.).

  But that doesn't mean that we can switch to "Kokugaku (National Learning)" or Qing dynasty "Kaoju Xue(search for evidence)". We owe it to the intellectual resources of the Westerners to even methodically (or constructively) notice the "white imperialism". The epistemological revolution of the Tokugawa era, these contributions were made by Ogyu Sorai and Motoori Norinaga, made us aware of the problem, but it did not make it a methodical (constructive) intellectual resource that is available to us. Therefore, they have no way to control themselves, and they fall into the trap that I pointed out. Since Westerners seem to be good at this kind of "methodical (constructive)" intellectual work, I think we non-Westerners should let them use us as intellectual resources.

 Knowing that Kant and Foucault are unconscious "white imperialists", I think it would be better to judge whether they are "useful" or "discarded" at each stage. I am ashamed to say that I have never read any books on Kant, Foucault, or Derrida as far as I am concerned. I've only read historical or theoretical science books. In hindsight, I think that might have been a blessing in disguise.

See (2)

(The above was translated with the help of DeepL.)