Building a large audience of fans is an esoteric skill for writers. The act of writing cannot be taken as a one-sided activity, the targeted audience is to be perceived beforehand. Most writers only write what intrigues them, but building up a career requires more impersonal skills than demonstrating subjectivity completely. Making an analysis of the nature of fame in the lives of Michael Foucault and Reinaldo Arenas reveals many aspects of what causes a writer to be famous while that equally talented remains in shadow.

The scope of an idea that a writer chooses to work at, hints viability of fame. Issues which affect a large number of audiences are more celebrated and achieve limelight than those which concern a limited audience. Michael Foucault discerns ideas of universal nature, and issues such as power, reality, medicine, asylums, madness, etc. These ideas have a broader spectrum and invite attention to the intellectual community as well as common folk.

Foucault had long harbored the ambition to craft a work that might reach beyond the academy, to touch Sartre’s larger public. And when The Order of Things was first published in France in the spring of 1966, it became a bestseller. (Miller)

Foucault’s idea was to remain at intellectual height to maintain intellectual hegemony in the corridors of epistemic abundance. The scope of writing determines its power to relate things over a large matter of issue. The viability of the ideas of universal themes invites intertextual references in academics to be cited everywhere in aural and written mediums making Foucault a universal celebrity. Unlike Foucault, Arenas’ work depicts a limited strain of ideas and representation, as he usually is preoccupied with his very personal fantasies and his scope towards life revolves around things intimate to him only, or which attract a limited audience. His preoccupation with homosexuality with a highly intellectual bent of faculties invites limited attention, especially from those people with whom his ideas went to complete conflicts, such as Cuban authorities or others interpolating resistance in the Cuban revolution against capitalist democracies.

Another argument that brings us close to the idea of fame is the political commitment to the status quo. Writings that attract political turmoil or show dissidents for the present regime are willfully sidelined. Dissipation of information is always in the hands of the government. Ideas which either support the government policies or are naive to the political ideologies are promoted inevitably. Hence, there is a limited class that writes for resistance and a limited class that reads and understands the messages. Michael Foucault with his ideas of government and its related peripheral ideas philosophizes the concepts and explores new avenues within the current concepts by the already great philosophers such as Hedgier, Nietzsche, and Deleuze. The ideas philosophized were not directly hinted at as anti-establishment rather, they were more generic and opened up intellectual debate to engage the people with sagacious nature. The content of Renaldo Arenas has been deliberately kept under limitations. Though he is a Nobel Prize winner and, acclaimed writer, yet due to his open confessions to his sexual life and resistance to the government made him persecuted throughout his writing career.

Arenas, having distanced his work from the popularized versions of “lo real maravilloso” … and critics turned into a commodity and niche marketing strategy for publishing Latin American literature … in Alejo Carpentier whose importance and popularity after the revolution Arenas sees as devoid of merit. (Lima)

Arenas was only an avid writer, only concerned with outpouring his intellectual, aesthetic and poetic nature and disabusing himself from artificiality in the ventures of pure aesthetic forms. He sees merit in works with pure intention to freely express what should be expressed unbridled and without clandestine motives to praise power politics.

Fame to writers also came as a political manipulation to the dissemination of knowledge, to award those who can weaken the ideology of the adversary. Reinaldo Arenas, a Cuban born was not in the limelight until he decided to have a permanent imprint on the literary and political history of Cuba, though notoriously known for his genuine struggle for the freedom of his individuality and the freedom of his queer clan, claims appraisal at the literary height. He was for his great literary contribution awarded the Nobel prize in literature by the Western hegemonies.

Arenas was supported by the US-financed war against Cuban revolution, this support to the gay community was unprecedented to disseminate dissent to weaken Cuban revolution of socialism. (Lima)

On the other hand, Foucault was already enjoying the elite Institute of Research; fame quickly came not only through his bold, aggressive and intellectual personality but also, because he intended not to directly hit any status quo political hegemonies, his sole purpose was to imprint his name on the top of intellectual community. French already had social and political order with the least resistance in the social strata as with Cuba which was passing through turmoil and social and political unrest. The only fear that Foucault faced throughout his life was his queer sexuality, he wanted to keep all his sexual activities behind the scenes yet it still was a thorn of flesh in his academic career.

gossip about his past and his homosexuality continued to dog him, complicating his efforts to move up the academic ladder. By 1965, he was nevertheless regarded as an authority of sufficient stature to appear on French television (Miller).

The popularity of an artist or a writer also depends upon how the authors are portrayed in movies and films or have been televised online. The movies and films made on the life of Arenas’ especially his memoir Before Night Falls were received differently by the different sectors of society. Some emphasize more n his queer or homosexual activities, others see him as a person openly defying the political regime of Cuba due to the repression he was encountering in his publications and intellectual activities. His main concern about his popularity might arise out of a sense of his celebrating his death through his authorship. Arenas’s autobiography ushered in aesthetics of dying where narrating one’s death has become a genre in itself (Lima).” Films and movies made on the life of Renaldo Arenas are still repressed as limited versions and its difficult availability on the internet as Odd People Out “Limited distribution and internet access has limited this important documentary’s interlocutors (Lima).” Contrarily to this, Foucault often comes to intellectual talks on media and other forums defying his ideas. He had not to face the repercussions Arenas had to face.  Impervious to what people perceive he had only one very forceful wish along with his academic group:

Dumezil, Barthes, Levi-Strauss, Althusser, and Lacan … and Foucault from each of them in tum, they all had at least one thing in common: a wish to destroy the intellectual hegemony of Jean-Paul Sartre. (Miller)

Thus, to extrapolate, artists or writers are always unique in their artistic, philosophic and literary manner, none is less than others in their ability to craft a writing or to philosophize life. The way they express themselves reaches the audiences vicariously and is perceived differently. There is no one idea of why fame to one writer is more celebrated while others with their own artistic and intellectual capabilities are less celebrated. This capricious nature of fame can be discerned with the social and political link of episteme and the biased dissemination of knowledge.