/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.10874269]

Where do I start with Foucault? I've heard his works are pretty accessible.

[Anonymous No.10874276]

>>10874269
Start with "What is Enlightenment" (read Kant's famous piece with the same title as well) then move onto the History of Sexuality.

[Anonymous No.10874295]

>>10874269
I got into his views on authorship and discourse through literary theory readers. "What is the Author?" and "The Order of Discourse". Madness and Civilization is also great, it helped me when I had a psychosis to realise psychiatry's history and why it might view me in a certain way. And I've read parts of History of Sexuality. The only starting point I wouldn't go to is probably interviews like Power/Knowledge. I've found I get annoyed at interviews because thinkers usually say something in passing, or go back on what they'd believed before, which is confusing if you haven't got a strong idea of what they believe.

>>10874276
Just to clarify, Kant's essay is called "An Answer to the Question: What is the Englightenment?"

[Anonymous No.10874303]

>>10874276
cheers mate
HoS was recommended elsewhere so I'll check that one out

>>10874295
Also thanks for the tipoff about interviews. I'm not so interested in his view on authorship yet, more about his views on society/power whatever

[Anonymous No.10874314]

>>10874303
Authorship and discourse is about power/society... Especially the latter.

[Anonymous No.10874324]

>>10874269
gonna pre-empt JBPetersonites by giving them some advice.

Foucault is more of a Historian than a Philosopher. Read "Madness and Civilization" if you believe Foucault is some screeching SJW.

The first few chapters are literally going over dry stuff like civil budgets during the 1600-1800s, he cites his sources well and makes no social arguments, he does not want to burn down western civilization, he's concerned with the history of ideas not social justice.

Then read his lecture on Oedipus he did for that university. He is very dense but it is because, like any other good continental philosopher of the German or French traditions he forces himself to be precise with his words when developing ideas. Ideally you need to read the french sources directly.

[Anonymous No.10874356]

A batman version for you to easily digest...

[Anonymous No.10874360]

[Anonymous No.10874363]

Ch. 3: Confinement...

[Anonymous No.10874365]

Ch. ?

[Anonymous No.10874366]

>>10874360
>>10874356
foucault's prose can be really beautiful

"But water adds to this the
dark mass of its own values; it carries off, but it does more: it
purifies. Navigation delivers man to the uncertainty of fate; on
water, each of us is in the hands of his own destiny; every
embarkation is, potentially, the last. It is for the other world that the
madman sets sail in his fools' boat; it is from the other world that he
comes when he disembarks.

The madman's voyage is at once a
rigorous division and an absolute Passage. In one sense, it simply
develops, across a half-real, half-imaginary geography, the
madman's liminal position on the horizon of medieval concern—a
position symbolized and made real at the same time by the
madman's privilege of being confined within the city gates: his
exclusion must enclose him; if he cannot and must not have another
prison than the threshold itself, he is kept at the point of passage. He
is put in the interior of the exterior, and inversely.

A highly symbolic position, which will doubtless remain his until our own
day, if we are willing to admit that what was formerly a visible
fortress of order has now become the castle of our conscience.
Water and navigation certainly play this role. Confined on the
ship, from which there is no escape, the madman is delivered to the
river with its thousand arms, the sea with its thousand roads, to that
great uncertainty external to everything.

He is a prisoner in the
midst of what is the freest, the openest of routes: bound fast at the
infinite crossroads. He is the Passenger par excellence: that is, the
prisoner of the passage. And the land he will come to is unknown—
as is, once he disembarks, the land from which he comes. He has his
truth and his homeland only in that fruitless expanse between two
countries that cannot belong to him."

[Anonymous No.10874367]

5/6

>>10874366
Indeed, he should have written novels.

[Anonymous No.10874370]

Last...

[Anonymous No.10874551]

[Anonymous No.10874567]

>>10874269
Foucault? Isnt that the mothafucka that twisted truth? Fuck nigga this pal was creep.

[Anonymous No.10874573]

I started with Discipline and Punish and it was pretty accessible

[Anonymous No.10874585]

>>10874366
The majority of French philosophy is filtered through a natural predisposition to poetic language, in the mother tongue, which is why it often seems confusing in translation.

[Anonymous No.10874595]

>>10874269
Paul Rabinow's Foucault reader is pretty good. It has all his basic stuff.

[Anonymous No.10874602]

>>10874585
Nah, it's also confusing in French. The French don't really value clarity, they like to abuse their language.

[Anonymous No.10874660]

>>10874551
>those too weak to seek it
Fuck that's edgy

[Anonymous No.10874671]

>>10874660
I feel like that's a lamenting quote rather than "I am stronger; so I am right."

[Anonymous No.10874680]

>>10874671
>"I am stronger; so I am right."
If stronger is defined as more powerful/influential then isn't this exactly what he's saying?

[Anonymous No.10874684]

>>10874324
A failed historian. Think carefully before you retreat this AIDS patient from the domain of philosophy to hide in the domain of history. His work can not survive the judgment of historiography standards, like his neghole could not survive being pozzed. Either he is a Continental Philosopher or nothing, he is not a historian.

[Anonymous No.10874685]

>>10874680
He is "right" insofar as he is influential. I think Foucault does see there to be some sort of objective morality which power obfuscates.

[Anonymous No.10874708]

>>10874685
Or maybe he is self-aware of his status as someone asserting arbitrary truth claims for the advancement of self-interest. Isn't this the same thing as "will to power?"

>>10874324
>Ideally you need to read the french sources directly.
Yeah, because explanation from a 21st century scholar appealing to my American sensibility isn't ideal.

[Anonymous No.10874716]

The "historian" made this up. No such Chinese Encyclopedia exists and no valid argument can be drawn from it other than Foucault's status as a charlatan:
http://blog.triciawang.com/post/12151308604/foucault-mis-cited-the-chinese-encyclopedia-of

[Anonymous No.10874719]

>>10874370
this is an adaptation from Mental Illness and Psychology right?

read it once but only got the half of it

[Anonymous No.10875083]

>>10874716
was it autism? he's quoting borges. god i hate stupid chinks.

[Anonymous No.10875086]

>>10874719
Madness and Civilization.

[Anonymous No.10875187]

He was a neoliberal hack and should fade away into obscurity.

[Anonymous No.10875801]

>>10874716
he's referring to the ideas in this you retard
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celestial_Emporium_of_Benevolent_Knowledge

[Anonymous No.10875810]

>>10874269
Begin with the Order of Things. If you pay attention, you'll begin to see that more than anything, he is a liar.

[Anonymous No.10875824]

>>10874716
I don't like Foucalt, but you are certainly wrong. It wouldn't matter if it's real or not. The point he is making has nothing to do with its authenticity, but rather the mere conception of its foreign-ness. The idea is no that the Chinese actually view animals in this way, but rather that this tabulation at once resonates with us, while also being completely inaccessible to our way of reasoning. You are not meant to get caught up in the specifics of this particular list, but rather to observe the metaphysics of epistemology which allow us to make any sort of categorization at all.

[Anonymous No.10875843]

When youre done...

[Anonymous No.10875905]

>>10874660
it's from harry potter

[Anonymous No.10875916]

>>10875824
That's fine for a philosopher, but for a self-described historian it's very poor practice, and Foucault was generally a very poor historian.

[Anonymous No.10875925]

>>10874684
>>10874716
hurrr

[Anonymous No.10876648]

>>10875916
>Foucault was generally a very poor historian.
[citation needed]

[Anonymous No.10876974]

>>10875916
>thinking that a postmodernist is a reliable narrator
It doesn't matter what he said, he is a philosopher, in that his works were philosophic. He never sought to demonstrate the historicity of an event, but rather wielded a selective history to demonstrate epistemological and metaphysical theories.

[Anonymous No.10876998]

ignore this degenerate frenchie, read Kant and then maybe Hegel.

[Anonymous No.10877003]

>>10876974
Like i said, that's good for him being a philosopher, but garbage if you want to use him as a historian.

Also i don't know how you can formulate a valid epistemological theory when you have to blatantly make things up or skew them beyond recognition.

[Anonymous No.10877004]

>>10876998
If you don't like the influence he already has, ignoring him will only make it worse. The longer a philospher's work can survive without legitimate criticism, the more people will come to believe it as true.

[Anonymous No.10877013]

>>10877003
You're right, rhetoric serves no purpose or function, and cannot be used to elucidate complicated and abstract formulations. That's why no one has ever used it.

[Anonymous No.10877012]

>>10877004
all of the nietzsche derived babble of the french degenerates will fade away in time, Kant will reign supreme and take his destined place aside Socrates and Jesus Christ as the greatest philosophers of men.

[Anonymous No.10877031]

>>10877012
And this demonstrates the problem. The whole cadre of french post-modernists, but Foucault in particular, were not speaking babel. Rather, they formulated a philosophy that rendered everything else into nonsense. Instead of attacking Kant, and Descarte, and all the rest, they have instead destroyed the field of reason. As the most influential philosophers among the Western elite, they will not simply fade away. Their goal, and one they are succeeding in, is to bring about a new culture and grind the West as we know it into dust.

[Anonymous No.10877034]

>>10877013
So lets just say that lets just say that?

[Anonymous No.10877047]

>>10874716
This kind of "criticism" is what is meant by missing the forest for the trees.

[Anonymous No.10877048]

>>10877013
>I make shit up to prove that people can get away with making shit up
Is this the philosophical equivalent of "it's just a prank bro"?

[Anonymous No.10877094]

>>10874567
Bait

[Anonymous No.10877131]

>>10877094
He's not really lying
>Then, Saint Michel Foucault happened on the scene with his death from AIDS in 1984. Foucault’s original claim to fame was Archeology of Knowledge, published in 1971. He lectured at U.C. Berkeley as a visiting professor during the Radical Sixties, crossing into San Francisco’s Miracle Mile of S&M extremism. He and his lover back in Paris seemed quite “ordinary,” but according to Edmund White, Foucault “turned into a S&M slave” for other S&M leather men to gang fist him while trashing Folsom Street’s more derelict bathhouses and backrooms. According to White, Foucault did not contract AIDS by being fisted or wasted (he sure could have, Edmund).
>Foucault’s schizo-affective S&M behavior is well-known to those of us who sadly came into contact with him on his San Francisco’s Folsom haunts. He could be a pathetic drug-crazed slave acting in the most humiliating manner one could only charitably characterize as a severe psychic disturbance and deviance. Sucking-sidewalks at 4 a.m. stoned out of his mind wandering out of the Barracks was not a pretty picture.

[Anonymous No.10877652]

>>10877131
Sounds fun

[Anonymous No.10877849]

>>10874269
start by scorning modern medicine and modern understandings of sexuality

then die of aids

[Anonymous No.10877899]

>>10877131
>Saint
The absolute state of neomarxism.

[Anonymous No.10877902]

>>10877849

[Anonymous No.10877917]

>>10876648
>>10876648
Camille Paglia :^)

[Anonymous No.10877928]

>>10877849
he did neither of those things but we never expect our /pol/tards to be literate

>>10877917
gonna need a specific citation pointing to a specific work, you youtube intellectual soyboy

[Anonymous No.10878181]

>>10877048
That's not what he said at all. What he was demonstrating was that, prior to the conception of any categorization must be some sense of how things are related. Because things can be measured by more than one characteristic, any ordering requires first a choice of what characters are most necessary to establish an order. But this creates a dilemma, in that in a given moment, that order may not be the most useful or clear or meaningful. This means that there must also be, before any ordering of things, a conception of which of all possible orderings is the most true, or useful, or meaningful. He uses the imaginary Chinese encyclopedia as a device for showing this, because it is strange. In its strangeness, regardless of whether anyone believes, we can ask--what must be believed so that this ordering of things is valid? In considering this, and approaching its foreign-ness, we can more easily see those things which we take for granted in the orderings we already believe in. It a piece of rhetoric used to deconstruct some of our most fundamental conceptual structures so that me may see their nature more clearly. If you are getting caught up in this minor detail, then it means you're not really paying attention to the work as a whole. In arguing against Foucault, you gain nothing be denying him this example. He could have picked a real example, (as he does throughout the rest of the book), but began with this because it was a fun, clever, and easy way to prelude the work he would be presenting from then on. Perhaps you didn't notice, but you're disagreeing with the Forward of the book, not even the book itself.

[Anonymous No.10879466]

Foucault? More like, fuckall.

[Anonymous No.10879471]

>>10877928
Foucault did criticize modern medicine and hospital institutions, even though those institutions were the only reason he even had a snowball's chance in hell after the virus got into him. He even said that HIV was just an american ruse aimed against blacks, drug addicts and homosexuals.

[Anonymous No.10879479]

>>10874716
>Analytic criticism of continental philosophy: the post

[Anonymous No.10880982]

>>10876648
this

[Anonymous No.10881025]

>>10877003
He didn’t make anythinh up. The account is obviously fictitious. It’s a Borges story that made him realized something that he later treats with actual historical accounts. The point of that opening passage was just to elucidate the concept woth the story before doing with real things.