I read this graphic guide on Michel Foucault today and felt deeply inspired. His approach is Nietzschean and deeply pessimistic. There is an unusual energy present in what I read about him. Next I am going to read History of Madness by Foucault.
Has anybody read this book? What are your views? How was your experience? Would somebody like to read this book with me?
Being taken literally, is like being sent to hell LITERALLY.
“It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.”
― Oscar Wilde
I've read most of Foucault at one point or another. It is mostly nonsense, and so dated by now. The worst form of theoretical masturbation, that if you choose to believe it, offers a path straight toward nihilism.
Generally the only people enforcing him as a text right now are mediocre professors who still cling to the nonsense that they were forced to read to pad their dissertations.
His general ideas are all found in The Archaeology of Knowledge, but when he applied them, in cases like The History of Sexuality, he was an utter failure. He had a few good points, but they were masked by the pages and pages of nonsense and crappy theoretical history.
Yeah, but you dislike pretty much any theorist, right?Originally Posted by JBI
There's some merit to what JBI says though, I think most people who even work with Foucault only take a handful of points from his work and acknowledge the fact that a lot of his historical research was flawed and that much of his conclusions are not meaningful. But all in all that's a reasonably successful contribution for a theorist.
"If the national mental illness of the United States is megalomania, that of Canada is paranoid schizophrenia."
- Margaret Atwood
To an extent. I like Derrida as an author, but not as a theorist. I like some of Butler, but not all (and it has got boring lately). I dislike almost all post-colonial theorists, though strangely I think Homi Bhabha is right some times, if you can understand him (Spivak is still just an annoyance).
I also am totally a student of Frye, and would say I love his work - he was a theorist, but didn't let that become all he was.
I also like a lot of historical theorists, and specific theorists, but nobody pays them any heed anymore.
Still, the days where you needed to flaunt your knowledge of theoretical trends are over, and now close reading is back in fashion.
I wasn't saying that JBI's views were invalid because he doesn't like theorists, I was just sort of pointing it out to the OP that his overall view of theorists in general isn't flattering--that it's not just Foucault.
I don't like theory much, either, no matter how much of it I'm forced to read in class. I like some of it--I do find disability studies pretty interesting, but mostly because of my personal connection to it--but most seems to be over-written, contrived, complicated for complciation's sake smoke blowing that could often be said in a page rather than the ten pages it takes the theorist to say it. I found Foucault to be like most theorists I've read: interesting ideas, but mostly BS.
Foucault is better as some short of evil anthagonist who will use any weapons to destroy a stabilished system, but often he is just confuse of what to do afterwards. But he was quite intelligent, quite a thorn.
I'd like to come back to you after finishing the book.
You found him this repulsive and you have read almost all his works!That is a little difficult to digest. I feel you found him interesting once and then were disappointed later on. If it is so, what did you like/enjoy? If not then are you saying you can read things that do not interest you or that repel you? I am assuming that you did not study him as a part of some curriculum.
Another thing - what is your opinion about Nietzsche's works?
Being taken literally, is like being sent to hell LITERALLY.
“It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.”
― Oscar Wilde
He probably did read him as assigned reading, at least I'm assuming so. He's been required reading in any class I've taken that involves theory.
Nah, he read him to try to impress the chicks.
To be honest I think Foucault was essentially the Swedenbourg of the 20th century. A huge fad, which turned out to posses the superficiality of fashion and none of the substance of style.
I am not saying it is all bad, people still read Swedenbourg after all, but they approach it more with a sense of historical curiosity than anything else and I suppose that shall be Focaults place in history, a historical curiosity to further elucidate upon the zeitgeist of the times.
Last edited by Alexander III; 06-14-2012 at 05:02 PM.
Impressing chicks with a gay philosopher's work? Won't work if he does that. :P
I am in total agreement with you on Foucault. My interest is to see the adoption of Nietzschean thought in his work - the chaos, the Dionysiac in action - the peak of the evil antagonist that you talk of. I have an intuitive feeling that the essence of Foucault works is not in their wholeness - of individual works or his oeuvre. It is somewhere else.
I read another thread http://www.online-literature.com/for...ad.php?t=36051 interesting, to me.
I have a feeling that your opinion is not based on study of Foucault's works. It is rather based on the public persona that Michel Foucault was.
Being taken literally, is like being sent to hell LITERALLY.
“It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.”
― Oscar Wilde
You have no idea. It is like telling you are sensible to listen to a gay and macho to listen to a gay everyone hated. Better than this only random quoting of Baudelaire.
Well, some of his study hold more water than others. He do make people think of the concept of freedom. Some guys did better than him, but it was him the annoying prick that went all over it and this is probally where he got more famous in America, as the counter-culture. Somehow he is also good against lefties, he is a kind of marxist, but he is so anti-marxism that he seems to go nowhere. I like his book about madness, as much I do not consider as truth or anything, but he do write well.I am in total agreement with you on Foucault. My interest is to see the adoption of Nietzschean thought in his work - the chaos, the Dionysiac in action - the peak of the evil antagonist that you talk of. I have an intuitive feeling that the essence of Foucault works is not in their wholeness - of individual works or his oeuvre. It is somewhere else.
(I find hard to believe Foucault have fans, because he does no effort ot be pleasant while writting. I guess more than one cheered Chomksy over him and Derrida was indeed a better writer...)
Not quite. I did a lot of work on literary theory, half as general background, half as assigned reading. I have, I would argue, read most of the major players, and am familiar with almost all of the big guns of criticism.
Anyway, when you deal with academics, they tend to try to groom you to fit their opinion. They seem to like the conversation, yet at the same time want you to see the world through their lens. They instinctively seem to have a desire to teach, and in the academic world, teaching is turned into quoting very easily.
So much so, I would argue, in the 90s everyone had basically read Foucault and others and they were required. Every chapter of a book needed to begin with a long post-modern epigraph. Theoretical lenses and gendered language (meaning, expressing the world in terms of phallus and vagina) became a must.
So, when I got my big starting kicks, I guess I was groomed to fit into that groove, especially by some of the Japanologists I studied under. The scholars of English I generally studied under tended to be historians for the most part not concerned with theoretical nonsense - a Spenser specialist, and Chaucerian, an Eliot authority, and a Canadianist. I had one professor from Berkley (a specialist on Joyce) lecture about nonsense, mixing in theoretical crap, and then ranting how she was not being rehired for the next term and that we should petition. The majority of my theoretical background actually came from professors in their late 30s, who seemed so preoccupied with their theoretical perspectives that they lost track of their own work - it became reading Foucault in Salman Rushdie, or Edward Said reads Jamaica Kincaid.
I think my big break seems to have come from the Eliot specialist, who really groomed me, I guess, and a historian I did research under specializing in modern Korean History, and researching domesticity. He I think was the first person to tell me not everyone is a post-modernist, and not everybody subscribes to this theoretical stuff.
As for the chicks, well, for the theory girls, they all seemed groomed and ready to drop names whenever they could. They always seemed to smoke, pretend to be political, have dark senses of irony, and, ironically, have boat loads of money from their parents. It is a form of snobbery in the worst sense, these girls who would sit their ranting about the world and gender issues, meanwhile exploiting the system that their parents worked so hard to ruin. Who really cares if someone can understand Zizeck - he is not actually relevant outside of a very small community of a certain type of reader.
The historian girls are more fun anyway, they are far more down to earth, and they don't smoke. I am more interested in talking, or going out with women who I can talk to about something other than education-related, or theory-related material. In the end, the people one likes best are those they can get along with outside of a fixed environment. Theory people always seem to have something to prove, and offer the most bland form of conversation that makes you wonder if you are arguing with them, or their reading list.
Last edited by JBI; 06-15-2012 at 01:57 AM.
I had to read him in college and it was quite the intellectual and almost physical challenge... I usually had to read everything two or three times to really understand what his point was, and so I find Foucault generally tedious. However, I do think he has contributed greatly to political, philosophical and social discourse and his ideas, even if many find them invalid or irrelevant to today, fueled a lot of debate, discussion and intellectual evolution, so to speak.
But generally I found him to be a bit of an intellectual snob who purposefully convoluted his language and ideas so that he would come across as ultra profound and brilliant... but that's my opinion. Still, I do think some of what he has written really was/is brilliant. He surely was a smart guy...
But I haven't read History of Madness, though I wouldn't mind embarking on it, if I can find a copy...
"All gods are homemade, and it is we who pull their strings, and so, give them the power to pull ours." -Aldous Huxley
"Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires." -William Blake
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