What does Veeky Forums think about Foucault?

so what

AIDS

he was quite literally a faggot though

"last" implies some linear teleological notion of history.

Because thats obviously a pathetic proposition, you're absolutely wrong

there was an obvious synthesis within the preposition, you fucking degenerate

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PSYCHIATRISTS HATE HIM

Learn how this bald man cured his depression in three simple tricks.

>french

...

what did he mean by this

Brilliant thinker who was somewhat intellectually overconfident

>no "HIV"
One job, Veeky Forums.

Leftists appropriating his ideas (or what they conceive of as his ideas) has been one of the ongoing farces of recent intellectual history. The man was a conservative to boot, if not outright reactionary. He has more Nietzsche in him than Marx (he said so himself).

How many of those tricks involve anal stimulation?

The aids in his butt

Please do not mix Friedman up with the Austrians, it's a real insult to the man's memory.

Laclau, Butler, Zizek (meme), Grossberg, Jameson, off the top of my head are all "great" thinkers post-Foucault but there's not really been anyone to have his influence since him, no

Foucault's ambiguous relationship with liberalism =/= conservatism.

(I consider myself pretty well versed on Foucault so if anyone wants to know anything AMA)

Why is he the go to reading for SJWs and tumblrites?

Same reason Nietzsche is popular among atheists and Adam Smith is popular among neoliberals: they don't understand the intricate and subtle nature of what they read or what they claim to have read.

A completely biaised reading of History.

A sort of confirmation bias no? You 'do not actually not read it', you read it selectively to fit your worldview.

I sort of accept that I will unconsciously or consciously warp anything I read into something that is self-serving. Is it possible to escape this?

I feel that it is hardwired into our psychology and that resistence to it is futile. Pure ideology.

Is it true that he believed you couldn't actually get ride of oppression? I read something of his a long time ago that said "people have to be oppressed before they can even share a common language". Something to that effect. Is there truth to this or am I misinterpreting him? This was what really stuck with me after reading him, watching him go through all the delineation and instead of ending with some Marxist critique just saying you can't get out of the beast.

amazon.com/Birth-Biopolitics-Lectures-Collège-1978--1979/dp/0312203411

In these lectures Foucault tells his students to take a look at classical liberals because they analyze the exercise of government power too. He is appreciative of Hayek and everyone else.

> Is it true that he believed you couldn't actually get ride of oppression?
Why do you think that even possible? Defeat all of the oppression is like eliminate all of the violences in society or win over all of the corruption. It would always exist like there is no way to create perfect energy source.

I wouldn't go that far but taking his thought to its logical conclusion leads one to be deeply pessimistic as to the possibility of change on any real level. I think the failure of his political interventions in the 70s lead to his so-called ethical turn

Is that seriously the only thing you are taking from those lectures

I would argue that he is, in fact, under-read amongst that demographic (to the extent that one grants that it actually exists and isn't just an empty signifier)

What's his basic philosophy? I haven't read anything of him, and the only thing I've seen of him was that debate with Chomsky, in which it seemed to me that he had a more grounded and realistic view than Chomsky's rather naive idealism.

Do hermeneutics 101 I guess

Agree that he took Chomsky to school. (He also got paid in hash for that appearance). For a brief rundown of his thought probably check out his wikipedia page, but as a rule he is suspicious of any attempt to "weld the disease onto the organism" through production of subject (and through double-bind, production of a population whose health must be tended through elimination of harmful individuals). So for example he talks about how the criminal as a "type" was produced correspondingly to the fall of crime as an offense against the king's body. Both Discipline and Punish and History of Sexuality Pt. 1 are pretty easy reads if you have the time available

This likely makes very little sense, ask me if you want me to explain more

I've heard he say something along the lines of critique and change of institutions of power being the only way a society can develop, is this true?

I'd need more specific detail: what do you mean by this exactly

I don't really remember the actual shit I read atm.

I think it was something about, in order to change society, you needed to change the fundamental structure of institutions of power, but I don't really remember.

>What does Veeky Forums think about Foucault?

Too stupid to use condoms when getting fucked by random faggots

Well, that much would be obvious, wouldn't it: that in order to change society, you need to change the structure of institutions of power. I think he has a quote about there being no point in overthrowing the guards in the Panopticon if all you do is replace them with the prisoners. The pertinent question is more _how_ you would change these fundamental structures, which I think Foucault is less developed/less optimistic about

Many straight people do that exact same thing. In fact, probably vastly more numbers of heterosexual people that do it, considering there's more of them than fags.

>I think he has a quote about there being no point in overthrowing the guards in the Panopticon if all you do is replace them with the prisoners

Cool quote. Interestingly similar to Stirner's critique that revolutions always are tacitly statist, because they just want the same power that their rulers already have.

Yeah I'm not sure Foucault is equivocating the two, however, he's just giving a warning. I wish I could find the quote, I think it's in the Rabinow's Foucault Reader (which is a pretty good introduction to Foucault if anyone is interested)

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I believe that Foucault was smarter then that, he was actually pessimistic about a chance for goverment and institutes (both obvious and latent) being different in their structure was higher than 0.0000001%~. Honestly, that's why I've grown to like him: radical opinions on these matters are always tend to be either ideological or nonsensical, here he's actually showing he knows what he is dealing with, a real philosopher if you would ask me.

But I would like that other user give an opinion on the subject too.

>inb4 Foucault fanboy

LITERALLY just started taking him seriously last week.

Right I remember now. It was the other way around. He was extremely pessimistic about the change of institutions of power in general, which is interesting, considering that they have changed in some way over the ages.

Does he give any examples of what could cause an government or institution to change?

What do you mean that they have "changed in some way"? I don't want to use the word "power" as something necessarily embodied solely in institutions when we're talking about Foucault, but would you say that institutions have "given away" power through history?

What you mean by "change" here is really crucial

Well, lets say that power has to some extent become less centralized than it was previous centuries for example.

For at least 1000 in Europe it was agreed that the King was the source of all authority. But that was just one kind of centralization. You also had serfdom which was a form of centralization of economic power in itself.(That was of course sanctioned by the King).

But this kind of power is frowned upon now, and democratic institutions have replaced the autocratic monarchy, at least in the West, and capitalism has replaced feudalism and mercantilism(say what you want about capitalism, even if it concentrates wealth in the hands of few people, it does it to a lesser extent than outright feudalism does, I would argue.), so things can change, at least to some degree.

Well, this is precisely Foucault's point: that our conception of power as acting through/embodied by specific institutions is fundamentally flawed. For Foucault, power is as much bottom-up as it is top-down. (There's a lot here in that power exists as both a verb and noun in French). So, his entire basic thesis in Discipline and Punish is all like, hey, we don't publicly torture criminals anymore, but at the same time, we live in society that constantly subjectivises us as potential criminals that must be weeded out, so swings and roundabouts, guys, swings and roundabouts. Which is not an equivocation, but even our temptation to be Whiggish about these things is an instrument of power

It's hard not to be Whiggish when you're *only* talking about top-down institutions of power though.

But I see your point.

Yeah. I don't think we ever are, though.

Why is Foucault used by the Postmodern Left but he hasn't gained traction amongst the right. For all the social institutions and forces that the Left critique using 'Foucault-like' methods, this critique is never applied by the Right to the Left's ideas.

The way I see it, the Postmodern Left love to use his ideas to destroy the universals proclaimed by the Right only to set up leftist universals in their place.

>(I consider myself pretty well versed on Foucault so if anyone wants to know anything AMA)
Was he really a Gaullist in the 1950s?

Wouldn't surprise me. Foucault is pretty well-known for some political blunders

Can his work from the 1970s be associated with functionalism?

Define functionalism. If you mean "structuralism", I'd say his work is fairly structuralist