What does Veeky Forums think of Foucault?

Politically, his work is more useful to the right nowadays. The left has reembraced progressive triumphalism, their greatest argument nowadays is "we are the right side of history."

It doesn't change the fact that he was a communist. He only wrote what he wrote because during the 1960s conservatives like Charles de Gaulle were in charge and things were good, so denying political reality was the only tactics left for revolutionaries like him.

Big fan, especially of his work on power and society, though I suspect most here won't be

he was a socialist at best

He was a fucking card carrying Communist in the most literal sense

Biopower and biopolitics sound cool and cyberpunk as fuck.

'Biopunk' is more fitting, but whatever.

Am I to rate your politics by your political opinions of your 15 year old self
Foucault spent 5 years in the french party before even conceiving his most notable works, I hardly see how a short membership stint means he was a forever a card carrying communist.

That's a photo of Grothendieck I've never seen b4 :^)

>Focault
>Commie
All of my what

Read him as an epistemological coherentists and he has a lot to offer.

By the time he did his most famous writings he was an anti-communist.
>In the early 1950s he had been a member of the French Communist Party, although he never adopted an orthodox Marxist viewpoint and left the party after three years, disgusted by the prejudice against Jews and homosexuals within its ranks. After spending some time working in Poland, then governed as a socialist state by the Polish United Workers' Party, he became further disillusioned with communist ideology. As a result, in the early 1960s he was considered to be "violently anticommunist" by some of his detractors

>Denies the existence of AIDS.
>Dies of AIDS.

But seriously, he's not so bad. I didn't like the history of sexuality too well, and really hated his book about mental asylums. I did really enjoy some of his essays and personal letters though.

"I watched that one Joe Rogan podcast where Jordan Peterson talked about this Foucault guy with the same broad commy-conviction brush that he does with all French intellectuals"

Well, Peterson gives him credit for actually using understandable language, unlike a lot of Postmodernists, and for his historical research.

Why'd you hate them?

Foucault is one of the most important philosophers in the modern age. History of Sexuality is fantastic.

He's a genuine philosopher. By genuine, I mean he died like a fool by swallowing his own bullshit and practiced it until the end. He thought that he was doing a creative resistance and projecting his own biopower, against state biopower, rewriting and reevaluating (cf. Nietzsche) his own body. It is the consequence of his own philosophical flaws, and perhaps everyone who adopted or influenced by Nietzsche's concept of transvaluation (inb4 tranny jokes).

I read that you can still live until you die of old age nowadays if you get AIDS. The pills are supposedly subsidized and either free or very cheap. Does this mean that, in the end, the state always wins?

>"Mental illness is a social construct!"
>"Prisons only exist because individuals refuse to conform to the social structure!"

Yes, what a genius.

>I haven't read Foucault

You could have just said so.

Are you saying my statements are wrong?

Yes. He never says it's a social construct.

He does. He explains several times in Madness and Civilization that mental illness has an obvious constructed manifestation. He also says that psychiatry has been used as a way for the social structure to remove undesirable people from society.

No. He says our perception towards it is and how we treat it, not the actual diseases themselves.

Fair enough, but he's not saying anything psychologists and psychiatrists didn't already know.

Psychologists and Psychiatrists are part of the modern day treatment that he sees as problematic.

That's not the point. The point is that his so-called insights are things that psychologists and psychiatrists already know.

It's also not a surprise that a completely amoral AIDS-ridden homosexual finds something objectionable about psychiatry.

fake & gay

I know him only for his works on history of ideas and he is awesome. Not too familiar with his philosophical opus.

>"we are the right side of history."

I don't know what the fuck that is even supposed to mean.

>we are on the right side of history
>I don't know what the fuck that is even supposed to mean.
It's a way to signal your complete conquest of the academy, and a declaration that if you can't win power openly in the political arena, then you will counterfeit the record of what went on, and seize control by deception.

Another example of French "philosophers" making a fool of themselves

He disliked the French Communist Party and the Polish socialist regime not because he was an "anti-communist", but because both were not communist enough.

But mental illness is a social construct. Have you actually read the criteria in the DSM-IV for what constitutes a mental illness? Even they admit they can't clearly pin down what qualifies.

It's an idea that goes to any form of "progressive" ideology that believes there to be some sort of clear course towards an end of history. You see it among Liberals with whig history and among Marxists with dialectical materialism.

[Citation Needed]

>his entire influences
>his entire bibliography
>his entire legacy and followers

No, sorry. The manifestation of mental illness is partly a social construct.

The fact that a person with hallucinations sees the hyenas from the Lion King obviously is constructed, but the fact that he or she has hallucinations to begin with is obviously a neuro-chemical and biological problem.

No, there's an obviously socially constructed element to mental illness of "statistical incidence" wouldn't play a role in whether a certain cognitive process or personality trait qualifies as an illness. Whether a quirk qualifies as an illness or not is entirely a matter of social consensus, and psychology has absolutely been used as a tool to enforce social conformity in its history (see how it approached the subject of homosexuality for instance).

>or "statistical incidence"

Yes it has been used for that purpose but this is the same monomania that all post-structuralists have.

Just because something has been used for a specific purpose in the past doesn't mean that's it's ENTIRE purpose.

I'm not educated enough in Foucault to say whether he thought it was its entire purpose or not, but the fact remains he does have a point there and acknowledging this portion of it helps minimize our chances of winding up doing the same shit over again.

Yeah but a quirk and mental illness are two different words for a reason.

If people are haunted by debilitating hallucinations, like schizophrenic people are, that impede them from going to work, having meaningful relationships with other people, or make them have continual emotional suffering, characterizing this as a quirk seems facetious, and it also seems ridiculous to assume that any attempt at helping them must necessarily imply that your motives are the lowest common denominator(e.g you're just trying to socially conform the person into a hegemonic capitalist society).

I laffed

Well I don't assume that's the sole reason someone might wish to help someone psychologically.

There's this weird assumption that any criticism of an institution means being entirely against an institution. Psychology can and has been used as a means of either forcing social conformity, or removing people we find undesirable from it; it's not some passive institution of intellectual curiosity and selfless well-making.

As for whether those hallucinations are an illness or not is again socially constructed, in a difference society we might assume they were blessed by the gods themselves. How we chose to view and approach this particular disorder (which is the language that we've largely moved towards) is for the most part dictated by the needs of our society and our social expectations.

Most are. Foucault is alt ritght

Including the debate with Chomsky? You're full of shit.

>As for whether those hallucinations are an illness or not is again socially constructed

No it's not. There's no conceivable social structure where a person with major depressive disorder simply suddenly has a good time.

Utterly degenerate faggot who couldn't accept that going in bars at night to be fisted by strangers was a mental disease and so wrote entire books about how society is unfair for calling a cat "a cat".