Your opinion about Foucault?

Your opinion about Foucault?

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chomsky.info/1971xxxx/
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Post hoc ergo propter hoc

Nobody deserved AIDS more than this pseud.

Out of all the Pseuds (Sartre, Camus, Rawls, etc.) I like him the most.

A wild man. Clearly a demon occupying a human's body.

Rawls wasn't a pseud.

Very smart. I've seen a lot of people on this board dismiss him for being the embodiment of pseudo-intellectual, postmodern/poststructuralist bullshit. I'm of the opinion that his reputedly somewhat difficult prose (difficult because tedious, not complex) actually revealed some new and interesting ideas regarding epistemology and subjectivity.

>When the proletariat takes power, it may be quite possible that the proletariat will exert towards the classes over which it has just triumphed, a violent, dictatorial and even bloody power. I can’t see what objection one could make to this.

>But if you ask me what would be the case if the proletariat exerted bloody, tyrannical and unjust power towards itself, then I would say that this could only occur if the proletariat hadn’t really taken power, but that a class outside the proletariat, a group of people inside the proletariat, a bureaucracy or petit bourgeois elements had taken power.

Thanks for saying this so I didn't have to

Did he actually say this?

His writing on governmentality is currently one of the most influential strands in contemporary political theory.

Most people don't ponder the relationship between knowledge, power and enjoyment/pleasure within their own thinling patterns so they end up quickly dismissing others to feel superior. While I do agree that plenty of philosophers, usually followers of better known philosophers, are "pseuds", the best known poststructuralists have plenty of good ideas and should not be dismissed outright. Foucault isn't even obscure, just tedious at times. And Chomsky's statement that he says trivial things has no weight as long as our society has not fixed the problems outlined "simply" by Foucault.

*thinking

It sounded a bit more like he was stating a reality, rather than "advocating" the position.

chomsky.info/1971xxxx/

Right. I find that one of the general criticisms of post-structuralist thinkers is that they're simply reaching for connections that aren't there—you know, the general caricature of the circle-jerking, head-up-his-own-ass type. But the issues Foucault was dealing with were, as you mention, knowledge, power, sex, madness—most interestingly, in my opinion, the everlasting question of how a subject can analyze, deconstruct, or even remove itself from the reproduction of the very same ideological structures by which it itself is constituted.

(cont) That is to say, issues that are still startlingly relevant today, and not merely masturbatory exercises in clever abstraction.

>difficult prose
>dismissing others to feel superior
These aren't the reasons why we criticize Foucault, we criticize him because his scholarship is persistently bad and he loves to outline a scope and method for his works which is very ambitious (and maybe impossible) and not at all matched by the legwork he does or the concepts he comes up with (which are typically vague and its entirely unclear what follows from them either in theory or praxis... this btw is why he's popular in certain parts of academia, you can always write a book about poverty in Australian cinema or some shit and find one out of five concepts of Foucault that apply more or less. Power-knowledge, governmentality and biopower are nice-sounding buzzwords each of which can mean at least ten different things).

Read this: nytimes.com/books/00/12/17/specials/foucault-order.html

scum

did irreversible damage to western academics

tryhard (n): the person who jumps at the opportunity to claim intellectual superiority by saying, "Well, /I/ didn't think it was difficult."
I was simply pointing out a fact: Numerous people find him a drag/bore to read.

>Read this: nytimes.com/books/00/12/17/specials/foucault-order.html

I actually enjoyed this read; thanks for the link. I find your criticism well-warranted, and agree with it. I just don't appreciate what I perceive as the outright and ill-informed dismissal of him as a leftist hack by many of the people I find on here, is all. So when you say,
>These aren't the reasons why we criticize Foucault
I find the "we" a bit out-of-place. But then again, not sure what I expected. Overall, thanks for your post.

>tryhard (n)
Speaking of tryhard, I didn't say I found it easy to read, and I didn't. Some passages of Les Mots et les Choses are really hard to chew through. That's just not central to why I am critical of Foucault (and I should note here that most people who like Foucault seem to do so because their first encounter takes them from a normie position to the realization that knowledge isn't neutral to power, power is not just governments and police, mental health (and every other normalizing pratice since churches like schools, prisons, etc.) work in more complicated ways than we think). This was not the case for me as I only read Foucault in my M.A. when I was already critical of all of these things from a different perspective. I think all the issues he deals with are important and certainly complex, I just don't think that the tools he crafted for us are very efficient at dealing with this complexity outside of academic publications).

Yeah the "we" is of course something of a stretch. I've been in a lot of Foucalt love-hate threads though and I've seen some posts similar to mine. Then again, there's also a lot of "lol GRIDS" posting...

>I just don't appreciate what I perceive as the outright and ill-informed dismissal of him as a leftist hack
It's not his leftism that's the problem. It's the fact that he spouts grandiose-sounding gibberish that is empty of nontrivial content.

>I find the "we" a bit out-of-place.
I don't - I think that other poster essentially nailed it. Foucault never comes close to delivering on his sales pitch.

>muh power structures
He's a faggot.

Excellent example of everything wrong with western academia though.

>I think that other poster essentially nailed i
>Overall, thanks for your post.

Hey guys check out my Stirner post and my leftist academia post in the other thread:
yes, I'm that desparate for attention :^)

>He's a faggot

Oh god, I see I'm dealing with a real intellectual powerhouse here. Michel Foucault, one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century, blown the fuck out by a genius on Veeky Forums. I worship the ground beneath your feet, etc. etc.

>I didn't say I found it easy to read
No, but you green-texted the phrase "difficult prose," thereby mocking my assertion that Foucault's writing is tedious, while also implying that you did not find it difficult. Don't think that's much of a leap.

Otherwise, you make fair points. I admittedly did come to Foucault in my sophomore year of college, though I'd like to think I got a bit more out of it than what you listed. All in all, I understand better why you feel that way.

Guy likes ding dong. Obscurantist. Ma feels, muh power. Leftist cuck. Everything wrong with academia. Impractical. Trivial at best. Pseud. Autistic.

How do you lads pronounce his name, though?

correctly.

A hack who misunderstood history and twisted facts to serve his theories. His style is narcissistic and reveals the void of his thought.
Geniuses like Clouscard and Debord were marginalized and ignored because of scums like him.

>Foo-Koh
I'm French btw.