Foucault

Is he worth a read?

I'm not an accustomed reader, especially of philosophical works. Will it be too difficult for me?

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he inspired feminism and the SJW movement by his 'muh feels' """""philosophy"""""".

A cultural marxist if ever there was one.

If not accustomed to philosophy, then yes, it will be difficult and not worth your time.

Well, Foucault is an important philosopher, but if you're not an accusomted reader you should choose something less complicated I don't mean the greeks

There is nothing wrong with feminism and the SJW movement.

triggered

I had Madness and Civilization especially in mind. Is that one too difficult?

Damn if so, it looked very interesting. But I guess I need to start with... Sartre, or something? I've tried reading Nausea several times though and it bored me to death.

>oh hello Veeky Forums, let's discuss foucault
>"sure thing!"

>oh hello Veeky Forums, let's discuss Evola
>HAHAHA HYPERBOREAN MORE LIKE HYPERBORING HAHAHA FUCKING PSEUD GTFO ALT RIGHT REDPILL RETARD

back to /pol/, retard

I just finished reading all of Foucault's early and middle work, and I'm about halfway into his later stuff, which is less relevant to the stuff I'm doing. He isn't at all hard to understand, once you understand him. His driving, underlying concepts are pretty easy, once you can concretely visualize them.

The problem is that getting to that point. Like most French fucks, Foucault is more about induction than reading.

I've posted this before, but: Almost no one with sea legs in Foucault got there by "sitting down and reading Foucault." Try to visualize a well-written book introducing you to a very complex theory as a set of stairs. The better the book, the more level and evenly gradated the stairs will be, so that as long as the person is willing to ascend them, there are no weird bits where it's suddenly like a ten foot difference between one step and the next, or the steps become really shallow and easy to slip on, etc. There will always be imperfections, slightly uneven parts where the author got really obtuse, and which give trouble to subsequent generations of readers (Kant's schemas, e.g.).

Foucault, and most French fucks, hit you with a first step that is just a twenty foot high brick wall as the very first step, and plenty of unevenness and wonkiness for all steps in general. The real key to getting over this wonkiness is to have already been immersed in Foucault's predecessors and the stylistic quirks and vague ideas of his milieu - in this case, to be familiar with Bachelard, Canguilhem, the structuralist vogue of the 60s, etc. These act as props and stepping stones that allow you hoist yourself up the stair, at which point you turn back around at the lesser-educated Parisians and perform tricks of exegesis for them in order to inflate your own ego.

Half the reason they are so popular and famous is because Parisian culture really, really loves this kind of exegetical showmanship. They think anything obtuse is just so goddamn profound that it could not possibly have been described in simpler terms, and that it requires sages and magicians to decode - but Foucault's ideas can be (and indeed they mostly were) produced in simpler terms, more evenly gradated. He's much more derivative of his predecessors than he is often held to be.

The nature of Parisian intellectual culture, which has now sadly infected a lot of the Anglosphere as well through critical theory in the humanities, is to write with this horrible, intentionally obtuse style that requires a period of induction into its standard jargon and to the vague presupposed ideas of its milieu. But they of course act as if they encountered each text alone in the wilderness with just a pointy stick and conquered it. In reality, they went through Jargon Bootcamp and had everything explained to them through meta-meta-commentary before ever reading it, and then read the commentary BACK into the text (which they skimmed).

Gutting's book (_The Archaeology..._) is pretty good

You'll need a strong foundation in the history of philosophy, Kant especially and the language of transcendental logic. Some background in structuralism wouldn't hurt either. As for Sartre, I personally find him quite worthless. I'd stick with Heidegger.

Yeah, Veeky Forums needs to be an echochamber of Marxist thought.
God forbid we allow some conservative/right wing authors.

How far up your ass are you people?
Conservatives, even extreme right wing people, have had a huge impact on literature, not to mention philosophy.
So you get the fuck out of here with your 21st century cultural revolution, nu-male red guard.

poor thing, mean ol' Veeky Forums won't pay him attention

We do make up a large portion of the users on Veeky Forums, but you guys keep on claiming right wing stuff has no place here... while discussing Marxist ideas.

The /pol/ posters on Veeky Forums do a shit poor job of providing conservative authors. Either its Evola or a strech in claiming Junger to be a conservative, or Turner Diaries tier, or else its christposting, which isnt bad, but certainly isnt great.

Am i supposed to feel bad for you?

What can you expect from people whose only source of education is jaypegs?

The dude was literally into pozzing and a BDSM cumslut.

Seriously, everything he wrote, from prisons to hospitals and madness, is like him exploring his perverted fetishes.

>implying there's anything wrong with that

What's your major?

youtube.com/watch?v=jjPQ_jVlEnQ

Best critique there is against Foucault.

"I`ve got gay cancer. I'm going to die, and so are you."
- AIDS patient zero

did you just realize this?

everyone does that. nabokov has a lap fetish, turgenev into fendom, kant had a whole machine to prevent him from masturbating, etc, etc. that's the whole point.

Sounds better than evola

There is, if you have morals.

/pol/sters don't provide "conservative thought," though. they don't provide any thought at all. they just call things they don't like cuck.

and anyway, there's enough disagreement within the academic left to keep things lively without you fucks trying to drown everything out. kindly fuck off.

yeah. his works up until the 70s were written in that awful style that can drive you mad. you should check his college de france lectures. they are more entry level and written in a clearer way.

I find Foucault completely lucid if you just keep in mind that he has three main "conceptual enemies"

They are

- The centered human subject. Foucault would like a history devoid of the idea of humanism, which in his view functions to restrict, rather than to expand, the so-called "human rights" to groups of people deemed "allowed to live" by hegemonic powers. humanism becomes an excuse to assert a killable Other.

- structural abstraction from the object of study. this is usually what passes for "interpretation" of the psychoanalytic varieties. rather than paying rigorous close attention to what the text says, certain interpretive practices employ all manner of abstract conceptual schemes to fabricate that which they do not, that which they have "repressed." Foucault hates that shit, and believes that what is being said, and the rules according to which the POSSIBILITY of saying those things is construed, is far more interesting and, if you're into this sort of thing, politically relevant.

- totalizing history, especially diachronic narrative. for good reason Foucault is very suspect of the idea that there is "one" history which can be rendered as a sequence of events, one "causing" the other, which is the one's "effect." Foucault rejects this kind of scholarship completely as not only hegemonic, but further, as essentially impossible, choosing instead to focus on synchronic structures of speech, the "discourses" identified as objects of study in my previous bullet point.

all this comes, more or less, from Hegel, who, in the hands of Kojeve, came to dominate intellectual thought of a whole generation, maybe two, in France, and it is against this kind of thinking that Foucault reacts, and from which his thought builds.

You don't have morals, nor does most of /lol/ right up your ally

also, keep in mind he is a historian first, and a philosopher second. his works therefore turn around issues of historical documents and the interpretation thereof. he's much more approachable if you bare in mind that he is always concerned with interpretation.

lmao he was p much against 2nd wave fems. he also was accused of being a fascist, a marxist, and other arbitrary ideological affinities. most of his methodology is based on the creation of 'genealogies'

>he inspired feminism and the SJW movement by his 'muh feels' """""philosophy"""""".

That's why I love him.

Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same. More than one person, doubtless like me, writes in order to have no face.

Archaeology of Knowledge. Last lines of the introduction.

you should read a "difficult" author if you have a reason to care about them. I'd recommend this nice little video:

youtube.com/watch?v=BBJTeNTZtGU

and if, without any philosophical prerequisites, you think those are worthwhile ideas that you want to learn more about, I'd recommend reading the standford encyclopedia of philosophy article on him and the Foucault Reader, an selection from some of his more popular books.

>TSOL
They're a cult, you know that right?

memes are everywhere my friend

Honestly I could never give Focoot the benefit of the doubt because the people who were into him in college were such fags and he looks like such a douche in all his photos.

I suppose some of the stuff he wrote is worth the time of day.

>because the people who were into him in college were such fags and he looks like such a douche in all his photo

You shouldn't be posting here.

Except that's the opposite of what happened. Did you not read the first post of the thread, or were you too blurred by your ideology goggles?
This is why nobody wants you here.

>tfw mfw I have no face is the face of Foucault

Foucault's genealogies are based in part on Nietzsche. Though honestly, just get a Foucault book and force yourself to sit through it. Basically, if you start somewhere other than Plato or Dostoevsky, your first few philosophical readings are going to be boring as shit.

I thought Nausea was awesome, but then again, I had already read lots of Heidegger and understood quickly what he was doing with the main character's moods.

Definitely worth a read.

nice user


and btw, everyone who is shouthing "hur durrr feminism sjw numale" go back to /pol/. Yes, sorry, nowadays you are a fucktard a fucking /pol/tard if you believe feminims is a bad thing. Stop thinking that you are an intellectual or something resisting some kind of cult. You just don't have the power potential to embrace something so revolutionary. You are just like the ignorant piece of shit which in the beggining of XX century thought socialism was not a worthy idea. top kek

Junger wasn't a conservative? He is generally accepted even among his detractors to be part of the Revolutionary Conservative movement of interwar Germany. Why do you think he's so often derided as a fascist?

I'm thinking on picking up History of Madness. Like OP I have little experience with philosophy. I've read novels with heavy philosophical themes, but that's it. Is it too heavy? Translated version.

lmao nevr mind senpai. I'll start with the greeks. I already have some plato to start with, any more recs?

Try to read anything before 1960, except Marx.
Yes, even the old liberals would be comfy in the right wing of today.

Lol it's the opposite. Classical liberals would be disgusted by neoliberal technocracy.

It's the direct opposite, they were far more radical than the left currently is. Because at the time it was the industrial revolution, economically, socially, massive change must occur at such times.

And instead of having the humab rights we just watch the power of the fittest and wealthiest grow? I can pretend to understand when Stirner attacks the human rights, because Stirnerian ideas are far to far fetched to be applied on any bigger scale, but from someone who already has impact, this is just a dangerous idea

Even feminists and SJWs would disagree with that statement

They're always turning on each other like a pack of animals that belong to a species that turns on members of it's same species

Idk like hyenas or something

This thread isn't about feminists or "sjws".

There's no reason to be using a tripcode.

Filtered.

Rude

>You are just like the ignorant piece of shit which in the beggining of XX century thought socialism was not a worthy idea

>mfw your worthless destructive ideology will never, EVER be relevant ever again

THE GOYIM KNOW!
SHUT IT DOWN.

Not the user you're answering to.

You're seeing feminists and SJWs (whatever that is) as big groups with a common agenda, when in reality there are various subgroups. You can't say "the feminists think that..." because there are different smaller movements in the feminist movement. Same goes for SJWs, which at this point is some sort of boogeyman with in it anything leftist, young people, ethnic groups, whatever. It's a buzzword.
In denying the complexity of feminism, in saying it's one big party with everything from radical "femnazi" to christian feminists, you cripple yourself and waste most everybody's time because then you're not talking about the same thing and things devolve into namecalling.

This applies to any tag you might use. White Cis male, cuckholdry, living in the third world, christians, jews, nazis, muslims: all these words are used in discussion as placeholders for "bags" of ideas (muslims: terrorists, bomb, veil, homophobia, war, sand). You have to break out of this habit which is the doxa to have a fruitful discussion and not a game of match the stereotype.
Something something socrates etc.

I don't mean to be rude, but that goes without saying

Just read his Stanford Encyclopedia entry and it doesn't sound all that revolutionary. Why is he so revered by so many students of the humanities today?

For questioning what otherwise wouldn't have gone questioned.

What exactly? The percieved superiority of modern western culture?

>What exactly? The perceived superiority of modern western culture?

No just that, but the numerous ways in which its superiority is baseless and always was. About individualism, power.

Stirner did it better

this
I'm still waiting for the "Ivory Tower, Fart-smelling fucktard french """"intellectual"""" french " to "Normal French" translation of Foucault and co. works

That would probably result in a lot of these works being laughed out into irrelevance though

>morals

No, others have done it better than Stirner. More indepth. Vice versa.

I dunno mang.
I've schooled people here about Spengler more than once, together with some fellow Spenglerians more than once.
Plus, there were a few threads about neo-reactionary related literature too, from time to time.
Foucault can be read from a right wing, reactionary perspective too, no?

Most of these people complaining should be ignored, but people like you that consider the user you're responding to as the sole representative of the "right-wing" in Veeky Forums are usually just as annoying.

Then again, I dont browse /pol/ beyond /sg/ nowadays. Its pretty damn bad

Yes Foucault and Critical Theory can be used from a right wing perspective to deconstruct many arguments leftists may bring up

yes, I know.
It was more of a rethorical question.

Sorry, English isn't my first language, I son't always pick up on such things