Has Foucault been ruined?

he appeared on the scene at exactly the right time. as allthusser started clowning around with marxism and psychology, and roland barthes started to fragment literature, academia became very receptive to cancelling grand narratives and individualizing theory and power (as was exactly the cultural logic of neo-liberalism, which is the dominant class's culture and therefore the dominant culture at the time) all paved the way for Foucault to horizontal theories of power and ideology, which consequently completely obscured capitalist power or the economic base as a determinate in the last instance.

b/c his theories were so serviceable to bourgeois interests they of course came into vogue with tenured radicals, who if they had continued to seriously follow marx and althusser into the 70s and 80s thy would have realized they lived as ISAs and functionaries, and would have to overthrow their bosses too, which is a lot of work. Foucault is their escape rope.

He's a distillation of Nietzsche and Marx, both of which are much more complex and generally more meritorious thinkers. He's okay in and of himself but really Foucault is more of a starting point into a deeper investigation of philosophy than he is an ending point. Having read all of Nietzsche and a decent portion of Marx going into him, every point he made felt like it was already covered.

>tfw my university told Foucault to fuck off with his faulty methodology (and then he went to France and published it there instead)

Something to be proud of, I think.

read Archaeology of Knowledge first. it lays out the method he was working towards in the earlier books. don't be afraid to look online for guides and summaries as well

enjoy it while you can.

Wikipedia scholarship everyone

Too bad your country is now striving to be the first Foucaultian state.

>le ebic /pol/ maymays

>short sentence expressing condescension without reasoning

I'm not saying you're a pseud but you're doing what pseuds do

Armchair psychoanalysis everyone.

do you have an actual reply to why that user's reading of foucault's place in lit history is "wikipedia" tier or are you going to derail this thread into a shitposting retard pen?

well his entire critique is that foucault is not a marxist, sort of betraying the fact that he has no idea what foucault is trying to do, at any basic level

What I don't understand about Foucault is that all his followers read him as some social justice hero, but his works try to demonstrate that making a claim to "justice" is just an expression of power. And if everything's power, then it's impossible to say what is most just, or true, or whatever. There's some genuinely weird radical Nietzschean individualism running through Foucault which his followers seem to disregard completely.

>genuinely weird radical Nietzschean individualism
sounds like most young leftists nowadays

That's because you think his followers are the stereotypical SJW-crowd.
Maybe go outside once in a while.

>all his followers

pedantic fucks

but your remark that foucault wouldnt believe in an abstract, universal concept of justice is instantly transparent to almost everyone

I'm just a 'dis'passionate observer, not the user who wrote that analysis of foucault

1. his notion of "canceling grand narratives" is lifted directly from wikipedia's "postmodernism" page

2. his understanding of Foucault and Marxism as an us vs them dichotomy is extremely juvenile

3. he clearly has no idea that Foucault understood his work as taking place within a cluster of problematics—within a discourse—opened up by Marx and Freud. read Foucault's "What is an Author?" instead of just Wikipedia articles next time.

4. I'm not quite sure what Althusser is doing here, but he has nothing to do with the kind of wikipedian understanding of Marxism as "economic determinate in the last instance." Althusser does not concieve of "the economic" as the mode of production, and does away with the base/superstructure modality.

Sometimes this board is awesome. You're one of the reasons it is sometimes awful

>trying to discuss academic problems
>>thinks pedantic means anything

I'm the user that wrote the analysis of Foucault. I'm not saying that I believe in a transcendent absolute, just that Foucault doesn't, while his leftist disciples (such as those in my graduate department and at my undergraduate college) do, that of justice.

I'm not out to beat up some SJW strawman, just wondering about Foucault and his disciples, who tend to be leftist. I don't know of any right Foucaultians. Maybe the Bush administration.

was that so hard

by all means, lose yourself to language if it'll help sate your pathological need to one up an anonymous faggot on a taiwanese farting competition entry page

Foucault was steeped in Nietzsche.

As of yet, however, Nietzsche has yet to have a satisfactory heir.

foucault was a student of althusser, althusser was reviving the economic base after the gramscians and liberals started their stupid war of position in the superstructure project of reforming capitalism, and he was very invested in the base/superstructure modality.

foucault was all about micropower and the debord idea that france was now 1 million little kings. This totally obscures that having a tniy bit of power over some person you meet is inconsequential compared with the bourgeois power over the proletariat. it was almost like foucault didn't believe in society existed anymore,

SJW's don't like him because he's white.

I saw a tweet by an intelligent black female sociologist PHD student claiming he stole all his work from People of Colour. She used an example of a paraphrasing of the "war is the continuation of politics through other means" quotatution that she attributed to Mao. When I pointed out its the most oft repeated quotation from von Clauswitz, she blocked me. She also regrets Biopolitics in favour of "Necropolitics" because the author is black

Deleuze

>

overdetermination is the antidote to base/superstructure. structural causality is a complete rejection of the expressivity that model implies.

foucault wouldn't claim that there is nothing but ''micropower.'' he distanced himself from marxism (and liberalism) because the basis of his historical studies was an escape from an ''economism of power,'' meaning he wanted to theorize power without subordinating the concept to an economic narrative or law.

lol necropolitics is predicated on biopolitics. they're symbiotic concepts

She sees it in contrast

twitter.com/ztsamudzi/status/583420364891357184

Reading Cioran right now, and I have to say that his ideas about the fundamental nothingness of all things are far more interesting and (kind of) true to Spinoza, or at least my reading of Spinoza, than Deleuze's - given, I still have to read a lot of his stuff. Everything is built of nothing and upon nothing, fulfilling the already-and-always existing destiny of immanence inherent in Being, and all acts of man are but bricks in the endless construction of the cathedral of utter nothingness, under whose vaulted arches we all laugh madly.

All of this to say that the true heir of Nietzsche is Giorgio Manganelli, an Italian writer - philosopher who, alone in the literary world, effectively embodied he-who-dances-upon-the-abyss-laughing, or how I imagine the Overman to be.

Okay I'm Italian myself and I wrote this thing awfully but fuck it.

why are black "sociologists" so obnoxious

She's a first generation child of middle class immigrants with an identity crisis.

twitter.com/ztsamudzi/status/730883258544594944

no, he wasn't

yep that'll do it.

reminds me of my Zimbabwean 'friend' whose mother is a fucking UN diplomat by the way crying about oppression. She was born and raised in Australia in an upper class gated community. For fucks sake she's practically a white girl in a semi black girl suit

They resent not being white

you know what, I really do think this is it.

I wrote a paper about this actually, how inferiority complexes trigger two different major responses

one is psychological overcompensation (the prevalence of reactive, almost spiteful ethnocentrism displayed by black people in particular, giving rise to memes like "we wuz" would seem to support this)

for all their talk of 'hating' white people they sure do spend a lot of time how great it must to be white. sort of reminds me of how the overzealous, homophobic preacher secretly frequents a truck stop for 'forbidden' liaisons

What's the other major response?

buy my paper and you'll know : )

>there is no paper, only racism

the paper is actually on psychology, not race. I just thought my contention was relevant to the issue

lol what grade did you get on the paper? this is some pseudo-sociolinguistics phrenology bullshit

overcompensation as a defense mechanism for inferiority complexes is a well documented phenomenon and it is not at all original or controversial. did you actually read his comment (though I agree that he is retarded)

Yeah, she's Zim too. Her parents are academics who paid for her to study in LSE London. She moved into Oakland but it is a textbook gentrifier yet she spends all her time bitching about white people making her feel inadequete

children of wealthy immigrants either become active defenders of white people or the inverse.

being piggybanks since childhood with being completely ill equipped to handle the prospect of their utter mediocrity will fuck up a lot of people, it's just that all of the ingredients are just there for second and third gens. perfect storm as they say

phrenology?
I should watch d-jayngo again.

dude, you only need to look at the rise of ethnocentrism and nationalistic sentiments in former colonies of imperialist nations.

look at korea, phillippines if Africa doesn't convince you.

though I wouldnt have the balls to write this in a paper the "evidence" aint solid

i meant that he could have actually written an academic paper tying "we wuz kings n shit" to overcompensating among less prosperous minorities

exactly, there may be plausible explanations for certain general attitudes towards the majority population, or current lack of geopolitical influence in light of previous historical significance, but in no way could one academically write a paper about this, not without being ridiculously meticulous and looking at very specific samples and populations

youtube.com/watch?v=Gmv9Pb5NafI

There is truth in that, funny enough she often disparages whites for being ahead in life because of their "privledged mediocrity". She was raised in white suburbs too and almost exclusively dated white men, clearly she yearns for an acceptable white folk wouldn't give her.

she's either wrong or trying to articulate a point larger than Twitter allows. the concepts are related to each other dialectically. it involves a sort of 3D rotation of the same object to its opposite side. biopolitics means distributing life and security, necropolitics means administering death and destruction. the Marxist perspective already encompasses both.

If I remember it correctly, she sees the power of state only invested in Necropolitics. I should note she also considers herself an anarchist

>Implying Sweden isn't coming apart at the seems

There's also the fact that being a Marxist is fucking retarded. There's a reason they only exist in literature and similar fields.

His disregard of AIDS ruined him

3 volume of capital total 2700

>Reading Das Kapital without reading Grundrisse too

He's literally a leftist academic

kek

You cannot help but feel that, like Zizek, he takes a single historical example (and his presentation of this example may not be completely honest) and tries to extrapolate everything in the world from it. When he names drops an ancient word or person or a specific prison or anything really, you're left wondering if he's intentionally left details, uses of the word in certain contexts, his test results, etc. out to make his point. I find him to be a completely untrustworthy guy in that respect.

What is your highest level in Pokemon Go

Because it's good clean academic FUN!
Marxism is all theory, no practical applications.
>end white supremacy
>dismantle capitalism
Now (((who))) might that appeal to?

totally retarded, youre basically criticizing him for using the concept of a paradigm or altogether wrong

that guy is actually making a pretty common critique made of foucault even by a lot of foucault scholars

he is a parisian of his time, all grandiose claims and sweeping ideas over empirical details