How to I begin to "understand" Derrida and Fouceault? Where do I begin? Kant? The Greeks? Saussure? Marx?

How to I begin to "understand" Derrida and Fouceault? Where do I begin? Kant? The Greeks? Saussure? Marx?


I encounter them all the time in my studies (art history undergrad) and I would like to read more of their texts rather than just the small excerpts profs assign. I've heard that they're even difficult to read for grad students. History of Sexuality is more or less straightforward, but anything on semiotics or whatever, especially from Derrida is filled with theories and references I don't know


TL;DR what do I need to do to form a complete understanding of Derrida, Foucault and associated theorists

Nietzsche, you dumb fat idiot

how do you know he's fat?

Because he hasn't read Heidegger. Only fat idiots don't do that

you had trouble with Venn diagrams didn't you.

heidegger read heidegger and was a fat idiot

>Fouceault

Heidegger and Nietzsche are a good start. Although there are many german idealists who write about aesthetics

I think I do this because I speak French, in my head I spell it as eau even though its a dumb typo

so starting with Greeks isn't necessary?

If time were like a video tape and you went back in time, how would you know you had gone back in time unless you had a separate video tape that you could compare it to that didn't rewind? But if everything is that video tape, then you couldn't have a separate one, and you could never know what you hadn't learned yet.

Therefore, you could be going back in time or forwards all the time and never really know it.

There. I just gave you permission to ignore everything that Derrida, and Fouceault, and all the rest of the postmodern critical theory idiots said.

You cannot analyze the recursion from outside of the recursion - you are still in the recursion, and the dialectic is myopic and just so much rhetoric and sophistry.

All you can do is change the paradigm or the intent of the narrative and "decohere" the Narrative Universe into its new state that accepts the new story.

You cannot deconstruct then rebuild, nor was what you built any more or less a story than what you built in its place. Nor do you have to deconstruct to persuade your audience that the story wasn't useful to be believed. The fact that it stopped is sufficient.

no it's not necessary. However reading the Greeks is always a good idea.

>Derrida and Foucault

Most people in allied fields of philosophy (especially political science) have only a rudimentary understanding of the philosophers they pull from. By showing some interest in the source material you're ensuring you're not a hack, so thank you for that.

Skip Derrida for now, at least until you have a functioning understanding of Foucault. Derrida is not worth the payoff until later, its hard to extract much from it.


As for starting with Foucault; the Greeks never hurt, esp. for Heidegger - Aristotle, but its not explicitly necessary.

The major linchpin for understanding any modern philosopher is Kant - with a firm grasp of him, and his concept of how we have experience, you can plod on to at least scrape together some Husserl, Heidegger or Foucault.

So, if you want a quick and dirty intro into Foucault with some background, just do Kant-Foucault and dive in with some companion texts. ('Cambridge Companion to X' books are invaluable and if you're a uni student your library might have physical and digital copies.)

If you have more time, you pretty much need to wade into phenomenology and structuralism for a deeper understanding of Foucault. I'd recommend using high quality secondary sources for everything except the thinker you're interested in (for that thinker, use primary AND secondary source) and then doubling back if you need to know more.

History of Sexuality is a great starting point - wonderful read, and it outlines a lot of what Foucault is doing in brief. You can do it in an afternoon and read some essays on its contents in two.

And because its winter and I have time to spoonfeed

Cambridge Companion to Critique of Pure Reason ISBN: 0521710111

Cambridge Companion to Foucault ISBN: 0521600537

thank you so much! Yeah, if internships don't pan out this summer I'm going to try the Greek meme but these sound really good as a starting point during next semester

nope

try reading them? i dunno!

love how people shitting on postmodernism and poststructuralism on this board usually only do so by repeating "pseud" and "cultural marxism" ad nauseum, but when they try an actual argument this dreck is all they can dream up lol

As an undergrad there's no real reason to delve too deep into philosophy if you're studying art history, let alone the Greeks. Secondary sources will be sufficient and you should be able to find articles that already apply theory for you, for relevant time periods. You'd be better off reading critics like Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Craig Owens, Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin Buchloh, etc.

Eventually yeah it would be useful to look further to expand your knowledge and understanding of art but as an undergrad it's mostly just survey stuff and assessment is the number one issue. There's enough of that already to keep you busy enough.

Though if you're really brave by all means do it but don't exhaust yourself by reading up on the Greeks in order to talk about appropriation art.

I should have put it in the OP but I've tried reading some of it but it didn't make much sense to me, especially Derrida

History Of Sexuality is fine so far

Cool thanks for the advice.

Heidegger, Nietzsche and Kant are pretty straightforward right? Or at least companion texts are readily available at least

you shouldn't take derrida and foucault seriously. in fact, you shouldn't even waste your time reading them. degenerate postmodernists are poison for the mind

This OP is on the right way. Derrida is complicated and better payed off later when you have a good grasp of the post-structuralist thinking.

For me the soultion was simple: I read a secondary book about him. His books has quite varying themes and if you read one of them, etc. the discourse on sexuality, you'll get to know a lot about power and knowledge, but not to much about how the subject is constitued and so on. I would definitely recommend a good introductionary book on him and then go trough one of his works.

I think you should have a clear objective in mind when tackling Ph. and Ph.ers. Otherwise you'll drown. Try a concept, just one, then apply it. Since you talk about D&F, you should just read what these authors think on Language. Use a Ph.dict. to get a general picture, then apply that to your understanding of Lang. If you get it right, you should come out with something to show for your hours' work. Otherwise I anticipate frustration.

wew?

>Starting with the Greeks
Don't fall for the meme OP. For Foucault read just have a working understanding of Marx.

He's by no means a Marxist but it'll give you a grasp of the type of method he uses. All in all, once you get past the needlessly complex language Foucault's ideas are pretty easy to grasp.

OP here

thanks for the advice everyone, I love this board

Derrida is meaningless, obscurantist bullshit. Skip him.

I'm not who you've been talking to, but secondary sources on Nietzsche are largely contradictory and often arguing against each other. Nietzsche is highly interpretable.
I'd say reading Beyond Good and Evil, which was my starting point, is a great start. It's a scathing critique of Kantian philosophy, amongst many other things, it's also rambling, fragmented and sometimes incoherent.
The Genealogy of Morals is really important afterwards because it's what influenced Foucault; the interesting thing is that the Genealogy is largely a joke - it isn't a Genealogy at all, it's sort of a long ramble about the beginning of morality that you might expect to see written by a shut-in on [r9k] - but Foucault uses the method laid out by the Genealogy, albeit with actual logic and backed-up claims.

Which then raises the question of, if Nietzsche wrote the Genealogy without any intention of it being serious - which we must assume, otherwise he was an idiot - was Foucault wrong in applying the same method seriously? Can we use the same criticisms of illogical assumption that we rightly lay on Nietzsche on Foucault?

>once you get past the needlessly complex language Foucault's ideas are pretty easy to grasp
This. Just work at it til you get used to the way he thinks and his ideas will start to flow intuitively.

Try finding some lectures online first and listening to them. Rick Roderick has some good shit on YouTube. Then maybe try some Wittgenstein if still not understanding.

I would say to just skip Foucault altogether. I read two of his books before starting to put together that he wasn't really saying much, and that he contradicts himself often. I had heard people say he was a pseud and undeserving of recognition, but I really came to realize it once I started reading his books.

>2016
>Bothering with any philosopher beyond Nietzsche
>Bothering with the French pseud-hacks who ripped him off whilst disregarding his most important/challenging and offensive (to Liberal/Western/Enlightenment sensitivities) ideas

Really...

Retards should be forbidden from reading Nietzsche, on pain of death.

I really don't get how Derrida or Foucault supposedly has any debt to Heidegger, and yet it is repeated ad nauseum.

If anything they only have a debt to Marx, the Critical Theorists and Nietzsche.

Wes Cecil's lecture on Derrida is a great intro, look it up on YouTube.

You need to read a whole fucking lot to have a COMPLETE understanding of them and I won't assign you such a list. A general knowledge of philosophy preceding is needed, especially with a guy like Derrida.

You can say though that Heidegger is necessary to appreciate Derrida. For Foucault I would atleast recommend reading Nietzsche's Zur Genealogie der Moral and then Foucault's text 'Nietzsche, Genealogy and History'.

Derrida is basically building all his shit on Heidegger and if you can't see that, you clearly have no idea what you are talking about.

I can see how it's not quite as clear with Foucault though.

A guy who says "nothing is outside the text" and is essentially a nihilist is building all his shit on a guy who wanted to save Being from the rationalist Greeks?

I don't think so.

Yes, he is building on H. Not parroting him. There's a huge difference. Most thinkers in modern continental philosophy have to come to terms with Heidegger. Vattimo/Agamben are other examples.

If you read Heidegger's What Is Metaphysics lecture closely it is quite clear how Derrida developed his concept of différance as a radicalization of some of Heidegger's thought. There are literally videos readily available on YouTube of Derrida confirming this.

Also, read the first few chapters of Sein und Zeit (especially 6-7 in the introduction). Tell me that the project outlined here can not be read as a direct inspiration for a thinker like Derrida.

it's simple, you've got to be supersmart, basically genius. you've got to possess some kind of wisdom of basically every scientific field, mostly math, history, philosophy, physics and astronomy

you're both retarded.
>Only fat idiots don't do that
means that the only people who don't read Heidegger are fat idiots, but not that all fat idiots don't read Heidegger.
Not reading Heidegger implies you are a fat idiot, but not the other way around

>not being on /pol atm

They're both explicitly against a sort of transcendent Cartesian (and ultimately Platonic) representationalism. For Heidegger this is realized in the form of an attack on dualism and the notion of a transcendent cogito, while for Derrida it's realized in the form of a rejection of a transcendent or Plantonic theory of semantics that always fixes content/meaning in some abstract and ideal form that hides behind the representation itself (this also seems to be heavily inspired by Wittgenstein's account of semantics).

>mfw all of your posts

Seriously, just read a fucking book written by Derridainstead of basing your opinions on a Mongolian origami board.

Every thread
>i didn't get it
>therefore no one can
just stop

heavy metal rules all that punk shit sucks it belongs on the moon