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
Wyatt Anderson
Nietzsche, you dumb fat idiot
Nathan Watson
how do you know he's fat?
Parker Sullivan
Because he hasn't read Heidegger. Only fat idiots don't do that
Ayden Cook
you had trouble with Venn diagrams didn't you.
Joseph Torres
heidegger read heidegger and was a fat idiot
Brody Robinson
>Fouceault
Austin King
Heidegger and Nietzsche are a good start. Although there are many german idealists who write about aesthetics
Brandon Harris
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?
Levi Bell
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.
Andrew Perry
no it's not necessary. However reading the Greeks is always a good idea.
Ethan Martinez
>Derrida and Foucault
Blake Martin
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.
Justin Morris
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
Lucas Collins
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
Michael Hernandez
nope
Luke Miller
try reading them? i dunno!
Luke Sanchez
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
Luke Stewart
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.
Gabriel Garcia
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
Hudson Watson
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
Brayden White
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.
Luis Watson
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.
Carter Flores
wew?
Anthony Roberts
>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.
Tyler Barnes
OP here
thanks for the advice everyone, I love this board
Tyler Sullivan
Derrida is meaningless, obscurantist bullshit. Skip him.
Hunter Johnson
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?
Aiden Reyes
>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.
Tyler Bell
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.
Brayden Wilson
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.
Lincoln Baker
>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...
Ayden Thomas
Retards should be forbidden from reading Nietzsche, on pain of death.
Robert Gonzalez
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.
Jaxson Evans
Wes Cecil's lecture on Derrida is a great intro, look it up on YouTube.
Cooper Morgan
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'.
Brody Clark
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.
Jaxson Baker
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.
Blake Barnes
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.
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.
Joshua Hill
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
Luke Sanders
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
Leo Ross
>not being on /pol atm
Ryder Wood
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).
Noah James
>mfw all of your posts
Seriously, just read a fucking book written by Derridainstead of basing your opinions on a Mongolian origami board.
Michael Wright
Every thread >i didn't get it >therefore no one can just stop
Jace Powell
heavy metal rules all that punk shit sucks it belongs on the moon