What does Veeky Forums think about this guy Foucault...

It's been that way since the French Revolution, back when 'Left' had it's original meaning.

>it's

>it's another right wing idiot gets triggered by any sort of disagreement episode

It's another left wing idiot gets triggered by any sort of disagreement episode

Foucault is alright. His facts (mainly dates) can get a little fucky, especially in History of Sexuality. The main value I get from reading him is his technicality when it comes to different historiographies. I think this is what a lot of people enjoy, hence his strong reputation as a Nietzsche guy.

Can anyone refresh my memory?

Haven't read anything about Foucalt since 2005 sociology class...something to do with a way to analyse history?

So you want a quick rundown?

Your entire post is nonsensical. Like it doesn't actually map out onto reality. Consider seeing a psychiatrist.

foucault showed my how the state can be evil, chumsky showed me how it is evil

...

He's like an 9/10 Althusser. Instead of getting interpellated by ideology he said you're subject (in its two-fold meaning) to discourse. He's great for general french post-structuralist introduction. However i think the badiou/zizek/lacan trio is stronger.

Few people know what that aids infected retard meant in his ramblings. Most just jump on the bandwagon to impress others with their kn0wledge b

kek

Foucault's essential idea is that mechanisms of coercion function principally by making people voluntarily compliant, as opposed to overt, physical coercion. In this sense he is a prescient critic, but almost everywhere else he is at best muddled and at worst reactionary. He spawned all the postmodern feels > reals bullshit and packaged reactionary Catholic notions of original sin in postmodern terminology (in his introduction to Deleuze/Guattari's Anti-Oedipus he goes on about "the fascist within all of us", this kind of deterministic bullshit is what good philosophy should seek to challenge). His influence is the result of an aura of false radicalism that people all too easily associate with him. All the "truth isn't real" and "knowledge doesn't exist and to know something is to oppress it" is dreck.

Foucault would have despised those parrots

>More importantly, he had now also liberated himself from the paranoid leftovers of his own studies in power. It was only the attitude of methodical calmness, acquired late on, that enabled him to formulate a concept of regimen, disciplines and power games devoid of all compulsively anti-authoritarian reflexes. When he states sententiously in the same interview, recalling his beginnings in abstract revolt, ‘One not only wanted a different world and a different society, one also wanted to go deeper, to transform oneself and to revolutionize relationships to be completely “other”, he is already speaking as someone genuinely changed who, light years away from his beginnings, remembers his confused longing for complete otherness. With this turn of phrase he is beyond irony, even beyond humour. In his way, Foucault repeated the discovery that one cannot subvert the ‘existing’ – only supervert it. He had stepped out into the open and become ready to perceive something strictly invisible for an intelligence conditioned in French schematicisms: the fact that human claims to freedom and self-determination are not suppressed by the disciplines, regimes and power games, but rather enabled. Power is not an obstructive supplement to an originally free ability; it is constitutive for ability in all its manifestations. It always forms the ground floor above which a free subject moves in. Hence one can describe liberalism as a system of disciplinary checks and balances without glorifying it in the slightest – but without denouncing it either. With the calm severity of a civilization trainer, Foucault states: ‘Individuals could certainly not be “liberated” without educating them in a certain way.’

>Foucault had gone a certain distance along this path by newly covering the universe of ancient philosophical asceticisms in a series of meticulous rereadings of mostly Stoic authors – unimpeded by the ubiquitous barriers of critical kitsch, which sees domination in every form of ‘self-control’, and immediately suspects any discipline in one’s way of life of being a self-repression that doubles an external repression.

>People took all those analyses of asylums, clinics, police institutions and prisons for a slightly outlandish form of social critique and lavished praise on its lyrically drugged fastidiousness. None of his readers understood that they were always also ascetic exercises in self-shaping in place of a third suicide attempt, and possibly even the author himself was not always aware of it. His insistence on the anonymity of authorship aimed in the same direction: if no one is there, no one can kill themselves. The bafflement was therefore great when the older Foucault sidestepped with the irony of one who had detached himself, shaking off his critical and subversive followers.