/lit/ - Literature

What do we think? I read discipline and punish alongside a companion book meant to explain a lot of the things foucault says in it.

I was hoping some of you philosophy readers here on /lit/ might be able to help me out here. Foucault's argument in D&P is basically that the judicial system served the needs of the monarchy before the revolution, and after the revolution the judicial system changed to suit the needs of the capitalist ruling class, or bourgeoisie.

Am I right on this or am I missing the point here? What do you anons think and have you read this book?

Okay, how the fuck do I get into this guy and understand his philosophy without actually going to school and studying philosophy? I've already read Discipline and Punish once, does anyone know any good books analyzing it? Where do I go from here?

I have been trying to relate Foucault to the main discourses and influences underlying his thought. I've made a decent amount of progress by reading a biography, reading his Dits et Ecrits (early interviews, articles, prefaces, etc), and reading miscellaneous writings by his major influences, to get a sense of French intellectual culture in the 30s-50s.

The more I read the more I feel like the French don't, or at least didn't in this period, have the discipline for focused intellectual work, instead preferring to creatively appropriate, and not minding if they have idiosyncratic interpretations as long as they make a splash. There is also a lot of fashion chasing, trying to stay au courant with the latest buzzwords, and name dropping. Kojeve gives his lectures on Hegel, which even he and his smarter contemporaries know are highly idiosyncratic, and everybody who attended them or has the inside scoop about them establishes "Hegel" (as vaguely talked up by Kojeve) as a name they have to coordinate themselves by and mention like "Ahh yes, Hegel you see, can we ever truly escape him? Indeed, indeed.."

The effect is to make you think "Damn this guy knows Hegel," because all he said was "Hegel," when really he read Bataille's oblique comments about Kojeve's strange views on Hegel and got enough of the "gist" of "Hegel represents immanent rationality" that he can nod along thoughtfully when Hegel is being discussed in equally vague terms by some other French guy. Everyone is sort of bullshitting everyone else. Kojeve (Russian but spiritually French) is making shit up about Hegel and doesn't care. Althusser doesn't really know or really care that he doesn't actually know Marx well (I have a feeling Foucault got his simplified buzzword tier "Bachelard=coupures epistemologiques" reading of Bachelard through Althusser's own such reading). Foucault and Deleuze talk about Artaud as if he's a canonical figure but he's just a meme kook.

None of them read Freud well or deeply, what they do is absorb the way the French were talking about key Freud buzzwords like the Judge selectively in 1952. Foucault goes out of his way to namedrop Heidegger and say "fufufu so you've deciphered that Heidegger and Husserl were quite decisive for me~" because Dreyfus starts talking about the obvious parallels between Foucauldian "post-Cartesianism" and historicity, when in reality he never really understood Heidegger, but understood Wahl's eclectic summaries of Jaspers' Existenzphilosophie and Heidegger, and wrote an essay on Binswanger where he showed semi-familiarity with Husserl as summarized for him by Merleau-Ponty's classes. He probably only really read the Sixth Investigation and the Foundations of Geometry.

AGGOT!

Is it possible to interpret Foucault's philosophy from a right wing perspective?

Where can I find a full college level course on Foucault and Spinoza specifically? Not really interested in any other philosophy but at the same time I lack the educational background to fully understand what they are trying to say in their writings. I think it would help if I had a professor to explain most of it to me especially in regards to certain terms, historical context, philosophy student terminology etc.

Hey /lit/. Is there any reading flowchart for this guy?

Where do I begin with this prophet and what are his essential works? What would be his thoughts today?

Marx didn't die. He shaved his head and beard and went under the name Michel Foucault.

>>19490182
>Unironically, what the fuck was his problem?
carbuncles

He tried to enslave us.

>>19371876

Name a more intentionally misconstrued thinker. You can't.

Foucault's predilection for children irredeemable tarnishes his work. His account of the mentally challenged farmer molesting a child and then paying her, closely matches his actions in Tunisia, paying children to fuck him. His writings exist to justify Adult molestation of children, nothing else can be seriously derived from them but that. Foucault must be removed from Academies, and fields that have relied on his work must either be reshaped without him at the core and if that is not possible then they must be abandoned.