/lit/ - Literature

>>4767421
>a trip permits a strong foundation for a complex dialectic

I'm interested in postmodernism. I tried giving Foucault's "A history of sexuality part 1" a shot but didn't understand it as much as I had liked.

What do? Where should I start? Any good "guides to foucault" ? Another piece of Foucault perhaps? Another writer? Please no discouraging comments like "hurrdurr if you don't understand Foucault then dont try" and please don't recommend starting with the greeks.

>Additional information: I'm interested in postmodern contributions to political science and it's practical use, and I'll be starting my masters program this year so I want to have a good foundation in postmodernism (also interested in critical theory) before starting so I don't want to have to read 50 books starting from Plato or whoever.

>>4520334

>If you actually read the sources which you reference, you'd understand that an idea being socially constructed is not a refutation of its existence.


I never said it was. In fact read >>4520341 in which I say that the fact that everything possesses a phenomenal aspect does not relegate the existence of everything into relativity. A sociocultural construction is fine as long as it's not violable of a biological construction.


> In Foucault

Well Foucault did not actually claim that all knowledge is socially constructed through power struggles. He said that all knowledge acquires its phenomenological façade through this mechanism. In other words, that power games are the naturalistic function of production of what we know, and this is absolutely tautological, so tautological in fact that it becomes significant (the revelation of its tautology), which was exactly the point of Foucault.


>(This is not saying that all knowledge is equivalent, but that an external and human criteria of "usefulness" exists always as a background for the formation of power-knowledge.)

And maybe if this is what Foucault said (and not simply an obvious misreading on your part), he forget to read his Wittgenstein, enough to realise that this statement, that usefulness is the necessary genesis of all knowledge, is itself consumed in its own relation, and is therefore self annihilative. It shows by saying that all knowledge is bound to the human criterion of usefulness that this human criterion of usefulness is /precisely meaningless/, and thus we simply use it as a ladder to arrive at our true, ineffable destination, only to knock it down. Why else would the man's smile have been so wide?


If actual homosexuality cannot exist then homosexuality in any sense cannot exist.

I want to get into Michel Foucault.

Where do I start?

Sexuality shit?
Prisoner shit?

>>4184262

>mfw i thought they were handing out aids

When are you all going to accept that his ideas are not going away and they will only become more and more prevalent with time?

>>3925687

I drink, therefore I jam.

http://rapgenius.com/F-scott-fitzgerald-the-great-gatsby-chapter-i-lyrics

Postin in a Foucault thread.

>>3645683
>"human nature"
>existing

>>3540678
>"Gandhi has a head like a fucking orange"
>-His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama

>giving a shit about canonical knowledge

>>3363254

>empiricism

gess fochan cant handle objetsm.

>>3317093
>I'm getting sick of seeing tits ... I'm not even homosexual.

All of your subjectivities are the products of discursive regimes of power. Internet-dwelling Marxist neckbeards will solve nothing with their class-struggle reductionism.

>>3191973
What's wrong with a good wank?

>>3191987
MVQ c'est.

>He thinks his discourse is independent from power relations

this may be a shot in the dark, but i'm looking for an article called "foucault and the welfare state" by ivan berend. it's published in the european review and available on journals.cambridge.org, but it costs $30. does anyone have this or know where i can find it?

>>3046962
I don't give a Foucault 'bout your feminism

>>2931634
Thanks breh, will give those a looking over.

The Blue/Brown books are lectures he made about PI so yeah.

Last bump from me: what works by Derrida and Foucault should I read?

>>2889859

D-dad?! Is that you?

This nigger. Is there any particular book of his that is a good starting point? Or any background knowledge I need?