/lit/ - Literature

I found extremely easy to read, Anon. I also found it very clear.

Perhaps you could provide an example of a paragraph you found to be horrible or difficult to understand?

>>4669926

You should have started with something else by Foucault. Not everything by him is as thickly/frustratingly written. Try Power/Knowledge or his lecture courses instead.

Also your rant says nothing about the book and can be applied to pretty much every hard book ever.

2/10 obvious troll post, made me respond just in case you're actually being sincere, in which case I will kill myself.

>>4669934
>Not everything by him is as thickly/frustratingly written.
Discipline and Punish isn't frustratingly written imho. It is probably the most entertaining history I've read along with Durant.

>>4669926
It's unoriginal 50 years after the fact because of how influential it was. It's like the joke about how a modern student read Ulysses and said "I don't get it, it's just a normal book."

Also, it's not nearly as hard to read as you're pretending. If it's the most unreadable book you've ever read then you have to get outside your comfort zone a little more.

>>4669945
>comparing Foucault to Durant

Durant was a master of prose. Foucault was a master of bullshitting.

>>4669955

0/10

>>4669935
This.

Speaking of amounting to very little, threads that call out writers/thinkers without providing any actual examples of the alleged offenses are useless.

>>4669963
0/10?

Go read the introduction to The Story of Philosophy and tell me with a straight face that Foucault would have ever been able to write something so profound and beautiful.

>>4669976

I've read excepts. I think it's well-written. But comparing Foucault to Durant is apples and oranges. Foucault wasn't writing with the same objective in mind, or even necessarily the same audience. Also he got clearer as he went on.

Really, you're comparing two dissimilar authors just so you can justify your butthurt regarding a prose style that personally rubs you the wrong way. You can bitch about Foucault's prose all you like, but if you've got nothing to say about his ideas, then this thread has no point.

>inb4 BUT IF HE WROTE LIKE DURANT I'D UNDERSTAND HIS IDEAS

Read harder. Philosophy takes effort.

>>4669985
the effort should be expended on understanding the ideas, not the prose.

>In fact, the shift from a criminality of blood to a criminality of fraud forms part of a whole complex mechanism, embracing the development of production, the increase of wealth, a higher juridical and moral value placed on property relations, stricter methods of surveillance, a tighter partitioning of the population, more efficient techniques of locating and obtaining information: the shift in illegal practice is correlative with an extension and a refinement of punitive practice.

D&P is clear as fuck, OP, you're just of subnormal intellectual capability.

I like how he introduces the idea of the Panopticon with lateral invisibility and imagined ('surplus') surveillance, but goes on to describe developments in France which are not panoptic at all, since they involve the gathering of information by the police (which is not 'surplus', but actual hard work sweat of your brow surveillance).

>>4670963
Can you into "economy of power" (Foucault's term), newfriend? Surveillance is like any other labor the sense that it experienced an industrial revolution, but still has manual labor.

>>4670968

In the case of the industrial revolution, the human labor that remains is augmented by the technology. This is not the case for the majority of Foucault's examples of surveillance.

>>4670990
Imagine I make a machine the waves signs. Where does that leave the occupational sign-waver?

>>4670999
You don't understand my point: In the chapter 'the panopticon', Foucault mostly uses examples of surveillance that - while partly of a quality and type new in their time - do not employ the specific technology of the panopticon (neither literally nor metaphorically or in spirit).

the panopticon functions not as the analytical key to the historical phenomenon, but only as a 'cool idea' that he uses to juice up his writing.

OP are you illiterate?

>>4669926
>French bondage fag lit
>even once

sorry op, that is the most readable book by foucault. this shit aint for you, thats all.

If you couldnt with D&P, read the Eribon's biography, maybe thats more accessible.

>>4669926
>There's absolutely zero reason to write in the style he employed
It's actually quite funny, Foucault agrees with you. In the latter part of his life he bemoaned the fact that within contemporary France at the time to be taken seriously one had to write in a very particular style. His lectures at the College de France are a lot clearer.

Do what everyone else does and blame Derrida.

>>4670039
>reading for plot

>>4671005
You're confusing the ideas of a literal tower and what Foucault is signifying with it. Panoptican represents the idea that anyone CAN be watched (and they know it) as the most effective means of controlling behavior, rather than trying to watch everyone. Whether or not they're actually being watched has to be hidden most of the time, because if they could tell then it would cease to control behavior any time they weren't watched.

>>4671708
His lectures are lucid as fuck.

>>4670963

He's using the panopticon as a literary metaphor for how modern-era surveillance works in all its various manifestations. He doesn't literally mean that everything is Bentham's panopticon. Foucault wasn't some kind of conspiracy-theory pleb.

>>4671718
>reading for prose in translation

>>4672161

Seconding this, Chapter 2 of "'Society Must Be Defended'" has Foucault coming the closest I've seen to defining the relation between power and truth in common-language, common-sense pleb-level terms.

>>4672161
>>4672626
In brief: what the Panopticon stands for is the idea that knowledge is synonymous with power.

Changing the subject totally, who do you think does the most interesting use/modification/interpretation/whatever of Foucault?

Agamben? Deleuze? DeLanda? Baudrillard?

One time I mentioned this book in a class and my professor corrected me:
>Discipline and PunishMENT

>>4673276

Kill him.

Yo dudes, what publication of Foucault lectures are the must reads? Are they grouped together so that they deal with the topics of the books? Like, is there a collection that only deals with topics related to D&P and another collection talks about bio-politics or whatever?

Foucault newbie here that's only read D&P and ready for more.

>>4673299
The Birth of Biolpolitics, for lectures.

The Essential Works of Michael Foucault, three volumes; it's all essays and interviews.

If you read D$P, you'd like his Sexuality and his Madness.

The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences was the work that made his name big, where he lays down the method that would follow in his other blockbusters.

>>4673315
Thanks breh. I was reading about The Order of Things while waiting for a lecture to start today. Seemed pretty interesting. Much broader in scope than D&P which seems like it'll interest me a lot more.

>>4673276
That correction is retarded, the literal translation would be "To discipline and to punish", since on the french title appear two infinitive verbs.

>>4673322
D&P deals with the science of its title.
Madness deals with the science of its title
Sexuality deals with the science of its title

The Order of Things deals with the science of several things in parallel, including economics and biology.

>>4672768
tiqqun

>>4669926

so is this book about bdsm or whatever? I have a boner to tend to

>>4673467
Yeah it's in the tradition of the Marquis de Sade. Partly autobiographical as Foucault was known for his promiscuity.