/lit/ - Literature

>>7005421

here's the skinny:

ALL relationships are based on power and Foucault was a fag who liked to have some of his students tie him up and burn him with cigarettes

and he was French

isn't it nice when a plan comes together?

you're good to go

>>7005421

His lectures, starting with 'Society must be Defended' are pretty clear and easy to read, so they make a good starting point.

>>7005421
>where the fuck do I start with foucault?
I assume you've fisted someone in a bathhouse?

>>7005421

condoms

>>7005434
>Foucault was a fag who liked to have some of his students tie him up and burn him with cigarettes

Is this true? I will say this word for word in class on Monday if it's true.

>>7005442
it is, he also liked being anally stimulated by men in leather in Bay Area dark rooms

>>7005442

it was true and you can easily verify it by the time your class starts

don't forget the part about power in relationships

>>7005421
>Shit, help me out gent/lit/men where the fuck do I start with foucault?

His errors of basic fact. His needless production of categories. The fact that he viewed his own "academic" work as irrelevant to the actual social knowledge: struggle.

>>7005421
Discipline and Punishment is probably his most famous work. Read that and you'll be able to bullshit your way through the class with ease.

He used to be pretty cutie.

>>7005442
Please say this

>>7005612
He explicitly states that the intellectual no longer plays a role in social progress.
>>7005421
Read history of sexuality volume 1 part 4 for power. Read discipline and punish for polemics against institutions and surveillance.

The cigarette thing is true. But the thing about Power mechanisms is also true. Also mention "sexuality as discourse" somewhere in there

>>7006892
That isn't an excuse for not caring about being factually incorrect. Not everything is about social progress. People who think everything has to move something else forward are major problem in Western society these days.

>>7005442
Yes. Also, he knowingly spread AIDS.

Derrida, Foucault-- Arborealists par excellance! Discard them: they have nothing to offer that wasn't already prefigured by Hegel. This kind of thinking, that kind of this-then-these, these-because-of-that type of work that festers, cold and moldy, in the penumbra of the vast, phallic hegemony of the Signifier (thinking which, by the way, some people call dialectics) assumes all its possibilities in its inception; you can go even further back if you'd like, to Kant. It's all there. Fuck it, go back to Socrates! Even Nietzsche, that iconoclast, that rebel against the great chain of meaning, was predicted by the giant of Reason! (Hence, of course, his ambivalence: he at once hates the father and loves him, though I should think by now you'll see that this triangularization is equally arboreal.) Needless to say clowns like Foucault are already nestled in The Republic, as obedient Citizens toiling in the name of the State (Don't be fooled by their claims to the opposite; for what is "Power Relations" but a justification for the dialect by which they are arrived at? What is "madness" if not an antithesis to reason?)

>>7006970

Forgive my ignorance sir, but what do you mean by "arborealists?" And you don't find any value in the basic principles of Deconstruction?

>>7006952
>he knowingly spread AIDS.
Do you have a single source to back that up, buddy?

>>7005421
what class is this?

What is the name of the class? just curious, want to orientate my reply. Need the context. You might be working on foucault, or genealogy and Nietzsche, or postmodernism and structuralism, etc. etc.

>>7005442
Mention the pedophilia apologetics too

>>7007025

I'll answer your question in reverse (note the singular; the two parts are entwined): Deconstruction, as its very name implies, is a philosophical dead end. It cuts away branches, severs connections, and attacks conflations of meaning as reductive, rather than the reality, that they are productive (but more on that shortly). The nuclear arrangement and subsequent short-circuiting of dichotomies assumes that they must be bound up with each other and only each other in the first place; it assumes a series of atoms, of POINTS, where in fact there are only lines, vectors, lattices flowing contiguously into each other. Above all this adds up to precisely what I mean by arboreal: that at the bottom of this field of points, the product of these nuclear fissures, is yet another nucleus, and yet another until you reach a critical point, an indivisible "root" that must be invoked to justify the seeding of the whole tree; some have called it God; Deconstructionists call it the subject. Still others call it "ideology." How often have we heard, "one can only take ones critique so far. No one may escape the confines of ideology." Without the underlying ideology, which can only be APPROACHED by a deconstructive (note the lowercase; I mean this generically) critique (think here of Zeno's paradox: we see the arrow, the philosopher, getting closer and closer to his object, but it always evades him), the whole practice of critique becomes impossible. At some point, to protect his career, this kind of philosopher must throw up his hands, must invent some final signifier, must submit himself to the end of his rational capabilities.

Nevermind this. It's all been done. It's trodden ground. It is time instead for a productive philosophy, a philosophy not of critique, but of creation. Not deconstruction: CONSTRUCTION. We may even grant the field of points; it is a convenient metaphor. But see, too, the lines shooting forth from these points, in -literally every possible direction, for in every direction can be found another point, and each point is connected to every other.- We can therefore group points together, produce concepts that enable the production of still further connections.

>>7007112
tl;dr: read Deleuze instead of Foucault.

wikipedia

>>7007119
Me again, just kidding read Stirner and be done with it.

>>7007123
i mean that's fine too. whatever. killjoy.

A final word: note that Nietzsche saw his task not as that of devaluation of all values, but the REvaluation of all values. Nietzsche saw the not as deriving themselves from some final (or for that matter, original) significance, as deeply enmeshed and blended with each other. His philosophy, too, is productive: productive of new values, but not destructive to the old ones; in fact, for Nietzsche, new, exceptional values cannot exist without propping themselves up on the backs of the old ones. Only then, once they have escaped the mud and touched the sky, can they learn to fly, and like bees spread pollen far and wide, yielding in their wake ever renewed production.

>>7007137
[...] but* as deeply [...]

>>7005421
What the fuck kind of shitty system do they have going where you only find out a week before your classes start that if you haven't read something then you won't understand the class?

Are you seriously saying that
-the class description didn't anywhere include the message that you need to read and grasp Foucault before attending
-the professor is so disorganised that he didn't let anyone know a week before classes start
-the professor also evidently thinks that people who may have never read any philosophy before can grasp Foucault within a week

Sounds like a fucking jip to me

>>7007112
The branches all meet again. Deconstruction is only the first step of their rejoining. Eventually you hit the conclusion. Hegel knew, but what Hegel knew doesn't help. Only what you know, you know?

>>7007153

Deconstruction's flaw is that at bottom, it sees this infinitely deep field of meaning as meaningless. Derrida, the bitter rationalist: "How can they mean anything if they all rely on each other to mean anything? How can any of this have meaning if meaning is derived from their difference?" As usual for a dialectician, he missed the forest for the trees. I trust you won't take the metaphor too literally ;)

>>7007112

>Nevermind this. It's all been done. It's trodden ground. It is time instead for a productive philosophy, a philosophy not of critique, but of creation. Not deconstruction: CONSTRUCTION.

Well, what do you propose?

I think a case can be made that criticism is the proper vocation of the philosopher. Society seems to "create" stuff organically without much input from intellectuals. It seems like critiquing the stuff is what intellectuals do.

>>7007161

(Different anon)

The saturation and excess of meaning does not equate to a literally meaningless. It is just that that meaning is so saturated in our linguistic appropriation of 'life' in its conceptuality, that all there is an abundance of interpretations, meanings, and trajectories. Deconstruction is the awareness of this abundance, and the careful rigorous re-orientation to that inundation of meaning that engulfs all discourses, whether they be philosophical, colloquial, scientific, etc.

>>7007161
The issue is when people stop at deconstruction. Deconstruct, get to the core, and begin building again. One must exit the forest before they can see its entirety

>>7007137

Nietzsche didn't create new values. His entire legacy rests primarily on demystifying stuff and developing psychological explanations for values that were previously considered 'objective.' His whole project was to unravel everything down to a single thread. To the extent that he was interested in 'new values,' he was recommending that future philosophers set that as their task; he didn't really propose any of his own and he seemed to admit it in Twillight Of The Idols ("no new idols are erected by me, destroying idols (my word for ideals) is more my craft")

>>7007180
I'm the other anon that isn't who you replied to

Understanding that there is no meaning, or that meanings are man made is good, but it only sets the stage. It's a truth to get put of the way early, and move forward from. Understand it, then ask "so what?".

>>7007192
there is no core when you deconstruct. it's entirely on the surface. you can't do anything with deconstruction other than play around with words and show that by flipping back and forth enough you can confuse yourself into believing opposites are the same. there's nothing to build or oppose or think about.

>>7007200

(Different anon)

I would contend with the following passage by Nietzsche.

"In what do you believe? -- In this, that the weights of all
things must be determined anew"

This is what this anon meant by a re-valuation of values. That the 'weight' (weight as in value) of all things must be re-orientated in light of a genealogy of values.

>>7007200
I've put the cart before the horse, but it's still moving forward. A horse can push.

>>7007210
>>7007180
>>7007192

The field of meaning isn't in need of deconstruction, though. I may have been too vigorous in my fucking of Derrida; the deconstructionists were needed to show that yes, arborescent constructions can be undone. But what needs to be understood is that this is not a necessary pitstop METHODOLOGICALLY, but only EPISTEMOLOGICALLY. We need not make the detour through deconstruction (or nihilism) in our construction of meaning, we need only be aware that it is possible. The flaw with this method >>7007192 is that it leans to arbitrary creation of meaning, which ignores the significance of existing metanarratives; indeed it takes as its own metanarrative the invalidity of metanarratives!

>>7007214
"no core" is a core in and of itself.

>>7007235
that's great. you just told me nothing. good job deconstructing that!

>>7007245
cute, but you misunderstand: the whole principle derives from the eventual supposition that there is no "center." deconstruction relies on its privilege, its supremacy, of the subject, to be valid at all. we're in agreement. deconstruction ultimately doesn't tell you anything you didn't already know.

>>7007112

Derrida precisely denies the existence of a transcendental signifier, hence he keeps inventing new terms.

And Foucault denies the existence of a transcendental subject.

blah blah blah, not everything has been the way it is. concepts like mankind, homosexuals, mental illness are a recent thing. labeling dehumanizes

his works are pretty easy to understand. just read a big into each of his big works


this sums up a lot of it
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBJTeNTZtGU

>>7005421
With this lectures.

>>7005421
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0dM6j7pzQA

Here you go.

"I wasn't always smart, I was actually very stupid in school ... [T]here was a boy who was very attractive who was even stupider than I was. And in order to ingratiate myself with this boy who was very beautiful, I began to do his homework for him—and that's how I became smart, I had to do all this work to just keep ahead of him a little bit, in order to help him. In a sense, all the rest of my life I've been trying to do intellectual things that would attract beautiful boys."

He sounds like a beta homo tbh, is he worth reading?

>>7007489

Yes; I think he has a lot of insightful things about the nature of knowledge and its relation to power. Moreover, I think his inheritance of Nietzsche's genealogical method, makes Foucault worth reading.

>>7005421
You may start by fucking his loose boypussy.
Then tie him up and burn him with cigarettes.

Finally, you will praise the benevolent ayatollah of Iran as the supreme leader and teh example for the rest of the world.

>>7007518
Since you mention genealogy I'd also mention if anyone wants an interesting criticism of it (ie not muh obscurantism) check out Milbank's Ontological violence.

>>7007149
sounds like an Evergreen class to me

>>7005421

OP. Give the fucking class name.

Wasn't Foucalt just a fag who based all his philosophy on the fact that he liked taking it up the ass?

>>7005421
Sounds like a shitty professor. Take another class but read Foucault anyway.

You read Madness and Civilization and try not to laugh whilst doing so.

20th century French philosophy is the utmost Satan-tier, totally haram

>>7005442
he supported pedophilia, voted for age of consent reform too

he was into bdsm, a french weirdo.

>>7006892
>He explicitly states that the intellectual no longer plays a role in social progress.
>states

Eh hoh oho hoh, we are all in a Paris [Number] University, hoh oho hoh, we are making fun of our own position in the superstructure, sorry, the range of discursivities NO DON'T LOOK AT THAT BOOKSHELF THAT'S WHERE I KEEP MY ANNOTATED ALTHUSSER

>>7007036
Yeah, I do.
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=foucault+spread+hiv

>>7008764
lmgtfy isn't an adequate source for a biography of a scholar.

>>7007112
still being a vitalist in 2015

>>7008824
the info's there. there's a limit to how much legwork i'm going to do for you.

>>7009245
You were asked for a source, not the sum total of human knowledge, organised by cuntish Californians, and regurgitated through a facetious interface used mainly by cunts.

>>7009263
Why the fuck are you even spending your time on this fagot anon? Obviously this guy is shitposting.

>>7009288
>Why the fuck are you even spending your time on this fagot anon? Obviously this guy is shitposting.
I'm not spending it on the shitposting anonymous. I am spending it on the concept of "sourcing."

>>7008331
>he supported pedophilia, voted for age of consent reform too
consent is a phony concept

>>7005440
>>7005439
>>7005442
>>7005540
>>7005558
>>7006952
>>7007089
>>7007489
>>7007534
>>7008023
>>7008032
>>7008331
>>7008764

This is why /lit/ will never be good - because what could have been one of the best threads in recent memory is filled with mindless homophobia, hate, and the spreading of misinformation.

There are some really good ideas in this thread, but nobody should have to wade through this absolute tripe to get to it.

>>7009644
If you don't understand how personal sexual experience is fundamental to the liberatory project in Foucault's contributions to praxis, how can you understand his academic contributions.

I'm willing to fist fuck you for the revolution.

>>7007112
>It is time instead for a productive philosophy, a philosophy not of critique, but of creation. Not deconstruction: CONSTRUCTION

pic related was pretty good

>>7009644
>There are some really good ideas in this thread

Please point them out.

>reading a sadomasochist sophist

drop the class

>>7009789
>pic related was pretty good
huh?

>>7007119
deleuze is really good

foucalt is good sometimes.

>>7009789
Bourdieu is pretty good, but really eurocentric. His theories don't work when applied to places where there isn't a class of snobs who jerk each other off at Bach recitals.

>>7010030
deleuze is hard for me

>>7010040
Have you ever considered learning less about european intellectuals and more about the working class?

>>7009644
Why don't you go to reddit or tumblr instead? Everyone will be happier.

>>7009644
It's amazing how quickly /lit/ went to shit after the /pol/fags started invading thinking it was "/leftypol/".

>>7010043
reading freud helps reading deleuze and guattari a lot. though the fought valiantly, they were, it seems to me, unable to escape the discourse that freud opened up. for instance, a lot of their descriptions of 'schizoanalysis' end up being flat-out objections to psychoanalysis, from which, granted, they then go on to build a lot more; nonetheless the critical, deconstructive, arborescent streak cannot be fully stamped out, which, if you read their chapter on the rhizome in mille plateaux, is actually ok: trees can grow from rhizomes, and rhizomes can burst forth from trees.

reading nietzsche also helps with reading deleuze. both of their philosophies share a kind of disdain for step-by-step rational argumentation, and rather choose to simply bombard you with their ideas and concepts until you can't help but acknowledge, at the very least, the need to refute them (which in and of itself is allowing them much more than the hardline rationalist would), if not out right agreement.

>>7010611
I don't like Deleuze though because he doesn't understand the Newtonian concept of the limit. His cheap appraisal of Leibniz is ridiculous. You know if everything was truly an approximation then you couldn't ever say anything is true, it would all just be approximate. This sort of shit posting is uncalled for so please quit praising the lord of the shit thinkers and their abhorrent linneage ranging back from the sophists opposing socrates to your every day generic shit poster. "huehuehue" why not just say everything is relative when u get the shit beaten out of you in real life for your beliefs? Maybe then will you believe truth is not all that relative. That is unless you think the one who bleeds the most is the victor. :P

>>7010788
wait, by that logic you can't even say you won because winning is merely an approximation now, you can never say you won because we're still measuring it! We still don't know what a limit is, doi!

>>7010187
why don't you stop being an idiot. maybe your mom won't stop being embarrassed about you m8

>>7010788
2015, still taking Socrates' side instead of the sophists

one week to go before summer ends

>>7010815
oh but you cannot claim you know everything with absolute certainty until you try for all events. You might be able to do it for some, but not all.

If so then please explain to us how you are able to do that, we would all love to here in lurid detail how you are able to know everything ranging from why atoms behave the way they do to why people fall in love.

Good luck, I believe in you. Unfortunately a casual stroll through an insane asylum proves that belief in anything isn't enough to make it true.

History of Sexuality vol.1 is all you need to read. It's quite short and not overly difficult.

>>7010824
crickets! CRICKETS!

DO I HEAR CRICKETS? Oh my gosh the stupidity has finely fallen silent. Thus the stupidity of the rest of the west may sleep as well until some idiot from /b/ pretending to be a /pol/ comes out here and says the same damn thing again.

My dear friends I must asketh of thee, doest thou ever get tired of the same follies over and over again? Perhaps it is in their fate to repeat them once more. Now that is a better question, do things repeat their selves or do we truly live in a world that is unique?

>>7007227

The 'arbitrary construction of meaning' is all I can foresee from a philosophy that takes 'concept construction' as its modus operandi.

>>7007857

Bill fucking Arney was my first thought reading the OP.

Fuck this school.

it's pronounced 'fuck you'

>>7010611
So you're saying that they both just shitpost .

>>7005421
explain to your professor, you understand foucault because you are attending the class despite never reading foucault.

>>7010788
great post, thanks.

>>7010980
a 600 page shitpost is one way to think of mille plateaux, yes.

>>7009299
>>7009263
man, going to google and clicking on the first couple links that come up really taxes your resources that badly? how do you manage to post and fill out captchas?
>>7009644
foucault didn't understand nietzsche and lied about gay history to push his entry-level left-libertarian views that most guys grow out of around age seventeen. there's no meaningful engagement with the tradition in his work and nothing that merits a serious response.
>mindless homophobia, hate, and the spreading of misinformation
fyi i love cock

>>7007112
Aren't lines oriented points, though?

>>7011025
underrated post

>>7010907
kill yourself

>>7005421
Foucault wasn't into oppression or sex but in the genesis of culturally important ideas. "Power" is simply the reinforcement of cultural identity. He believed this power is a necessary quality for there to be truth or meaningful communication between people.

Do not get punked into thinking he was an SJW.

>>7012447
>wasn't into

But some of his key works definitely involved it to some degree and he acknowledges both as part of his own personal development.

Like I'm with you, he's not really any sort of SJW, but those two things are definitely there in a good number of his texts.

>>7012523
He said in an interview later in his life that he found sex boring and went on to discuss Greeks and how they were more interested in food than sex. Foucault picked sex because he saw it as being one of the major "ideas" of the West from Christianity onward. I'm sure his own perversions (I mean no offense) played a role in his choice of topics, but you have to remember that he was also trying to score popularity points with the French academia, which was then and still is very much into this overly wordy and shocking style. It's a major reason why he moved to the U.S. He got tired of it.

Foucault was the opposite of a SJW, pro liberatory sex, anyone who read the fucking beginning of History of Sexuality would know this.

>>7012443
would a hand gun kill me with one shot or would i have to buy a shotgun?

>>7012650
This. Repressive hypothesis. And Foucault continues Nietzsche's tradition better than anyone else except maybe Bataille

>>7012650
have you ever heard of sex positive feminists?

Does Foucault have any works on literary theory?

>>7013507
I saw one at B&N today. Language madness desire. Haven't really heard anything about it

>>7005619
cute af

>>7013507
His work is regularly applied as literary theory (in case someone hasn't mentioned that) i.e. his ideas are applied to literary texts.

>>7009644
please no, cornfather

>>7013532
What's a fun work of his that contains these regularly applied ideas? For a first time reader

>>7010040
> places where there isn't a class of snobs who jerk each other off at Bach recitals.

You mean parts of Africa and the Amazonian forest ?

>>7013549
Don't forget Australia

>>7013548
I have a lit crit book with selections from him and I own a few of his books. Discipline and Punish is often mentioned because it has the Panopticon in it and some of Foucault's core ideas like knowledge =s power and stuff like that. Depending on the direction of this class it might be more worthwhile to read his stuff in History of Sexuality. If this is a general lit crit class the prof might just be trying to scare the students. Foucault can be overly wordy and needlessly difficult sometimes so some undergrads don't understand his stuff.

>>7010040
everybody is better for it every time they listen to Bach, even if it's a latent effect

>>7011163
>man, going to google and clicking on the first couple links that come up really taxes your resources that badly? how do you manage to post and fill out captchas?
I think you've demonstrated that you have no proof, as you are unwilling to provide a source.

>>7013578
I never found Foucault to be overly difficult, in fact I think Discipline and Punish is one of the best written philosophical studies. The first chapter on the execution of Damien's is excellent.

>>7009644
I don't hate Foucault because he's gay, its because he's a dime-a-dozen 20th century French deconstructionist and his theories were shit. His ideas are fine hanging around in philosophy, but they've started to poison the humanities and sciences and I despise it.

Start with The Order of Things then move on to The Birth of Biopolitics

>>7009644
>with mindless homophobia, hate, and the spreading of misinformation

so Foucoult wasnt gay?
didn't dig the BDSM scene?
die of AIDs?
had a student burn him with cigarettes?
was French?

it's just about the facts

>>7005421
Stanford encyclopedia / foucault. thank me later.

>>7014176
Anyone can follow the link I posted and see as many sources as they like. You're not fooling anyone.

>>7009644
why don't you go back to reddit you little fucking faggot? then you can just downvote all the posts you don't want to see.

Maybe Foucault's sexuality reminds you of your own desire to take dragon dildos up the ass?

>>7014968
>your own desire to take dragon dildos up the ass?

oh my

>>7014516
I honestly believe not even Foucault knew what he was talking about in The Order of Things.

I still talk about it like I understood to qts, tho

>>7014945
>anyone can read 5000000 pages of archives and see

u r a c u n t